How Auckland University mapped its IT capabilities for continuous change

This article is definitely worth reading.

Here's some quotes from Richard Elliott, head of IT transformation for digital at the University of Auckland.

"this approach was necessary to create an IT workforce that is match-fit for an age of continuous change, where new technologies are constantly emerging and customer expectations are rising"

“It requires a mindset shift away from thinking of technology roles in a relatively kind of static way—‘I am a developer but I only develop in this particular language, or I work in infrastructure and my area of speciality is just this’—to something designed to respond effectively to continuous change which is essentially going to be the new normal, which we knew even before COVID-19,”

“SFIA is a rich catalogue. It’s got a sophisticated framework which allows you to profile roles in terms of general levels of responsibility, almost in terms of seniority and experience in your career, but also the specialisms that you might have, depending on whether you are an architect or in service management or in user support or an applications developer. So, it allows us to clearly define ideal expectation within any role.”

“It’s part of a holistic approach to development which is centred around everybody becoming more cross-skilled. Our desire is to see all of our teams adopt a major and a minor approach to their specialism so that we remove key person dependencies around specific skills. This can sometimes create critical bottlenecks or limit our ability to be agile with a small ‘a’.

“We’re obviously going to continue to recruit externally, but we want grow the capability internally as well. We also would like to minimise the number of our great people that want to leave because they’re not getting the opportunity to grow.”