🚪 🏛️ 🌛 Management of individual development of team members 🚖 💋 🎙️

Professional development is the most important motivator in work. If you are a team leader and agree with this thesis, you probably wondered how you can manage this process and help your team members grow.

At TeamLead Conf, Pavel Filonov from Kaspersky shared his pain and approach to solving it: personal development plan, he is also an individual development plan.

Further from the first person: the goal, structure, examples and feedback of the team members, over which the experiment was conducted to compile the IPR. This is only one implementation option, if your experience or intuition suggests that everything needs to be done differently - tell us in the comments. If you have your own IPR - supplement the feedback, write whether he allowed to achieve the desired goals or did not justify himself.

About problems

I am a linear manager of medium-sized teams. My direct submission is 10 people, which can be divided into three subcommands with different expertise: Data Science, Automotive Security Development, HRIS & Analytics. Each subcommand usually works simultaneously on several projects. For example, we can have 10 active projects that all three teams work together.

In this situation, I often encounter the same problems that you probably are familiar with.

Motivation through development. An employee comes to me and talks about his problems and needs. For example, that he wants to develop, because at conferences, in podcasts and articles, everyone insists that an engineer should develop. The problem is that it is not always clear how to do this.

Sometimes there are slightly more specific requests. For example, Masha says that she wants to be promoted (in position, in salary, in responsibility), and asks what to do for this. Masha, in my opinion, is doing the right thing - she tells the head that she wants to be promoted, and now, in her opinion, this is your problem. It seems to me that she is right: you need to do something together, for example, to set goals and deadlines and agree that if the goal is reached within these deadlines, Masha can expect an increase. In fact, this is a controlled process and an independent project in which two participate: the leader and his subordinate.

Change management. Olya loves to read everything in a row, not a single article on Habré passes by her. She is a big fan of conferences and is watching a video of those reports that she could not get to (approx. Ed .: if you, too, at least occasionally return to video from conferences - look, we have opened all the videos of the February TeamLead Conf ). She studies a lot of everything and wants to drag everything new into the project. I call it development chaos .

On the one hand, this is good - Olga reads, develops, learns something new. But for me, as a leader, it is desirable that this process be more controlled. Because I know, let's say that JavaScript is a great language, but in embedded development for microwave ovens this is not exactly what is needed here and now from the point of view of the project.

On the other hand, I sometimes use this tool for my own purposes. Quite often, I can predict the emergence of certain projects and I want that when work on a project begins, it doesn’t start with “let's see what it is, what kind of technological stack it is.”

I believe that you can start faster if you guess which project may appear and which technological stack is suitable for it. To prepare one or two team members in advance: to offer them something to learn in reserve, to try, to experiment. When the real work begins, it will go faster.

Managing changes in the technological stack, technologies sometimes need to be added, and sometimes removed. Unfortunately, we cannot be experts in everything at once in order to learn something new, usually we need to forget something old.

Increased team flexibility. The third important tool is not about the individual. It is important for me, as a leader, that in projects and teams there should be as few as possible unique people who are difficult to replace. So that if a person gets sick, goes on vacation or quits altogether, there are no big problems. From my point of view, individual development management is including mitigation of risks . You can try to smear competencies, reducing the ubiquitous bus factor.

I’ll tell you about a tool that helps me, if I don’t solve all these problems, then at least control or move towards their solution.

Plan

If we understand the problem, then the obvious engineering step is to decompose it, draw up a solution plan and stick to it, preferably constantly monitored by feedback. Here is our plan, including this article.

Let's start with the well-known tool - the matrix of competencies (skill matrix). Many people know and even make up such matrices. But this is not enough, some process needs to be applied to it - it needs to be completed.

In this case, we will talk about an individual matrix of competencies, in which each employee can find himself and understand what competencies he has and which he would like to master. This is essentially an assessment procedure . Moreover, this is a double parallel process: on the one hand, the employee evaluates himself, on the other hand, the manager can evaluate it. Comparing estimates and, in fact, expectations of where to develop can be a very important part.

After the assessment stage, the central topic of the article is an individual development plan.(Personal Development Plan). There should already be a call to action in PDP. The document with the plan should visualize the plan itself and, if possible, answer the question of what to do in order to reach the desired point in development within the established period.

The last but important detail is that it’s not enough just to make a plan and say: “That's it, let's go!” Any process needs support, execution control and the ability to make changes along the way ( execution & control ). It is difficult to guess everything at once for a year in advance, something can change dynamically. Therefore, it is important to have constant monitoring tools. For example, I include this in a one-to-one structure.

The final transition to the diagram - “execution & control” in the “skill matrix” - is also important. This is not a terminal process.. You need to scroll through this cycle with the frequency for which the employee development plan is designed. In 2020, we began the second iteration of working with plans, and some employees already expected this and asked: “Will we draw up a development plan for next year?”

IPR solves not only my tasks, but also the problems of the employees themselves.

Let's go through all the points of the plan in more detail.

Competency Matrix

It is difficult to imagine a universal matrix that is suitable for everyone, so we will consider the principles using fairly general examples.

Columns are fields of knowledge. In addition to software development, our projects often need machine learning and data analysis, so there are separate columns for them. Titles, levels, grades are usually marked on the lines.

Both columns and their contents are an individual issue for each company or even a team. You can start with a ready-made example and modify it for yourself.

When you compile a matrix of competencies, you can proceed to the next item in the plan. But note, sometimes in the matrix you can see that the rows do not correspond to titles, but to specific team members. Then this is a slightly different tool that allows you to understand what skills are missing in your team. It’s also important to know, but I’ll talk about using the competency matrix to focus on a specific individual, that is, how much a particular employee has knowledge in the domain areas important in our projects.

Rating

To mark the level of knowledge or skills, you can use the traffic light scheme, I offer just three colors:

Dark green - not just “know-know”, but there are a large number of artifacts that confirm this knowledge.
Light green - I read, heard something, but I myself did not work much in this area.
White - I don’t know at all.

Naturally, the question arises, how to understand how to colorize the cells. How to distinguish: I know, I don’t know well or don’t know at all? The criteria may vary from case to case, but I have such tricks.

I use the rule of thumb that my colleague suggested: if you know one system, then in fact you do not know one; if you know two, consider that you know all of them.

Curiously, it works with so many things, for example, operating systems, programming languages, databases, and data visualization systems. You still can’t know everything, but if you take two extreme cases, you begin to understand some generalization of the process. So you can offer this option: you know, if you know at least a few tricks from here.

The second option: I know if there are artifacts that can be presented - code, presentation, conclusions. If there are specific artifacts, then most likely a person has done this, and more than once.

So, we ask the person to paint over the matrix as a children's coloring. The leader can do the same from his point of view.

Everyone knows the T-shaped model - when a person knows a little something from different areas and is well versed in one. In various articles you can come across the idea that this is an ideal engineer and specialist of the future.

It turned out that there are more interesting options .

In addition to T-shaped, there is Pi-shaped - when a person is deeply versed in several areas. But the discovery for me was Comb-shaped - a comb-man, who is an expert in almost everything, and there are such people.

Indeed, sometimes we need a person who will know one area very deeply - the specifics of the project are as follows. And sometimes we want a super-versatile person (though I'm afraid that he needs to pay indecently much).

Individual development plan

The competency matrix is like a coordinate system in a sea of personal development:

The axes are connected by domain domains (software development and machine learning in this case). When we make an assessment, we essentially fix just two points in this coordinate system:

what a person knows now;
that we (the employee and the manager) would like to be mastered within a reasonable time.

Obviously, the construction of a plan begs. In this visual image, an individual development plan is a vector between the points as a way to get from the current situation to the desired one. Moreover, it is important to do this as transparently as possible, and not: “You will study within a year, and in a year we will see.” In my opinion, such a difficult to control process does not make sense at all. And how to control it, we will discuss a little later.

IPR structure

It is convenient to divide the structure of IPR into two large blocks: goals and methods of achievement.

Goals are essentially points from the competency matrix. I recommend not to plan too many goals - no more than 20. But rather abstract points, for example, “learn data visualization tools” or “deal with modern natural language processing algorithms” are better divided into smaller tasks.

The number of goals, of course, depends on the person, because people have different learning abilities. It can even be measured in the framework of this approach - how many goals a person has mastered in a year. My team was when an employee managed to advance on all points of the plan, even time was left and had to be added. I like to add more than a situation where not all points were able to advance. Adding something to the scope is a more familiar process than removing it from there.

Methods of achievement. There are three important components that can be roughly described in terms of the time that you potentially need to invest.

Workplace training ~ 70% of the goals.

The learning process using current tasks and projects is the most effective. Firstly, it is useful because customers are satisfied, work is ongoing. Secondly, these are tasks from real life, that is, it is a real pain.

But almost always the current portfolio of projects does not allow covering all the skills that I would like to master. Then there is a danger that regardless of whether this is necessary in the project or not, as soon as a person learns a new tool, he tries to drag it in - knowledge must be consolidated. There are two other options for this case.

Self-training ~ 20% of goals.

This is a kind of attempt to structure what a person reads, looks at what reports he goes to, what he listens to prevent chaos. I call this the "summer reading list." Honestly, I didn’t really like it before, but if it contains books, courses, lectures that are interesting, then it begins to be perceived much better.

Do-it-yourself projects ~ 10% of goals.

Pet-projects or research projects. They do not always have a customer, that is, they don’t pay money for these projects; business does not need them yet. But if in self-study you just read a book, listen to something or go somewhere, most likely, after 1-2 months, the material will completely be washed out of your head. Independent projects are needed to consolidate new knowledge, which is now not needed in combat projects, but may be needed in the future. Independent projects are allocated the least time.

Let's go deep into each of the points of the methods of achievement.

IPR example

The objectives of the IPR are points from the matrix of competencies that a person would like to master, and the leader would like him to master. But most importantly, we need the expected results - roughly speaking, confirmation that the goal has really been achieved.

Individual development plan
Goals		Expected Result
1	SE-3. Python Proficiency	Source code application
2	SE-3. Infrastructure setup	Created CI / CD Conveyors
3	SE-4. DevOps Template Development	Template for building conveyors
4	ML-1. Mathematical statistics	Using methods in projects

It’s good when achievements are confirmed by artifacts. For example, to justify that an employee has really acquired the skill of building modern CIs, he can simply present the pipelines that he launched that already work, do not crash much and deliver value.

If you want to master such an abstract skill as mathematical statistics (this is a large area and in fact some separate parts of it are being studied), then you also need to present, for example, research methods or techniques used in specific problems.

The development process usually goes in small steps. A person does his task for 1-2 days and does not feel that something is changing. Therefore, it is important that you can gather once a quarter, open IPR, select an item and look at the artifacts of progress. This can be a measure, including for the employee himself, which prompts: “It turns out that I already know how to do it, because I do it! Yes, maybe I don’t know everything yet, but I’ve already done these things. ”

Further, in each of the IPR blocks, specifics related to current or future projects can already go. Although we are planning two-week sprints, as a project manager, I also present prospects for six months to a year and approximately know what specific tasks may appear.

Workplace training

For example, I assume that in three months we will receive a new project that will need to be decomposed and understand what is generally required to be done. This is a separate skill - decomposing a complex problem into a series of small ones. Another separate skill is to evaluate how much time and resources are needed. It is quite possible to entrust such a task to an employee if he wants to grow and learn how to decompose complex tasks: take the task for 3 person-months and break it down into tasks for 1-2 days (paragraph 7 in the example).

Workplace training
Goal number	Job type	When
2	Configuring CI / CD on TFS	Q1
3	Development of a common template for logging and monitoring	Q2
7	Complete decomposition of tasks for a new project	Q1-4
8	The task of automatically retraining models	Q2
9	Using TFS to measure time	Q1-4
10	Mentoring over the intern	Q1-3
eleven	Conducting meetings with the customer. Preparation of reports and reports	Q3
12	The formation of sprints and backlog for several projects	Q3-Q4

Or if a person wants to become proficient in soft-skills, then you can offer him to try himself as a mentor. Thus, you can set the task up to a year long (paragraph 10).

It is important for me to indicate when it is approximately necessary to deal with one task or another, and it’s enough to do it roughly - within a quarter or six months. Then one-to-one, you can return to this scheme, but do not go all the way from beginning to end, but concentrate just on the tasks of the past period.

A look at the current time interval often helps to understand what tasks are currently relevant and what is needed to fulfill an individual plan. Constantly monitoring the implementation of the plan is the task of both the employee and the manager.

You, as a leader, can significantly contribute to the promotion of an IPR employee if you control the distribution of tasks. Then, distributing tasks from the backlog, you can focus on IPR.

Let's say we are talking about a classic sprint. First you need to make a sprint backlog from a big backlog, and then either invite everyone to take what they like, or choose which team will solve this or that problem. This planning can be carried out through the prism of an individual development plan, especially in the projection of the current quarter or other short period of implementation of goals.

For example, we agreed with one employee that in the first quarter he wants to learn how to work with docker images. If there is a task to renew certificates in a docker image, then I have a hint for the routing task who should be sent to this task.

Here, of course, there is a pitfall and a possible conflict of interest. If an employee learns with the help of a task, then it is likely that on average he will do it longer than an experienced employee. This is really a problem and a compromise is needed.

If we want employees to be trained at the workplace, then the distribution of tasks will not be optimal in terms of speed of their solution.

A two-criteria task appears: to close all the tasks to the end of the sprint and to enable people to learn something new. From the point of view of performing tasks, it makes no sense to give the task to an inexperienced performer. But I look at this both as a resource manager and as a leader whose team must develop in order to do the job faster in the long run.

I don’t believe that you can just get someone to do the job faster. I believe that this is a long process when a person begins to accelerate. You need to invest in this stage, for example, by making the correct routing.

Self education

The "Self-development" section usually has fewer points than the "Workplace training" section, but they are also as specific as possible. True, behind each of them a whole list of literature can already be covered.

Self education
No. Objectives	Area of study	When
1	Python tutorials	Q1
2	Docker	Q2
4		Q3
5		Q4

For example, if a person wants to deeply learn Python, then 3-4 good books can be included in the basic training materials right away. And if the goal is related to the use of this language in a specific field, for example, in web development or data analysis, then you can pick up another 5-6 good materials. Therefore, despite the fact that there are few items, they can be supported by good lists.

The selection of materials can include: online courses, links to electronic libraries, articles, reports at conferences. But my attempt to compose such collections on my own failed, I am not an expert in all areas. It’s better to propose compiling such lists and keeping them in the knowledge exchange system for all team members and categorizing them precisely according to development goals.

Add Net Promoter Score (recommendation index) to thematic material collections - how much you liked this resource and whether it can be recommended to colleagues.

NPS in collections helps you understand which materials are more useful. Otherwise, it will be just a list of dozens of items for only one programming language.

Do-it-yourself projects

The independent projects section is even shorter. Usually it has those goals that are not in current projects and projects for this year. For example, we now do not need to deal with Named entity recognition (this is a subtask from the field of processing natural languages), but you can come up with a pet-project and implement it in the framework of the IPR.

Do-it-yourself projects
No. Objectives	Area of study	When
6	NER Research	Q3
4	Project for assessing the time of solving problems	Q2

At one time I got the insight that if the engineer is motivated, most likely he already has such a pet-project. Maybe he even deals with them at work, you just don’t know about it. This is a good reason for them to finally go outside. Therefore, I really like when these items are offered by the employees themselves. Then you can find out, let’s say that your natural language specialist is studying Kotlin to write mobile games. If this process is already underway, why not take it into service if it is ever needed.

On the other hand, independent projects save our product from the introduction of technology for the sake of interest. Because you can do a very short task, spend one or two weeks during the year and during this time check the technology in action.

Independent projects usually do not have an external customer, they can be the leader and offer these options:

Make an internal tool for the team.
Check product ideas - sometimes good ideas come from development teams, not from product managers.
Prepare a report - for this you will definitely have to better understand the topic.

But it’s important not to try to pile everything at once. If you plan for the first quarter and training at the workplace, and self-education, and independent projects, much will definitely not be done. It is necessary to try to smear them as much as possible. Fortunately, deadlines in individual development plans are very rare.

Feedback

My team left feedback on this tool. It has both pros and cons.

Pros of IPR:

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A situation may arise where there are no tasks for specific purposes. Of course, even with independent projects, sometimes there are no current tasks to consolidate.
The items from the Soft skills section do not understand how to evaluate.
Somehow it turned out that the last two months have hardly met, which allowed us to forget about the plan. That is, I would like to focus on the regularity of meetings.

findings

So, here are the main recommendations for working with IPR:

Make a plan - having a plan is better than not having one, and the team agrees.
Distribute tasks based on IPR.
Make lists of materials with the involvement of the team and use them as a tool for self-development.
Use independent projects as an experimental platform to consolidate skills when and in current projects there are no such tasks.

useful links

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Management of individual development of team members