Lessons learned in launching and scaling capability management projects. Big bang or start small. One large model or many linked models. The roles of leadership. Delivering value to employees first.

1. karen@ibbaka.com
steven@ibbaka.com
Building
Capability
Management

2. The Capability Management Transformation
Lessons learned launching and scaling
skill and competency platforms
karen@ibbaka.com
steven@ibbaka.com
November 2020
2 I Ibbaka © 2020

3. 3 I Ibbaka © 2020
Why adopt capability management
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability
1. Align capabilities with goals across all levels
○ Individual
○ Team
○ Organization
○ Society
2. Give individuals, teams and the organization the insights needed to
○ Develop skills and competencies
○ Put them to work in Jobs Roles and On Teams
○ Know what skills are the most relevant
○ Prepare for the future

4. 4 I Ibbaka © 2020
Some Common Use Cases
Develop new capabilities
Identify skill gaps and
target learning investments
Enable self directed
career growth
Build cross functional
skill-based teams
• Model the new capability
• Use Open Competency Models to accelerate development
• Find the people with potential to develop the skills
• Build individual and team skill profiles
• Apply capability/competency models
• See skill gaps and hidden potential
• Take action to close gaps
• Identify core and target skills
• Align with organization goals
• Build and apply new skills
• Design team skill needs
• Understand the complementary and connecting skills
• Search and combine people into skill-based teams
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

5. 5 I Ibbaka © 2020
Leaders must be able to answer key business questions
1. What skills are available to our organization?
1. How are they being applied?
1. Do we have the skills we need to meet today’s goals?
1. Will we have the skills we need to meet tomorrow’s goals?
1. Are there hidden pockets of potential we can deploy?
1. Who are the critical people on our team?
➔ Ibbaka Talent answers these questions
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

6. 6 I Ibbaka © 2020
What is capability management
1. A new discipline focused on
alignment of goals and skills to
deliver outcomes
2. That combines skill profiles,
competency management and
strategic choices, and
3. Uses AI to enhance (not replace)
human understanding and
performance
Business Impact
Enable major new capabilities for
category creation strategies
Build resilience and adaptation
Develop the skills and competencies
needed for the future
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

7. 7 I Ibbaka © 2020
Capability - Competency - Skill
Capability
The bundle of people and their skills, frameworks, tools, processes,
systems and data needed to deliver an outcome
Competency (Skills in Context)
A bundle of skills, behaviors and in some cases values that are needed
for a capability
Skill
The genes of competencies (and like genes they are only expressed in
the right environment and are often connected in networks)
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

8. 8 I Ibbaka © 2020
The concept blend
Skill Profiles
● Skills understood
● Where used
● Who used with
Strategic Choices
● Winning aspirations
● Where to play
● How to win
● Capabilities Competencies
● Organizational lens
● Find skill gaps
● Inject new capabilities
Capability
Management
Concept blending is an emerging tool in
innovation and design thinking based on
work in cognitive science by Gille
Fauconnier and Mark Turner.
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

9. 9 I Ibbaka © 2020
How to adopt capability management
1. Start small and expand
○ One use case for a small group
○ Add integrations and use cases
○ Bring in more groups
○ Extend to partners and community
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

10. 10 I Ibbaka © 2020
How to adopt capability management
2. Bottom up and top down
○ Bottom Up - Skills bubble up from skill
profiles
○ Top Down - Skills are introduced through
competency models
○ Connected - Skill Profiles connect
Competency Models for Jobs-Roles-Teams
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

11. 11 I Ibbaka © 2020
One competency model or smaller connected models?
or
One Big Model
+ Plus
● Easier to maintain consistency
● Promotes cross functional internal
mobility
- Minus
● A lot of work to build
● Difficult to get started
● Can be overwhelming
Smaller Connected Models
+ Plus
● Easier to build
● Each business has a strong sense of
ownership
● In many businesses this reflects current
reality
- Minus
● Can lead to silos
● Connections can be hard to build and
maintain
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

12. 12 I Ibbaka © 2020
Some lessons learned 1/3
● Goal alignment is critical
○ Ibbaka uses Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade for this
Winning Aspirations
Where to Play
How to Win
Capabilities
Systems
○ We have a downloadable tool for this available on our website
○ There are other tools for designing a competency model and design and planning
○ Roger Martin on Strategic Choice Making
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

13. 13 I Ibbaka © 2020
Some lessons learned 2/3
● Start small - deliver immediate value - but plan for expansion
○ One use case for a small group (100 - 500)
○ Design for measurable results
● This will only work if leaders are engaged, transparent and willing to participate
○ Have their own skill profiles
○ Show their own strengths and the places where they want to grow
○ Suggest skills to other people
● Leaders are the people at the top of the organization chart but they are also the thought
leaders, networkers and culture bearers
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

14. 14 I Ibbaka © 2020
Some lessons learned 3/3
● Expansion means three things
○ Additional use cases
○ Expansion to other business units supporting their goals and skills
○ Integrations with other applications (do not make initial success dependent on
integrations)
● The value to employees must be obvious
○ Employees can shape the competency model
○ Employees own their data
○ Employees are supported in their career growth
2020 - Lessons Learned for Launching and Scaling Capability

15. 15 I Ibbaka © 2020
The Ibbaka Platform
Create value for all involved
● Individuals
● Teams
● Organizations
● Communities
Enable adaptation
● People, teams, organizations change
● New skills are needed
● New jobs are emerging
Connect the ecology
● Gather data from other systems
● Be the system of record for skills
● Deliver insights
● Support actions
Provide transparency
● Give people control of their data and
how it is represented (represents
them)
● Use AI in meaningful ways that can
be understood

16. 16 I Ibbaka © 2020
Why this is hard
1. Data is scattered across internal (HR, talent management, project management) and external
systems (LinkedIn) and is in structured (databases) and unstructured (document) forms.
1. Skill and competency models have been developed and implemented top down, they are
outdated and do not connect to actual work (they are not connected to projects and outcomes).
1. Skill inventories are taken annually or at best quarterly (sometime not at all), this is too slow to
reflect the rapidly changing nature of today’s project driven work.
1. The interactions between skills, people, work and performance are not captured. These are
complex and have emergent properties – only artificial intelligence and machine learning can
uncover the real connections.

17. 17 I Ibbaka © 2020
How we do it…
1. Integrate skill data from multiple systems
1. Build a skill graph connecting people with skills roles and projects
1. Infer potential skills using AI and Natural Language Processing
1. Enable social interactions on skills
1. Build skill profiles for individuals, roles, projects, teams and the
company
1. Identify skill gaps
1. Find potential and put it to work

18. 18 I Ibbaka © 2020
Configurable Competency Models
• Design and configure a competency
model that meets your unique needs
• Connect competency models to profiles
and see who has the required skills or
where skill gaps exist
• Add learning resources to help build new
capabilities
• Connect skills and competencies across
your HR ecosystem

19. 19 I Ibbaka © 2020
Ibbaka Talent Architecture
We extract skill data from
multiple applications,
documents and social
interactions, recommending
additional and potential skills
and represents this data in the
Skill Graph. Skills, roles,
projects and people are
shown in the Skill Map, which
is easy to search and can be
used to build skill-based
teams.

20. 20 I Ibbaka © 2020
Ibbaka Talent Skill Graph
The Ibbaka Talent AI is able to
infer real and potential skills
from this graph.
By comparing skill
requirements for roles and
projects skill gaps can be
found.

21. 21 I Ibbaka © 2020
How we connect
Ibbaka Talent adds value to your existing talent, learning, project management and
collaboration systems
By connecting data from multiple systems and putting it in the context of skills the
value of the data on all systems can become more valuable.
1. Take control of LinkedIn data by moving it to Ibbaka Talent and getting new insights.
2. Map tasks to skills. Staff projects with the skills and keep skill records current.
3. Enhance scheduling and financial tracking with skill data. Convert CRM opportunities to project
data to forecast skill demand.
4. Connecting learning to skills to focus learning investment. Keep talent management up to date
with the most current skill and project data.

22. 22 I Ibbaka © 2020
How we can help you build capabilities
Skill Insight
CONSULTING ENGAGEMENT
• Consulting service delivered
through Ibbaka Talent Platform
• Answers the Key Business
Questions on skills
• Delivers a Strategic Skill SWOT
and Skill Action Plan
• Reduces execution risk while
improving project outcomes
and performance
Skill Profiles
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION
• Integrate skill and performance
data from inside and outside
organization
• Real-time insight into skill
trends
• Improve project performance
• Energize consultant
engagement
Competencies
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION
• Build and manage skill and
competency models
• Integrate skill models with
other systems such as your
Learning Management System
and Recruiting System
• Leverage open competency
models being built for the
system

23. 23 I Ibbaka © 2020
Leadership Background
Steven Forth
CEO
Skill Profile
Steven works closely with our customers to
understand how they use skill management
to deliver on their business goals. His main
job is to take these insights and work with
the team to develop the solutions that
support high-performance teams. He
combines experience in growing early-stage
companies (Agreement Express and
LeveragePoint) with high-level strategy
consulting (Monitor-Deloitte).
Karen Chiang
COO
Skill Profile
Karen drives the team to ever-higher levels
of execution. She brings close to 20 years of
management experience in the
technology sector with over 20 years in the
solution consulting and enterprise B2B
software. Having direct experience of the
challenges people in these industries face,
she is determined to help them to solve
them. She has a keen interest in high
performance teams and promoting
leadership within them.
Lee Iverson, Ph.D.
CTO
Skill Profile
Lee builds intelligence into our
systems. He has a Ph.D. in computer
vision from McGill University and
worked at SRI International in Palo
Alto from 1993 to 2001. For the past
decade, he has focussed on
collaborative work, privacy and
security. Lee makes sure that our
systems get smarter as people use
them.

24. 24 I Ibbaka © 2020
Contact us
c/o VentureLabs
Suite 1100, 555 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 4N6
Steven Forth Karen Chiang
E: steven@ibbaka.com E: karen@ibbaka.com
T: +1 (604) 763 7397 T: +1 (415) 799 8326
W: ibbaka.com