For the Love of Work
What am I supposed to do with this?
I finished my last Winter, and it was a lot of fun, a lot of long nights studying and wiritng papers. I came out of it with a renewed sense of purpose and some sweet, sweet validation that I’m not as incompetent as I often see myself (insert jab about Millenial “Gifted” burnout here).
Now, I’ve been in my current role for a minute, but I’m pressing myself to view it through this newly acquired lense and come up with some strategies to best approach the work going forward. This is likely going to take many forms over the next few months, but the end goal is to define a path that will allow me to use these skills to better address the opportunities I have seen in the product development lifecycle.
Topics to include (but not limited to):
- Corporate strategy
- SWOT analysis
- Supply Chain Strategy
- Constraint Analysis
- Lean Systems
- Capacity Planning
How to translate the degree to work
Best I figure, here’s some steps I need to take.
- Start writing professionally again.
When I first started in IT, moving over from retail banking, I was in a position that was graded based on how much I learned. Every new skill, every new technology consumed meant a small bump in pay. Additionally, it was a requirement to blog about those things on the company site. Initially I thought it was a hokey method to grow interaction on the site and drive traffic, but I began to find that the things I wrote about stuck with me longer and were easier to implement in every-day activities.
- Regular note taking/Jounraling to understand what worked, what didn’t, and document ideas that sprung up throughout the day.
Thinking of this as a retrospective. This is supremely useful on development teams to understand and reflect on what went well and what could have been better, and then incorporating those notes into the next Sprint’s work. The same must be done as a TPM to understand your successes and opportunities.
- Increase quality and level of communications
I have always taken a “less is more” approach to corporate communication, and in the world of back-to-back Zoom meetings, I pride myself on that trait. However: There must come a second step of making the communications I do have be worthy of that goal as well. Additionally, making strides in the methods of communication is going to be critical. While I’m pretty handy with SQL and statistics, putting it all together into a slick dashboard or presentation has not been my strong suit, instead relying on Slack and wikis to do the talking.
I will likely update and adjust this as time goes on, so let’s let this blog post be a living document of the strategy, evolvoing over time as I figure this whole thing out. The key for the MBA to be useful and not just an expensive ego-boost is to actually use it.