Understand Your Team's Capabilities

Why conduct a capability assessment?

A capability assessment provides an indication of the ability of the team to deliver business value effectively, referenced to a best practices model. The output of this activity can allow individual and team development plans to be produced. We can draw upon our best practice-based competency framework to rapidly prepare a tailored capability that matches your specific context and needs.

What competency areas can we address?

Our approach allows the capability assessment to focus on the detailed elements of every strategic procurement process stage, and this maps exactly to our training curriculum.

The approach

We use two complementation data-gathering methods when undertaking a competency/capability assessment:

An online competency survey. This uses situational questions and a combination of response mechanisms to evaluate how respondents would deal with typical ‘day-in-the-life’ scenarios. These can be tailored to a client-specific context to be seen as relevant. The survey takes approximately 30–40 minutes to complete. We also ask people to rate their own ability for each competency area.

Interview-based competency assessments. These are grounded in the same competency framework as the survey and last for no longer than 90 minutes per respondent. Interview-based assessments are best suited to covering a few senior team members.

Competency Assessment

How are the competencies defined?

How do we measure competency?

Each competency area in our survey is tested using a situational question – asking the Respondent what they would do in response to a day-in-the-life scenario. This approach is effective because:

1. It avoids the trap of the competency survey becoming a knowledge test
2. It allows tailoring of the survey by using relevant, realistic scenarios that portray your industry context

What are the deliverables?

The key output from completing a competency survey is an individual report. This shows and contrasts the situational and self-rating scores for each of the competencies. These can also be plotted against minimum target values for each job role or function competency.

We also provide a team capability heat map that shows the results for a group of respondents in a single, consolidated view, allowing strengths and common development needs to be easily identified.