668 Blog for Week of 7/5/2010

Reflect on a successful experience you had managing someone else?

I do like the word Sponsor better than manager or boss. I enjoy the conversations that my peers have because they have always asked me for the final thought. I feel that I'm good at assisting others think in terms of the other person. Being empathetic to the other person's situation is a must. People must do this in order to make a sound decision. Unfortunately we can not have the other person do the same, but then once we think in their shoes, we can talk to them in a more understanding way. I've assisted my mentees this way and I've enjoyed it when they came back to me and said oh boy! that was great! the client understood exactly where we were coming from and understood why we came up with the recommendations that we did! This puts a smile in my face knowing that I made a minor difference.

What made this successful?

I think the ability to LISTEN to others is key not only at work, but in life. People in general are too eager to offer their own opinions and therefore really tune the other person out when they are talking. (I admit that I do as well) They tend to think that it's my way or the highway. We have to take a step back being in the IT world. We need to assess, reflect and recommend according to budget, interoperability and business need. Once we fully understand this, we can come up with a technically creative way to solve issues that the business may have. What makes our group successful is the fact that we indeed care about the business, but they have to understand that we too are doing our jobs and we need to follow the process, procedures and the policy set by the leaders. We are 'managing' the infrastructure and need to comply. But if we see an opportunity to go outside that policy, we have to do our homework to assess the risk, and the consequences.

What could you have done differently?

Unfortunately there are times where we take the Business's word for something that they said they had as a control. We don't have insight into their world so what they tell us we pretty much have to trust. In the real world, I was told that you can not audit trust. SO having said this, there were times where the business would take us for granted and didn't disclose fully what lack of controls they had and when IT Audit came in to audit them, it made us look like we messed up. I know we should 'do more' but then with the authority that has been passed down to us, that's all we could do, but we are however going to work on finding a better solution in the future so that we can improve upon the process so that we don't have to shrug and move along. Be agents of change...is what i'd like to do differently...