“This is a big step forward and will really help us in building professional skills across government over the next few years.”
— Fiona Spencer, Director Function, Profession & Standards, IPA
“Government Online Skills Tool – equipping people with the right skills.”
– Rupert McNeil, UK Government Chief People Officer
Initial Brief
Comaea were approached by the Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) to provide a solution to replace an existing tool that was coming to the end of its life. The existing tool captured and tracked over 7000 project professionals and their competency levels in a bespoke competency framework.
We were tasked with importing over 300,000 lines of data and providing an enhanced user experience and reporting capabilities, and be able to scale to provide access to up to 12,000 project professionals across government.
Solution
Comaea was available through the Government Digital Marketplace, and since the project delivery capability framework (PDCF) had been embedded already with the Government Project Delivery Profession, we were able to quickly put together a proof of concept model that used the PDCF and demonstrated the comaea dashboards, user experience and reporting.
A key consideration was to ensure that existing data was transferred to Comaea so that users did not lose any previously completed assessments. So following the successful pilot, we mapped out a timeline to import all the existing data from the old system, over 300,000 lines of data, and since Comaea is built for integration this was achieved quickly and smoothly.
The old system was branded as the Government Online Skills Tool (GOST) , so we were able to brand Comaea in the same way to ensure the brand continued to be used and was familiar to users. We affectionately named it GOST 2.0.
Comaea now enables over 12500 project professionals to carry out their assessment against the 19 technical competencies, and 10 behavioural competencies of the project delivery capability framework. These self-assessments are then moderated and approved by their line manager (of functional manager).
Following the success of GOST2.0, many other UK Government professions and departments are starting to use comaea for their own competency frameworks, including Data Analysts, Science & Engineering, Security, and Digital specialists.