Writing to describe problems

A large part of problem-solving is the ability to see a problem in its true form. If you're able to describe a problem in a sufficiently clear and precise fashion, most of the solution will become evident.

Writing helps. Write about your problems. It's more precise than thinking

— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 22, 2018

On Keeping Promises

Are all promises worth the same?
How do you know?
If they aren't, how do you discern which ones are worth making, & which ones should simply be a "Sorry, no, I don't have the time to make it happen".

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Day 1 of my 2 week break has been fabulous.  Made a promise to myself that I'd not be working, & I'd be fully devoted to the family. Took the kids to the local library for term holiday activities that are usually set up. We had breakfast & lunch together, which was so much fun.  We bought a new phone for mum, & did all the chores we'd planned for the day. We played a game of badminton. It was unstructured, & it was fun, & it was liberating.

I did, of course, break my promise - kept browsing the phone, pining to keep abreast of the things I've set in motion before I decided to get off the wagon for a couple of weeks.  The phone turns off tonight.  Will I keep that promise?

Looking back

It's been just over two years since I started my role at Australia's largest infrastructure project. My title suggests I'm a finance analyst, supporting the revenue earning arm of the Government Business Enterprise behemoth that is the company. I'm about to wrap this two year stint to move on to another role shortly.

I've been asked a few times: what has it been like?

The early days:
The team I joined two years ago had three other analysts, so it was a really small group. Our manager has a reputation for being one of the better managers around, and it was quite evident right from the first week. 

It so happened that I joined right in the middle of the annual long-term forecasting cycle, so I was right in the thick of things. Despite my previous experience in a similar industry, the  tasks I was assigned were new, different & frankly sometimes quite obtuse. I also had a regular role that I was to shoulder, as well as take over the weekly & monthly reporting. To top it all off, one of the team was going on leave for three weeks so it was a definite baptism by fire.

I did have a few things going for me:

• I knew many of the people I needed to interact with (staying in the same industry helps enormously!) or could fairly easily build a relationship with through introductions from mutual connections
• Data wrangling & analytics were two of my secret weapons & I wasn't shy about using the right tool for the job. I also knew my way around the IT department, thanks to a couple of my good friends who'd preceded me into the organisation. 
• I do have a commercial background after all, so I knew precisely what the numbers I was reporting would mean to the recipients

So while the first few weeks felt overwhelming (I also got the distinct impression that I was being pushed to the limit), I had landed on my feet within a couple of weeks, & was learning the ropes quickly.  My manager was regular with both feedback & praise, building my confidence & helping me get very clear with what I needed to deliver. 

It's been my personal mission to learn something new every week.  While still early days in my new job, I still kept up with my learning. I had also just finished reading Nancy Duarte's blog post on slidedocs, so was messing around with the corporate slide templates the organisation had recently issued to see if I could use them more effectively in my work. I had just started reading about the Google Places API. I wasn't quite sure if I would ever use it but it seemed interesting to me. 

By the end of month one, I'd put up a template (with some VBA) that made preparing & presenting the long-term budget a far-more effective & efficient task. The solution was simple: make the presentation a book-like form, laid out in landscape, with the even-numbered page showing the graphic & the odd-numbered page showing the numerics. While there was some initial resistance (finance processes, anyone?), the exec team loved it when shown a draft, & it was a resoundingly successful production effort. 

Less than 2 months into my primary job supporting a team with commercial reporting & analysis, I was told of the peculiar challenge that this team faced: they had no idea who their end customers were. It was like a light-bulb went off when I heard that.. why couldn't they use Google Places API? I spent the next few train trips to & from work using R (another tool I was teaching myself to use) and the Google Places API for R building a prototype that might possibly be a solution.  I shared my prototype with my manager, who immediately sent it on to the head of that team, but also reminded me that it was not my job to solve that specific problem.  Let's just say that prototype, & a few follow up actions on my part, earned me a trip to Google offices in Sydney. 

note to self:  Solve problems, even if they aren't in your specific job description. The value gained personally in the learning far far outweighs the politics of the situation. 

By the time I had completed my official probation period, I had already made my presence & value felt around the organisation. I'd saved a bunch of people a few hours of work, & not just in reporting, showcased some analytical capabilities, & build a bunch of reporting frameworks that made reporting very boring :) 

What does a good manager do? Find a challenging project, & throw it the bored employee's way. Alongside my day job, I was thrown into a pricing project that was struggling for modelling skills. Three months or so of intense optimization modelling later, the proposed pricing structure went into the market and dramatically changed the industry's behavior, but without endangering the revenue prospects of the company.  I value the learning on this project hugely - the mental models of thinking about problems, the approaches to solving them, & the wide variety of factors that were considered in the final solution, all within a deadline that seemed insane at the time. Most importantly, the relationships that were built in that project have grown into friendships. 

 

I've since been involved with some mind-mending business problems. I've been thrown into projects that seem irredeemable in the time available to solve them. I've learnt to see the problems of a behemoth operating at scale in many different angles - regulatory, commercial, operations, strategy, financial, and human. I've seen many of those angles considered and ignored, ideated & forgotten.  In any case, I think these last two years have shown me how much I can accomplish in a very large organisation, how much I can collaborate with people far smarter than I will ever be. I've also learnt about (& felt the impact of) the politics that accompanies a large organisation, of rewards & recognition (or the lack thereof), of personal & team motivation, of technological opportunities & technology's self-inflicted wounds, and a whole heap of things that won't ever make it to a blog post.