Approaches to responsibilities, projects, and tasks vary significantly depending on the organization’s size, structure, and culture.
Companies can often have clearly defined roles where processes are executed in a systematic, almost mechanized manner, leaving little room for interpretation. In contrast, startups and more flexible organizations adopt a more flexible, dynamic approach to responsibilities, where the boundaries of a role are less rigid and adaptability is crucial.
Similarly, project and task management approaches differ-with some organizations emphasizing planning and documentation, while orders prioritizing agility and rapid execution.
My particular approach to common topics:
Team Development
- Mentor team with examples from my own experience with code examples, technologies used, and training sessions to explain a given topic.
- Encourage collaboration by
- Never talking down to anyone regardless of experience, which fosters trust and an openness to collaborate.
Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
- Review and understand the design, implementation, and maintenance of the current system, while balancing fixed and variable costs to minimize waste while offering an easy path for growth.
- Many companies have moved to the cloud. Keep track of the different offerings from AWS, Azure, Google and investigate if any tools would lead to efficiencies.
- Produce suggestions and improvements with benefits, costs, risks, and timelines.
Product Development
- Review what the company offers and what the market wants.
- Investigate the offerings of competitors. What are they doing? Is their offering better? What can we do to improve the offering?
- Customers will often tell you what they want, but are not often listened to. Find out what they are saying, run it through an AI summary model to quickly see what the majority are looking for.
- Produce a roadmap of what the company wants vs the resources available with a risk vs profit profile. This makes it easier for stakeholders to see what initiatives should be prioritized.
Data & Analytics
- Review current business intelligence setup to identify gaps in product offering, time-to-close, and other sales metrics.
- Produce insights for stake holders to aid in decision-making regarding growth and operational efficiency.
Cybersecurity & Compliance
- Review SOC, PCI, and industry specific compliance standards periodically for changes that may affect the organization. Disseminate this information to the proper teams where changes may affect their processes.
- Security is typically not in the forefront for many organizations. Identifying the risks and showing results from penetration testing change the mindset of those involved.
- Review security practices in regards to source code and process management, identify and produce actions to mitigate risk.
Budget Management
- Manage the technology budget by reviewing salaries, server/equipment maintenance, subscriptions, and other expenses.
- Eliminate waste by canceling or finding alternatives where the long term cost savings exceeds the short term risks.
Stakeholder Engagement
- Regularly advise stakeholders on trends, risks, and opportunites.
- Explain the technology in discussion using easily understood analogies as to how and why it should be considered.