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If your career seems in a slump, it’s probably time to change your spark plugs.
Below is Part 2 of a 2-Part article designed to help IT and database professionals stay on top of their game in an ever-changing trade. Part 1 describes the steps in general career perspectives. Please review Part 1 before continuing.
Part 2 takes those same concepts and implements them in a specific IT scenario. For more examples that fit your specific work environment, please feel free to contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
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When your career is stalling and your performance is losing power, it’s time to change your spark plugs. The ceramic inserts in your career spark plugs have worn out and are no longer allowing that energy to arc across the gap between “who you currently are” and “who you want to be”.
Changing your CAReer Spark Plugs:
- Revisit your overall Career Goals and Vision plan
- Evaluate your current activities
- If your activity does not support you career goals, run the 4D diagnostics (Delete, Delay, Diminish, and Delegate). (*1)
- Often times we feel that a certain task is our role and responsibility, even though it doesn’t fit our current career path. If you feel that the task is mandatory (demanded by upper management and job related), twist your thinking and participation level such that it does match your career goals.
(*1) Feel free to contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info for more information on the 4D process for managing your affluent task lists.
There are many ways to accomplish this. We will now illustrate how the IT Professional can implement the above steps.
Example:
In Part 1 of this article, we outlined Jason’s issues. This article, we will discover exactly what Jason did to change his career spark plugs.
Jason contacted his Corporate Exit Strategist career coach. Working with a success coach, Jason learned to think like an entrepreneur while in the corporate environment. Together they defined and reviewed his Career Goals. They divined the below CAReer Maintenance Plan:
1. Provide ‘just enough’ maintenance on the legacy technology to support qualified clients.
Most IT professionals do not realize that not all clients deserve the same level of service. They are just looking at the Problem Report in front of them. They don’t take the time to understand the client history and the overall Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to the company.
There are clients that are on the expensive premium support plan, others that pay the minimum to ‘get by’ and still others that expect support for free. There are clients with 100 units of this product. There are clients with two-five units (and anywhere in between). Therefore, come clients are making the company money and others are costing the company money.
Jason created a Client Criterion Chart that outlined which clients qualify for his time and talent investment.(*2) By creating his chart, Jason was able to identify which client was making the company money and which were costing the company money (more on this later).
With this chart, Jason was able to determine which clients are worth his time investment and which need to be accommodated in a different way(*3).
Qualified clients were high-paying clients (over 50 units) that had up-to-date high-priced premier maintenance support packages (Diminishing the people he will be servicing). This means that the return on his investment and time (ROI) was in the positive. The company was making money with this caliper client.
Clients that did not meet the new qualifications were offered assistance to the new technology along with free-deployment support for the first month. These clients were handed off to a different Technical Support and Deployment group (Delegating support activities to a different group). That team devised a roll-out procedure to quickly get these clients onto the new platform.
It was acknowledged that these clients may refuse to transition and even threaten to go to the competitor. This was an acceptable risk because this echelon of client was actually costing the company money by staying on the legacy product (the Return on Investment was negative). (*4)
Now that he has fewer clients to support, he appreciates that these clients all have the same needs and requirements. He realizes that those pesky, previous clients (that did not meet his new criterion) were the outliers that created havoc on the change-management system and release schedules. He is now able to restructure and simplify the code-configuration branches to support a single maintenance release branch. Although the releases were relatively frequent they were properly merged and scheduled. They were also from one support branch versus multiple separate streams. By restructuring the maintenance schedule this way, Jason was preparing his current clients for how the new platform releases would be structured.
This entrepreneur thinking reduced his maintenance time which allows him the freedom and space to create his new role in the new platform.
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(*2) Contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info for more information on CLV and how to determine which clients are worth your time.
(*3) This is an example of thinking like the owner of the company, and not just an IT developer.
(*4) Thinking like an entrepreneur means accepting the concept of firing the clients that do not match the company growth vision.
- Improve his skill set on the new platform, next technology or product line.
Once this product was discontinued, his current skill set would be out-dated and obsolete. Therefore, Jason needed a plan to upgrade his current skill set while he still had a job.
Working with this coach and manager, Jason identified his technical and soft-skills gaps. He also identified his transferable skills which can be extremely valuable in various positions.(*5)
To gain hands-on experience in these new skills, Jason volunteered his services on the other products as well as the Technical Support group that will be transitioning his previous clients to the next platform.
To gain additional information, Jason planned to facilitate weekly discussion groups or Brown Bag Lunch series on the next technology so that he and others on his team were ahead of the learning curve. During these chat sessions, Jason kept an eye on the folks he wanted to include on his future team (more on that later).
To practice this new skill, Jason created coding solutions for his high-paying clients, using the new technology, next-generation programming language or database method. At every opportunity, he continually mentioned the advantages of the new platforms to prepare his current clients for the inevitable roll-over. He continued to devise ways to integrate the old legacy with the new product technology. These side-applications provided a way to port or seamlessly transition his MIC (Most Important Clients) to the new product line little by little as well as provide hands-on training for himself in his new craft.
If there were no ‘in-company’ opportunities, he considered volunteering his services to outside organizations to get hands-on training in a new craft. This gives him some experience in external consulting while learning his new skills (both technical and soft skills). (*6)
- Take ownership in transitioning his clients off the old legacy product onto the new platform.
Instead of dreading the transition, Jason used the fact that “eventually the support on the legacy product will be discontinued” to create his next role.(*7) Jason takes the lead and creates a multi-phased proposal on how to get the current legacy clients onto the new platform.
In his proposal, he creates a lead position for himself that supports his future career goals. He also identified his dream team. He outlined the various roles needed to accomplish this transition and the exact people (and personalities) that would make a successful team.
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(*5) For a list and definition of Transferrable Skills and a Transferrable Skill Worksheet, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
(*6) This is another example of thinking like an entrepreneur.
(*7) Entrepreneurial thinking immediately accepts the inevitable and turns it into his advantage.
Jason has an unlimited resources and options at his disposal. This was just a taste of what is in Jason’s future, once he changed his spark plugs for better arcing potential.
For more information on how to change your CAReer Spark Plugs: CAReer Maintenance 101, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
If you are interested in more detail professional coaching or a professional coach to help you stay on target with those goals, please consider one-on-one coaching sessions to propel you forward faster.