EMBRACING AMBIGUITY

I don’t know of anyone who likes ambiguity. However, at the beginning of many of life’s adventures, there are things that are not well understood or mapped out.

If you’ve had a college experience, remember back to what it was like to be in high school, thinking of college opportunities, what you might like to major in and what experiences / internships / summer adventures you might like to have. The future probably contained a lot of unknowns and you were forced to make decisions without fully understanding all the consequences or where the roads might lead you.

This blog is about how I’ve learned to embrace and even value ambiguity at work. Times of uncertainty are often good opportunities to ask questions, explore the unknown, wait patiently, and trust that character is being built (slowly but surely).

One experience that I’d like to share is when I was challenged to apply for a client service engagement, working for the Global Technology Services organization. They needed assistance with a key client, “C-company,” who had engaged IBM to manage the consolidation of their data centers. I decided that my background in engineering and certification in project management would enable me to contribute to this project’s success (or at least gain valuable experience while trying).

The project was quite a challenge on many fronts. First, the engagement grew from a 6-month plan to over a year-long commitment. Secondly, architectural changes were so abundant that the teams could not keep up with change tracking and approvals. Third, the number of stakeholders grew to be over 200, so communication became quite complex.

Although I had no prior datacenter relocation experience, I took this as an opportunity to embrace the challenge, knowing that I was a part of a strong IBM team that would work together to get things done. Due to the strong support of my management team, and the extremely supportive peers in our engineering organization, we were able to ensure my availability on the assignment for the year-long engagement.

However, the continuous architectural changes required a bit more ingenuity. I led the IBM team to recommend a new, more robust change management process. The new process would institute a change management board through which all changes would be reviewed and approved. We documented new technical baselines from which to measure all changes. We also instituted a change tracker to thoroughly document all recommended changes, their potential impact to cost, schedule, and resources, and status of review/approval from the change management board. The implementation of these process controls enabled successful change management on this project.

The third major challenge on this client service engagement involved the complexity driven by the number of stakeholders involved in the datacenter migration. To manage this complexity, I developed a communication plan that not only documented all key stakeholders, their responsibilities, and their contact information, but it addressed which stakeholders were involved in each phase of the project. This plan enabled all project managers to engage the right people at the right time.

At the outset of the client service engagement, I would have never envisioned the full extent to which my skills could benefit a client seeking to consolidate datacenters. However, my willingness to step into the unknown and explore the opportunity provided some invaluable experience that I would not trade for anything!

And now, I have the opportunity once again to step into the unknown world of an IBM Client Service Engagement. It will be an opportunity to volunteer my time and skills in a world-wide assignment, assisting non-government organizations and clients to resolve their industrial pain points. The benefit of each engagement is to help clients, develop new skills (such as cross-cultural awareness and consulting skills), and gain IBM mind-share in developing markets.

Again, I don’t understand the extent to which I’ll be able to contribute, but I am willing to apply myself to the opportunity, trusting that much success will come from my dedicated labor.

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