Personal Branding

What do you do well?  And how do you communicate that to people you meet?  Here’s what I’ve found useful.

I read a post a while ago wherein the author was touting the value in a “personal branding statement.”  The idea is that leaders need to have a 30-second elevator pitch type, pithy statement about their personal brand.  Good advice.  Succinctly communicating your business value is important.

So, I worked through a number of ideas about the Tracy Hunt brand.  I eventually came up with this statement: 

My legacy is three fold:  IT Strategy, IT Operations, and Information Assurance. 

Succinct, indeed.  Too succinct, probably.  But it catches attention, and gives me a platform from which to dive into other things.

To help me frame “those other things,” I created a personal branding graphic.  When conversing off the cuff, recalling this graphic helps keep me on target.  And, when talking with clients, colleagues, etc., showing and talking through this graphic helps them remember me and my value to their organization.

For my graphic, I started with the above triad of Strategy, Operations, and Information Assurance.

What I do

Everything I do generally falls into one or more of those three buckets.  It’s “What I do.”  Lots of IT folks do those things, so what sets the CIO-type apart is that we consider four critical success factors for every project.  That’s “How I do what I do.”  Those critical success factors are People, Process, Technology and Infrastructure.

How I do it

Most seasoned CIOs and other executives already know that successful projects consider many things beyond the direct scope of the project.  So, what sets me apart from seasoned CIOs is “Who I am” – my personal commitment to achieving a balanced mix of personal core values, business value drivers, and regulatory constraints.

Who I am

So, to recap…moving from the outside in, we have below

• Who I am (circle)
• What I do (triangle)
• How I do it (square)

Give it a shot.  Create your personal branding graphic.  If nothing else, it will help you work through thinking about your accomplishments from a different perspective.

Try it – you’ll like it.

Why Organizational Design Matters

Structure is important in an organization of has any significant size.  Granted, in an extremely small organization, structure may be irrelevant.  An example I like to use to illustrate this point is that of an amoeba.  An amoeba doesn’t have any internal structure (i.e. bones, skeleton).  It’s just a squishy blob.  The amoeba’s lack of structure is advantageous in situations where the environment is constantly changing.  The amoeba can physically adapt quickly to mold itself into its environment.  But if the amoeba grows too large, it will collapse in on itself due to a lack of internal structure.  To put it in IT speak, amoebas don’t scale well.

I recently observed an amoeba-like project.  It started small, with just two people involved in the day-to-day activities.  The focus was to create a proof-of-concept application for business process automation and situational awareness dashboards.  There was little project management type oversight, few rules of engagement, etc.  It was a true experiment in Agile/Extreme Programming type work – and it was extremely successful.

Fast forward to the follow-on work.  The team grew to 10 people overnight, with two interdependent work streams.  That’s a big amoeba.  Astute leadership would have recognized the need for internal organizational design and structure in the vastly expanded project.  However, the PM and Deputy PM opted for carving the amoeba into two independent teams, one focused on each of the interdependent work streams.  (Anyone see any potential for problems with that approach?  Note the italicized words.)

About four months into the one-year project, things were undeniably unraveled.  I say “undeniably” because while they were in fact never raveled to begin with, leadership insisted things were running smoothly until about the four-month mark.  At that point, their “master plan” was not being achieved, in part because it was never conveyed to the team (where there is no vision, the people perish – Proverbs 29:18), but mostly because there was no thought, no plan, no structure in place to enable the team to achieve success.

To their credit, the PMs acted upon my commentary about structure and design for similar projects.  However, like an OCD person with a newfound fetish, they went way overboard.  They had structure.  Boy, did they have structure.  But they missed the two most important phrases in my diatribe about organizational design:  first, that there should be an abundance of thought and critical analysis put into the effort (there wasn’t), and second, that the resultant structure must enable success for the team (it didn’t).

Now the project stands at a critical juncture.  A competitor has entered the picture, and is demonstrating success where this project team hasn’t.  The good news is the situation presents an opportunity to readdress the organizational design and structure issues for the project.  And this time, rather than just coach them through the process, I’ve decided to take the lead on introducing some creative, non-standard, unorthodox, and even off-the-wall approaches to the organizational design issues.  If nothing else, it will be an entertaining conversation.