Competency is crucial to business mission success. Fact or Fiction?

Seems like a no brainer, of course competency is crucial to business mission success. So why do we sometimes find ourselves in the situation where we work in a group of well-respected and individually knowledgeable and capable people, but still have some significant challenges with the success of our business mission?

Checking competency against a set of requirements out of context of our business mission will only test the capability of an individual, not the effectiveness of the organisation.

What if we treated our organisation as an engineered system, a system engineered for a specific purpose? A system enabling and supporting our capable people to assure we achieve our business mission.

In this mindset we can then use a systems engineering approach to designing an organisation that will achieve its strategic objective, its business mission.

Once we have a clear business mission, why the business exists, we are on the starting blocks to developing an organisation suited to achieving that mission. The next logical step is to translate that mission into as set of stakeholder needs, the detailed business needs to achieve our mission. 

Next we would elaborate those business needs, through collaboration with the organisation designers, to create a validated set of organisational requirements and an organisational architecture. This is the functional baseline of the organisation that will enable us to achieve our business mission. This is the baseline against which changes will be assessed to allow us to maintain all necessary integrated responsibilities across our organisation to achieve our mission; even as it evolves and changes with growing business success.

Now we get into organisational design definition, how we will do things. As with the development of a technology product, we need to understand the limits of our baseline capability, in this case the limits of our human resource capability, management processes and business tools and how we can use that baseline capability to achieve our mission.  

As with technology we must look at whether we need to enhance our baseline organisational capability. Do we need to develop or acquire new capability to achieve our business mission? 

It is risky with any system development to assume that just because good capability has been secured that the system, in this case the organisation, will work.  Having technology product capability alone does not create an integrated technology system, so why assume a similar approach will work for your organisation?

The organisational design needs to define what, the detailed design requirements of what will be implemented, and then allocate those design requirements to:

·      The people – requirements for the organisation chart, role descriptions and competency baselines.

·      The processes -the requirements for your policies and procedures

·      The products -the requirements for your business infrastructure.

If these three things are not carefully integrated, then the organisation will not be is not assured as designed to achieve your mission. 

As with any system it needs to be designed, implemented, verified, and validated to assure successful deployment to achieve your mission.

Knowing how the business mission links to the organisational requirements is critical to managing the risk of not achieving the mission. Reviewing threats to your mission, business risks, is a way of validating your organisational requirements and that your organisation design will realise the benefits you expect.  Emergent threats and risk controls should be traced to organisational requirements and the changes controlled to maintain the integrated management system; an integration of people, process and product. Implementing good configuration management to assure effective control and management of your business and any change that could impact the capability to achieve its mission is key to maintaining your success.

I hope you are convinced that competency of a person can only truly add value and contribute to business success if they are part of a competent organisation. To assure that success requires a validated organisational design traced back to the business mission. 

So back to the original question, the answer is Fact, but only if we recognise that an individual’s competence needs to be verified as matching the skills needed to meet the defined responsibilities of their assigned role. This crucial element of competency management will enable individuals to apply their capability effectively, to make a valuable contribution to the business mission, with a positive side effect of making them feel successful.