Invest in your employees
A manager send me an email: “In the article “Process Improvement with CMMI”, you wrote: “If you want to invest, please invest in your own employees. Provide better trainings to help them improve their skills”. As a manager of a software company, my questions are: “What skills do I need to invest in them?”; “How do I know that they are improving?”; “ How do I measure their improvement?”
Answer: Software is not just about technology but also a communications business. If you do not know what to invest in your own employees than my first question is: “How good are their soft-skills such as communications? You need to look into areas such as requirements engineering, project management, and customer-relationship, to see if the listening skills, negotiation skills, and presentation skills of your employees are good enough. You may ask them which skills do they need so you can provide training for them. Today, most software companies have foreign customers so another important skill they may need is foreign language skill. Developers must at least communicate well in a foreign language such as English.
My second questions are: “Do your employees have domain expertise? Since you are in the software development business, does your employees understand how your customers use your products? Do your employees know and understand your customers’ business processes? Do they understand what is important to the users and why? This may be the time to invest in explaining how your products are being used in the market. It is important that your employees learn about your business to build domain expertise for them too.
My third question is: “Are you considering adapting any new technology? If so, do your employees have adequate skills in development, design, implement, and test in that technology? If you are planning to adapt new technology, this is the time to invest in training to help them learn and use the new technology. If you do not have any new technology, you could invest more in process improvement such as provide training about how to develop high performance, high reliability, high availability, high quality software. The best training would be on how to conduct reviews to identify and remove defects and improve software quality.
Like any investment, you could measure productivity, quality, schedule, project success, and customer satisfaction before and after the trainings to identify how effective is your investment. Having good measurements and metrics are the best way to know if your employees are improving. I suggest that you have a survey of customers satisfaction as well as employees satisfaction every six months. Another good indicator of employees satisfaction is low turnover rate. Happy employees do not change jobs, if they know that they can advance in their career in your company, they will not leave. If you treat them well, they will stay with you. If your customers are happy they will give you more business, you can measure your revenue and profits before and after your investment in training too.
Once you have invested in your training, my advice is to invest in your hiring process too. Based on my study of software company, many only hire people when they need. Most do not do a good job in selecting because they need to fill all positions quickly. They hire anyone who are qualified technically but not know much about them in other skill areas. You should know that a good inputs will bring good outputs. Rather than react to the demand, advertise positions, selecting by interviewing applicants when needed. You could collaborate with universities to have an internship program where you hire students to work in the summer. You have a chance to observe them, know them well and see how they work. Not just on their technical but also their behavior, their soft-skills so you can have a list of the best candidates before they graduate. This advance planning will saves you a lot of time and money in recruiting. Since these students already work in your company, they know about your process, your tools, your employees, so you will spend less time to train them when they come to work for you. If you need certain skills, certain technology, you can collaborate with universities to have them provide that kind of trainings in their program. University is in training business, most will welcome your suggestions knowing that you will hire their students. If you visit Carnegie Mellon, you will see that there are always number of company’s representatives who stay there permanently in school to observe and mentor students so they will work for them. Our university collaborates with many software companies and adjust our trainings to meet their needs. That is why most of our students get job offers before they even graduate.
Plan for your employees investments now. Your company will be more successful, and this will make your customers more satisfied. It is the best investment that you can make today.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
