The Exception: Fifteen Years and Four Jobs at IBM Later

I was fortunate enough to have breakfast with an IBM executive last week, and while he and I were talking about our careers and career progression, he mentioned that he had recently written a blog post about his 20 years at IBM. That, in turn, ultimately inspired me to write this, given my recent 15 year anniversary (and a bit of time on an airplane.)

If you would have asked me when I graduated college fifteen years ago whether or not I’d still be working at IBM, I would have said that I have no idea. On one hand, my dad (and grandpa for that matter) always worked at the same company, so that part wasn’t unusual. However, coming out of college in 2003 meant that times in tech were very turbulent. For that matter, had I started to work somewhere else, many of the tech companies around then are no longer around now. If you were a Vegas odds maker, the odds would have certainly been against still being at IBM.

I fully realize that staying at the same company for this long is by far no longer the norm these days. Nearly all of my other close friends from college have changed companies several times, with the biggest job hopper likely being at more than ten different companies. By age, I’m at the edge of the millennial designation, but I’ve always been more closely aligned to the older generation when it comes to decision making and approach to responsibilities.

So all of this begs the big question: Why have I stayed at IBM for Fifteen Years?

Understandably, there are many aspects to the many decisions that have kept me there, but I’ll highlight three major reasons.

1) IBM has been great to me

I came into IBM as a college hire onto a team where I was given a great opportunity to make a big impact on the business. I’ve always strived to be a top performer, and that hard work has usually been recognized. I’ve been blessed to have great mentors, managers, and executives supporting my career progression. That led to four promotions during the first twelve years of my career, and I am cautiously optimistic that I will be able to make the leap into the executive ranks in the next couple of years.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been tough times, long days, or challenges during my time here, but I know those challenges exist outside the Blue walls as well. I’ve always worked on interesting projects with great clients and have been rewarded for that hard work.

2) While my employer has had the same name, my job has not

There are certainly both pluses and minuses about working at a big company. I’m a positive sort of person, so I’ll stick to the biggest positive in my eyes: the ability to have different careers in the same company. I started off in a post-sales support/SWAT-type role where I was able to visit many Fortune 100 companies and help solve some of the biggest technical challenges they were facing. I always used to joke that I knew far more customers than IBMers, but those were great experiences to garner during the start of my career. I also was able to travel the world and get a wealth of international experience along the way.

But never knowing where you are going to sleep at night gets old, so I decided to take all of the experiences and lessons I learned in the field to empower others. I knew that I could scale my ability to make an impact by empowering a multitude of others, so I moved into an enablement role. While there, I learned even more about enterprise architecture and used that to improve the way we went about training our resources.

Then an opportunity I couldn’t refuse manifested itself, and I made the jump to a worldwide technical sales leadership role. I learned far more than I could have imagined about the sales process and how the front-end side of the business worked. Of course, I brought with me an abundance of knowledge about how customers actually use the software they buy, which was tremendously helpful. It was also great to see customers again!

This year, I’ve taken that enterprise architect role and picked up responsibilities to lead and manage an infrastructure team that now supports both tech sales and external audiences. It’s also in a fast-moving area of the business where we’re investing, which leads me to believe that, I again, am in the right place at the right time in the right role.

In many respects, these have been four (or more) completely different jobs, but with my network within IBM and the variety of opportunities, I was able to tackle them all without switching companies.

3) Work life balance

I know there are many jobs that pay more that I what I make, but I’ve come to understand that there’s more to life than money. The flexibility to balance both work and family life is nearly impossible to put a price on.

I’m a fully mobile-enabled employee; I can do most of my core responsibilities from my phone, iPad, or even on an airplane (provided there’s WiFi). While that sometimes means I answer some emails, calls, or Slack messages after standard business hours, that also means that if I have something personal that I need to take care of during the day, I feel confident that I’m able to do so without reprocussions.

The biggest aspect of the work life balance for me has to be working from home a few days a week — in particular in the morning. Mornings are my time to spend with the kids, and for the last five years, we spend a couple quality hours together running, playing, or whatever that morning brings before I go to work. There’s no way I could do that if I needed to sit in traffic and drive to the office every morning.

I’m empowered to both do what I need to do to be highly successful at work, and still enjoy the precious time I have with my family. This wasn’t historically the biggest reason that I’ve stayed, but it may be now with kids.

So the next logical question is, “What do the next 15 years have in store?” I’d likely fall back to the same answer I gave that long ago in college, that I really don’t know. What I do know is that if I’m able to repeat the success and satisfaction of the previous fifteen, that I’ll be a very happy (albeit a bit older) man. IBM has certainly been good to me, and I hope that our symbiotic relationship does continue for the next 15 years as well.

I’d love to hear why you’ve stayed or left your company. Let me know in the comments or @TalkToErik.

Sleep was Hard to Come By in Spain

It has become relatively rare that I get to scratch a new country off my list for work, but the 2018 Fast Starts presented one of these opportunities. I started off with a very hectic week in Madrid. [Check out the subsequent week in Thailand here.]

Let’s start with the timing, which was definitely far from perfect. Our cruise got back into Galveston at 9AM on a Saturday. My flight left Austin later that evening from Austin, and I wouldn’t get into Spain until Sunday afternoon. We also had quite a bit of heartbreak to start the week with all sorts of network problems that needed to be sorted out. And the scale at which we were running things required quite a bit of planning, but we did make it. Between making sure things went smoothly, being on the phone with Skytap (sometimes at all hours), and presenting several sessions, it made for a very busy week. Tim wasn’t very happy to see me most of the week because of it.

That being said, there were a few fun things that I managed to do during the evenings as well. Bill and Sam were both over there as well, so the three of us got to spend several of the evenings together. We went out the first night and found a hole in the wall tapas bar which appeared as though the back was in a cave. They even had a guy playing piano randomly (even a bit of Metallica). We got a beer, some monchego, a plate of anchovies (they weren’t as bad as I would have thought), some delicious stuffed mushrooms, and several types of ham or sausage. Oh the Spanish love their ham!

Another night, we went out with the Skytap team for a really nice dinner at the restaurant where Real Madrid goes to celebrate. We had more things that I can even begin to remember — but a few that stand out were the white sangria, the garlic shrimp, and nearly all of the other nine appetizers we ordered. The mains were all good as well. I ordered the steak the waiter recommended, and while it wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, it was really good. Somehow we ordered a few desserts to share, one of which (I don’t remember the name) was absolutely to die for.

On top of the delicious food and beverages, the company that night was amazing. Bob, Erin and Ian are always a blast to hang out with. Roger Snook, Bill, and Sam were able to join in on the fun too. Then things got really interested when Bob and Sam started talking tech (no, seriously they did), as Bob explained some things about one of his side projects.

On Bill’s last night, the three of us went into the city center again, and this time ended up at a restaurant that Sam found as being one of the 35 best tapas places in Madrid. This was a total Mom-n-Pop shop where literally we saw the man and woman who owned the place in pictures from years ago still there working away at their craft. The great part about tapas is that you get to try a lot of different things, and even better was that all of them were very good. It wasn’t my favorite dish we had there, but they did have an octopus dish that was very flavorful, and also some of the most tender octopus I’ve ever eaten. We capped off that evening with a walk around the city before catching a cab back to the hotel.

I had presentations all day Thursday in multiple locations which made for a hectic day. The hotels were also way out by the airport, so I wanted to take it a bit easier, which ended up working out really well. That last night, I got to hang out with Troy, Tim, Gina, and Matt which was a lot of fun. The food was good and the drinks were flowing, which made for a very good evening after a tiring week leading up to it.

How to a Explain a Standardized Cloud Architecture to Your Spouse

My lovely wife has gone unscathed from blog posts for quite some time, but I think it’s time to bring her up to speed on some new technology. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some interesting projects at IBM that have yielded some good potential topics. In this instance, I wanted to explain the importance of having a standard cloud architecture.

Like many cloud service providers, IBM has realized that while every client would like a 100% customized solution, it’s not cost effective to do so. Instead we have taken a standardized approach to guide our clients into common deployment patterns, and then provide some customization on top of those base configurations to meet the specific needs that will of course vary.

To help illustrate this concept of a standardized cloud architecture, my analogy of choice is again, a car.

In many respects, designing and building an enterprise-class cloud is like designing and building a new vehicle. While car manufacturers could create every vehicle by hand and customize it to uniquely meet every driver’s request, that would introduce several problems. Let’s explore several of them and how they relate to developing a best-in-class cloud architecture.

1. Complete customization would be completely cost prohibitive. By standardizing on a common frame, body style, drivetrain, engine, etc., manufacturers are able to build cars much quicker and much more cost efficiently since they can implement standardized tooling, assembly lines, and scalable training to produce a large volume of vehicles. Similarly, developing a custom cloud solution would incur far more costs and likely would result in a costly situation where it wouldn’t make financial sense for clients to move workloads to the cloud.

2. Safety (i.e.: security) and reliability would go down dramatically. Would you feel comfortable driving a car 75 mph that had never been tested? I sure wouldn’t! Drawing a parallel conclusion, clients want to know that the cloud they choose to run their workloads is going to be secure and reliable enough to run their critical business workloads. When you hit the gas to cross an intersection, you know your car will accelerate. When clients spin up additional instances to handle a peak workload, they too want to know that the cloud will be there for them.

3. It makes sense to have several base offerings. Vehicle manufacturers have different models to address different needs. There are good reasons that everyone does not drive a minivan. A recent grad living in the heart of the city has no need for 7 seats and a power lift gate. A sports car won’t fit the needs of many 3 kid families. Similarly, cloud providers have different base offerings to address the differing needs of their customers. Some clients need the full control and performance offered by bare metal servers. Others want the flexibility and agility of a container service. Still others want to consume the capabilities that they need as a managed service. These major offerings allow both types of providers to focus their innovation on few focused items, so that they can actually make an impact.

4. It’s ok to tweak those base offerings to some degree. Manufacturers offer different trims within a model and the ability to make some modifications within a given. That dad driving the minivan to soccer might want the V6 Turbo-charged package, or he might not. He might pay extra for a DVD system with premium sound system, or he might not. Those smaller feature sets build on top of the base and help match a particular set of requirements within the constraints of an offering. Similarly, cloud providers allow some customization of their base offerings within a given set of approved constraints. Just as you could not buy a minivan with a V12, there are a fixed set of customizations you can make to your cloud environment. Standardized cloud architectures help define what options are tested and permitted to meet specific client needs.

As you can see, while cars and clouds have many differences, the principles that go into designing and architecting them have many similarities.

Do you have another way to explain common cloud architectures? Let me know @TalkToErik.

Did WannaCrypt Wreck My Demo Infrastructure?

For those of you that follow me professionally, you know I own the demo strategy for IBM’s Cloud business unit. That leaves me responsible for ensuring we have a reliable platform available for hundreds of other IBMers to use with our clients, a responsibility I don’t take lightly.

The other day, I was asked whether or not we needed to be concerned about getting hacked / infected by the recent WannaCrypt ransomware in our demo infrastructure running on IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions (ICSS). While you as my readers wouldn’t directly be affected by that, it seemed like a good opportunity to share a little bit about why I chose Skytap as our hosting platform.

But first, let’s start with the basics.

What is WannaCrypt?
WannaCrypt is a piece of ransomware that attacks Windows machines that have not been patched, encrypts files, and requires payment for the files to be decrypted. More details about the here.

Well, were you affected?
Fortunately, the short answer is NO!

Why was this a non-issue for the demo infrastructure?
The main reason why this wasn’t an issue is really the way the fundamental architecture is implemented for running workloads in Skytap.

When VMs run in Skytap, they are located on their own software defined network that is isolated from the public internet. Therefore, hackers and other ill-intentioned persons can’t get to the VMs that are running in these isolated network spaces. This is a huge benefit from a security perspective, but the benefits don’t stop there.

This networking model also allows us to run multiple copies of the exact same environment without the trouble of duplicate IP addresses. Imagine being able to configure a demo environment once, then create and use an identical copy – in parallel – tens or hundreds of times all with a few clicks of a button.

Is there a way to still get access to specific applications running on the VMs?
Yes, Skytap also provides something called Published Services that expose a specific application port to the outside world to address these needs. The published service will give you access to specific ports on your VMs and won’t change from launch to launch. More detail on published services is here.

What’s the bottom line?
In addition to being able to avoid security issues with vulnerabilities like WannaCrypt, ICSS allows our technical sellers to spin up demo environments in real time, while saving over 80% of the infrastructure costs required to deliver the service when compared against other hosting environments.

Interested to find out more?
You can check out more details about the formal offering on the IBM Marketplace, or as always, feel free to reach out to me directly @TalkToErik.

The 5 Things You Can’t Forget to Pack for IBM InterConnect

I’ve lost track of how many conferences I’ve been to in Las Vegas by now, and in all those visits I’ve picked up a few tips that I wanted to pass along. Here they are in ballpark order of importance.

1. Comfortable Shoes
If you’ve never been to a conference in Vegas before… lucky you! Okay, I’m just kidding about that, but I’m not kidding about the shoes. You’ll be amazed at how much walking you’ll do over the course of the week. You could easily walk over half a mile just getting from one end of the hotel to the other. Give your feet some love and bring something fashionable, but comfortable.

2. Chapstick
Even though it’s still early in the year, we are still going to Vegas — which is still a desert last I checked. Deserts are dry. Dry air, regardless of how much oxygen the casino’s pump into the air will dry out your lips, and no one likes chapped lips.

3. A convenient water bottle
The conference is always well stocked with beverages, but I’m always amazed at how thirsty I get in Vegas — and I’m not just talking about the adult beverage kind of thirst. Buy a case or fill that water bottle up and drink the whole thing before you go to bed. Regardless of what you did earlier in the evening (no judgement here — what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!), you’ll feel worlds better in the morning.
4. Plenty of Business Cards
There are many great reasons to come to InterConnect, from hearing the keynote speakers, getting the latest information from IBM experts (don’t miss my session Wednesday afternoon), hearing from our customers, or enjoying Zac Brown Band; however, the piece that I always look forward to the most is networking with all the other attendees. While social media and mobile phones have provided many other ways to exchange contact information, in a business setting, I find that there’s still no replacement for a professional business card… even if it’s just to let someone take a picture of it. Get out of your shell, introduce yourself to someone you don’t know, and take advantage of this opportunity to network. I know I’d love to meet anyone who took the time to read this!
5. A little gambling money
I always say, I love to gamble but hate losing money, and that’s certainly still the case. That being said, I do find it entertaining and InterConnect happens to fall in between some of the best weeks for college basketball this year. If you’re arriving early, you can get in on the opening weekend of March Madness. If you aren’t there’s still an opportunity to pick some of the deeper games in the tournament. Or throw some dice, pull a handle, or get dealt a blackjack. Think of all the money your saving by coming here on business. Even the most frugal of us all need to have a little fun every now and then.

As I said, if you’re going to InterConnect, be sure to look me up. Also, if you think I missed something on my list, be sure to let me know! I’m always available @TalkToErik.

Whirlwind of a Time in Singapore

I took a very short flight to Singapore Monday evening after my client meeting in KL. After checking into the hotel, I caught up with Brian for a bit to grab a bite to eat. I was thinking we’d do something light, but Brian had other plans.

Apparently, he had booked an extra non-refundable night at the hotel, and when they said non-refundable, they meant it. However, they did say that he could spend it on other things at the hotel, so rather than letting it go to waste, we went out for dinner. And if you happen to know Brian, he doesn’t mess around with food.

With that in mind, we went to the grill on the first floor of the hotel. Apparently, they have a massive special cut T-Bone that’s meant to be shared by two. It looked pretty darn amazing, so we decided on that. They threw this big slab of meat on a wood fired grill, sliced it up and brought it out. There’s no way that I would have gone there and ordered it on my own, but it was pretty freaking amazing.
The next day we kicked off our IBM Design Thinking workshop at the Changi office. We had a really strong turn out of close to 50 tech sellers, lab services folks, and architects. We switched things up a bit this time, i and added the Marshmallow Challenge into some of the intro charts to break things up. As expected, it was a huge hit! I was really happy with how the lessons from the exercise fit into many of the concepts of Design Thinking. After that, we had enough time to split the groups into teams and cover the basics of the case study.

For lunch, Desmond took us to get some local food (apparently there’s a debate whether it’s originally from Malay or Singapore but I digress). The specialty for this place was a pork rib soup, so I went for it. The broth itself was really flavorful, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the ribs themselves any time soon.
In the afternoon, we got into the full swing of things from a design thinking exercise / artifact perspective. I have to admit, facilitating these workshops is one of the most enjoyable part of my responsibilities. And unlike my CSC assignment, it is truly reality and more or less part of my real job. And not to pat myself on the back too much, but I’m pretty darn good at it too, which doesn’t hurt. I just love seeing when people “get it.” I guess that’s the teacher in me.

I can’t go to Singapore without getting chili crab, so we made sure to check that off the list Tuesday evening. Brian, Desmond, Richard, and I all were in. We had planned to go to No Signboard, but they were out of Sri Lanka crab and the other options were really pricey, so we opted to go to Jumbo instead. After all ending up at the same one (there are two in Clarke Quay), we ordered some really good shrimp fried rice, some veggies, and then the main event: a pepper crab and a chili crab.

If you’ve never had chili crab, it’s this amazing combination of a huge Sri Lanka crab (similar to dungeness) topped with a thick semi-sweet chili sauce with egg drops mixed into it. Typically it’s served with “Mantou” or a sweet lightly fried bread that you can then dip in the delicious sauce. It has to be one of my favorite dishes… period! The pepper crab is a dry dish, but they take the same crab and douse it in crushed black pepper. The two are very different, but both are delicious. Our hosts were gracious enough to give Brian and I each the two claws — which is almost like cheating. But after a little discussion, we graciously accepted. The meal was complete with a pitcher of Tiger (beer).

The next day we spent a little time to frame the whole design thinking discussion with respect to how we could actually apply it in tech sales. In particular, we talked about how design thinking could fit into the adoption of DevOps. We had a lot of good dialog and discussion with the class on their thoughts as well.
After that we picked up where were left off with Design Thinking itself, starting off with Ideation. It’s always interesting to see the variety of ideas that everyone comes up with. Some folks are definitely better at it than others, but we did manage to get quite a few big ideas (as opposed to just product features). After that we got into what sometimes seems to be one of the more challenging exercises: turning those big ideas into a tangible goal (or hill in IBM Design Thinking terminology). This is the part where the rubber really starts to hit the road for teams. And it’s sometimes challenging for them to clearly state what will be provided to the user and how it will significantly improve their experience, without getting into a technical implementation. Because of the struggles, this is where guided facilitation really needs to take place. We obviously don’t want to do it for them, but we need to ask the right questions to keep them going down the right path. You’d be surprised how long it takes to come up with one really good sentence that captures the essence of everything.
If there’s a good thing about spending a lot of time on creating the Hills, it’s that by the time the groups are done, they have a really good understanding what needs to be done for their users. Because of that, when we went through story boarding, there was much less “bloodshed” as one team put it.
After we wrapped up the rest of the day, Brian and I had a short debrief with Adam to talk about how we could scale this out in the region and how to identify some local leaders to drive everything. We then went back to the hotel and said our goodbyes. We both had early flights in the morning, and I was stuffed from the ridiculous amount of Chinese food I got at lunch for the equivalent of $4.
Also since I was heading back the next day, I figured I might as well start getting on the right sleep schedule, so I went to bed right then and was able to sleep from about 6:30PM (or 5:30 AM at home) until just after 1 local time. I then got up and proceeded to do everything that I would have done the rest of the evening had I stayed up.
I went and haggled at the local Kebap shop to get some late dinner — or perhaps now breakfast) with the remaining Sing dollars I had left. I didn’t want to go to the ATM for such a small amount, so I was glad I was able to make it work.
I then went to the gym and ran on the elliptical machine and read on my Kindle for an hour at 2 in the morning (thank you Hilton for 24 hour gym access!) After showering and spending a bit more time in my room bumming and packing up, it was time to go for real breakfast (now lunch?) before rushing to the airport. Breakfast started at 6 and my flight was at 8, so I did need to hurry.
A four hour flight to Hong Kong leaves me in the airline lounge where I just finished up this post up. Just another 15 hour flight (and then 1 hour flight) between me and being home! Here’s to uneventful travel! 

Have a fun travel story to share? Let me know @TalkToErik.

Three Week Reflection on My Time in Qingdao (Part 3 – Personal Reflections)

[This again is a continuation… I’ve already gone through some broad comments in Part 1, and some of the professional impact in Part 2.]

From a strictly personal point of view, I was a little surprised at how spending that month in Qingdao changed my perspective. But to be completely honest, I wasn’t expecting any personal changes or personal impact (as opposed to professional ones) to come out of going on this assignment. I’ve traveled extensively internationally for work fairly regularly over the last 13 years, so why would this trip be any different?
Looking back, the biggest differences –and also the obvious two reasons — were the people I was with and the length of time I was gone. I think just knowing that I was going to be spending four weeks with these eleven other people made me far more apt to want to get to know them in more detail.
Now don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I’m antisocial when I typically travel, but the reality is, for the most part, I’m in and out of most places in a week or less. It’s hard to establish a meaningful relationship with someone in that short of time, especially when you consider that it’s unlikely that I’ll continue to work with them closely when I get back home.
But as I said, Qingdao was different. Going into the engagement, I was a bit worried about being gone that long from my family for that long. I was worried about being lonely. A month is a long time. Realistically, I think it also made a big difference that the group had been in contact with one another for the previous three months going through all the pre work together. While the content of some of the pre work was sometimes suspect, there’s no doubt that it allowed us to get to know everyone’s personality. After after just talking on the phone for those three months, it also created some anticipation for us all to actually meet. Who really is “Jose from Dubai?”

I think the demographic makeup of the group also had something to do with it as well. Now granted, this is changing, but if you took a random sample of IBMers that I work with, you’d typically find a slightly older group. When I started, most of my coworkers were far closer to my parents age than my own (after all, I was set up on one date with a daughter, but I digress). However in Qingdao, the majority of the team was pretty close to my age, which meant we had quite a bit in common. Of course not everyone was in the same stage in their lives, but it did mean that it was easier to open up.
So what really was the most eye opening experience? Quite frankly, I didn’t realize that working with other people that closely (and in person) would be so much fun! Now a lot of this may have to do specifically with Maria and Matthias, but I genuinely enjoyed working with them. It made me see that if the people you worked closely with were all colocated, it might not only be worth it from a professional interaction perspective, but also from a personal one.
If the three of us all lived in Austin, and were working on the same project, I might actually want to go into the office every day. However, the reality is this was an artificial arrangement when compared to my real job. Virtually everyone I work with lives in a different state (or country), so going to the office only to talk to someone on the phone doesn’t make much sense. I still see some social benefit to going into the office from time to time, but I do think doing so makes me take a hit from a productivity perspective. I’m disciplined enough to stick to work when I work from home which means there are fewer distractions and I can actually get things done. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt I’ll always think back fondly of those few weeks working together.

On a related note, it’s pretty interesting to look back and think about how close of friends I became with Matthias and Maria in such a short time. I enjoyed hanging out with them for nearly 12 hours a day most days. Between breakfast, the morning commute, working, lunch, the drive home, and often dinner, we spent a ton of time together. And luckily, we managed to not drive each other nuts in the process. Don’t get me wrong, I was definitely glad to get home to Korey and the kids, but not seeing, spending time with, and working with those two is easily the part I miss most about Qingdao. The three of us have had a video chat once since we’ve been back, and have daily conversations in our WeChat group, but it’s just not the same. Since the twelve of us spent so much time together, we all became sort of a temporary family (with those two being my brother and sister) — yet this family may likely all never get together again.
The last thing I noticed from a personal perspective is that while I love my kids and Korey to death, being gone that long gave me a chance to remind myself that I like to have fun too (outside of being Daddy fun). Since the kids are so young, most of my non-working life revolves around them and their schedules. I genuinely feel a little bad / guilty that Korey hasn’t had this same opportunity (and even worse, she had to take care of them by herself while I was gone). But being away gave me the chance to remember what it was like pre-kids (If only Korey was there too!). I’ve traveled enough that I now try to get back as soon as I can and avoid staying extra days, but this was different because I had to be there over the weekends as well. I obviously still had my work responsibilities, but there’s no doubt I enjoyed being able to go out on the weekend, listen to the band, have a few drinks, and walk back to the hotel without needing to worry about anything else. I wouldn’t trade my real life for that any day, but given the situation I was in, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it temporarily. And since I was going to be gone either way, I’m glad I wasn’t miserable.
I guess the wrap up of this rambling blog is that I’m truly thankful that I had the chance and support to go on what really was a once in a lifetime experience, both personally and professionally. I learned a lot, sharpened some skills, and had some fun along the way. The whole experience is certainly something that will stay with me forever. That all being said, as great as all of it was, there’s still no place like home.

Three Week Reflection on My Time in Qingdao (Part 2 – Professional Impact)

This is a continuation (Part 1 is here). I’m jumping in to the impact my IBM CSC assignment made to me professionally.
Let’s start with general consulting skills. Given the nature of my previous job roles, I’ve never had the opportunity to work directly with a client for this long on a consulting engagement. When I was in on the GRT / Swat Team, I definitely spent a lot of time at specific clients — Chase, Aetna, and eBay all immediately come to mind. However, in each of those activities, the main focus was establishing stability in the environment or solving specific problems, and not focusing as much on a strategic effort. I’ve also done many more short consulting based assessments, but I’ve never had the ability to stay on the project long enough to help implement the recommendations I’ve made. Long story short, seeing this full (though still brief) lifecycle of a consulting engagement was both very beneficial and interesting.
I was able to refine my consulting skills leading up to the engagement through some of the pre-training we went through, but more than anything, putting those skills into practice with a real client was invaluable. It was really interesting to have the conversations that we had with Hante and to learn from Matthias’s and Maria’s consulting styles as well. I know we all adjusted how we asked questions and drove the discussion as we learned what was working and what wasn’t with the client.
Also from a consulting perspective, I saw firsthand the importance of continuing to validate assumptions and to continuously probe to ensure that you are on the right track. Closely related was seeing first hand how having flexibility in the Statement of Work to focus on the biggest issues was important. Had we only considered the information and deliverables that we knew about after the first few days, we would have ended up much farther from the mark in the end.

It reminds me of a picture we drew nearly a dozen times during various conversations at Hante. Essentially the top is the waterfall approach. You define the goal a the beginning and then head towards it, never changing course. The downside to this approach is that the goal likely changes (from an oval to a rectangle in this case), so you end up not achieving the right goal. The lower (agile) option is to use frequent checkpoints and adjust priorities as needed based on the new information received along the way. It could take a bit longer because it’s not a straight path, but getting the right end result is typically more important.
I also learned quite a bit just working with Matthias. He is obviously a bright guy who knows a lot about Agile and running Agile teams. I was familiar with many of the terms and concepts, but going through a deep dive with him and actually putting those ideas into practice ourselves brought much further clarity. For example, after watching him lead them several times, I know worlds more about how a morning standup meeting should be run. After using a Kanban board for four weeks, I feel like a pro!
The last major lesson learned was around negotiation and working with other strong leaders. This is something that I do on a regular basis, but the CSC assignment was a bit unique as there were no predefined roles to fall back on to give us guidance. It was really up to the three of us to sort out what we were going to do, how we were going to it, and sometimes the most difficult piece, who was going to do it. We were all selected because we were top performers, but that at times brought a bit of conflict. It took a little time to figure out our team’s rhythm and how to work best with one another. I don’t think the multicultural aspect of the team played into that too much, but there may have been some. Not to overplay on the stereotype too much, but you know those stubborn Germans. (Sorry Matthias!)
There were a few other smaller things that were reinforced from a professional side, but they made a smaller impact, primarily because these were all things that I do or have done regularly. For some of the team, working internationally was a new experience. Working with translators wasn’t new to me either, but doing so for such an extended time really made me realize how much longer things take when that’s a requirement. The same conversation takes at least twice, but more realistically three to four times as long and there’s always a little bit lost in translation — regardless of how good the girls were because there was a lot of technical info intermingled. The engagement also involved quite a bit of training and presenting to the client, but that as well is something that at this point in my career, I take as a mastered skill.
If you missed the other broader reflections, check out Part 1. Otherwise, let’s move on to some of my personal reflections in Part 3.

Three Week Reflection on My Time in Qingdao (Part 1)

At this very minute, it’s been almost exactly three weeks that I left Qingdao. Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I’m actually on another airplane to Asia and will nearly pass over Qingdao on my flight from Dallas to Hong Kong (on the way to Malaysia and Singapore). As another interesting side note, we flew nearly over the North Pole to get to where we are now.

I thought I would take a few minutes out of the 15+ hour flight to sit back and think a bit about my time in China. The first thing that stands out is that I’m really thankful for having been able to go in the first place. If you’ve read my various blogs, you certainly could see that it was an all around amazing experience. I’m also lucky to have the support of my family (especially Korey — Love you!) to put up with me being gone so long, and for my management to not only support, but to encourage me to leave my real job for a month. I couldn’t have gone if either of those had not fallen into place.
Leading up to my CSC assignment, we were told about the triple benefit of the program. IBM CSC assignments give leadership experience to the individuals that go, they help the clients we worked with, and exposes IBM to new markets. Reflecting back, all three of those were certainly fulfilled.
I’ll go through them in reverse order… IBM definitely got a lot of attention and good press over the course of the month. For the pieces we know about, there were over 70 press releases and news articles written about the program / our team while we there. I know all of us certainly learned quite a bit about Qingdao and working in an emerging market along the way as well.
There is also no doubt in my mind that our client, Hante, received a lot of benefits from our engagement. Between the design thinking workshop to allow them to focus more on their users needs and requirements, the agile development workshop to improve their delivery quality and efficiently, learning enhancements, management training, and other various problem solving and training sessions, we delivered a lot of value over the course of the three weeks. But don’t believe me. Here is some of the feedback with got from our primary client stakeholder, Carosa:
“They left us 1000+ post-it notes, over 40+ training videos and countless valuable memories. One simple way they taught us how to hold a meeting has saved us over 40 hours a week on meeting. They stay positive and happy while working and solved many problem we had been suffering long, which is the very important thing we would like to learn!”
The publicity and helping Hante were obviously very important, both to me and to IBM, but the biggest change or impact has to be with me directly. There are so many things that I learned and experienced that I need to split this post into three pieces. I’ll write the professional reflections as a second post and the personal ones as a third post.

Heading Back Home… And in Time

Today started like so many other days for the last four weeks… Breakfast at the corner table with the sea view with the A-Team. I had my peanut butter honey toast and some yogurt, but the mood was definitely a bit more somber because we knew that this very well could likely be the last time the three of us are ever together again. Even that aside, we still had some of our morning playful banter which has made the time we have spent together so enjoyable. I’ll certainly miss hanging out and working with (now) such close friends on a daily basis. I typically love working remotely (and alone), but four weeks with Matthias and Maria made me see the other side of things.

After we finished eating, I grabbed my bags and went down to the lobby to check out. Jose caught the same lift down, so I got one more picture with “Jose from Dubai.” Elaine, Karen, and Matthias were all there to see us off. Since Jose and Maria’s flights were all close together, the three of us shared the ride to the airport. Both Elaine and Karen were having trouble fighting back the tears. I gave all three a big hug and we were on our way.
It was probably a good thing that we left a little earlier than what Karen had originally planned as it took almost an hour to get to the airport. Jose was taking a domestic flight first so we said our goodbyes curbside. Maria was on a slightly earlier international flight than me, so she had to head off pretty quickly as well to catch her flight while I was waiting to check my bags and get my ticket. I found it really odd that they didn’t start the check in process until 100 minutes before the flights are scheduled to take off. However, that gave me time to weigh my bag and figure out it was a little too heavy. I had grabbed my last Tsingtao to bring home and knew that drinking it would be an easy way to lose some baggage weight. Somehow I was unprepared and didn’t have a cuzi, but I made do with the sock cover I used for my sunglasses. A bit tacky, yes, but also effective.

Even though my bags were still a bit heavy, the agent checking me in let it slide. Getting through security and immigration took about half an hour, which was a bit surprising given how late check in really starts. I had originally thought I might see Maria off, but by the time I got through, I only had about 25 minutes before my flight started boarding and her flight was already pushing back from the gate. So instead, I pulled the fruit I brought along out, and I snacked on that as I waited since I knew it wouldn’t be allowed through customs. As I was alone for the first time in awhile, it also really then sank in that the my time in Qingdao had come to a close — which was certainly bittersweet. I was glad to be going home, but would miss my CSC friends.

After a bus ride out to the China Eastern flight, I found my small aisle seat for fortunately a short ride to Seoul. The one thing I love about international airlines, even on very short flights, you get food.
I didn’t realize when I was booking my flights how tight the connection was in Seoul, but when we landed and I turned on my phone, I saw that my next flight to Dallas departed in only an hour; and I didn’t even have my next boarding passes. Fortunately, there was a airport representative there waiting outside the jetway with a piece of paper with my name on it to escort me to my next flight… Which I made it to physically pretty easily. However, even though I got to the gate, I couldn’t get my boarding pass. They told me to wait in a long line for it that didn’t seem to move at all. Eventually, I was getting a bit concerned so I pulled the status card and was on the plane shortly after. The next problem I would soon find out about was that they thought only one of my checked bags was on the plane. One of the agents came on the plane to personally tell me. Sure it was nice to know, but bummer that it was happening.
It was getting pretty late in the day, so after I ate the meal they served, I popped an Ambian and slept for the next 9 hours — which was very welcome on a 12 hour flight after a busy previous day (and night). A long trip back always makes it even sweeter to get home.
When I got to Dallas (literally going back in time due to crossing the international date line), I confirmed that indeed only one of the bags made it. So I rechecked that bag and headed up to the Admiral’s Club for a shower. It’s amazing how good that feels after a long flight. I also grabbed a little soup and some veggies and dip.
When I finally got back to Austin, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly I was able to fill out the paperwork for the missing bag. Also thankfully, the one bag I was now expecting came out safely.
Then came the moment I’d been waiting for… Curbside pickup from the clan. And it didn’t disappoint either! It was great to see and get a big hug from Korey, and huge smiles from Crosby. He was so excited to see me he didn’t stop talking the whole way home.
When I finally got home, I started pulling out gifts… The only problem was that most of the stuff for the kids was in the missing suitcase. Still, it was great to be home with everyone, presents or not.