Every CPO I have run a skills baseline for asks me the same question afterwards: so, are we good or bad? I think this is probably the wrong question.
A baseline doesn't just rank your team against averages. It shows you where capability actually sits versus where your operating model assumes it sits. That gap is the finding.
I have run assessments and capability reviews for twenty-five years, and the pattern repeats: organisations invest in strategic sourcing training for a team spending most of its time on transactional activities. The training was never going to land, because the job the team is actually doing doesn't match the job the training assumed.
So before commissioning a skills assessment it is better to ask the harder question first: what does this team need to be capable of, given the operating model you have actually built — not the one in the org chart? A baseline against the wrong target produces a tidy report and no behaviour change.
The baselines we build pair a skills assessment with a role-reality check: shadowing, workload sampling, a look at what people actually spend their days doing versus what their position description says. Where the two diverge, that's where the real gap lives — and it's rarely technical. More often it's commercial judgement, stakeholder influence, or the confidence to challenge a category strategy that has stopped making sense.
If your last baseline came back as a heat map with no operating model context attached, you got half the answer. The other half is the one that actually changes anything.