Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
The Skills Matrix
Like any good craftsman, project managers need to have the right tools for the job, but even more, they need to know the quality (and availability) of what’s in their team’s tool chest. Here’s a simple technique for assessing and distributing your team members’ skills.
Believe it or not, there was a time when the average project manager ran several bulging teams at once, teams that could handle any project they came across. Overstaffed but not overextended, these teams were huge, and their members brought an abundance of skills to the projects they worked on. (You may have guessed that teams like these were par for the course in the over-indulgent 1980s, when “more” was de rigueur and American firms spent lavishly on personnel.)
Times change. Today “lean and mean” is the order of business, and teams are often assembled ad hoc, based on the needs of the project at hand. They rarely contain more people than are needed, and the skills that team members bring to a project, while ample, are rarely enough to meet the full extent of the tasks at hand.
But one thing hasn’t changed. The project manager, despite the size of the team and the range of its skills, still has to deliver the goods. So what’s a skilled project manager to do? The answer is simple: Wring every last drop of talent from the team at hand. To that end, there are three steps to perform:
1. Assess your team’…
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"Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crisis in the old theory, through an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulties created. We must examine old ideas, old theories, although they belong to the past, for this is the only way to understand the importance of the new ones and the extent of their validity." - Albert Einstein |