Role IQ
One of the important tasks that front-end architects can (and should) perform is to help organize teams. Their strategic position within the organization, combined with their technical expertise and visibility, makes them perfectly qualified to identify people’s capabilities, talents, and preferences, as well as to allocate them into different projects and roles.
As we know, human interaction is prone to synergy, either positive or negative, meaning that it tends to generate results that are either bigger or smaller than the natural arithmetic sum. The quality of a project depends more than just the technologies used and the combined years of expertise of the developers. It also depends on who was involved, how did they feel about the work they were doing, and how they interacted with each other.
As architects, for every given product, we would recommend an optimum amount or personnel, the best people for each position, choose the ideal channels of communication, work on their psychological safety, promote clarity of processes and objectives, and so much more. All so that the human aspect of the application can favor both the final product while helping employee retention.
That evaluation of the workforce and consecutive alocation across projects and roles could certainly be done by managers or team leaders. However, managers don’t always have the technical expertise to asses the developers, and team leaders not always have the visibility or the business mindset to support adequate recommendations. Obviously, they could simply meet and discuss the subject, in case they have time to verbalize all of their observations and collaboratively work towards a solution. That is an option, for sure. But it often fails given the intrinsic difficulty of defining humans’ psyche. It is just difficult to put that into words. Also, most people are afraid of how their speech about others will be perceived. In fact, I can see how that kind of evaluation would carry many kinds of communication noise.
Whatever the case is, either by the work of architects or manager/team-leaders, in the end, we could really benefit from the use of tools that help increase the quality of our assessments. I believe that the Pluralsight‘s new tool (Role IQ) has a great potential to help us with that. That is more efficient than requesting your developers to take dozens of different IT related assessment tests.
However, I need to say that no tool can’t fully replace human observation at this time. We still need experienced people to identify the developers’ capabilities and talents, which they can either overstate or depreciate in their own eyes. Aptitude is something that goes beyond the developers’ current range expertise, and a human observer could identify it even if they have very little knowledge in the given subject.
Also, most computer tools fail in identifying dreams and aspirations. Even if we were to ask that on a web form, the developers could still hide or discard prematurely based on their own self-image. In that sense, architects have a special opportunity to work as coaches, helping people see and balance out their aptitudes and dreams.
This is no small subject. Having the right people in the right positions, and to keep them engaged, is extremely valuable for the success of any endeavor. Just ask the successful leaders that you know. After all, nobody can argue with the fact that everybody works better when they do what they like, knowing that their contributions are important and perceived as such, in a psychologically safe environment, with challenges that match their natural abilities and aspirations.
My father and I have been working on a methodology for more than a decade that will do just that: work on all of the non-technical aspects of job-matching. After all, skills can be learned, including on the amazing Pluralsight. Furthermore, our methodology (and coming Web App) will not replace Pluralsight’s Role IQ, but rather complement it. Please keep tuned here in this blog to see when it comes out! Meanwhile, it is very worthy to start using the Role IQ to help you increase the success of your projects. Check it out: