Understanding Your Role in the Big Picture
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What is the goal of the organisation that you are working for? Typically it will fall into the template below:
The third bullet point is often implied, and left out of mission statements. For people working in academia this might feel alien or irrelevant, but I believe it is equally applicable.
However, the devil is in the details. What — specifically — is the valuable thing that the organisation wants to achieve? With a clear understanding of the organisation’s goal you are in a position to answer an even more important question. More important to you that is. How does my work contribute to the organisation delivering value and reaching its goals? Note that this is not necessarily an easy question to answer. Particularly if your work is more than three or four layers removed from the customers receiving the value. You may need to talk to many different people in the organisation to get a better understanding of how it all fits together. You may also need to challenge your assumptions about what value your role brings. Developing a better understanding of how your work fits into the Big Picture has several benefits.
However, there is more. Go beyond! Plus Ultra! Once you know how your work adds value to the goal of the organisation you should work out how to express that in layman’s terms, so that it can be understood by anyone in the organisation. The key is to avoid getting bogged down in technical details and focus on value. I hope you found this useful. Stay awesome! 😃 Best wishes, PS – Below are links to posts of mine that feature the Big Picture. Ensuring your team gets the credit it deserves If your team delivers value and no one understands it, is it really valuable? Or perhaps more flippantly... is it really valued? This post outlines six tactics to mitigate against this. The first one is to care deeply about the company goal – the Big Picture – and how your team’s work relates to it. The value of understanding management styles even if you do not want to manage people Your boss’ management style has a direct impact on your day-to-day life. Developing a basic appreciation of management styles can help you understand this impact. If your manager is “telling” you what to do, start asking how the work fits into the Big Picture. This way you can push your manager to switch from “telling” to “selling”. Pitfalls to avoid when presenting technical work to a general audience Typically you will have four different types of people in your audience: decision makers, internal customers, experts from neighboring teams, and everyone else. The decision makers will want to know how your team is delivering value to the business. One way to achieve this is to start by zooming out and echoing back your understanding of what the company is trying to achieve, and then explaining how your team’s work fits into the Big Picture. There are no, or very limited, technical details at this point. You are simply explaining the value that your team is or will be delivering. Three activities for building a high-performing team Managing a technical team requires balance. Technical people, like software engineers, need time for deep work, to focus on nitty-gritty details. So, you need to give them the space for this. However, it is possible to get lost in nitty-gritty details. When that happens to engineers in your team you need to pull them out and help them see the Big Picture. This is a balancing act. PPS – Feedback is really valuable to me. Please feel free to let me know what you like, and what could be improved, by replying to this email. |