How to spot your expertise.

“Matthew, I told you it would take me twenty days, so in twenty days I’m going to deliver!” He added, “Now please leave me alone to get on with it!”

That was a reaction that I was once quite familiar with, when I was a project manager reporting to the CEO of a small software company.

Back then, as in all traditional projects, we established estimates for all the bits of work that needed to be done. As the project manager I would put them into a project planning tool which in turn produced the (in)famous Gantt Chart so that we could see the critical path, track progress, and so on.

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This post is an extract from my book Five Steps from Corporate Hell to Freedom & Fun which led to the creation of NineAligned.

Download the first and last chapters here.

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After a couple of months, one of the critical path items was in development, led by a developer named Mike. He had estimated that the development would take him twenty days. I went to Mike after half of this time had elapsed and asked him, “How’s it going, Mike? Are we done? Do we have 5% left? Are we just starting? How does it look?”

He replied, “Matthew, I told you it would be done in twenty days; it will be done in twenty days.”

I just wanted to know if we were on track, and to make sure we had transparency in our work. I thought it was a reasonable question. My intention was to help him if he was behind schedule. So I asked again, and he, irritated, said basically the same thing:

“Matthew, I told you it would take me twenty days. So in twenty days, that is what I’m going to deliver.”

Again, I tried to explain my reason for requesting a status update. But Mike, now angry, repeated himself:

“Matthew, I told you it would take me twenty days, so in twenty days, that’s what I’m going to deliver!” He added, “Now please leave me alone to get on with it!”

We then had a full-blown argument in the middle of the open plan office. Our fight didn’t send a good message for all the other employees. In the end, Mike did deliver in twenty days, but he did it working weekends and fourteen-hour days.

Clearly this way of managing projects, was not my expertise! It was not something I could offer assist others with.

Now, let us fast-forward to six months after we adopted changes that allowed us to work more collaboratively with greater autonomy, a higher sense of purpose whilst always inspecting and adapting how we worked.

I was still the project manager, but now Mike came to me and said, “Hey Matthew, I’m done, and my team is on track. Who else can I help?”

Amazing. Same person. Two completely different attitudes. But the story does not stop there.

We then delivered the software to a powerful client who had been previously so unhappy with our work that he, a client, had sent us help! After they went live with the new software, that very same client told us he was not happy with the quality of the software.

We were speechless.

He repeated, “I’m not happy,” he then explained “I’m ecstatic.”

Now, however we have something. Now we have an expertise, backed with experience. I could now help others - this is my expertise. 

It illustrates two key points that convinced me that my experiences could be of help to somebody else:

1. That we established a track record of success backed up by statistics. People could see it.
2. (And most importantly) that the changes we applied had a positive impact on people. Mike changed for the better, and we delivered to a very happy client. In turn, his clients would be happy. In other words, the work mattered.

The work—rather, my work really mattered.

When you think about your experiences, have you done something that affected the lives of others? In the story above, the experiences changed the company and the people within that company, and it made us a more compelling group of people to work with. How we worked made a difference to our working lives, and our client saw this. In fact, new clients chose us because of who we were and how we worked, despite the fact that the product was not the best on the market.

Again, have a think about your current experiences.

Have you done something that others benefit from, in which you may guide them?

If so, get out there.

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Once you do have an idea, though, don’t go writing a big business plan—which is a mistake that most people will do, as I explain next in a future installment…
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NineAligned is a community that creates, launches and support new businesses and startups that are fit for humans to work in. Want to get involved? Want to launch your own business? Find out more here: www.NineAligned.com

If you like what you have read about, you can read about this and more in my book Five Steps from Corporate Hell to Freedom & Fun on Amazon by clicking on the cover image below: