Career Ruminations

Summary

Core aim: To help create business value from technology, using my attributes and skills as effectively as I can.

My approach rests on Conway's Law: the mirroring/interdependence between how the organisation is structured and how the technology is delivered, in particular how this relationship can both help and hinder change. So I'm very interested in roles that will deepen my understanding of this relationship: my ideal role would both require a lot of deep technical understanding and working with the organisational structure, so I can help technology and the organisation evolve in harmony with each other.

This is also what's driven my career to date: doing for a mixture of roles, some aimed at gaining technical knowledge, some at organisational experience, most recently one that's ranged freely over both.

Other big ideas:

• Congruence (Carl Rogers): facilitating change by creating zones where people can align thoughts, words and actions
• Retrospectives: getting value of of experience, becoming adaptive
• Systems Thinking: look at the system as a whole, don't over-optimize parts of it
• Framing: much discussion is conditioned by the active frames, so recognising them is important
• Social Roles: context-dependent behaviour is necessary to work effectively with people

Notes

Core Attributes:

• Curious and Learn Quickly
• Documenting and Explaining
• Conscientious
• Enjoy Building Relationships
• Enjoy Making, Fixing Things
• Flexible Approach
• Seek Deep Understanding of Underlying Principles

Experience:

• Development, both in quant & IT
• Design/Architecture
• Management

Where Next:

• My most recent role has combined aspects of being end-user, manager, implementor, analyst/designer
• I've enjoyed that variety but I think it might be a special case due to my history with RBS
• Focusing on implementation alone only takes you so far, there are wider questions:
  • Why: Why are you doing this? (value)
  • What: What exactly are you aiming to achieve? (spec)
  • Who: Are you the right person to be doing this?
  • When: Is this the right time to be doing this? Should it be deferred?
  • Where: Are you in the right organisational position to achieve the goal?
  • How: Is the implementation using the right technologies, processes, governance, resourcing?
• I tend to end up focusing on the wider questions no matter where I sit; no matter what my role description is.