February 2010 Archives

Terry Gray, IT Leaders Program (ITLP) alumnus from the University of Washington, suggested today's reading, "How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story". Terry thought that the piece might be of interest to the leaders community. Jim Bruce (ITLP) sent this out as an ITLP Tuesday Readings for this week.

I thought it was a great article, so I wanted to re-post it here.

In this Forbes.com piece, its author Avril David talks about two acquaintances - whom he calls Mark and Ted - and their respective, different approaches to their first job, analyst at a small investment firm.

What set the two apart?

1. Understanding how things work.
2. Knowing what everyone does and how they do it.
3. Learning where gaps exist and conveying to others how to fill them.
4. Identifying solutions to organizational problems and making quick fixes.
5. Being unafraid of unglamorous work, and pitching in where help is needed.
6. Identifying linkages, for himself and others.

The last item that I'd like to share from the StrengthsFinder assessment is Achiever. A few common traits that stand out:

• You enjoy staying busy, but you need to know when you are "done".

• More work excites you.

• Achievers tend to move on to the next challenge without acknowledging success. Remember to build up celebration and recognition.

The last item gave me pause. When I read it, I had to stop and think. Yes, I think I do sometimes move us from project to project without recognizing the achievements we have already made. I make an effort to give kudos as often as I can.

You can help me, here. It's not that I'm ignoring the huge achievements we have made, but I may miss recognizing them in my focus on the long-term goals. So, when we have reached new heights, when we have reached a milestone, you may need to remind me. Send me a note, stop by my office. I'd like to call these out for the rest of the group (and the rest of OIT) to see the work we have done. I'm very proud of the work that we do here.

The StrengthsFinder assessment also identified Responsibility as one of my strengths. As I look through the list of common traits, several stand out to me:

• You look for accountability in projects, and dislike unfinished work.

• Push yourself to say "no". Because you are instinctively responsible, it may be difficult to let things drop.

• You naturally take ownership of projects you are involved in.

The second bullet item in particular reminds me of a previous blog post, Why it's hard to say "no". I'm sure a lot of you share that trait with me. As IT people, we often measure our productivity by the things we've done or built. When we go home at night, it may not seem like we've done "work" if all we did was respond to server issues, or write a design document. As a result, when someone asks about a special "one-off" project, there's a tendency to say "yes" because you can reference something as "I did that."

But it's important to keep the focus on the areas that matter most to OIT and to the University. Since writing that item a year ago, I hope we've all become more selective in the work that we take on, more aware of the resources we have to assign to a new project.

Note that people with Responsibility as a key strength like to know they have "delivered" on a project. By extension, I often ask that of you. One simple way you can let me know you've "delivered" on a project is to send me an email. Often, this can be a note to tick off the things you were asked to work on, and noting that each has been completed.

In the StrengthsFinder assessment, another of my top 5 strengths was Analytical. Do you see any of these traits in the things I do?

• You find credible sources on which you can rely.

• You are at your best when yo have well-researched sources of information and numbers to support your logic.

• Your mind is constantly working and producing insightful analysis.

• You may be skeptical until you see solid proof.

I know some of you have been frustrated by my asking for a documented strategy before we start work on any effort. I also insist on the 5 documentation milestones (Vision, Design, etc.) for new projects. This is part of the standard process in OIT, but it also plays to my core strength of Analytical. I need to see a plan before I'm willing to have us work on new initiatives. And that plan can't be briefly sketched out - I ask for it in writing.

Certainly this may slow certain efforts, but I believe it's important to carefully evaluate the options and understand what we are doing before starting work. It's also in our best interest as technology "stewards" to the University of Minnesota (and to the taxpayers of Minnesota.)

It's that last point that convinced me I should share these thoughts with you via my blog. My analytical approach will often require data and information to logically back up new ideas that others suggest to me. Don't take it personally; it's about the data.

Another of my top 5 strengths was Discipline. A few traits that describe me:

• Don't hesitate to check as often as necessary to ensure things are right.

• Increasing efficiency is one of your hallmarks.

• You not only create order, you also crave it in a well organized space.

• Timelines motivate you; you like to know the deadline.

These describe me very well, I think. In particular, that second bullet item should sound very familiar to many of you.

I prioritize my time carefully and pack a lot into my days. Look at my UMCal sometime, and you'll see my time ordered to give me more time to do certain work at specific times.

When you look at Discipline, please don't confuse this with "rigidity". If I check in with you for something, or as I push us to become more efficient, that stems from me (and by extension, us) trying to be as organized as possible.

In the StrengthsFinder assessment, one of my top 5 strengths was Harmony. Do you recognize any of these traits in me?

• I build a network of people with differing perspectives, and rely on these people for input when making decisions.

• I help draw people with differing opinions together, to find areas where everyone can agree.

• We're all in the same boat, and we need this boat to get where we're going.

If you've worked with me on projects, you know that I prefer to frame a topic using the whiteboard, often breaking a large group into smaller teams to facilitate discussion. After ideas have been generated, I'll pull the group back together and collect their thoughts on the whiteboard.

I find this to be a very effective tool for me - and I believe it is because the whiteboard discussion model fits very well into the Harmony strength.

By breaking up the group into smaller discussion groups, we get lots of people thinking about an issue, pulling from different strengths. At the same time, using small groups means no single personality can dominate the room. By collecting ideas on the whiteboard, we work together to solve problems.

After hearing from everyone, we have a very targeted and productive discussion on the topic. At the end of the whiteboard session, we've generally identified the best ideas, and crafted a plan to address them.

A while back, I mentioned the StrengthsFinder assessment within OIT. I hope everyone who was interested had an opportunity to participate.

I took the StrengthsFinder assessment, and my results were very enlightening. I'd like to share them with you. I'll write a post every day this week about my top 5 strengths. By sharing this with you, I hope you'll learn something about me, and understand why I am so motivated for things like documenting a strategy, mentoring/coaching and simplify-standardize-automate.

Imagine this: one of the systems you help support develops a problem some weekday evening. It crashes, system is down, unavailable. As the on-call support person, you get the alert, and connect in to see what's wrong.

1. Maybe it's a quick solution. You bring the system back up within minutes.

2. Or, maybe the problem is more complex. You aren't able to find an immediate fix for the problem, and the system is down for an hour before you can figure out the cause ... then another hour working with the vendor's support line ... and another hour before the problem is fully resolved and you can bring the system back up.

It's important to keep your manager updated with these problems. I encourage everyone to have a conversation with their supervisor about appropriate notification. Different types of problems demand a different level of escalation. For quick fixes like the first example, maybe an email to the manager is appropriate.

But for cases like the second example, I expect any on-call support person to notify their manager.

Why is this important? When systems are down, end-users are not able to use the system, and that means our customers are affected. Most of the systems we run support students in some way - and our customers are the campus departments (Registrar, Housing, e-Education, etc.) that respond to those students.

Ultimately, a manager in OIT will get asked by the customer, "What happened?" I'd hate to say "I didn't know" about a system problem! That would be poor customer service.

To provide the best possible service to our customers, and to the students of the University of Minnesota, managers need to know about what's going on - good or bad. Please let us know when your systems experience a major outage.

• System database administration, and Production services, escalate to me.

• Storage and backup team members should escalate problems to Jac.

• Systems administration escalate to Patton.

Jac and Patton can respond to the issues that are brought to them, and will raise the problem to my attention if necessary.

Currently, support for web hosting services is split among three different groups within OIT. So customers have several entry points to OIT for the same service, and the web hosting options and feature set may be defined differently depending on which OIT group provides the service.

Kevin Henninger, Arash Forouhari, and I have asked Chris Ament, Chris Bongaarts, and Patton Fast to work on a project to align OIT's web hosting services. This team will provide recommendations and a roadmap for OIT's future web hosting services. Their recommendations are due in March, with final report in April.

If you follow the OIT Tech Brief, you may have noticed a mention about this project team, under the heading Web Hosting 2.0.