FlexPoint Consulting

Thanksgiving is fast approaching! What can you put a bow on over the next two weeks? Part of our holiday planning is tackling urgent and important things that require others' input *now* and teeing up more individual focused work for the first half of Thanksgiving week. And your holiday will be more relaxing if you trust that the things queued up for completion in December are well-understood and organized, so you can easily pick them back up. Take a few minutes and refine your personal backlog as a gift to your future self!

Since we have the privilege of spending Thursday afternoon with CIOs Against Cancer, we've been thinking about technology leadership. Many of us are familiar with moving up the IT org chart by taking on more people leadership responsibilities, extending what we know and learning new skills to keep advancing. Today we want to shine a light on how to progress through your career by building and sharing expertise. This doesn't exempt us from knowing how to lead and manage, but there's a compelling advancement path through the technology ranks in mastering techniques, consistently demonstrating capabilities, and becoming the go-to person on a specific set of topics or practices. Say you begin your career as a technical analyst. If you're not drawn to the management side of the career track, you can go wide in an area of interest, see where your interests intersect with providing value for teammates and customers, and then go deep in that area of intersection. If you repeat this process, building your expertise *and* figuring out how to effectively share it with others in a way that provides value, this is a great recipe for advancement. If you are more interested in solving technical puzzles than in managing people, we recommend four steps to move up outside of the management track: 1. Look at the products, projects, challenges, etc. in your sphere of influence and pick one that you can really dig in on. Start by getting a solid, wide foundation of understanding, and then share what you're learning with those around. 2. Find someone in your organization who's successfully advanced through expertise and learn more about how they took early steps. Maybe this person can be a mentor (helping you lean into strengths and avoid derailers) or a sponsor (vouching for your value to the organization), but at least they can be an example to you. 3. Survey opportunities to share what you're learning with teammates. Maybe this is volunteering to present at a lunch and learn. Maybe it's contributing to an internal explainer or white paper. Find some way to demonstrate your expertise in a lower-stakes environment. 4. With rising confidence from sharing expertise with teammates, look for ways to invest your expertise in ways that are valuable to the organization overall. Raise your hand to draft a blog post. Use accessible resources to understand the way your area of expertise shows up in customer-facing work, and be quick to contribute when relevant questions arise. Ultimately, we're aiming for your voice and actions to be visible and highly valued. If you're aiming for a career path of building, demonstrating, and sharing expertise, know that the FlexPoint team is cheering you on!

Talk about spooky: an ERP implementation can be downright frightening! ?? We've all experienced or heard about enterprise resource planning implementations that go on for many months longer than expected with budgets ballooning and scope somehow decreasing. But we can set ourselves up for success by reframing an ERP implementation as an organization-wide digital modernization effort, not just a narrow technology project. Expanding our reach may seem counterintuitive, but by engaging business leadership, people management, operations, product teams, *and* IT from the very beginning, we're far more likely to: - Set a compelling vision for the ERP that's worth investing in - Dedicate more, deeper, and broader resources to the effort - Bring the ERP implementation into company-wide focus, rather than relegating it to a few teams Without a compelling vision, it's more difficult to persevere through the ERP implementation and to bring creative thinking and sharp problem-solving in the moments that count. Without resources from across the organization, it's too easy to solve the same sets of challenges in the same sets of ways, instead of taking a fresh look at how to delight external and internal customers. And without making the ERP implementation a program that the entire company cares about, we'll be tempted to deprioritize it in tradeoffs when the next exciting project idea comes up.

?? Cool news! ?? Our friends at Explainly just shared that the video we worked with them to create has been honored with a silver Davey Award. The Davey Awards celebrate the David's -- the little guys, as in David and Goliath -- in creative industries. Check out this year's Best in Show reel (https://lnkd.in/gYMw4yiq) and view all the winning entries (https://lnkd.in/gNsYSg56). https://lnkd.in/gmmPcqCT

We're practicing our golf swings in anticipation for this event! ? We have a few extra spots available in the FlexPoint bays – reach out if you’d like to attend as our guest. ?

Big news:?Steven McPhee, PMP?has joined the FlexPoint team! ? Steven is a seasoned technology leader with a passion for reporting and analytics leveraging AI, cloud technologies, and automation to drive business transformation. He brings considerable experience in international program management, change management, and business intelligence, and he’ll fit right in around here with his people-centered approach to transformative projects. ? Welcome, Steven!

Let's talk about reframing work/life balance. In the spirit of adding nuance to common business practices, the FlexPoint team doesn't really use the word *balance*?when talking about managing the push and pull of everyday priorities. Rather, we talk about work/life *tradeoffs* to?make it clearer that we have a sliding scale of which takes more of the priority at any given point. Frankly, work and life aren't always in balance. When we're nearing a major program milestone or putting the finishing touches on a big deliverable, we work hard. We put in extra hours, we may reschedule a personal commitment, and we focus on the task at hand. When we have something happen with a loved one or wake up to a home emergency, we support each other. We immediately say "we got this; go take care of your family" to the teammate who needs to flex up the life part of the equation. We take seriously that we all have responsibilities outside of work, and managing them well is important. Let's also not make this seem too binary. For those of us with multi-faceted home or work lives, this is a many-pronged consideration! Life may include investing in your health, caring for others, managing the household, coaching a basketball team, and more. Work may include multiple client projects, internal efforts, or even?a side hustle. We look at tradeoffs across all of these dimensions. We're constantly prioritizing and negotiating which aspect of work or life to focus on. And, at the end of the day, we aim to be satisfied with what we directed finite attention, time, and talents on. #teamflexpoint #worklife

As we thought about practices and patterns we want to reframe, enterprise architecture was immediately at the top! Enterprise architecture can provide *so much value* when working in partnership with business leaders. Keep reading on how we can reframe enterprise architecture from the "police" to the "city planners" of modern technology enablement.

REFRAMING INTEGRATION | Over the coming weeks, we'll address several topics that have a very specific context in business transformation *but* may benefit from a change in perspective. First up: integration. We typically use this word in the context of mergers and acquisitions: we often seek to integrate the two entities into one. This has process, technology, team, and culture considerations. We need to understand how each side does things, weigh options and considerations for leaving them separate or bringing them together. And if we're bringing things together, are we choosing one entity's process/technology/org structure, or are we blending them? In the mix, even if it's not said out loud, is the culture of each organization. It's almost guaranteed that there are meaningful differences in how the two groups have operated, particularly in the realm of unwritten rules. Honoring and melding the two cultures is a considerable portion of integrating two distinct entities. But what if we didn't think about integration only in the M&A context? We can benefit from being more cohesive and connected in many aspects of business. If you're feeling a bit of friction between departments, or have someone manually entering information sent from across the organization, or notice disconnection or talking past each other, you may benefit from greater integration. Follow the same checklist of the M&A integration: look at processes, technologies, team, and culture. Working within the same organization, you may have to dig a bit deeper into the unwritten versions and unacknowledged practices of these, since the disconnect may be in the places where some of us aren't following the procedures as prescribed (or maybe we're not using the enterprise solutions!). Zero in on the symptom that caught your eye and then zoom out a bit. How do you see different assumptions, philosophies, or non-negotiables at work? You may need to work with the other team's leader to get clear on some unspoken aspects of culture or priorities. Where do you see practices differ, or handoffs break down? This can be an opportunity understand why some of us aren't following the prescribed processes or technologies. Maybe they weren't efficient at a key point. Perhaps they didn't serve an external or internal customer well. It's worth examining the *why* of differences before seeking to integrate them. As with M&A, we have the opportunity to look not just at culture fit but culture add. Where can melding the two teams/organizations' ways of doing things create something that's greater than the sum of their parts? This is where the magic happens.

Last week we talked about identifying key metrics that matter to you, your team, and your customers. But how do you get the data to create reliable metrics? For the non-data specialists among us, it can seem like we need to call IT or Analytics immediately. But take a few minutes to organize your thoughts, and the conversation will be more effective -- or maybe you'll realize you already have what you need! First, define the metric you have in mind, describe it as vividly as possible, and list some examples. How frequently does it make sense to measure? Is it a point-in-time metric (a value "as of this date") or a rolling number (year over year, quarter over quarter change)? Why do you want do understand it? Make sure the "so what" is clear to you, so you can share it with others. With the desired insights clear, get as close as you can to describing the data sources for this metric. Is there a certain person who shares it with you, a report you've seen it in, or a transactional system you know that the information comes from? We'll need to find a predictable, reliable source for your key metric to get it on a regular basis. We just looked upstream in the data flow. Now look downstream: what other teams, reports, etc. use the information you're describing? Perhaps they're already getting the data you need, or even calculating the metric (or something similar) that you're seeking. Best case: you can use what they've already developed. If not, you will have more information and you may even have allies in your request for insights. Now you're ready to ask the Analytics team, IT, or another business group looking at similar concepts for help in securing your metric. Describe the metric you've identified, why it matters to you, where you think it comes from, and ask if they can help you gain access to the insight -- or help you take the next step toward it. We hope you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much more productive the conversation is with a few critical details prepared. If you're knee deep in data detective work and could use a helping hand, let us know.