After a long time, the BI project
that you were leading is finally in production; to everybody’s surprise
(including yours) things are working perfectly and customers are actually using
the system. All the hard work seems to have paid off after all, with your boss
congratulating you on how the project was deployed and the fact there were no
priority one issues during the roll-out. In short, you have achieved success,
you are no longer afraid of being part of the failed BI project statistics. After
a week or so of babysitting the new system you start to wonder what is next? You
start to realize that you have been so single mindedly driven to deliver the program
that you have given little thought to what you will do after delivering. Many
options start popping on your mind: should you take vacation, should you ask
for afternoons off to play more golf, should you go to your boss and ask for a
new project when you know that nothing in the pipeline is as good or as
interesting as the project you were just on. Maybe you should leave the
organization and find a company that has an even more challenging project where
you can contribute immediately? With so many options, what is the right thing
to do? What option will provide you the most happiness, what option will help
you the most in your professional career?
If the situation above is
familiar to you, you are not alone. According to industry statistics, most of
the IT turnover happens immediately after the successful delivery of large
programs. It seems that many successful Information Management professionals crave
the excitement that comes with an impossible deadline: they need to feel that
they are absolutely needed and nothing could be done well or on time without
their expertise. In my opinion, this is part of the human nature, as
individuals we tend to measure our worthiness by our contributions to society
at work, at church, or even at home. It is almost impossible not to increase
your ego when you are getting constant and immediate feedback on the effort you
are providing and you are seeing the direct impact it has on achieving the
goal. However as “human” as this reaction can be, it is one of the most fragile
situations an individual can face. During this quiet “period”, defined as the
absence of constant feedback, the IT professional needs to be extremely careful
of not to make any rash decisions just to get “back in the game”. It is almost
funny to be in this paradox, many people spend their entire professional
careers trying to achieve success, but as beauty, the definition of success is
in the eye of the beholder and can change quickly depending on the perspective
from which is being looked at. As many successful people have found out, it
takes a significant amount of effort to achieve success, but it takes an even
higher degree of discipline to maintain success.
So, as the title of this blog
asks, what is next? In my experience what follows is a battle of the self,
where a new equilibrium of the inner ego and outside person needs to be
achieved before one can embark on the next big “adventure”. This battle of the
self cannot be won using technology; it needs to be fought from within through self-discovery.
The biggest break through will come the time that we realize that our worth is
not defined by how many emails we get a day, or how many reports/dashboards we
can deliver but on our capacity to learn and adapt to new environments, after
all it is also part of the human nature the capacity to survive in the most inhospitable
climates. More importantly you worth is not defined by what you have done,
neither from what you will do but from the self. You are, you exist and you
have the capacity to be happy regardless of what life alternative you decide to
choose. After all, the world is vast and the possibilities are only limited by
our imagination.
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