DevelopMyTeam — Improve your team’s maturity and individual skillsets

DevelopMyTeam is an on-line self-assessment-based tool that helps team leaders get insights about their team members’ skills maturity and capability levels, both individually and as an ensemble. For procurement and supply-related functions, because it maps skills with gaps in the team, it enables the CPO or head of procurement to cultivate plans for the development of individuals and the team overall towards delivering more value for the business.

As Spend Matters is primarily involved with the technology that can make the procurement practitioner’s life easier and more efficient, we were interested in this piece of software which was chiefly architected just over a year ago by procurement strategist, coach and trainer, Nick Ralphs.

We spoke with Ralphs to understand more.

Why a team development tool? — Surely they exist already

Ralphs explains that throughout his time training and coaching, he has found that procurement teams have been inconsistent in the way they develop their people and the team as an entity — if indeed it happens at all. He also explains that when it did happen, it was an exercise often carried out using spreadsheets. He became very aware, however, that organizational leaders are generally very interested in assessing where their teams are against where they want to be.

“It’s true that there are good tools out there that look at behavioral insights,” he explained, “but nothing that does the same from a skills/goals mapping point of view, so the overwhelming need was to make DevelopMyTeam not only easy for people to use, but flexible and company-bespoke.

“I didn’t want to create purely a benchmarking exercise that looks at scores against others. That’s useful, but in reality, the organization isn’t interested in that. The organization is interested in what you are able to do for them and whether your skills match their need. It’s interesting that many teams can produce great results, but they aren’t necessarily always in line with the company’s objectives. And this is when procurement teams get frustrated, because the rest of the organization doesn’t really understand what they do or how they add value.”

How does DevelopMyTeam work?

An individual survey allows team members and their line managers to self-assess their skills to provide a baseline for implementing development plans at both team and individual level.

“The platform is intuitive to use, is quick to set up, and you receive your insights automatically once your team has completed the survey,” he explained.

In a nutshell:

• A client gets a personal portal to the system
• They quickly set up their team members and sub-teams as appropriate
• In detail they can also enter role types, set bespoke targets for different skills areas and roles, tailor those targets to levels of seniority or responsibilities
• Once submitted it auto generates emails to all the participants with their passwords and the different types of assessment, whether individual or as a team
• Each has a description of the varying levels of maturity in areas tailored to the role, the ‘assessee’ and assessor (the line manager) chose the level they of maturity they believe best describes that person, or team
• When the assessment date comes to an end or when the whole team has completed it, reports are automatically generated. Some go directly to the participants, and team-level ones are held in a portal for the CPO or designated admin to review

The process seems simple, and it is. But Ralphs assures us that behind this much bespoke system lies a complex code that enables it to do what is does — but that complexity is completely hidden from the user.

What does it give you?

Each individual receives a dashboard with targets for their particular role — that might be category manager, sourcing manager, and so on. They have visibility of the assessment and the line manager review.

“The whole focus is on prioritizing the right areas of skills development for the individual or team,” he says.

For one-to-one development conversations, the CPO or manager might look at the areas where the individual assesses themselves below the target for the role, and offer the individual the training necessary to offset the misalignment between what the individual thinks and what the line manager thinks. “That genuinely works both ways: one might score higher or lower than the other. This might be down to lack of confidence, but when that flag shows up, it’s a great insight-backed conversation to have,” he says.

Results are rolled up to team level too, so the CPO can check the whole team alignment between what the individuals say about the team effort, and what the line manager thinks. It unearths mismatches that might have lain undetected.

The line manager might also look at how many times an individual or team underscores themselves and for which skillsets. It might be that gathering supplier intelligence for example shows up as a team deficit. If that’s the case it digs deeper into more detail: how many times has this happened, and for which roles in which scenarios?

So it identifies where the gaps are so that you know precisely where to target training and for which cohort.

“The team assessment in particular is very much a team engagement process,” explains Ralphs. “Everyone contributes to the review of where they think the team sits for specific areas such as e-sourcing, sustainability, risk management, procurement process etc.

“Results can also be sliced by subteams, role types and even length of service. This allows a review of which parts of the teams score relatively well and what can others learn from them to bring them up to the same level.”

As valuable for the leadership team as for the individual

The reports also focus on team dynamics and what can be learned from them. So the different views might focus on leadership for example and where the gaps are between what the leadership team thinks is working well, and what the team members actually see is happening.

In the case of limited resources, the team leader might want to know what skills development to focus on to make sure they are augmenting the right skill in the right places so they don’t waste time and effort.

Basically, for the leadership team the system offers the bigger picture: do they have the right skills in place for the right roles? Is the team where it needs to be to fulfil organizational goals?

For the staff it shows that development plans are in place, and that’s good for staff retention.

“What’s really important,” says Ralphs, “is that this is not seen as a performance measurement tool. You don’t want staff getting nervous and not giving honest feedback. This is a positive development identification tool.”

What other services are available?

“If a CPO wants help to determine what to do with the outputs, the team at DevelopMyTeam can help analyse the results and put development plans together. But it’s important to get the team together and look at results,” he advises. “If you are in a team that seriously wants to improve, you can use the power of the team as a real positive: interpret the results together, then decide on the next course of action.

“This is something that is becoming more and more important for organizations’ central functions,” says Ralphs. “You have to win the right to operate within an organization, and if you are not doing the right things at the right level, you won’t succeed in your goals.”

Find DevelopMyTeam here.

If you are looking for tech to help with your procurement goals for 2022, try out Spend Matters TechMatch℠ to benchmark and shortlist providers