For over 20 years I have been delivering IT solutions and services to organisations in different sectors and industries. What I have realised over that time is that the skills I love to use the most are the the ones that bring about changes that improve the organisation I work for.
Having technical skills is great, but they’re limiting if you can’t communicate with people of all technical levels – including none – and inspire them to adopt new technology and ways of working. And having those skills alone is limiting if you can’t work with those people to understand and simplify their processes so they can be translated into a technical solutions that reduce waste and bring efficiency gains.
More recently, I discovered this way of thinking had a name: Lean. While I am not a fan of labels and even less so of management buzzwords, having a framework to structure what I was already doing was enlightening. And the fact that the history of Lean showed it wasn’t a passing fad was reassuring. This included the fact that Toyota – the godfather of Lean – traced the root cause of its major failings in the first decade of the 21st century back to the 1990s when it stopped focusing on Lean.
But I’m not so naive as to believe that is all there is to successful change. Other skills are called upon such as managing the tender process, contract negotiation, supplier management and budgeting. Fortunately, I enjoy using them, too!
The desire to focus on my people, process and technology skills led me move into the world of contracting and consulting and set up my own company. It could only have one name: PPT etc.