Digital transformation at Red Eléctrica de España

Client need 

Red Eléctrica de España (REE), a Spanish utilities company, needed to increase its flexibility and efficiency to comply with an international treaty on climate change. Its newly unified IT department (DTI) spearheaded a digital transformation with the following components: assess current employees’ competence, anticipate talent development needs, and promote a cultural shift towards active, continuous learning. 

To expedite this transformation, REE partnered with Netmind, a BTS company, and followed European e-CF and ICT Professional Role Profiles standards set by IT Professionalism Europe, a network of stakeholders committed to the advancement of IT professionalism.  

The solution… 

Netmind helped facilitate REE’s digital transformation in four steps:  

• Define competency profile:  
  • Group competencies by strategic knowledge areas 
  • Create a Dictionary of Competencies based on e-CF 
  • Create the DTI Competency Profiles based on current and future roles 
  • Define and document the Competency Assessment Model
• Design new training portfolios that bridge individual skill gaps, increase the versatility of each DTI employee, and eventually train all global staff according to new IT management trends and disruptive technologies.
• Deliver online competency self-assessments to each DTI employee, measuring their knowledge and skills against each competence level.
• Create individual development plans using quantitative and qualitative assessment data. Each DTI employee receives an itinerary of developmental actions, reinforced through ongoing conversations with managers. 

Results 

Over the course of two years, DTI employees received training and development plans, designed for both individuals and the collective. They also benefited from an additional follow-up initiative, which included a seminar series and manager workshops in transformation and technology trends. 

By enriching the baseline e-CF model with each personalized development plan, REE improved DTI in the following ways: 

• Combined similarly-functioning profiles from different departments within DTI. 
• Modified internal distribution of roles and responsibilities after identifying profiles requiring highly-differentiated skills. 
• Implemented an IT talent management process in collaboration with HR. 
• Identified and rationalized training activities needed to develop DTI talent according to strategic organizational goals.