INTRODUCING THE UNIVERSAL COMPETENCY ASSESSMENT MODEL (UCAM)

The process that is proposed in this book is known as the Universal Competency Assessment Model (UCAM). The idea of UCAM is to provide a set of generic core processes that can be used as a basis for competency assessment in any business, in any domain and using any competency framework. The essence of UCAM is four core processes that form the heart of any assessment. These processes will provide an assessment result, but will need to be augmented by other bespoke processes to make the results truly useful. The UCAM processes are described in detail in the next chapter, but UCAM addresses the five requirements of a competency assessment process in the following ways:

• Repeatable. By having a rigorously defined process, it is possible to have a repeatable process. The UCAM process is defined using the ‘seven-views’ approach to process definition which, when applied and executed correctly, ensures that the process will be repeatable.

• Transferable results. The output to any assessment using UCAM can be compared to and recognised by any other assessment using UCAM. The key here is that the process that has been used to carry out the assessment is the same (see UCAM) and that the format of the results themselves are the same. Therefore, given that the approach followed is the same and the results look the same, then the results are potentially transferable. There is another criterion here, as the assessors who carry out the assessments must themselves be competent.

• Measurable. The output of the UCAM assessments all take the same format and have a set of well-defined attributes that can be used for more formal measurements, such as statistical and trend analyses.

• Based on best practice. The process behind UCAM is based on best-practice capability assessment processes, such as CMMI (see CMMI) and SPICE (see SPICE). The theory behind this is that if both capability and competence represent ability at different levels (capability at a business level and competence at a personal level) then the underlying processes must share some common features. As thousands of man-years of effort have been put into creating a number of well-defined and now mature processes for capability assessment, it seems obvious to make use of this wealth of knowledge and experience when defining UCAM.

• Tailorable. The UCAM processes are designed to be generic and tailorable. Examples of this are provided in Chapter 5, where some tailored examples of UCAM are discussed.

Of course, there will be other approaches to competency assessment rather than the one proposed here, but these basic requirements remain the same for any approach.