Excellence in It:. Warren C. Zabloudil

what if the project assignment is a ‘one-off’ anomaly? Let’s say a good boss got a rush request from a customer that can’t be denied. Then you need to figure out how to professionally mitigate risk in a hurry. Step one is to take a brief moment to go on the record by politely reminding everyone for the umpteenth time that this’s not how things should be done and to truthfully establish an understanding of the increased risk you’ll be facing. After all, it’s better to get the gripes out before you begin than it is to complain later on when the deadline is approaching and things are crazy enough on their own without you adding to the noise.

      Whether you’re rushed or have plenty of time to work with, a handy trick to identifying all those pesky risks in any job is to narrow your view to as granular a level as is reasonably possible. The more granular you have time for, the better. Do this after first gaining a solid understanding of what needs to be done and laying out the job milestones as usual. Then divide each milestone into several smaller projects with contiguous start and endpoints. The smaller, more granular view provides a clearer evaluation of risks relative to each milestone. As each risk is identified it needs to be assessed against the scope of the job as a whole. Used properly, this trick provides a more thorough approach to risk identification by narrowing the scale of each part of the job that any given risk can affect.

      Narrowing the scale not only helps you better assess risk, as a side effect it also forces you to become more familiar with the job down to the granular level you’ve chosen. Focusing on the subdi-vided parts before you begin will give you a more detailed overall picture of how to proceed. This increased clarity helps identify even the most subtle of job-related details and allows you to eliminate any risk hiding in those details before the work begins.

      The more you understand up front, the more courage you’ll have when you start. The more courage you gain, the more prepared you’ll be to move quickly to deal with issues as they arise. This is where the confidence part comes in. Even those elements of risk that managed to remain invisible during the planning stages won’t be quite as overwhelming when they rise up and try to knock you off schedule. No matter what happens after you begin, the more prepared you are at the start, the more confidence you’ll have in the middle of the job in the event any setback does occur.

      Preparedness is the result of both planning and training on the plan. For preparation to be considered fully complete, at least one rollback option must also be in place in case something goes wrong beyond your control. A rollback plan is not only a critical step to ensure the operational continuity for end-users; it’s a real confidence booster as well. A rollback plan is the ability to turn the clock back to a time when everything was still functioning properly. It’s the reset button in the video game of life. Rollback is made up of the contingencies needed to keep a failed implementation from ever reaching the end-users. A good rollback plan isn’t based around a single trigger either. Rollback can be total if the implementation was a complete disaster or just partial if the implementation went mostly well, but had a few bugs along the way. Every undertaking is always less scary if it includes plans for how to get back to a safe place if need be.

      A final note on courage is that it’s almost a certainty that every busy IT professional tech will experience at least once in their career a bad spell in one form or another when anything which could possibly go wrong with their work usually does no matter how hard they try to make it right. Even the best techs out there can experience times in their career when it appears fate is against them, or at least extending some persistent doubt in their direction. This type of thing usually happens when you’re going through a "snake bit" period. That is, while everything you touched before on the job seemed to turn to gold, now everything you touch in your work seems to turn to lead. You’re still a great tech, but, for some unknown reason, no matter how good you always are at making judgment calls about what to do next, for no apparent reason those calls simply start going wrong despite your best effort. When you look back at your recent work all you see are mistakes…usually dumb ones too.

      This happens to everyone every now and then in the compli-cated and constantly changing world of computers so don’t take it personally. If you’re doing your best and your best is good enough, then there’s no explanation for being snake bit that’ll make sense so you shouldn’t let it hurt your confidence. Just keep doing your best and the rest will take care of itself. It’s an honest truth that every tech in the world will experience a snake bit period at least once in their career; including you. When you’re snake bit, even your best work can leave a dirty trail behind you. You look back at your recent jobs and all you see are problems all around. Not big, complicated mistakes either, but irritatingly simple ones you can’t believe you keep making. Since this kind of thing happens to everybody at least once over a long career, you should create a “snake bite kit” ahead of time for whenever the situation finally arrives. For starters, remember that being snake bit is always temporary. It’s best to just buckle-down and push on through it. Soon enough the successes will start returning and your courage and confidence will get back on track. You can, and should, bank on it.

      One tool that should be in every snake bite kit is your resume. It’s old advice, but as long as you know you know it’s truthful, re-reading your resume helps remind you that your self-confidence is not unwarranted. You did good work in the past and you’ll do good work in the future too. Revisiting your past successes will often give you the boost in self-confidence you need to move forward with your head held high. As long as you know you’re good, the successes will return. When they do, count them…literally. Always keep your resume up to date if for no other reason than to remind yourself that you are a first rate tech. That kind of continuity in your confidence over time is what will help you rise to the top of your professional world and earn a reputation for excellence in your company.

      Other curative steps can include reviewing your certifications or degrees and what you did to get them. Also, any past accolades from bosses or coworkers are worth review too. This’s a highly personal act so design your snake bite kit as you see fit. The thing to remember is to never lose confidence in yourself, even if it others around you appear to have begun to doubt your ability. It’s OK to give yourself credit even if no one else does. In fact, it is a critical part of moving over those rough spots in your career and keeping your courage level high at all times.

Focus

      Nothing defines a solution better than the number of details it involves and nothing measures a tech’s skills better than their ability to work with those details. Having good focus is how you come to terms with those details. Taking solutions from a variety of vendors and combining them into a single system means adapting the nuances in each of those solutions to work alongside all the other nuances around them. Being able break something down into its basic parts so you can accurately focus on its details is a critical skill for anyone who works with complex elements for a living. In reality, the old adage, keep it simple stupid, only applies to jobs that were simple to begin with. The beauty of a great solution will always be found in the complexity of its details.

      Many techs have a problem coming to terms with the true level of detail that good preparation entails. Those techs need to learn the hard way that overlooked details will always come back to haunt them when moving to production. You should guard against this kind of education. Don’t let this happen to you. Take the time to inventory all the details involved with the job and touch on each one before starting to work. Maintaining a high resolution focus goes a long way toward achieving excellence in the tasks you’re involved in. For a tech traveling to a site on a service ticket, this could mean going through all the possible causes of the problem in their mind before they arrive. For someone starting a new project, it means working through the project and accounting for all the details in a thorough project plan before moving to development.

      The more you trial your solution to account for all of its details before moving to production, the better off you’ll be. This’s because trials are a great way to expose the hidden problems in your system. Failure is one of the most useful tools you can have when working to get things right, so it’s actually a good thing to fail during a trial. The more you understand about how things can go wrong while you’re still in the preparation phase, the better everything will work when you finally move to production.

      There are different outcomes