The Helix Group is proud to offer our Growth and Agility Skills Portrait (GRASP) to any individual for FREE. The Skills Portrait is designed to help individuals explore the skills needed to successfully run a transformation or even to just understand what is involved.
Very simply, a skills portrait is an evaluation of an individual’s ability to perform a specific skill or set of skills. Usually, it’s an evaluation of skills specific to a job or role. Ideally, the assessment captures the level of proficiency for each skill, so you know which participants are new to a skill and which have mastered it.
Skills portraits may be conducted in person and/or online and may take the form of a simulation, test, questionnaire, or observation. Skill levels can be assessed with proficiency markers such as: “Limited,” “Basic,” “Intermediate,” “Advanced,” or “Expert.”
Regardless, you’ll want to conduct standardized, objective reviews, so results of all the skills portraits can be reliably compared. Results are centralized, always current, and readily available.
The sad truth is that the majority of practitioners in the Agile, Lean and DevOps communities truly lack the required skills to not only run a transformation, but to understand one. The certification factories over the years have done a tremendous job of fooling individuals and organizations into believing that just understanding Scrum, Kanban and tools is all you need to become a practitioner, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As we discuss in “Transformations, What’s Gone Wrong?”, a transformation is made up of a portfolio of initiatives, which all involve different skills. To see where you stand professionally, take the skills portrait and use it as a baseline for your learning.
| Risk | Management’s Role | Variation |
| Processes | Automation | Lean |
| Agile | Testing | Delivery |
| Structure/Evaluation | Culture | Communication |
| Benchmarking | Strategy | Feedback Loops |
| Technical Debt | Quality | Change |
| 21st Century Mgmt | Psychological Safety | DevOps |
| Business Agility | Servant Leadership | Change Management |
| Organizational Alignment | Organizational Design | Active Inertia |
| Self-Organizing & Empowered | Adaptive Organizations | Organizational Cuture |
| OKRs | Product Operating Model (POM) | Learning Agility |
| Experimentation | Redesign Roles | Financial Incentives |
| Management by Objectives (MBO) | Continuous Improvement | Design Thinking |
| Organizational Learning | Agile/Product Funding | Change vs Transformation |