Thinking about Your Career Path

 education, leadership, management  No Responses »
Jun 152011
 

I have the privilege of leading a great group of IT professionals at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Part of my role is to help my team members think about and plan for their careers. I wrote about an approach using Personal Learning Plans that contributes to my thinking about this topic.  I also added my thoughts to something Chris Lockhart (@chrisonea) wrote called The Right Stuff in a post called Building on the Right Stuff.

I had two sessions over the past weeks helping intermediate systems analysts think about where they should focus their efforts in their learning plans and about their future career paths.  I introduced both people to our thinking about the types of people that are needed in every organization (in our case in IT organizations).

We started by talking about some of these continuum that influence careers:

  • Individual vs Team
  • Follower vs Leader
  • Technical vs Functional
  • Departmental vs Enterprise
  • Specialist vs Generalist

I firmly believe you need to know yourself before you can determine the paths you will take.  I suggested to both team members to take the Myers-Briggs tests to get a clearer sense of themselves.  Taking this approach also allows us to have a common vocabulary when talking about personality attributes.  Take a look at my blog post Being a Teacher Works for Me.  I suggest you take the test and see if it matches your perception of yourself.   I will write another post that builds on the next step of our discussion by looking at what attributes we should work on.

Response to: The Progressive CIO’s Model for Project Success

 enterprise architecture, it governance, leadership, management  No Responses »
May 172011
 

I scanned my Twitter feed on Monday May 16th and found a post by Todd Williams called The Progressive CIO’s Model for Project Success.  After the last couple of months of having to put our IT Services PMO team in place to rescue “business” led projects, I am compelled to question approach proposed by Todd.

Todd makes the point that IT organizations have been unsuccessful in building systems that meet their customer’s needs and fail in schedule, usability and scope.  This is a true statement as long as it is taken in context.  These symptoms of project failure (note: I did not say IT failure!) represent organizations that have a low levels of IT and Project Governance in their IT departments and in the rest of their organization.  Todd suggests that “progressive CIOs” need a new approach which is opposite to today’s practices.

I disagree … progressive CIOs need to recognize that IT touches all parts of the organization and that IT is one of the only places in a company where a broad enterprise view can be well understood and supported. Growing and maturing a PMO (project,program,portfolio mgmt) in IT is the first step.  Then moving that mature PMO out of IT to serve the entire organization should be the mission of a progressive CIO.

Next Todd suggests that because a business unit can use MS Office tools like Excel and Access to build small departmental applications on time, schedule and budget that we in IT should consider handing this work back to the business and concentrate on infrastructure.

If the user is better at creating useful applications and IT builds better infrastructure, then create an organization to mimic that model.

This is a huge generalization and does not come close to the complexity and scope of what an enterprise system project can entail. I will have to write a different post about the massive technical debt that our organizations carry due to all these departmental systems built with Microsoft Office tools!

There is a reason for having specific departments in organizations and that is to deliver on their specialized services.  Human Resources should deliver HR services.  Finance should deliver financial services.  IT should deliver IT services.  PMOs should deliver project services.  Creating redundant Project Management services and IT implementation services in multiple departments adds cost, complexity and creates silos within organizations.  Another big problem is this approach causes issues in departments that end up relying on individual experts who get sick, go on vacation, on training or leave the company.  This makes the department vulnerable to not being able to deliver on service commitments to the organization.  The level of risk of not being able to deliver a key departmental service is not something any senior leader should accept for their organization.  Read more...

Finding Time …

 leadership, management, personal  2 Responses »
May 122011
 

I found two great articles in my Twitter feed this week that really struck home for me.

Over the past decade, I have prided myself on how busy I am multi-tasking and having a calendar booked solid. My hard work has paid off as I successfully progressed in my career, learned many new things and served my team and customers to the best of my ability.

But … with this self imposed hectic/chaotic pace, I have seen my commitment to fitness deteriorate, my personal and family life being compromised all for the sake of working harder (not necessarily smarter).

The first article I came across was retweeted by the American Management Association (@AMAnet):

#Leadership & White Space. (RT @mikemyatt) #Management | http://ow.ly/4Rn8i

Mike Myatt (@MikeMyatt) started the article Leadership and Whitespace with a great quote:

I don’t care how busy you are, but I do care about what you accomplish – the former doesn’t always lead to the latter.

After reading the article about creating “white space” in my calendar, I took some time to think about how I could go about doing this. It’s not easy when you have grown up in a management culture of “do more with less” and “deliver, deliver, deliver”.  When I started the management role of my team of 22 analysts, I deliberately chose to take a “servant leadership” approach that focused on setting direction, empowering my team and then managing the inevitable roadblocks, politics and priority changes that come along the way. So do I have an answer today … no but I am committed to work on it.

The first reader comment on Mike’s post was from Tanveer Naseer (@TanveerNaseer) who wrote the second article I mentioned – Learning to Appreciate the White Spaces.  Tanveer provided four reasons to create white spaces:

  1. Provides opportunities for contemplation and review
  2. Shifts our decision making from reflexive reactions to measured, deliberate responses
  3. Allows you to address those unanticipated issues without penalizing other tasks
  4. Even machines need maintenance/repair

These are great guides and really challenge me to rethink my approach to work.  Thank you @MikeMyatt and @TanveerNaseer, you both have given me new insights on how to be a better leader and manager.

ps: For the social media naysayers, this is yet another powerful reason that I believe Twitter is an essential part of my professional and personal development!

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