Merita Consulting

Skills First

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one truth remains constant: a company is only as strong as its workforce. This is where skills-first hiring and promoting come to the forefront, offering a means to fill positions and a catalyst for driving your company’s growth. When you strategically hire for skills, you open doors to enhanced innovation, heightened productivity, and an overall surge in business success.

Skill Definitions

Determining the skills for each role is a critical first step in building an adaptive workforce. These definitions are the foundation for your job descriptions, job postings, career pathways, and workforce development programs, all of which provide the platform for implementing a skills-first hiring and promotion program.



Skills Assessments

Skills assessments are crucial to the skills-based hiring process. They are the litmus test that helps employers determine if a candidate’s abilities align with the role’s requirements. Yet evaluating technical skills alone is not enough.

You must embrace a holistic approach to skills assessments to find the perfect fit for your team.


Lean Startup Reviewed by Steve Denning

Posted on by Dwayne Nesmith

In a 4 part Forbes series, Steve Denning describes some of the key ideas presented in Eric Ries book, Lean Startup.  In conclusion, Denning states, “Overall, Eric Ries has made a major contribution to thinking about innovation by instilling a scientific mindset to providing value to clients and customers.”

Part 1: Something New In Innovation: Lean Startups. Denning states the comparison of Lean StartUp to traditional management techniques is an unfair measure. Then he highlights these items as being genuinely new:

  • A more scientific method to improve the chances of building a new product or service that people will actually buy and really like.
  • A mental shift from “build, measure, learn” to “learn, measure, build”
  • A better definition of “done”, to include validation from the customer that the product or service is indeed better than it was before.
  • A “magic test” to ascertain whether clients will buy the product even before there is a product.
  • Metrics for the three types of sustainable growth engines: viral growth, paid growth and retention models.

[pullquote align=”right”]Don’t miss Denning’s series: When Will US Firms Become Agile?
Part 1: Virtual agility: Li & Fung
Part 2: Internal agility: Zara
Part 3: Agile software development: Scrum at Salesforce
Part 4: Today: What Exactly Is Kanban? Is Kanban Really Agile?
Part 5: Coming: Can an organizational culture become Agile?

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Part 2: A Scientific Method For Creating Innovation covers Ries’ assertion that a startup’s main throughput is to learn and that everything they do is based on defining what knowledge they want to gain from the customer, how to measure it, and then build an experiment, called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), that will successfully test the hypothesis.

Part 3:  Most Changes Make The Product Worse. Do they really? The truth is in many cases, no one really knows and that is what Ries suggests changing. Focus on only those things that may add value and test it early will lead to adding things of value, wasting a lot less and making customers happy sooner.  Guess what this does to ROI when waste is down, delivery is early and returns start sooner?

Part 4: Implementing Lean Startups: Kanban vs Scrum describes Ries Kanban example, where things are not completed until they are validated by the customer. Here Ries describes how there is no pure role of programmer in this system, everyone must be driven by getting work through the system and not just off her desk.