Using Linkedin to Manage Your Career
Jun 30th
I had a chance to give presentation at the downtown Seattle Career Masters group today. My topic was how Linkedin can be a valuable tool in career management. Much of the topic was based on my personal experiences as a ‘professional in transition’, combined with my prior expertise in web information architecture. I covered some basics – what you should include in your profile, as well as some secret tips to maximize your on-line presence. The group was very receptive to my message and I was thrilled to have a number of people attend to see my presentation.
I created a one page handout, which I’ve included here. I welcome questions or comments.
If you are a downtown Seattle professional, check out the Career Masters program.
Competing For Your Future
Mar 17th
The other day I attended an excellent presentation by Robin Borough, of Omnikron Systems on “Competing for Your Future: Career Acceleration for the Next Generation.”
Presentation at Pacific NW itSMF LIG
Robin has an interesting model which links the idea of managing your career with ITIL concepts. Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation all have counterparts to managing your IT career.
Create a Service Strategy to making some overall strategic decisions about your career direction, including financial considerations and demand for your chosen profession. As IT professionals, we should take the time to plan out our career strategy with the same energy we do to create our IT service strategy within our companies.
Service Design really gets to the nuts and bolts of what you’ll offer to the marketplace. This includes what you offer as a potential employee (service catalog management) and your performance standards (service level management). As an expert in service catalog creation, this really gets me thinking about what services I offer to the market place, and the attributes, such as service levels, pricing, metrics which would apply to those services.
Service Transition refers to the steps you’ll take to get where you want to go. This would include your change management and release deployment activities.
Through Service Operations, you manage your current position, including how you handle issues (incident management) along the way.
Of course, an ITIL or career lifecycle would not be complete without dedicated effort to work on your Continual Service Improvement plan. Thrown in a plan for life-long learning and mentoring to make your career complete!
Robin shared a Career Accelerator workbook, which is a great way to help ‘embolden and refresh your career vision.’ You can find it at Your-Career-Now.com. Direct PDF link here.
Competing For Your Future Book
Robin has a book on Amazon if you would like to learn more about managing your IT career. The book provides valuable information about how much career management and job hunting have changed in the last 20 years. It also gives tips the use of social media to promote your career. The book is a great overview, yet I most highly recommend her as a speaker and presenter. I found the interactive nature of her presentation to be a big plus. Lots of energy and enthusiasm from the audience.
If you have a company or professional organization that would benefit from an IT career development presentation for employees/members, check out Robin’s company at www.omnikron.com.
Three Groups Desperately in Need of Service Levels.
Jan 23rd
Recently I had the privilege of attending the Pacific NW ITSMF meeting on the topic of service levels. Ilene Jones presented a snapshot of Boeing’s approach to service levels. I was amazed how a company as large and complex as Boeing is tackling the idea of standardized services and service levels. In my own experience, I’ve seen the growth and use of service levels, from no service levels, to IT-centric service levels, and finally to the evolving use of business –relevant service levels. So in this post, I thought I’d examine service level maturity by a humorous look at “Three Groups Desperately in Need of Service Levels.”
First, if you are new to IT or Service Management, you may be wondering what are service levels?
In short a service level can be thought of as: A measurement of the performance of a system or service.
Examples of common IT measurements may include:
- Availability of a service: 99% availability means the system is up 99% of the scheduled time
- Call Answer Speed: The amount of time it takes your help desk to answer your call. In other words…how long will you be on hold!
- Time to Resolution (TTR): The amount of time that elapses between a system failure and the resolution of the issue. This can often be measured as an aggregated percentage, such as 90% of incidents will be resolved within 4 hours. You aggregate individual incidents in this case because a single incident may not be a relevant measure.
I call these types of measurements IT-centric, in that they are often useful to the IT professionals providing the service. For example, Call answer speed statistics can help a manager staff a help desk at proper levels to provide the level of service.
These types of measurements may not be relevant to business however. I remember once trying to explain availability to a business manager only to see their eyes glaze over to the incoming techo-babble. Business people need measurements relevant to them.
What might be relevant service levels for a business user, manager or department?
Here are some examples of business relevant service levels:
- Sales volume of $X per hour
- # of Clients service by the customer service department per shift
- # Hours to complete payroll
In each of these examples, the measurement may be closely related to the measure of success used to evaluate the performance of the business person or group.
In translating a service level, a company can achieve a more mature and business relevant service level if they can translate the IT measurement into a business measurement.
Now let’s explore meaningful measurements by our humorous look at Three Groups Desperately in Need of Service Levels:
Seattle, New York, and Atlanta all received complaints about city response to snowstorms this winter.
Do they snow removal services have service level commitments? Who knows? A recent review of articles in the paper and the web was fairly silent on the issue.
An IT-centric service level might be: We promised to plow X tons of snow per hour.
A business (public)-centric better level might be: We will clear now from all priority routes within 6 hours, ensuring critical services can still function.
Let face it…in spite of the Seahawks reaching the playoffs, they had a 7-9 record. The Mariners had a 61-101 record. Ouch!
An IT-centric service level might be: The Seahawks will play 60 minutes per game! Now that’s an easy goal to reach.
A business-centric service level might be to win 51% of game, or reach the playoffs! Perhaps even reach the World Series! Now that’s a service level we fans could really support.
Finally, since I have a teenager at home, I had to include a category for them.
IT-centric service level might be: Clean your room, or return the car with gas.
A business (parent)-centric service level might be to clean your room I have to remind you for the third time, or make sure the car has enough gas to get me too and from work on Monday morning.
As you can see, these examples may be more humorous than practical, but I hope they get the point across that IT as an organization needs to look beyond their own needs for service levels, and think in terms of the business and customers they serve.
Oh, back on that snow removal thing….I have a friend in the Seattle Mayor’s Office. She told me the Mayor has a bring new service level set for the next big storm.
It’s called: Wait for Spring!!!!
