Next Challenge, transition to management role

Enough technical! I have years of technical experience, but now I need a move on to management role. How? What should I do?

Technical experts generally struggle to jump next step in their career ladder. I often come across this aggression from absolute genius and experienced technical gurus. There is no one single answer to this question. Through personal experience and research I come up with following guiding principle that can help individual to start building his/her profile for the management role. It take’s time and highly depend on personal efforts, it may take few months or could be few year but only thing required is commitment to grow.

Analyze your current profile and plan accordingly: – find out what should be the natural path to grow. Take small steps example if you are the software developer consider moving business process area, and target to project/program management. If you are network engineer consider service delivery expertise and target service/project management. Create one sketch what you are now and list all your existing skills. Create another sketch what you want to be and write all the features of your target. I also recommend visiting recruitment website/companies in your subject area and look managers’ profile you would like to be. This will give you fair idea what expertise is required for your future target personality.

Networking/Socializing: – The single most effective suggestion I can ever give to anyone is to build networking. Lets accept that majority of technical experts are not good in communicating and socializing with people. In order to improve you have to develop your people and interpersonal skills. Start looking for associations which interests you, be a permanent member, do some voluntary work. Talk to colleagues in different department. Most importantly stay in touch with your network, if you don’t the relationship will eventually going to die. 

Training: – More technical training is not the answer for sure, the most appropriate and faster ROI is to invest in soft skills. It will be noticeably effective in short term. I also advise to look for business degree program if you don’t have one. There are plenty of good part time/distance/online offering. Market place is getting very competitive day by day and the only way to have a competitive edge is to fight from every front.

Restructure your resume: – Start building it early, even if you are not ready yet for the challenge. This will give you the chance to keep enhancing it. Design your resume to explains what is your achievement and how did you achieved in an organizational prospective. You have to sell yourself. Employer does not care what certification and how good you technically are. They need to know how you will be useful in their organization. Always consider to prepare your resume that interest and show some value to your potential employer.

Self development: – Besides training, there are various ways to improve and continue self development. I am amazed most of us don’t read the news papers. I am not saying to read each and every story inside. Only front page, local news and business section is enough to stay in touch with current affairs. Start looking for business/financial terminologies use in the market. The minimum you should know is how to read financial statement of the company. Start reading professional business magazines, read articles, read good books, try to understand business processes inside your company. The biggest challenge you will face in self development is availability of enormous information, and hard to filter valuable information. But if you know what you are looking for, and keeping your goal in mind, you will find the way. Continuously learning and growing is the way to move forward in coming competitive business world.

Dress Code: – Start dressing up like an executive. Most of you argue that our job does not really allow suites to wear and we are not customer facing. But I insist you to start changing your dress to look more professional of course considering environment around you. After all it’s all a mind game.

Monitor your progress/Stay focus: – In order to avoid loosing touch, consistently target your goals, monitor your progress on monthly basis and stay focused.

I know above are not an inexpensive advices to offer but investment on self development in terms of time, money, and relationship will always pays off.

Human Management in fast pace Implementations

After receiving a project to manage with nearly impossible stated deadline, the first most imperative thing comes into my mind is ‘how to create a sense of urgency in project team?’

As most of the project managers, I come across an authority issue, my project team usually a collection of functional roles congregates to execute the specific project and dismantle after the closure. 

I stick with some of the rules that helped me in finishing the project on time. 

Define sharp-edged milestones: The first important and basic principal I followed was defining flexible schedule yet with SHARP-EDGED deliverables and milestones that left no ambiguity. 

State the deadline: When assigning a task to team member, always make sure you STATE THE DEADLINE and when you are stating the deadline include date and time e.g. March 13 at 3:30. That leaves no room for negotiation.

Document the commitment: Document what your team member committed to in a simple email.

Followup followup followup: Always follow-up on the deadlines, and when the deadline arrives take action by providing feedback.

Escalate : There are obstacles all Project Managers come across during the implementation but one should know when to break the barriers and escalate.