If you found the last post about web teams irrelevant, this should be a consolation. If you’ve got a web team, then there is one essential thing you need to know before you can do just about anything else.

You need to know what they can do.

There are lots of ways to measure web teams, but one of the easiest is self-assessment. And to make it even easier, I’ve prepared something so that it should take no more than 5 minutes per team member. That’s less than an hour for most small to medium sized web teams for something that could give you valuable insights into your team.

Whilst I’m loath to use the word, it is a matrix - although a very simple one. It contains a list of key skills that most web teams should have. Obviously there may be some skills that aren’t relevant to your site, and you don’t need to have experts in all of the areas. It largely depends on the size of your web team and nature of your site.

Download the web team skills matrix

Feel free to take a copy of the web team skills matrix (it’s an excel spreadsheet), and use it for your web team.

How to use the web team skills matrix

Each individual in the web team fills out the level of skill in all the areas listed. The spreadsheet then allocates a score for each level. You can then compare scores to see where the strengths and weaknesses are in the web team.

The spreadsheet only has room for 10 members of the web team, but you should be able to extend it easily – just unhide everything and you’ll see how it works. Or if a few people leave a comment letting me know how many they have in their web teams I can build a bigger one.

If you want you can write the team’s names in the top row. However if you would like to keep it anonymous you can send everyone a team member id via email. It’s a judgement call about what is appropriate for your company culture. If you really want to keep it confidential, you can recreate it, or something similar, in survey monkey.

It is important to make people aware that it is a very informal method of assessment. It is meant to help you as a manager understand your team and has nothing to do with an individual’s performance.

It is also worth trying to identify some benchmarks for the differing skill levels, to avoid wildly different interpretations. I haven’t included anything at this level as its dependent on the organisation. However even with wildly different interpretations, you can still get an idea of where the web team’s strengths lie in comparison to other skills. You also may have some indication of whether or not individuals in the web team have a tendency to inflate their skill sets or not.

If you’re unsure about what any of the skills are, there’s a brief description in the spreadsheet. You might also want to go back to the earlier post about growing web teams as it has a break down of most of the major roles within a web team.

As mentioned at the beginning, this is only one technique among many. It’s quick and dirty, and isn’t going to solve any problems - but it may help identify what they are.

If you’re still hungry for more ideas about the skills required in a web team, you may be interested in Jesse James Garrett’s Nine Pillars of successful web teams. Otherwise stay tuned for the next post on web teams, or take a copy of the web team skills matrix and tell us how it worked for you.

Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:05 am | Categories: web teams

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