Archive for the ‘career’ Category

A lesson in client servicing an application development project

Posted in: application development, business, career, client service, enterprise, strategy, By: E. Long, At: August 20th, 2008

We recently completed our first integration with an external customer website and our e-commerce website. (By “integration,” I mean an API in which we pass configured product data from our site to a 3rd party shopping cart.) What ensued was an interesting learning experience for myself and our group of developers on the project.

Everybody has their own development process

Standards are hard to come by in the web application/development world and the process for managing development projects is certainly no different.

Case in point: We created a technical specification for an API and worked with developers on our own team spanning 3 different time zones. Add on top of this that our technical specification was an “ideal world” document which didn’t account for specific requirements of the external website we were to interface with. This meant further coordinating our simultaneous development of our API with the integration of the API (as we were building it). This essentially equated to “building the plane as we flew it.”

Agile development is great…but falls flat on its face when involving people outside the core team

In an agile software development world, code is written, tested, and released in several mini-stages. This methodology allows for us to be very open, flexible, and speedy with new development on our various web properties.

However, my takeaway from this project is that I would utilize a different approach when interfacing with external developers that are not part of the core team…taking me back to my agency roots when educating our clients about “our process.” What we found is that our process didn’t at all align with the customer’s process for development, testing/QA, and release management. In fact, it caused a lot of tension between the two groups throughout the project — especially in the home stretch.

Where we normally operate in a lean environment with small release gaps and short testing periods, the external party we interfaced with was accustomed to a more traditional waterfall model of building the entire application up front, test all of it at once, and going through several iterations of testing & debugging of all code at the very last stage.

Lesson learned: Provide a visual map of your process and timing

Multiple lessons were learned on this project:

1.) Provide a “site map” of the intended integration. This allows business stakeholders to visually understand where the API “handshake” occurs between the sites. It also empowers the external QA team to understand the bigger picture so they can see which areas need testing.

2.) Provide a map of the major components of the development project, timing on each, and the order in which they will be developed. Seems simple, but when you don’t manage the external developers, keeping tabs on the timeline proves difficult.

3.) Schedule regular daily meetings to check in on status and even if there’s no updates to report, it provides a crutch for the collective team to lean on so everybody remains on the same page (in terms of timing & expectations). Morning meetings are important so the day doesn’t get away from either party. This is particularly helpful in the final weeks/days of the project.

Positioning yourself as a “go to” person for your department or team

Posted in: business, career, cio, strategy, By: E. Long, At: May 21st, 2007

Recently, a post on the CIO advice and opinion forum posed the question about working your way up the IT food chain. This made me think more about advice for IT, developers, and general “tech” people and how they can break the mold of IT and advance up the department ladder. Some developers or engineers find themselves working for managers who “have no clue.” What they don’t realize is the managers have the ability to work with internal stakeholders effectively and translate business problems into requirements for the technical team to implement.

Here are some examples of how you can position yourself more effectively with other departments in your organization so they look at you as the “go to” person not by just the title on your business card, but by the value you bring to their business functions.

The title on your business card defines what you do, not how you do it
The title on your business card does not always mean you are viewed as the “go to” person for your functional area — I have experienced plenty of people in business who are avoided at all costs due to lack of strategic and/or big picture thinking within an organization or on a project. Your title defines what you do, but how you go about doing it is another game completely.

In IT, understanding the needs of another department is extremely important when they come to you with a question or request. Nobody likes feeling stupid, and this is one area where IT typically falls short — fail to understand the problem, provide short, non-descriptive answers to questions, and allow the uneducated business person to craft the design requirements for a (web) project that makes little sense. This then results in an application or solution that underdelivers due to poor planning and creates a customer (the employee in the other department) who is unhappy.

Picture yourself bringing your car to a mechanic for service…how do you want to be treated?
(This is often times an easy analogy to make, so if you already understand cars, then pick another area where you are not as knowledgeable in and put yourself in the position of that customer.) You drive your car into the shop — it’s vibrating whenever you “drive it” and you obviously want it fixed because A.) it’s annoying and B.) it seems very unsafe!

Now, there are two ways to approach this: probe deeper, ask questions to help you navigate the troubleshooting process with the customer face-to-face, or take the car and run a series of tests that run the risk of looking at an area of the car that is not broken (and in the end not be able to find anything wrong — we’ve all experienced this, and it’s frustrating!). Vibration in a car can be a number of things — bad brakes, unbalanced tires, unbalanced driveshaft — the list goes on, and can be varying degrees of technical explanation depending on the customer’s expertise on the matter. A “go to” person asks questions because they genuinely want to help.

Sometimes the problem described is not the source of the problem at all
Odds are the customer doesn’t know exactly what the problem is, but they may suggest a fix because they don’t want to appear stupid in front of you. This happens countless times in business! They could say “the tires feel out of balance” but in reality, it could be that the vibration only occurs during braking, which generally points to warped brake rotors (among other things). Being the responsible businessperson you are, you would always start this process by going back a step or two to understand the customer’s needs and a description of the problem.

This will ultimately lead to a more accurate and timely resolution to a problem and a solution that hits the nail on the head. Part of being the “go to” person is providing that guidance that other departments lack — knowing they can come to you with an idea and you can help them make the most of it without making them look incompetent is critical in business. You will turn them into repeat customers.

Your customers (fellow employees) don’t really care about your deadlines
Another problem area in IT is the ability to turn on a dime or the tendency to paint a dreary picture from a resource standpoint. Just like bringing your car to the shop, you don’t really care to hear about all of the other work the shop has queued up, so spare your own internal customers (fellow employees) the details. Explain that you want to help them, understand their timeline, and fit their project into the mix where you can. If you make other departments feel like you’re doing them a favor for every request they come to you with and that it feels like pulling teeth just to get some time, you will lose your position as the “go to” person. Likely, they will look elsewhere or even outsource — at which point you’re cut out of the process completely.

A “go to” person follows up.
Ever brought your car to a mechanic, the expected due date comes and goes, and you never hear from the service manager? Avoid this situation at all costs. Manage your customer’s expectations, and provide reasons for why you’re going to be later than promised. Things happen, deadlines change, but how you manage the situation will also improve the satisfaction and perceived value you bring to a project and will ultimately paint you as a “go to” person. The “go to” person gets things done and follows up when they have or haven’t been accomplished. It’s just that simple.

Work through the process and/or problem, don’t work around it or point fingers
Many times IT is looked at for solutions to sharing data or information with other internal departments or external customers. This often times means creating a new process for the application or implementation you’re building on behalf of a department. If the success of your project implementation depends on the actions of another person or department, then work with them until their job is finished. Unless explicitly told to do so, don’t “pass the buck” and assume your work is done when another department has to get involved. Part of being a “go to” person is finding the answers to problems that are outside of your current knowledge or your functional area’s expertise.

Your internal customers may not realize the amount of collaboration involved, so don’t hesitate to give them a high-level (notice the phrase “high level” — avoid the technical details!) overview of what’s being done throughout the project. This is what will make them look to you in the future for other projects and view you as a “go to” person.

What does a CIO do?

Posted in: business, career, cio, levolor, By: E. Long, At: May 11th, 2007

I’ve come across a few posts lately as well as some confusion (in the office and in blogs) about the roles and responsibilities of the CIO (Chief Information Officer). A CIO is not “the computer guy,” “web guy,” or “a techie.” A CIO essentially bridges the communication barrier, knowledge, and strategic gap between the many departments of a business that require technology (whether they realize it or not) to solve business problems.

Big-picture thinking
The CIO is a strategic position because it requires big-picture thinking, and the ability to quickly and effectively identify broken processes (or lack thereof) where technology can be integrated to improve efficiency and the bottom line — or better yet, drive new business and capture market share. Driving new business and capturing market share is really a critical area where a CIO can contribute — because it requires a heavy dose of business intelligence and market awareness.

But I thought the CIO was the head of the IT department?
The IT department is an operational entity, responsible for executing the support of the daily technical needs of employees, implementing new technology as a result of a business need, or implementing/building new services as a result of a business need. IT still needs the “business need” delivered to them as well as an operational manager who manages the department. Depending on the size of the organization, there may be multiple operational managers within the various divisions of IT. The CIO will guide the functional managers in IT to implement solutions that satisfy current and future business needs/problems.

Why don’t other departments just talk to the operational manager(s) of IT?
Typically, departments (marketing, HR, Finance, engineering, etc.), lack the technical expertise to be able to identify exactly what they need to solve their problem. IT can normally listen to these problems and provide a very specific solution. The problem is when these solutions are implemented in silos. Over time, you have many “one-off” IT projects, built as temporary fixes or workarounds that gradually grow into a substantial maintenance burden and waste of IT resources.

This is where a CIO-role plays a strategic role. The CIO has visibility to multiple departments and layers of the organization. The CIO thinks about all of the needs of the various departments, takes future needs into consideration, and plans for scalability. The “silo effect” is neither fun or fair to anybody in IT and as a company grows, managing all of these silos because cumbersome and uninspiring — and costly. To undo years and years of silo’d development is usually a major undertaking.

Alright, so the CIO doesn’t manage the IT employees. What is the CIO involved in, then?
To quote an excellent editor’s note from InformationWeek, “CIOs are less involved in day-to-day operations and technology implementation and more involved in business strategy, revenue generation, business-process management, and customer relations.” This article was written in July 2004 and still holds true today. The only addition I would make is that the CIO is also heavily involved in online strategy because it is such a critical customer touch-point and is a major source of revenue generation (directly via e-commerce or indirectly via offline sales), customer relations, and requires strategic business-process management.