Brian Stokoe

There is a evolutionary ‘survival of the fittest’ concept that comes to mind when we think about the Agile Methodology.

Management is on the hook for setting a date for delivering something and making sure it happens. Commonly tied to the Waterfall Methodology.

Execution teams are like the end of a funnel, where they have to sort out all the requests being thrown their way.

The two Methodologies can work together, but like any relationship, you have to put in a fair amount of effort to make it function.

Communication is critical.

The execution team needs to understand the value drivers for all requests to prioritize appropriately. The business needs to understand and represent the position of the execution team.

Transparency is required on both sides.

End of the day, it’s a team effort. Working together to have a shared point of view will help frame context around any situation.

Everyone must be comfortable with the process and have confidence in the core idea that the strongest / most impactful work will take primary focus.

It takes time. You have to be cautious of political pressure to ensure that associated benefit and value is the core driver. But, when all the teams begin to click, the best work will come through to survive and thrive.

As an individual contributor, there is a habit, maybe even a desire to go into a dark cave and work quietly with no distraction so you can come out and reveal the glory of your work to the world!

A mentor once shared with me that no matter what is being crafted, you must maintain communication so others have a sense of what you are working on and your work remains on the radar.

People’s time at work is finite. Even strong work can be overlooked if the leadership does not have a constant ‘ping’ of the effort.

You have to maintain that ‘ping’ on the radar. Provide updates. Pop your head out of the cave every once in a while to let people know that you are cooking up something awesome. They will be excited to see the result!

Sometimes there are so many little ‘wins’ that it is hard to bundle those together to demonstrate value that will mean much to leadership.

It’s like the opposite of ‘death by a thousand needles’… ‘Success by a thousand needles’?

Remember to document the quick wins through the year. Do your best to bucket them into categories. Some way to consolidate the benefit ($, labor hours saved, cost avoidance, etc…).

Zoom out, and look at all the efforts together. You should have a good story to tell!

It still catches me by surprise. When a team has been working diligently for multiple weeks and gets caught up in the ‘shiny’ nature of a new technology but looses sight of the connection to value creation.

Unfortunately, this happens time and time again.

It is critical to ensure your team remains focused on demonstrating business value.

Years ago, a former leader shared the basic concept of… “If we put $1 into a project, you must be able to demonstrate how $2 is generated as revenue”. This is the mantra I follow when evaluating any proposed work.

If the value is not clear, stop. Reset. Reevaluate the strategy and direction to ensure the investment has line-of-sight to tangible return.

This may be difficult to drive with a team that has momentum, but it is the right thing to do for your company.

I just counted how many meetings are on my schedule today (excluding ‘Out of Office’ meetings)… 17!

Of course, that is representing conflicting meetings that I will not be able to attend. However, it does represent a packed schedule where there will be no time accomplish anything independently.

I know I am not alone with crazy days like this.

A good approach to tackling a packed day is to plan on rolling with it. Just go into the day knowing that not much email will be touched and some things just will not be done.

All that being said, it is tempting to plan on multi tasking through the day.

I always remind myself that it is proven that humans cannot multitask. So don’t try. In fact, try to avoid it.

Be present. Be mindful of the discussions. Don’t try to do things on the side.

Team members will appreciate your attention and the fact that you are bringing your ‘A’ game to the discussions.

Wish me luck!

There has been a shift in the corporate leadership model in the past decade or two. Historically, leadership paths have been focused on the ladder concept where an employee would start from the bottom, become a domain expert to the point where they train others and eventually become the one that oversaw individual contributor’s work and rated their performance.

Leadership career paths are much more flexible today. Effective leaders are given additional responsibility based less on their domain knowledge but more on their ability to manage details of a business (ie. budget, stakeholders, vendor management, etc…) and their capacity to produce results with teams they manage.

This shift does not require the leader to understand the nuances of every tool in their toolbox. It does place more emphasis on coaching employees that are domain experts to meet and exceed the needs of the business.

For the most part, this is good! However, as a leader it is important to remain in-touch with the pace of change in the marketplace. While there is a threshold of ‘ignorance’ that can be tolerated by employees of their leader, there is a drop off point. If you as a leader cannot understand the primary concepts of the domain, connect the dots of the technology and generally not speak the ‘lingo’, employee’s will loose respect for your effectiveness as a leader even if you are good at all the ‘business stuff’.

At minimum, be sure to stay tuned into the industry. Join webinars and attend training sessions as much as possible. As with many things, showing your team that you are taking initiative to learn more about their domain can be a major factor in earning their trust and respect.

The old saying of “It takes more muscles to smile than it does to frown”, may be a bit weak on scientific evidence, but I like to draw a parallel thought from this idea.

It seems to be easier to focus on the negative aspects of situations rather than appreciating the positives.

As a general rule of lifestyle, I think it is really important to highlight and emulate positivity. However, just like a muscle, it needs to be exercised and worked.

If you want to be a grump, it’s not hard. If you want to be a positive person that influences others, look to the silver linings and minimize focus on things that are negative.

It is officially July, 2021!

For me, this means things are about to get really busy.

We are about to initiate a fair amount of hiring as there will be 10+ roles opening up in my teams. There is a lot to do to make this all come together. It is a great opportunity to recruit some of the best & brightest minds to join our team.

We will be primarily focusing on hiring for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Interaction Studio, Informatica P360 and Google Analytics.

As we start, it is clear that the job market is very competitive.

One of the benefits of recruiting for a major company like Caterpillar is the power of the brand and the known opportunity to work on fun / challenging things that have clear impact on the world.

There is a lot of paperwork to complete before the majority of the openings hit the market, but really looking forward to extending the team.

Sometimes things break. With all sorts of processes and expectations, you will find that somehow, someway, someone will figure out a way to break something. Ether that, or someone will just not follow the process… and things break.

It’s not fun when things break.

It can be embarrasing and not look good.

When the situation looks messy, you are faced with choices. You may have a natural reaction where stress takes over and you begin to hyperventilate (hopefully not). Or, you can take a breath and do your best to be a calm voice of reason and help everyone figure out what has gone wrong.

I recommend a 5 stage approach

1. Stop the bleeding. When something has gone wrong, stop the processes and ensure the issue(s) are contained.
2. Root Cause Analysis. In the end, a complete RCA should be created so everyone involved understands what happened and what needs to be fixed to safeguard against the issue(s) in the future. However, when you are in the heat of the moment, ensure you at least have a high level of confidence that the root cause is understood so you can fix.
3. Give the team time to build a plan to fix. Don’t rush. The worst thing you can do is have a team quickly try to fix something and they accidentally break something else. Make sure the full team participates in solution planning to allow for multiple points of perspective.
4. Block and tackle. If the team needs any form of support, be there for them. Favors may need to be asked. Special exceptions may be needed. Be prepared to push.
5. Most importantly… COMMUNICATE! Through the whole process of something breaking, regular communication to stakeholders and team members is critical. Ensuring everyone knows what is going on and giving insight into the decisions and steps being made will calm everyone else’s nerves.

Dealing with breaks is not fun, but it is not the end of the world. Keep a steady hand on the wheel and get out of the storm.

My work has commonly involved establishing new solutions to meet specific business needs. With new solutions come new processes.

I am a process nerd. I find it critical to have documented flow charts of all steps that are expected of various teams so everyone can be working from the same set of agreements and instructions.

With that being said, teams need to work in an agile framework where they can change processes as efficiencies are identified.

If you ever think that a process is set, you are thinking about it wrong.

Managing documented processes has to be a part of a teams functional DNA. The idea of empowering team members to find better ways to do things is exciting and highly encouraged.

However, if a processes adjustment is not recorded, those process changes may only be recognized by the small group of ‘in-the-know’ individuals that have hand-shake agreements on adjustments

You have to recognize processes as the playbook for enabling common understanding and scale.

There are 3 key benefits to maintaining process maps.

1. Team members can use process maps to visually illustrate where changes can be made.
2. New team members can study the process flows to understand how a entire system is managed.
3. Leaders can quickly review and understand the flow of work.

It takes work to maintain documentation of processes, but it pays off in the long-run.