Oden Hughes
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- Skilled Development Manager, Project Leader, Community Organizer, Data Geek.Newspapers | Phoenix, Arizona Area, USSummary
I'm a born organizer and planner. No really, my mother could tell you stories of reorganized cabinets, grade projection graphs and receiving my very detailed birthday party plans - with budgets. What gives me energy is working on strategies, taking a goal and figuring out all of the steps needed to achieve it, looking at all of the ways something could go wrong, and assessing the potential success of any given choice or direction. In a way it's as natural as breathing and just as important to my life and well-being. Early on I realized that all of this was far more fun if I surrounded myself with talented and motivated people. A firm believer in a leadership style that not only seeks to reach goals but also to build up each individual involved; my philosophy is integrated leadership – creating an environment where people learn and grow in the process of effectively reaching strategic objectives is the real measure of the success of a project and a manager.
Specialties: Project Management, Business Intelligence, Software Development, Organizational Development, Enterprise Application Database & Process Architecture, Business Analysis, Knowledge OrganizationExperience- Dec 2009 - PresentVice President / Phoenix Innovation Foundation
- May 2009 - PresentProject Manager / Ignite Phoenix
- Jan 2003 - PresentSenior Manager, Analytical Development / The Arizona Republic
I manage a team of .Net application, Reporting Services, Sharepoint and SQL Server 2000/2005/2008 data warehouse developers focused on delivering the tools and metrics used by our organization to support decision making processes, assess financial health and determine strategies for growth.
- Dec 2001 - Dec 2002System Analyst / The Arizona Republic
- Apr 2001 - Dec 2001Application Database Administrator / The Arizona Republic
- Jul 2000 - Apr 2001Contract Database Administrator & Developer / Robert Half International
Education-
1990 - 1993University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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- IF you were a flower, what kind would you be?A freesia, for no other reason than they are difficult and lovely at the same time.Asked by Formspring Feb 23, 10
- If you could wake up as anyone tomorrow, who would it be?I'd have to pick me. Mainly because the thought of assuming someone elses identity and life makes my head hurt. My life may not be perfect but at least I know how to manage it...I think.Asked by Formspring Feb 22, 10
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- May 21, 13
Yesterday we completed our 11th iteration, I’d like to say at this point that we are experts, that every plan is executed flawlessly, and that we are the very model of an Agile team. As I’m sitting here thinking about our postmortem today and mulling over the issues that arose this past iteration and all of those we have confronted before, I’m wondering if everything really does need to be fixed or if there is room for some tiny bit of chaos in this method. By that I mean that I feel confident that we get it and that we’re living it to the best of our ability but it doesn’t have to be perfect – does it? And by whose definition of perfect do we aspire to?
With that being said…
Collaboration & Team Work
We started this process as seven very disparate individuals with different skills and very separate responsibilities, silos if you will. There was very little opportunity for working together on a project much less discussing a new approach or working together on solutions. I saw SCRUM as an opportunity for cross training and collaboration as well as the foundation for our migration to Agile processes. In a little more than a year we are regularly working together, brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. I often hear about how another team member was instrumental in solving an issue or provided the missing insight into a design and the timing of a sick day is rarely a cause for stress.
Estimating
By far this is the most difficult piece of Agile to implement consistently; there have been iterations where we have hit every single target and there have been others were I’m not sure if we were even on the board. Unexpected time off, unresponsive product owners, truly optimistic planning and a major shift in project priority or two have all occurred more than once. At this point I do believe that we understand better what can go wrong and are working towards nailing the best ways to course correct.
Unplanned tasks
One of the reasons that I became interested in Agile was that I felt it would give some transparency to a common problem in our department, constant firefighting, reacting to a last minute customer changes and the scrambling to shift to the newest high priority project. We started tracking these as part of our burn down chart and have discovered that we consistently equal the number of unplanned tasks that we had actually planned in any given iteration. Part of me is giddy with the thought of what we could accomplish if we can only get rid of all those interruptions but that the thought is usually overruled by the knowledge that we can accomplish more than planned, be nimble enough to respond to our customers and for the most part still deliver projects on time.
My Challenge
This year I’ve been working with a number of teams in implementing Agile in their own environments, providing training on the methodology, guidance on best practices, sharing my own trial and error and supporting their transitions. As those teams launch, develop and adjust Agile to suits their own needs, I also still need to keep my own team as my top priority and continue to give them the same support and nurturing as we move along on our own path. That will be a delicate balancing act over the next few months, one I’m certain I can accomplish and still have fun.
Filed under: Agile, Leadership Tagged: Agile, Leadership, Mentoring, Project Management, Retrospective, SCRUM, Training - Apr 22, 13
I feel like, in some ways, I was exceptionally lucky growing up. Throughout my childhood I was told I capable of accomplishing anything I had an interest in pursuing. Both of my parents are intellectual and growth orientated, my grandparents were all self-made, entirely optimistic and competent people and my teachers and mentors were all supportive and nurturing. I had such a blissful bubble of confidence surrounding me that when I began to encounter obstacles in college, it was shocking and puzzling.
In three short years, I changed my major four times. Not because I’d failed at anything, in fact my lowest semester GPA was a 3.8, but because I started being told that I wasn’t suited for certain careers; I was to squeamish to be Doctor, women don’t have the hand-eye coordination for Nuclear Medicine, I was to empathetic for social work or teaching. I left college completely demoralized, settled into a part time counseling position and focused on family for a few years.
Since then I haven’t really had a plan, it’s always been more of a to-do list. I’ve taken positions based more on what captured my interest and suited my needs at the time over what would further my career aspirations. About twelve years ago I took a gamble on a company that promised opportunities and room for growth and happily I can say looking back that I did make the right choice. Throughout my time here I’ve been regularly challenged to learn more, better myself and positively impact the world around me, in return I’ve been encouraged and promoted along the way.
A few years ago I realized that I still didn’t have a plan and started working on what I felt were the gaps in my education or experience; flexing my leadership abilities, focusing time on learning new technical and business skills and creating a positive, efficient work environment. But I still didn’t have a plan. This year I set about to treat everything I needed to accomplish but had procrastinated on as a project with milestones, tasks and deadlines. Number one on that list was creating a career development plan.
Last year I spent some time learning about business modeling after reading Business Model Generation. When I spotted Business Model You by the same author on the shelves over the holidays I immediately grabbed it, it promised to be the answer to my planning problem. Business Model You takes the exact same approach used in Business Model Generation but with a very key twist, all of the exercises involve discovering yourself, your abilities and your passions.
The first section of the book takes you through each piece of the model generation canvas; who you are, your skills/abilities, your partners and customers, how you communicate and the costs and rewards of doing what you do. I did my canvas around my current position; you can see the results in this photo. Getting to this level of detail took about an hour of jotting down the results of nine separate brainstorming exercises. I did all of these in a very quick, write down the first thing to pop into my head fashion. Nothing at all surprising but very interesting to see my work life surmised onto this one page.
Next up I have some reflection exercises to do….
Filed under: Books, Growth & Goals, Tools Tagged: Business Model Generation, Business Model You, Development, Development Plans, GTD, Leadership, Mentoring, Modeling, Project Management - Apr 10, 13
At the end of a training session last year, I asked the group to participate in an empathy exercise. Basically, I had them put themselves in the position of a brand new manager, not new to the company but new to the role, to brainstorm on what it feels like when you’re facing unknown challenges. I was hoping to get some ideas on next steps for the group, where we should focus resources and effort to make transitions here more positive for everyone involved.
I didn’t have any problems getting feedback from the group; we talked at length about the things that make people feel like outsiders, the difficulty of navigating without a map and how disconnected we can all be at times. More than one story of a coworker that quit over the lack of support came up and out of all of the reasons to lose an employee that to me is just well silly.
Initially I thought that much of these problems could be solved with a simple mentoring program coupled with a more formal onboarding process. This was immediately followed with something along the lines of “Huh, where do I start?!”. Keep in mind that I spent a couple of years in HR in training and development so I’ve actually participated in both in the past yet I was still stumped.
How do you go about providing a baseline of how the company wants manager’s to act or more importantly – What is our culture? What are our expectations?
Are there tools already in place that the company can leverage? What training are we providing?
Who should be involved? Is everyone at the same level automatically included? Do we set criteria for mentors and mentees?
What obstacles exist that prevent these things from existing now?
The process of weeding through those questions, and many more, has brought me to a straight forward strategy – training for the skills every manager should have and support for the transition. How do you draft up a proposal for something that big? Well, more to come on that. In the meantime check out the process flow I’ve diagramed, I think it’s a good start.
Filed under: Leadership Tagged: Leadership, Mentoring, Onboarding, Strategy - Apr 01, 13
Leadership
Prepping for Leading for Change
My 2013 training proposal for our leadership group was approved; this included another round of Everyone Communicates, Few Connect with a new facilitator while I’ll be taking the 2012 group through Leading Change by John P Kotter. I’ll spend most of April reviewing and revising the session plans, transitioning Everyone Communicates, Few Connect to the new facilitator and organizing all of the logistics.
Department Training Pilot
Last year I spent some time looking for a decent set of instructor led basic business skills training courses without much success so I decided to shift focus to online offerings and found CoursePark, a subscription based service with a large set of on demand classes. It looks like a great service, has everything we need from an administration perspective and hopefully the classes themselves will prove valuable, unfortunately they do not give you the ability to audit them. I’d like to define a standard set of required classes for every new employee and perhaps even a learning progression for folks as they move up within our organization. Fingers crossed this will get us there.
Mentoring
As part of my 2013 training proposals, I scoped out a mentoring process for new managers. And when I say scoped I really mean I did a process diagram so not entirely defined. Now that I’ve had some time to ponder this one further, I’m working on fleshing out my reasoning along with how I think we can effectively and perhaps more importantly efficiently implement this type of program this year. I’m hoping to do some type of pilot over the summer.
PMO
The PMO Implementation is off to a rocky start, more from a focus perspective than the tools or process, I’ve had some difficulty getting information from other project leads and finding the time to compile everything I am able to get. This month I’ve carved out an hour each week to devote to streamlining this for myself, in the hopes that I can get caught up.
Management
Agile Training & Support
I’ve spent the last couple of months focusing on my duties as an Agile lead; we’ve gotten two additional started with basic SCRUM methods, will be finishing the planning training this month and will finalize the rest of the implementation plan to move both teams to Agile completely by the end of this year. I favor this slow progressive method because it is helps with morale and because it is an Agile project in itself, we’re able to make adjustments as we go to better serve the teams.
Our Agile Process
This month marks our eleventh Agile iteration! I have to say that as complicated and scary as change and managing change can be, getting to this point in our process has been nowhere near as difficult as I thought it would be and I am so happy that we are now fully implemented. In April I’ll be focusing on tightening up our reporting, testing out Team Foundation Server to see if that makes our daily management easier and we will also be changing up our meeting schedules/ agendas to effectively include our customers and product owners as well as from putting together some ideas for implementing formal code review and ensuring that were meeting standards across the board.
Projects
April will kick off the redesign of three of our warehouses complete with business logic changes, new processes and who knows how many report conversions. We’ll also be plunging head on into a flurry of new Lotus Notes to SharePoint conversions, wrapping up two major report migrations and starting the 2013 common review season.
Personal
I am fortunate enough to have been given the go ahead to pursue my PMI-ACP certification as well as renewing my PMP certification this year. In doing some of the prep work I discovered that the PMP test is going to be changed in January so I’ll focus on the PMI-AC P exam and tackle the PMP towards the end of the year. I’ve attending a three day PMI-ACP exam class to get the full scoop on what I’m in for and get an idea of how long it’ll take for me to prepare. I’ve also submit my request to take the exam with PMI and after running up against some challenges with the way we manage projects at my company and how the PMI organization views the world, I am now approved to proceed. I predict loads of flash cards in my future.
Filed under: Agile, Books, General, Growth & Goals, Leadership, Project Management Tagged: Agile, Business Intelligence, Everyone Communicates Few Connect, Leadership, Mentoring, Project Management, Training - Nov 27, 12
In October & November our Working with Emotional Intelligence meetings covered Chapter 6 – What Moves Us and Chapter 7 – Social Radar. Overall both chapters didn’t generate much heated debate at all, partly because we’re all very similar in these areas and also that there wasn’t much content that anyone saw as controversial.
Chapter 6 – What Moves Us?
The great thing about working with my team is that everyone is self-motivated, that’s not to say that everyone is a Type A personality at all. What I mean is that everyone has their own initiative, the desire to get things done. It displays itself in different ways; some are fixers that prefer to focus energy on resolving issues while others are designers that get energy from creating solutions. That drive though to roll their sleeves up and tackle whatever is on the plate today exists for all of us. The Chapter outlines three different areas under motivation; Achievement Drive, Commitment & Initiative/Optimism; most of our discussion focused on how individual performance is impacted depending on where your strengths are. Achievement and Commitment were seen more as management/manager type skills while Initiative/Optimism were deemed necessary for good team performance. That brought up a deeper discussion on personal vs work goals and how we all display various level of those three areas depending on what the task is, an interesting thought when you consider this as a performance indicator (If I’m really interested in a given goal will I be more motivated and committed to complete it?).
Chapter 7 – Social Radar
Our entire Social Radar conversation revolved around the concept of empathy – being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes to better understand their point of view, their needs, or their position. Part of being a great IT person is centered in that ability…I know… hold on…hear me out! In IT positions we’re continually solving problems that we ourselves are not experiencing, whether it’s designing a report for a group of analysts, troubleshooting an issue with a website or drafting documentation on how to use a process, to be successful we have to have the ability to put ourselves into another’s view point in order to accomplish the task at hand. If we aren’t able to do so we end up with poorly designed products, frustrated users and inefficient processes, which should eventually mean we work ourselves out of a job.
I know what you’re thinking here and I agree that traditionally the social radar skill set is not something many introverts (because naturally all introverts are IT people) are well versed in but they usually are service orientated so it’s really only a matter of taking that customer focus a step further to understanding the customer. Easy, yes? Well, I’ll admit that six months into our Agile transition does probably help with this area, when you move from designing based on function to designing based on roles and user stories you’re definitely getting more empathy into the process from the start.
Next up we’re going to tackle influence, an area that most of us don’t really understand or get to play in.
Filed under: Books, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Tagged: Agile, Dan Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, empathy, Leadership, social skills, Working with Emotional Intelligence
