Effectively Using a Skills Matrix to Develop Your Team

As we delve into our Lean journey and begin to develop a culture of continuous improvement, the people issues come up pretty quickly. How we identify the skills needed for our standard tasks and how we train our people up in these skills becomes critical as we develop processes and standard ways of working to optimise our efficiencies and workflow. Effectively using a skills matrix is key to developing your people to meet these new challenges. Here we’ll look at what a skills matrix is, why it’s important and how to use a skills matrix to develop our people.

Example Skills Matrix Photo
Skills Matrix showing employees skill level for each task.

What is a Skills Matrix?

A skills matrix is a visual tool that identifies the key skills needed in each department and then recognises our team members and their level of competency against these skills. A good skills matrix can start the conversation about each person’s confidence with the tasks needed. From here a training plan can be created to cross train your team members, providing job variety and a robust team that can still perform at the same level, even when people are away.

Why is a Skills Matrix Important?

Developing a skill matrix is important as it focuses conversations on how work is completed and the basic skills needed to complete the tasks that contribute to the work in each department. This ties in well with developing standard work. Once the key skills are identified, we can check our current team for their level of competency and use the opportunity to correct any bad habits that have crept in through the “Chinese whispers” method of training, where each person just shows the next person how they do it and it slowly gets modified over time, often losing the critical elements of quality and safety along the way. A skills matrix also helps our new team leaders by clearly indicating who has the skills to carry out a job correctly and whether they are competent to do this unsupervised or if they need assistance. Welcoming new people into a team can be made easier with a skills matrix, as it shows the key tasks completed in the department and gives them an understanding of the way each department works. Plus as new team members are learning new skills, it helps to see that each skill is part of the overall picture. This can reduce frustration and overwhelm by seeing how each smaller part fits into the whole.

Developing a Skills Matrix for Your Team

There are three key steps in developing a skills matrix

1. List Skills or Key Tasks

Preferably with your current team, identify the key skills or tasks need to complete the main range of products made in this department. Of course, we realise that it will depend on a number of factors as to what work is done where, but make the list fairly broad, including the use of key pieces of equipment.

2. Evaluate Your Team Against the 5 Levels

With each person, or as a team if your team is comfortable with this, step through each skill and note the level of competency for each person. None – person hasn’t completed the task or doesn’t need to 1st quarter – being training in skill 2nd quarter – can perform skill with supervision 3rd quarter – able to perform skill without supervision Full – is fully competent and can train others

Skills Matrix legend pic
This legend shows how to rate each workers skill level.

3. Review with Each Person and Put On Display

If you haven’t completed the skills matrix as a team, now take the time to review your evaluation with each person. Let them tell you how they feel they perform each task. Do they feel they need further training? Would they like more training in one or more areas that they don’t currently work in? Use this discussion to get a feel for how each person is feeling about the team and the work. Depending on your company culture, add your new skills matrix to your Visual Management Board. Making it visible helps remind the team where you are and where you are heading. Branach Skills Matrix Photo

Creating a Training Plan

Once the skills matrix is complete, it is time to develop a training plan to start filling in the gaps. As we all know, training takes time and can reduce process efficiency in the short term while the training is taking place and the new person is getting up to speed with the new skill. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of cross-training our teams. We hear time and time again “we don’t have the time for training” and suddenly someone is sick or leaves and the team efficiency is compromised more that if the time was invested in training before the need was at crisis point.

Invest the Time to Train Your Team

And this may be where you need to change your mindset. If you find yourself thinking “what if I train someone and they leave?” Well, what if you don’t train someone and they STAY?!? Are you prepared to put up with the ongoing efficiency compromises by not training your team? When considering what training is needed, note that not all of your team needs to be fully competent and able to train others.

Having more than one person at each of the top two levels is important but having all of your team at the top level will take time, so a reasonable approach is advised. Once the skills gaps and training needed have been identified, help the team allocate the time for training and make sure everyone is clear on how we check on the level of competency. You may need to refer to quality standards or drawings.

Tap into your Learning and Development department, if you have one. Like any good Lean system, ongoing evaluation and review must be built into the skills matrix process. With a relatively stable workload, an annual review will be adequate. Adding new work into the department, or a great change in job type might need a review within the annual plan.

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TXM Article: Reviewing Your Skills Matrix – Example  

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As the days are dark and cold, there is nothing like sitting down with a good book to feed your brain and get you ready for the challenging week ahead. Here are four good reads to get you started.

The Lean Strategy

Using Lean to Create Competitive Advantage, Unleash Innovation, and Deliver Sustainable Growth

by Michael Balle, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize and Orest Fiume

Lean book strategy

A lean strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form, lean has been radically effective, but its true powers have yet to be harnessed.

Lean Strategy harnesses that power and delivers a new way of creating value from lean. Leading lean experts address popular misconceptions about the basics of lean/TPS, showing the true purpose of tools, methods, and attitudes that leverage the intelligence of every employee doing the work. You’ll learn how to think―and then act―differently, tapping the power of every person in your organisation in a disciplined manner that generates unparalleled, sustainable success that is responsive to today’s most pressing challenges

The Work of Management

A Daily Path to Sustainable Improvement

by Jim Lancaster

Lean book management

Jim Lancaster tells an inspiring story; It’s a close-up, candid look at his personal transformation as a leader. It’s also a practical, in-depth, business case study of Lantech’s lean transformation, relapse, and comeback that American manufacturing – and other industries – can use to profitably transform themselves. In his engaging story, Lancaster reveals: Why Lantech, a stellar lean performer for a decade, struggled over time (like many other companies) to sustain gains and improve financial performance. Why 60 to 90 minutes of daily frontline management activities are a CEO’s most important minutes of the day for sustaining and growing their business. 8 steps executives can take to lead experiments to create a bullet-proof, real-time daily management system without expensive consultants. Why daily management requires a major shift in managers’ mindsets and behaviors from giving orders and judging individuals on performance to asking questions and enabling good work by people at lower levels so metrics are routinely met. How daily management and sustainable continuous improvement produces dramatic positive effects on the bottom line. What happens in daily huddles where team members review how well they are sustaining gains and staying on track. How to practice true lean leadership in which “bosses” truly act like coaches — not solving problems for people but asking them what they can to do help. How Lantech ties together all facets of the company in an integrated way (from sales to production). Why it deeply invests in the lean training and practice of every single employee every day.

On Time In Full

Achieving Perfect Delivery with Lean Thinking in purchasing, Supply Chain and Production Planning

by Tim McLean

on-time-in-full-cover (Duplicate)

This book is a practical guide for manufacturers on how to meet a fundamental requirement – how to deliver to the customer the right product in the right quantity at the right time. While the concept of on-time delivery seems deceptively simple, achieving it can be incredibly complex. This book unravels this complexity and provides simple, practical solutions that will enable every manufacturer to delight customers with reliable, consistent on-time supply at a competitive cost. It covers the end-to-end process of delivering an order to the customer, from understanding customer demand and forecasting, through production scheduling, supply of materials and delivery of finished goods.

Grow your Factory, Grow your Profits

Lean for Small and Medium-sized Manufacturing Enterprises

by Tim McLean

grow your factory, grow your profits (Duplicate)

The last 25 years has seen Tim lead and assist over 100 small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) manufacturing operations. This experience has now been condensed in to Grow Your Factory, Grow your Profits: Lean for Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprises, a start-to-finish guide on how to run a successful small and medium-sized manufacturing operation.

The book presents case studies, practical examples, illustrations, charts, and pictures from real SME manufacturers to provide straightforward solutions to the issues facing every growing manufacturing business. In the book, Tim McLean explains about recruiting the right people, empowering them and many more elements key to getting you up and running with your Lean improvement to meet your needs and grow your business.

The book details how SMEs differ from large organisations and why the approach to improvement must also be different. Covering the complete life cycle of small and medium-sized manufacturers, the book addresses a different SME manufacturing issue in each chapter. This enables readers to tackle issues at their own pace and in their own order of priority.

Grow Your Factory, Grow Your Profits is essential reading for owners, managers, and operational leaders in the 90 percent of manufacturing enterprises that are small or medium sized.

In every manufacturing process, our aim is to add value to a product that the customer will pay for. While adding value to our products, there are tasks that must be done to complete the work but don’t directly add value; set-ups and inspection, to name a few. Then there are the other activities that occur during production that are waste.

According to Lean Manufacturing principles, waste is anything that creates no value that the customer is willing to pay for. Waste is defined in terms of value therefore we can only know the waste by first knowing the value first. Waste, therefore, is relative to the customers’ needs.

How Do We Begin toSeethe Waste in Our Production Systems?

Cartons on Pallets
Knowing where the waste is in your process is a must for any manufacturing business.

We begin to investigate the value-adding steps and cycle times in our process, through a Value Stream Mapping process. Out of this process, we now understand how long the value-adding steps take and the overall lead time it takes to get a part all the way through to the customer.

We realise that there is always a BIG difference between these two times.  The difference between value-adding time and the lead-time time provides us with the opportunity to remove the hidden wastes in the value stream. The difference in times is where we can begin to focus on and discover where wastes are hidden.

The 7 Wastes

The 7 wastes (or Muda) have been defined by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, and they have become known as the 7Ws.

The original seven Muda (Wastes) are:

  • Transport (moving products that are not actually required to perform the processing)
  • Inventory (all components, work in progress and the finished product not being processed)
  • Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is required to perform the processing)
  • Waiting (waiting for the next production step)
  • Overproduction (production ahead of demand)
  • Over Processing (resulting from poor tool or product design creating activity)
  • Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

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In order to remind us of these concepts, Acronyms can be a very effective tool and here a few examples,

An easy way to remember the 7 wastes is TIMWOOD

T: Transportation

I: Inventory

M: Motion

W: Wait

O: Over-processing

O: Over-production/Excess-processing

D: Defects

Another easy way is NOW TIME: It’s now time to eliminate Mudas:

N: Non-Quality

O: Over-production

W: Wait

T: Transportation

I: Inventory

M: Motion

E: Excess-processing

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With the 8 wastes use the acronym DOWNTIME is a useful memory aid.

D: Defects

O: Over-production

W: Waiting

N: Non-utilized  Human Resources/Talent

T: Transportation

I: Inventory

M: Motion

E: Excess Processing

*Note this has now been expanded to include an eighth waste of “Non-utilized  Human Resources/Talent”.

What are the 8 Wastes?

Paint cans
Waste must be identified and removed if you are to make your business as efficient as possible.

  1. Defects – The simplest form of waste is components or products that do not meet the specification.  The Toyota quality achievement came with the switch from Quality Control to Quality Assurance – efforts devoted to getting the process right, rather than inspecting the results.
  2. Over-Production – A key element of JIT was making only the quantity required of any component or product. This is the main challenging point to the Western premise of the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) upon which MRP system is built on. This defines the fixed ordering costs, built around set-up times, and thus the need to spread these fixed costs over large batches. The Toyota production system moved from long set-ups to Single Minute Exchange of Die (or SMED).
  3. Waiting – Time that is not being used effectively can only be a waste – we are incurring the cost of wages and all the fixed costs of rent, rates, lighting, and heating so we should use every minute of every day productively. The Toyota production system is focused on the reasons why machines or operators are under-utilised and set about addressing them all. Thus we have new tools for preventive maintenance, the creation of flow and the emphasis on takt time.
  4. Transportation Waste – Moving items between areas, buildings or factories incurs a cost, in energy to initiate the movement – such as the petrol absorbed by a forklift truck. However, there is much more than just the accounting costs; the movement brings other costs. Managing a factory with operations spread apart is much more difficult than when the subsequent stages are located in the same work cell adjacent to one another.
  5. Excessive Movement – Separate from the transporting of items is movement. People spending time moving around the plant or cell is equally wasteful. The time a machine operator wastes walking around in order to find a piece of tooling or spanner could be better utilised if we improve housekeeping by locating every needed in a place that is close at hand.
  6. Over Processing – A good example from my own experience relates to surface finishes requirements on the component. The original drawing required a cyclonical grinding to improve the surface finish after turning. When a new CNC machine was installed the required surface finishes could now be achieved with a finished path of the new lathe.  Thus the grinding operation was removed. A basic principle of the TPS is doing only what is needed.
  7. Excess Inventory – Now everyone understands that a key element of the Toyota production system is that a JIT production system reduces the cost of inventory. By lowering the inventory we can then see the problems in resupplying the inventory in short lead times. Thus lean is a continual process of improvement.
  8. The eighth waste – Non-utilized Human Resources/Talent – The waste of not using people to the best of their unique abilities. How can we involve everyone in developing ideas to generate improvements and new products?

Now you have an understanding of the 8 Wastes and how to identify them you can start to learn about Value Stream Maps and how to create your own Value Stream Maps to identify where the wastes in your processes. Value Stream Mapping sessions are some of the most powerful Lean tools you can use to enhance your business, it’s people and process.

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