Become a Generalizing Specialist or T-Shaped

A generalizing specialist is someone with one or more technical specialties who actively seeks to gain new skills in both his or her existing specialties and other areas. A generalizing specialist is more than just a generalist. A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few.

A generalizing specialist does one kind of job very well and some other jobs adequately. With generalizing specialists your teams enjoy the benefits of high productivity, while lowering the risk of bottlenecks, and retaining flexibility. There is another similar concept called T-shaped people:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. - Tim Brown, “Strategy by Design”

There are many benefits of having T-Shaped people in team

• Better communication even with less documentation, if someone has an enthusiasm or curiosity about many different subjects and disciplines, then they can be more flexible, more empathetic, and more engaged with the world
• Better bottlenecks management, as T-shaped person can do other jobs adequately, he can contribute in other jobs if required.
• Better solution of the problem , If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. ~ Abraham Maslow , The T-shaped person can explore the problem from many different perspectives and that helps in driving better solutions.

How to become T-Shaped person? You need to find your own answer, some suggestions

• Reading is a good method: There are some great books and Web-based resources available; you need only to invest time to take advantage of them, follow some good blog, one need to read more than just technical publications.
• Participate in community activities, thanks to internet and many popular social media sites ,its easy to participate in online and face to face community activities , join some good groups 
• Do some experimental projects in your non core areas, say if you are C# expert, try to make something on python.
• Share your knowledge , if you do this other will also follow and that will help you in acquiring new skills
• Find a mentor for a target skill, mentor could be junior to you…but he has to be expert in the skill you want to acquire  

Avoid making people Indispensable

Every individual in a team has a important role to play, but in the interest of individual, project and organization, leaders should not allow people to become indispensable. Lots of career articles have been written about “How to make yourself Indispensable..” the tips like doing more than expectation is essential for professional growth but it should not let person become indispensable. The important part is we should motivate people to become more knowledgeable, productive, friendly and professional but not indispensable.

Indispensability can create issues like 

• Poor Team Productivity , the person become too busy and as a result there may be many tasks kept waiting ,and because of his queue other may not be able to start their activities
• Create Risk for project timeline, if the person is not available because of any reason it puts project timelines on risk
• Monotonous work, as he can only do some of the work, people keep coming to him only for the same work.

Some of the measures Project team can take to avoid Indispensability

• Continuous knowledge sharing, team should create environment of knowledge sharing. 
• Task rotation, we should keep rotating people between modules, so there should be more than one developer who codes for one use case.
• Educate team to become more professional, the growth in career happens by sharing knowledge not by keeping secrets.
• Put process in place, process like one codes and other does the review, one codes and other fixes the bug, peer programming and group design can institutionalize the knowledge sharing. 

Skill Portfolio Management

Significant number of project execution organizations have started using project portfolio management (PPM) as a means of selecting the right projects,  The same approach can be used to manage our skills, or say skill portfolio management (SPM)


Project portfolio management (PPM) is generally defined as a dynamic decision-making process, whereby a business' list of active projects is constantly updated and revised (Cooper, 2001). In this process, new project are evaluated, selected, and prioritized; existing projects may be accelerated, killed, or deprioritized. Organizations are using project portfolio management (PPM) as a means of selecting the right projects .The derived definition of skill portfolio management could be , a decision-making process, where one evaluates the need of new skills, select and prioritize acquisition of skills. The way organization maximizes returns on capital by using project portfolio management, we can also maximize returns on our time investment by using skill portfolio management.


Let us take example of two project portfolio management tools for skill portfolio management.
• Strategic Alignment Model
• Boston Consulting Group Products/Services Matrix


Strategic Alignment Model
This model attempts to align projects with the direction the enterprise has decided to follow. In other words, it aligns projects with those things that are important to the enterprise. For skill portfolio we can look at it along with Habit 2 from “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”. The habit 2 talks about   “Begin with the End in Mind”, if your ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step you take get you to the wrong place faster.  We should have clear career goal in mind, so when we think of acquiring a skill we should look at the possible contribution of this skill in achieving the career goal.


Boston Consulting Group Products/Services Matrix
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix is a well-known model that has been used for several years. It defines four categories of products/services based on their growth rate and competitive position,

Cash Cows
These are well-established products/services that have a strong market share but limited growth potential. They are stable and profitable. Projects that relate to cash cows are important to the organization because the company will want to protect that investment for as long as it maintains that market position.
On the same line, Person’s skills, which are returning profit in current market falls in this category, for example a coding skills of a developer. It is necessary to protect and enhance these skills, but it should be understood that these skill will not be enough for growth.

Dogs

Because these products/services are not competitive and have little or no growth potential, any projects related to them should not be undertaken. The best thing an organization can do with dogs is, phase them out as quickly and painlessly as possible.
First I thought that dogs are not relevant for skill portfolio management, but later I realized, we do need to identify skills which are not adding value to the current role, lets take example of a project manager, He is not expected to keep enhancing his coding skills, he should not be investing time in enhancing dog skills.

Stars
These are products/services that have strong market positions and clearly strong growth potential. Projects related to stars are good investment opportunities. Stars are the future cash cows.
Stars skills are the one which gives us future growth, the skills which has great growth potential. We need to invest our time in enhancing the star skills.
?
For both the cases, the question mark represents the starting point of the model. Products/services that are untested in the market but appear to have strong growth potential. The objective is to turn them into stars and then cash cows.


Conscious career planning can help us in achieving our career goals faster. Identification of right future skills is quite challenging exercise but we have to do it, there is no alternative to it.