Talking to the business

I think I wasn’t prepared enough to talk with the NY head. My aims weren’t clear, and I wasn’t specific enough in my recommendations to him.

I don’t think I was able to sell to Jim the need to have the people budgeted for the training. Should I have warned him specifically? Maybe, but I don’t want to be a mouthpiece for other people. My job was to sell him the benefits of budgeting the people, but as he quite rightly said, if there are champions who can do their own job and assist with others, then there is no need to budget for additional people to do it full time. He wasn’t convinced that there was a need for it, given that in previous years it has never been mandated.

Going forward, I think I need to be ready with a proposal to discuss the pros, cons and my recommendation. Be ready with the arguments, and frame the recommendation in a way that will persuade them to take up the action.

I think I am awed by people in those higher positions. The only way to get around this is to prepare, prepare, prepare.

Had a good chat to Alex:  I also need to question the statements made by execs. Understand what the training involves, when was the last training, who has gotten training etc. Provide the facts as they are and let them make their own decisions.

 

Quick Turnaround Times

I had the work breakdown structure in place to be able to quickly do some estimation of individual work pieces, and ended up with a number that satisfied the CIO.  Got good praise for it.

 

How Can I Contribute?

Reading the famous Peter Drucker on how to be an effective executive, and the question he poses is :

“How can I contribute to this company by direct results, values of the company, or people? “

I believe this is the list (in order) of the areas I can contribute:

1. Creating ISSAC for AMER LLc.  Focus on reducing the cost to create by keeping changes to a minimum.  Ensure that they can use it well.
2. Savings on General Conditions tax schemes for health care projects. I really think there could be something here. Follow up with John C on it, and make sure we understand the tax process.
3. ICT value creation opportunities with construction.  Book in time with SVPs to talk about how they design in ICT to a project, as well as look at possibilities such as open bidding platforms.
4. Webcare.  Make safety as simple as possible so everyone can enter in incidents and lessons learnt.

 

Details Details

Recognised by Gareth for putting in the effort and time to go through the system with thoroughness and finding bugs.

 

Support and Praise

Given the bad feelings I got from the meeting, it was heartening to hear from one of the attendees that:

1. My presentation made sense
2. He appreciated my sensitivities to the topic

At least I know that there are supporters out there, and that my communication style / methods get through to execs at that level.

 

Career Learning

I just did my presentation to the operation directors in NY about the pilot program to get more traction on the enterprise tools here. What I found was fairly strong resistance / lack of care. It’s amazing to read people’s body language, all those guys just did not care. Or they did, but they believe that the program doesn’t have the support for it to work.

I will have to engage those operation directors in more one-on-one meetings to get their proper feedback. Need to know how to present the information so they think it will help their guys do the job.

Currently it will be heavy going.

 

Culture Learning

New York culture:

• People take your word literally, especially if you’re a senior exec.  No bagging out others in public, and don’t put down people, they will take offence and you will lose the ability to influence
• People are very results-driven, and they won’t give you a second chance if you do mess up or don’t deliver.  So much sure you stick to your word!
• There are a lot less moderates in New York.  Everyone has strong, possibly extreme views on religion, politics, sports etc
• This place is the capitalist centre of the world.  Money is king.

 

Career Learning

For adoption of applications:

• Try to create a “day in the life” scenario for users, broken down by roles. Mimic what they do, and ensure that the training database has sufficient data to test out these scenarios. This database can be doubled up as the test database.
• If upper management are not directly supporting the application, then focus on getting the good users better and the better users best. You will need the actual users to sell the system, as opposed to any ICT requirement.

 

Personal Learning

For note taking:

Split the page into quadrants to record different types of information e.g. questions, references, to do, to delegate

For passwords:

Don’t have the same password for everything.  Start with a base code and add relevant customisations based on the context of the password.  Use the same base code for all passwords.  The base code could be my favourite song, or birthdates, or mum’s name etc.

 

Project Management Learning 19/04/07

It’s always good to talk to the other project managers, as they are a fountain of knowledge. One thing we don’t do well in LL is the ability of the business reps to manage the change that comes through with any new application. This leads to a lot of issues i.e. retraining, lack of adoption, low quality of data.

The other thing I have learnt is that higher execs will most likely sign off most things, if there is enough trust from them to you. Even with a lot of mistakes in the change request, this still had no problems getting through. However, for my personal criteria, I really should make a better effort to make sure that my documents sound professional and have been proof read by at least one other person.