Mind the Skills Gap: Talent Triage for Faster Delivery
- Darren Emery
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
How to keep critical IT and ops talent on board, reskill where it counts, and align capability to strategy.
If your IT team feels like a revolving door, you’re not imagining it.
According to ISG, tech functions are losing talent at almost twice the rate of other departments - and not just to competitors, but to entirely different industries.
Meanwhile, the skills you can’t afford to lose - AI engineering, cybersecurity, cloud architecture - are the ones most in demand globally.
And here’s the truth: adding more headcount doesn’t speed things up. In many organisations, it has the opposite effect.
The Talent Problem No One Wants to Admit
Most organisations still treat talent challenges like a resourcing problem:
“We’ve lost people, so let’s replace them - quickly.”
The problem is, without diagnosing which capabilities you’re short on and how those capabilities are applied, you can easily end up with more people… doing less useful work.
This is particularly true in IT and operations, where:
Attrition is higher than other functions - recent Gartner data shows IT attrition at 10.5% vs 6.6% average across all corporate roles.
Time-to-productivity for specialist hires is getting longer, with complex onboarding, fragmented systems, and unclear priorities slowing them down.
The most in-demand skills (AI, cybersecurity, data engineering) are evolving faster than your training plan can keep up.
All of this erodes your delivery performance. When a team lacks the right skill mix, lead times stretch, quality dips, and strategic outcomes are missed - no matter how “busy” everyone looks.
Why Throwing Headcount at the Problem Rarely Works
Adding people without addressing systemic issues is like pumping more water through a leaky pipe.
Work still flows through the same bottlenecks.
Decision-making remains fragmented.
Teams get bigger but slower - communication overhead increases, dependencies multiply.
Fred Brooks famously proved this in The Mythical Man-Month: adding people to a late software project makes it later. In today’s complex delivery environments, the same applies to almost any strategic initiative.
The core issue? Capability ≠ Capacity.
You can double your headcount and still fail if you haven’t built targeted, strategically aligned capability.
Structuring Around Value: The Real Talent Advantage
The organisations that win the talent battle aren’t the ones with the biggest recruitment budgets. They’re the ones that:
Structure around value - organising teams by customer outcomes, not departmental silos.
Build small, high-performing teams - optimising for autonomy, cross-functional skill sets, and rapid decision-making.
Continuously rebalance capability - moving the right skills to the highest-value work, rather than locking people into static roles.
This isn’t just theory. Research from McKinsey shows high-performing small teams can deliver 2-3x more value per FTE than larger, less focused teams.
The Systemic Causes of Poor Talent Utilisation
When we run capability diagnostics in mid-to-large enterprises, we repeatedly see the same patterns:
Misaligned roles - people’s skills don’t match the work they’re assigned.
Fragmented responsibility - no single team can deliver end-to-end outcomes without external sign-offs.
Underused expertise - senior engineers or specialists spend most of their time on low-value tasks because processes are rigid.
Over-reliance on “hero” individuals - creating burnout risks and delivery vulnerabilities when they leave.
These are structural issues, not individual performance problems. No amount of hiring will fix them unless you change how work flows through your organisation.
From Talent Shortage to Capability Clarity
At Agilicist, we help leaders move from panic-hiring to precision-building. Our approach is less “fill the seats” and more “triage, target, transform”:
Triage - assess where delivery performance is genuinely constrained by capability gaps, not just capacity.
Target - identify the smallest set of critical skills needed to unlock strategic outcomes.
Transform - build those capabilities into durable, high-performing teams - through reskilling, redeployment, and selective hiring.
This model ensures every hire, every training programme, and every redeployment directly links to your business strategy - not just today’s urgent project.
Diagnosing Capability Gaps: Our Model
Before you rehire or retrain, we run a structured capability assessment:
Map value streams - so you know exactly where outcomes are created (or lost).
Assess team autonomy - high autonomy correlates strongly with delivery speed.
Match skills to outcomes - identifying over- or under-representation of key capabilities.
Spot systemic blockers - process, governance, or tooling issues that waste talent.
This gives you a clear picture of:
Which skills you must retain.
Where retraining delivers faster ROI than rehiring.
Which roles are redundant to strategic outcomes.
Reskilling vs. Rehiring: The Smart Balance
With AI and emerging tech moving so quickly, “hire for it” is no longer a reliable strategy. By the time you onboard a rare specialist, the skill set might already have shifted.
Instead:
Reskill where possible - moving strong performers into emerging skill areas.
Hire for future potential - prioritising adaptability over hyper-specific experience.
Leverage mixed sourcing - combining permanent staff, contract experts, and partner capability for strategic flexibility.
Retention: The Forgotten Multiplier
The fastest way to close a talent gap is to stop losing the talent you already have.
We’ve seen delivery performance soar in organisations that invest in:
Clear career paths - mapping how skills evolve and open new opportunities internally.
Team stability - avoiding disruptive reshuffles every quarter.
Psychological safety - so talent contributes ideas without fear of blame.
Retention isn’t about beanbags and free coffee. It’s about making work meaningful, manageable, and impactful.
Your Next Step
If you’re feeling the talent squeeze - whether in AI, cybersecurity, or just getting delivery back on track - resist the urge to start a recruitment sprint.
Instead, ask:
Which outcomes matter most right now?
Do my teams have the precise skills to deliver them?
If not, is this a hiring, reskilling, or structural issue?
At Agilicist, we help you answer those questions. Before you rehire or retrain, let’s understand the exact skill mix you need to execute your strategy.
Because the fastest delivery comes from the right capability, not just more people.
