The Four Different Objects for Tracking Skills in FinancialForce PSA

Incorporating a skills database into your PSA can be helpful for many reasons, one of which is assisting management with professional development planning. However, the best function a skill database provides is giving you the ability to see an overview of skills and certifications for each individual resource. For instance, if you’re performing a yearly annual performance evaluation, and you want to see how a resource’s skills measure up year to year, you can do so and be confident that you’re giving a good scoring evaluation.

Within FinancialForce, a skills database also allows you to separate skills and certifications into relevant regions, practices and groups. For example, if a company covers multiple countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, the U.S., and maybe even Mexico, there might be skills needed in each of those countries that are not relevant to the other countries. You can actually align different skills with each separate region, practice or group. By doing so, you don’t have to worry about people having the right skills in the right regions because you can have those skills zoned by each individual region.

With the Skills Management function, you can identify the skills that a particular job role requires, as well as the skills of individual employees and where there may be any gaps between the two. There are four objects that are part of the Skills Management function within FinancialForce that you can work with to track skills. The first is the “Skills and Certifications” object which is a full library of potential resource skills and certifications of skills relevant to your company. Then there is the “Skill Certification Zone.” This is where you can specify that particular skills or certifications should only pertain to certain regions, practices or groups.

A third object that helps to track skills is the “Skills Matrix.” The Skills Matrix is an overview of the skills or certification for a particular resource. For example, if you want to find out what John Smith’s skills are, you are able to go into that skills matrix, open it up and take a look at those skills.

The last object is the “Skills Capacity” object. The Skills Capacity object shows the number of resources by region, practice, or group with the type of skill certification, along with a high value rating, average value rating and the number of open resource requests for that skill or certification. This is a helpful to know because you want to know what your capacities are, and whether or not you can actually fulfill all of the resource requests that are out there with your current staff.

Financial Force PSA allows you to create a whole library of all potential resource skills and certifications, as well as the ability to track these skills. Additionally, users, operations teams and a field can view and manage skills development for individual resources in the overall business.

To get a hands on demonstration of how to use these objects, or how to set up and add skills or certifications in FinancialForce, view the webinar “Skills and Scheduling in FinancialForce.” You can also register for one of TOP Step’s monthly FinancialForce webinars on our TOP Step FinancialForce webinar page.