Question: How did I develop my technology support staff when I was a Senior Manager of IT Operations for a major professional service company?

Surprisingly, I get this question a lot. Really it came down to a plan that the people could get into. The key is to recognize that tech people want tech or hard skills training and the business wants business or soft skill training. Over a 4 year period I (we) developed a program that included:

1. Annual National Conference with focus on soft and hard skills training
2. Annual Regional Conference that focused on specific requirements for the region including hard skills and soft skills plus effective team building events
3. Individual SWOTs where the techie actually had say into the four quadrants
4. Individual tailored learning plans with SMART goals and objectives
5. The identification of levels for core competency development
6. Mentorship and Support tagging on company initiatives
7. One on one coaching sessions to build skills and sometimes just talk about what was important to them
8. Team hiring practice. All interviews would be conducted by HR for fit, the team for technical expertise and personal fit, the team lead for future fit and then head office for OK
9. Befriend HR professionals and leverage their expertise. We had 3 in our region.
10. Working with your boss to best build your team
11. Sharing with peers the responsibilities of the job and cross training
12. Weekly meetings were people would do a quick round table of what they appreciated about the other person. We would record this and encourage people to put it in their personal evaluations
13. Monthly reports where we would do CAR stories (challenge, action, result) in three sentences. These could be placed in annual performance reviews
14. Opportunity to work with different teams in different locations across Canada
15. Opportunity to travel to work in different areas with different teams
16. Developed a cross-training matrix were people could back up other people when needed

These were the things we did to develop our technology teams hard and soft skills. In the end it worked great. Skills improved and team members advanced to higher professional levels based on core competencies.

Do you think based on your understanding and experience of business analysis/IT, can a BA position be shipped offshore?

The trend in our location of the world is to keep BBA (business - business analysts) and outsource TBA (technical business analysts). Organizations have made a distinction between the two. There are a number of organizations that have made the strategic decision to do 80/20 or 50/50 splits as part of their outsourcing model. The management and the BBA tend to sit above the line as the business does not want to loose the business knowledge. The TBA are more likely to be outsourced to mid tier near shore providers. The lower level BA's are easier to outsource.