My IT Leadership Journey

Well back to blogging about leadership, it sure has been a while.  That's not to say that I have forgotten anything that I learned these past months.  On the contrary, I continue to use a number of the techniques that I was taught during ITLP. 

I have to say that my calendar is under control.  People are still somewhat upset with me because they cannot schedule meetings on my calendar.  In some cases I have been excluded from the meeting.  I look at that as a blessing.  If they really wanted me there, they would have contacted me, right?

Again this is me talking, but I would say that I feel much better about handling meetings too.  I feel confident and definitely listen more.  I have an urge to help, however I also have the same urge to delegate too.

Oh yeah, another reason that I have not had time to blog here has been that I have been actively blogging about software and process in my other blog.  I urge you to check it out sometime. 

Of course with all of this goodness, there has to be some bad.  Reality is, there is.  In handling stressful situations, I do a much better job at flying off of the handle like I did in the past.  However, my new problem in some situations (mainly with my boss), I have the tendency to shut down and be very quiet.  So I am controlling my emotions, but not adding anything constructive.  I need to find a solution for that one and work on it. 

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 was ITLP graduation and I was fortunate to be amongst the lucky group of folks that graduated.  So what does that mean to this blog.  Nothing really.  I still plan to blog about management and leadership issues and this will be my forum to do so.

Too much today, we just assume if we have technology it will always work.  Well, if you think that you really could have a serious wake-up call some day.  Tuesday was graduation for IT Leadership.  I presented two talks, one about the program and the other was about our project report.  The first one went fine, because I just talked.  The second started out rough, because the PC locked up when displaying PowerPoint.  So up on the screen I had basically a blue screen.  With a roomful of folks, you do not want to just try to fiddle with the problem.  I sure did not.  So what I ended up doing was just talking about the project.  After a while, the PC was fixed and I could continue with the presentation.  But the key thing to remember is not just sit there and fiddle around with things.  You do not want to keep your audience waiting.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a meeting with an employee from another group within AIT.  The meeting was supposed to be about a presentation we are doing in June, but it morphed into something else.  He was explaining his problem about the new file system we are using and I was just listening.  The discussion was one of trade-offs and futures.  As it turns out he was thinking strategically not tactically.  At one point, he even came to the balcony.  I was just sitting there in awe in the revelations he was making.  Then he asked me the all important question, "how do I affect change?"  Wow I told him what a great question.  With my ITLP classwork, coaching and reading, I was able to affectively answer his questions.  This was such an unbelievable feeling for me, of course he was exciting about the discussion too.  The the discussion turned a little bit into something that is near and dear to my heart, process.  As it turns out I was little surprised to find out that I have more people in my group who really do support my idea of process.  Our next steps are to talk about his ideas with his manager and I will do the same.  As leaders, we both want to do the same thing, that is "the right thing".  All I can say is Wow!

Well after many starts and stops, I really think my calendar is under control.  I no longer schedule any meetings, all of them are funneled through my staff assistant.  She knows the rules and really follows them.  This really helps take care of the unwanted meetings or time wasters.  I have been using that extra time very wisely in reading and writing about process and talking with others who have the same interests.

As part of our ILTP project, we are interviewing various leaders within IT and ITS.  Last week, Mike and myself interviewed representatives from the Penn State Workflow project.  I am still pretty active in this project, which gave me a little edge in knowing the people.  Anyways during our meeting with Ron Rash, Sr. Director, AIS, when Mike and I walked in, Ron's comment was that this program must be working because he really doubts he would have seen Mike and I on a project like this without something like ITLP.  I somewhat agree with that, the attitude in my group sometimes really hurts us in dealing with external customers and members of our sister ITS organizations.  However ITLP really made me realize that the silos exist and that they are an extremely bad thing.  I think that feeling is very consistent across the board with my other team members.

Running meetings has always been something that I have been good at.  However with the help of ITLP and examples from various guest speakers, in my mind I have come up even more techniques to apply.  About two weeks ago, I requested a Birds of Feather (BoF) on Software Engineering.  My goals were twofold, first I wanted to test some new ideas regarding facilitation, and secondly I wanted to hear more about process.  Well, overall, I think things went great.  I came into the meeting with a fairly loose agenda, because BoFs are like that.  In addition, I made a simple prepared statement (no powerpoint) about what I hoped the BoF to accomplish.  We then entered into some great discussions centered around failures in software and process.  The whole BoF lasted for close to two hours.  I found myself doing a lot of listening and only providing input when I thought it would add value.  I was told that last month's BoF did not go well at all.  The facilitator came into the BoF with a very focused agenda and took complete control of the meeting.  People were not very happy.  I told by many people afterwards how well things went.  I am actually looking forward to the next one.  I think having guest speakers come to ITLP really has helped me with obtaining not only better facilitation skills but also presentation ones. 

I mentioned my experiences with a problem that I had of late with Brian during our last coaching session.  Basically there was an incident here at UP related to communications.  The vehicle used of course was email.  Well we all know that email is a great trap for communicating anything.  The problem is based on how the email is written, people can take things differently.  So what I find myself doing these days, is just picking up the phone and calling the person.  Today is one of those cases, a couple of days ago we had a user who was using WebMail and tried to forward a message to her church group.  The problem was a new message arrived in her inbox at the same time and change which message she was going to forward.  That message contained offensive material.  Luckily she reviewed it and did not send it.  So we received an email thread about all of this.  I could have explained via email what the problem was and that we are working on it.  However, in this case its just easier to pick up the phone and talk to the person.  So that is what I will be doing today.  I'm going to be a little bit outside of my comfort zone, because this person is faculty.  I have dealt with managers, directors, CIOs and staff, but never faculty.  So my goal is just listen and stay focused on her problem.

Well, I thought I was making really good progress with the whole calendar problem.  As it turns out, in some cases things were becoming worse.  My staff assistant was following the rules, which is great.  However, nobody else was.  I did communicate my rules to my employees, fellow managers and Steve.  The problem is by default our calendar is set up to allow anyone who has a calendar account to be able to schedule events on your calendar.  So with Steve's permission, yesterday I plugged that hole and removed access to my calendar except for a small group of people.  Those people know what the rules are and hopefully like my staff assistant will follow them.  When they say practice defensive calendaring, they really mean it.  People see those open blocks and feel that its open season.  So we will have to see how this works.  I will report on its status in a future posting.

As I ponder things daily about how services are provisioned and about things in my personal life, I have come to the conclusion that a process is really needed.  What do I mean by this?  Well, like anything we do we need a process by which we develop something.  I am still trying to affect change when I attend meetings these days, because most of them have no agenda and/or focus.  It is somewhat frustrated to sit there and listen to technical discussions only to find out that there really isn't a plan.  A plan is part of the overall "process".  Without a plan, you have do not have a road map to a project's success.  This is a common problem everywhere.  In my free time, I'm reading a book called Dreaming in Code.  Its about the open source Chandler calendaring project.  Penn State actually contributed money towards this effort.  After reading about six chapters, the problem is staring you in the face, the team lacked focus because they really didn't have an overall plan.  They thought they had a plan but they didn't.  Of course the plan is only part of the "Process".  You have to execute it in a timely fashion.  Those words are easier said than done.  I just ran into this with one of my employees.  He had a great plan for implementing a new system.  It was a work of art, but when it came time to implement it, things just didn't fall into place.  Normally, the old Jimmy would step in and help, but doing that would not help him learn and of course that goes against anything that I learned during ITLP.  So I'm just sitting back and hoping the process works.