Introduction

Human resource manage-ment is the key to the success of an enterprise. It is the key driver and needs to be better managed to be able to sustain in this competitive world.

It is also one of the most complex resources to manage owing to increasing complexity of the businesses that companies have to manage. This is especially true in IT organisations where the knowledge and competency of the persons matter and leads to the success of the projects that are undertaken. Typically, in IT organisations, a job consists of various activities, which are interlinked but differ from each other and hence require different types of expertise. For example, a customer may request for a small IT system. The activities against this customer request will be project planning, analysis, design, build, test, train the users, procure and set up hardware and load software, provide network facilities, etc.

Tata Steel’s IT centre

All these activities will require different competencies, eg. software development in the particular platform, network management, quality assurance, supplier management, project management, etc. It is hence of paramount importance to know the competencies of the people that an organisation has and the competencies that are required for the kind of business that it is in. This will help in better management of human resource.

ITS, Tata Steel manages the IT requirements of the entire company. The technological advancements in IT have ensured that latest products and solutions are offered to the customers. Both customised and ERP based products are in place and talk to each other. More and more advanced products are on offer in the IT marketplace out of which, some of the proven products and technologies will find their way to Tata Steel. To manage this there is a need for Activity Based Competency Management.

Activity Based Competency Management

The objective is to identify the competencies available and required in ITS and to design and implement a system for measuring and reporting the competency levels. The objectives of the system are a competency dictionary properly categorised, which contains all the competencies that are required in ITS for implementing the various IT projects in Tata Steel, and a transaction system to capture the resource deployed against the IT projects for each competency across the organisation.

A project can be classified into several activities with certain start and finish dates. These activities will ensure the completion of the project. The activities need to be allocated to the persons with the relevant competency. If a competency dictionary is made, then all the activities that are being undertaken in ITS can be linked to the competency. This will ensure that the competencies that a person has developed can be easily found out through the system. Similarly, one can find all the persons who are equipped with a particular competency. This will enable fact based decision making while filling up vacant positions and help during the appraisal process.

Problem with the Existing System

The existing system did not capture the activities performed based on the competencies that are required in ITS. It captured the activities performed by the persons, which was not standardised, and hence it was difficult to identify the competency that the person has developed while doing the jobs allocated to him. Although this system helped where monitoring of the jobs effectively was concerned, it failed where the right person needs to be given the right job based on the competency requirement of the job vis-a-vis competency of the person.

There were a number of limitations with the system, which made it difficult to find a person with a particular set of compe-tencies. This made it difficult to fill a vacant position where the competency required is known, but the person with the required competencies is not known.

The various shareholders were facing the following shortcomings with the system :

Need for a New System

A need was felt to have an IT system, which would help overcome all the above difficulties and help take fact based decisions. A study was carried out to find the required competencies in ITS with the HR team. These were then classified into activity heads and each of the activity heads were further classified into activity detail. So each competency became an activity head with a number of activities under this head.

A person can then enter into the system the competency in the form of an activity head and an activity detail while he is doing a particular job. A number of such activities needs to be performed to successfully complete the job. All the activities that the person performs against a job can then be entered into the system. This means that one can find the competency the person has developed while doing the job.

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