James Gray

Join Microsoft IT Solution Delivery As a Trusted Strategic Advisor to Our Business

The Microsoft IT Solutions Delivery organization is looking for people to help us reach our potential.

The role of a Senior Solution Manager is to become the CIO of our clients. By helping them shape their long-term strategy and build technology solutions to enable the business, we can achieve trusted advisor status and earn our seat at the table. We partner with groups such as Human Resources, Operations, Sales & Marketing, Legal, Services and OEM which gives us a great opportunity as an organization to see the landscape of Microsoft. In partnership with Engineering, our organization has built some exciting tools & processes which have streamlined how we do business ranging from sales opportunity identification and contact management, recruiting and staffing, and processing of sales agreements and service contracts to name just a few.

We are looking for individuals with the ‘customer first’ mindset that have a proven track record in problem solving, strategy development, project management, innovative thinking, cross group collaboration, conflict negotiation and an ability to drive for results through influence and relationship building.
The solution manager will act as a functional process owner. This role includes project planning, business requirement definition and management and ensuring that the IT deliverables meet the customer’s expectations. This position requires an attention to detail on system requirements while still being able to understand the long-term vision of both our business partners and our IT architecture. The Senior Solution Manager also needs to be able to map the current projects into a broader, long-term integration strategy.

The applications under this process umbrella are far reaching in scope and visible to the Microsoft executive team. Subsequently, this is an opportunity for broad exposure to many teams and executives throughout Microsoft.

Apply online for this role or feel free to contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in discussing career opportunities with Microsoft's Solution Delivery organization.

See all open jobs on Microsoft's Career site. 

It's Life Strategy Not Just Career Strategy

Over the years I have always had this theory that a successful career strategy and plan was really part of a larger life plan. How could you plan and execute upon your career without defining what you want out of life and what drives true happiness?  My recent experience working with friends and colleagues confirms the hypothesis that when you help people think deep about their careers they quickly expand to examining the most intimate parts of their life. This deep introspection is the foundation for establishing a great career strategy that "blends" with the other important aspects of your life.

Recently I had a check-in session with person that I have been helping to define a career plan using the career strategy framework outlined on InfoTechLeader.com. Initial comments were "James this is hard".  The self assessment of Step 1 was clearly driving all types of emotions and personal introspection. While this was a career planning session the conversation morphed into what this person was learning about themselves, the issues in their life, and the relationships with friends, family members, and a significant other. The career planning process was acting as a catalyst to understand life's purpose and define success as an individual and with their most important relationships.  We were clearly connecting more on life than just career.

My experience is that many folks conduct assessments but really never take the reflection time to understand their meaning and take action. Feedback from others also confirmed that the work to understand who you are and define what you stand for is the hardest part of career planning.

Companies should expand their career planning frameworks to include the realities of life and provide methods to help ensure alignment with employees careers.  Effective career plans that maximize happiness start with defining your personal profile including mission and critical success factors (more on Mojo post). In an upcoming post I will outline how you can use your critical success factors to create a Personal Scorecard for driving and sustaining change. 

IT as a Premier BI Solutions Provider

The TDWI Wayne’s World post on “Evolving Your BI Team from a Data Provider to a Solutions Provider” provided a nice summary on some of the reasons why IT serves as just a data provider and how to evolve into a solutions provider. This topic is near and dear to my heart so I thought I would share some additional insights as a practitioner delivering BI solutions inside Microsoft.

In my view, IT must serve the business as a trusted advisor by delivering end-to-end information-enabled solutions while also providing a secure, scalable, and reliable BI platform for the business to innovate in areas where IT cannot or should not expect to serve.  It is unrealistic that IT can cost effectively serve all of the needs given my practical experience so you need a strong collaborative partnership with the business to serve the growing thirst for strategic information and analytics.  This includes leadership and credibility to deliver enterprise solutions but to also enable them to deliver their own solutions using IT’s platform.

My vision for enabling the business to deliver solutions is not about the business replicating data and developing applications in isolation from IT.  Success in my opinion is IT delivering valuable end-to-end solutions and a certified integrated data platform that can be used by the business to also deliver solutions where and when needed.  This is a collaborative model leveraging both the strengths of IT and the business.

While I do believe it's essential for IT to deliver end-to-end solutions for long-term viability, I do view providing the business with a certified data platform as a "solution" as they would generally prefer not to be in the data integration business.  While this could be considered IT acting as a data provider, my experience tells me that IT is solving a huge problem by standardizing and integrating data into compelling offering that can quickly support decision support and analytics across the entire organization. Think about the huge opportunity cost when the business is spending their valuable time on hard core IT and not analyzing and understanding your customers, partners, market competition, and internal operations.   The extreme cases of IT or the business doing it all is not realistic and there is a optimal position somewhere in between where IT focuses on the complex enterprise-level opportunities while enabling the business to innovate on the fringe.

Microsoft’s business intelligence environment is diverse including both IT solutions and business solutions. Maturing the information strategy is journey and there is no silver bullet so this requires strong leadership and phased approach.  

Data Provider

IT can act as a data provider in two scenarios:  

1. Enabling direct data access to transactional systems
2. Serving integrated data in the form of marts and cubes

We have both of these scenarios in Microsoft today.  Let’s face it, in many companies the business built the shadow solutions they have today because they likely had a need that was not being served by IT at a specific point in time. In certain cases the business has built solutions by integrating data served by low level interfaces and bypassing IT completely (scenario #1).  While this approach can address the immediate business need, the result is higher lifecycle costs due to data replication, needed changes to support corporate taxonomies and upstream data sources. 

Strategies to Transform IT into a Premier Solutions Provider

Here are ten strategies for evolving IT from a data provider to a premier solutions provider:

1. Strong IT Leadership – transforming an organization, it's offering and results requires strong leadership. Evolving to a true solutions provider will require trusting relationships with business executives that understand and value IT’s offering. Transformations do not happen overnight so leadership is required to sustain the journey and deliver on IT’s promises over time.
2. Mature a solutions-focused organization – establish a trusted advisor organization within IT that is responsible for managing the business relationship, business architecture, understanding and anticipating needs of the user community, delivering solutions that enable complex end-to-end business scenarios, and leading change management. It’s also critical that the solutions organization understands the data and ensures data quality. These change agents must clearly define the business value of the solution and then measure and communicate the benefits after the solution is deployed.  Our organization inside Microsoft IT is called “Solutions Delivery” which reinforces our mission: "Earn Trusted Partnership status by consistently delivering high value innovative business solutions".  This team represents IT on behalf of the engineering and operations teams that deliver and support the applications.
3. Differentiate and market IT’s solution - similar to any other product offering there needs to be something compelling that truly differentiates IT's solution.  Evaluate what IT is offering and understand what is driving the business to invest in their own solutions.  Position capabilities that can be best delivered by IT and not easily replicated by the business including data quality and report certification, enterprise-wide integration and analytics that enable a broad business view (multi-business solutions), embedding integrated data into IT applications, and a holistic information management solution set. Track and communicate the business value derived from IT's solution as part of the continued marketing communications process to drive brand recognition.
4. Manage and predictably deliver on solution roadmaps - with a IT solutions organization in place, develop and manage solution roadmaps that include the business capabilities, features, and solutions that will be delivered on over the 1-3 year time frame. The roadmaps should support "priority" business capabilities where there is a high strategic importance but low performance.  Establish credibility with the business by delivering on-time, on-schedule, and on-budget.  That is the ticket to the game to advancing to higher value business solutions.  The business is not going to give up their solutions until they have confidence that IT can predictably deliver the goods.
5. Embed integrated data and analytics into business process applications – at the end of the day business value is only realized when users take action from insight. IT is uniquely positioned to deliver key information and analytical models into the applications that run the business and serving end users.  Delivering on this promise requires strong collaboration inside of IT between the data warehousing/BI specialists and those organizations that own the transactional applications.
6. Enable the enterprise perspective with multi-business solutions - most business BI solutions are targeted at specific problems or business capabilities within a business of a large organization.  The most strategic insight can only be realized when there is an enterprise IT data platform in place that integrates data across a broad set of transactional systems that run the company. IT should focus on delivering the enterprise scope data platform and delivering BI solutions that serve multiple businesses as this will be difficult for a business group to replicate.  A few years ago Microsoft started the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) journey to mature it's internal and external insight as well as consolidate the application portfolio to reduce costs and quickly adapt to changing business models.
7. Understand user needs - compelling IT solutions can only be delivered by understanding the pain points and needs of the employees executing business processes.  Proactively engage and research the needs of both the corporate and field user base. Understand the roles that you are serving and what solutions they need for their job.  This will help proactively focus IT on what "markets" to attack.
8. Pro-actively reduce data access - easy access to transactional data, feeds, and integrated data perpetuates the growth of shadow applications around the company. Periodically assess the reasons why non-IT applications are integrating transactional data and aggressively reduce access by providing alternatives such as IT's BI solutions and integrated data platform. 
9. Engage the “Developer Network” - successfully executing a hybrid strategy where IT delivers solutions as well as the business can be accelerated when you can harness the power of the distributed network of "developers" across the organization.  The business is going to deliver solutions with our without IT so my view is that IT's strategy should be to build a platform that can used by both IT and stakeholders in the business. Formalize this collaborative and social network that is geographically distributed to quickly surface best practices, data issues, and deliver on BI needs quickly. Members of the "developer network" would be formally approved and get access to sanctioned integrated data and IT services. I envision a robust social network where "information" is the lifeblood of the conversation and user needs are served quickly and cost-effectively by the "developer network" (both IT and approved business developers).
10. Empower the business on IT infrastructure – IT will never have all of the data required by the business so it’s essential that IT provide a collaborative solution that enables the business to manage data on IT’s infrastructure and mitigate the need for the business to replicate data in their environment. There will also be scenarios where the business will need to have quick bridging solutions so providing capabilities to enable agility and access to IT’s certified data set will reinforce IT’s vision as a customer-focused organization. Recently, we have enabled a set of capabilities on our Enterprise Data Warehouse infrastructure that enables the business to co-locate and manage their business data on IT servers.  We believe this will reduce data replication outside of IT, reduce shadow applications, improve insight into user needs and enable the business to deliver niche solutions.

Run your IT shop as a business and act as a change agent by delivering valuable end-to-end solutions across the organization!

Join the Team that Delivers IT Inside of Microsoft

If you are looking for a great opportunity to own investment plans, product management, delivery and adoption of enterprise scale IT platforms and solutions that run Microsoft then the Solution Delivery organization inside of Microsoft IT may be a great fit for you. 

Please send an email to [email protected] if you are interested to discuss and explore career opportunities in Microsoft IT.

You may also connect with me on Linkedin.  

The Mojo Moment - Feel It, Understand It, and Capitalize on It!

The "Mojo Moment" - that euphoria when your energy level, enthusiasm, confidence and impact skyrockets.  Have you felt it lately? Would you even know what this rush means?  Over the last few weeks I felt this strong emotional rush and after reflecting on these moments it became clear to me how my career plan provided the essential ingredients for creating the Mojo in the first place.

My first rush hit when a colleague remarked that he found my Career Planning Lifecycle posts insightful and planned to share them with some of his colleagues.  I then began talking about how I created the framework and how important it was to me as a manager for members of my team to have great career plans. I could feel my energy level rise and I would have continued the conversation for hours if it were not for an planned meeting. We agreed to have a follow up conversation.

Another rush hit when I was “selling” an IT investment to a group of stakeholders responsible for allocating funds.  Again, I felt the energy from competing and trying to persuade a group of people why the investment was important to the company. I was in the zone and I could feel it. After the meeting one my colleagues remarked that "I had the Mojo". I did not think too much about that comment at the time.  Prior to the second meeting the same colleague said “James make sure you bring your Mojo again".  During the second session I felt the same euphoria and it felt great.  I was more conscious of "measuring" my Mojo this time and what brought me this thrill.

Coincidentally a few days earlier I had purchased a few books from Amazon including Marshall Goldsmith's new book Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It.  So I decided to open up the box and see what Goldsmith had to say about this Mojo thing. 

Marshall Goldsmith describes Mojo as:

"a moment when we do something that's purposeful, powerful and positive, and the rest of the world recognizes it".

"Mojo is that positive spirit toward what we are doing right now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside". 

As I reflected on his operational definition and the insights from the book I saw the connection that helped create the Mojo moment in the first place. It was the fact that I am in the right job that provides the required happiness and meaning in my life and value to others.  Marshall Goldsmith states that your identity is the first of four vital ingredients to having great Mojo. I could not agree with him more. Knowing who you are and what you stand for is the first step in my career planning process and is the basis for aligning your career plan for maximum happiness. Let me show you some examples of how to define your identity as the first building block to establishing Mojo.

 In the article “Career Planning Process – Step 1 Know Yourself”, I outlined a number of attributes that you can use to describe yourself and define what brings happiness and meaning to your life.  Great career plans are designed with this in mind.  Defining a life mission, critical success factors and the identifies you embody is the first step to building your personal profile and Mojo. My life mission is described in the center of circle with each of the critical success factors that must be fulfilled to deliver on the mission.  Each of my identities are described outside the circle that bring clarity to who I am.  I feel the most Mojo in my life when my critical success factors are in balance and this enables me to bring the maximum energy to my daily work.  I experienced relatively lower Mojo earlier in my career when I held a role with extensive travel that impacted my health and relationships with my family.  At that time I did not have a detailed career plan in place and now that I look back it was obvious why my Mojo was lower then and why now it's sky high.

 
I then define my professional identity using a set of attributes that I gathered from various assessments and personal reflection.  The attributes on the left describe who I am and the attributes on the right describe the "defined" identity that I am positioning and selling in the market. Marshall Goldman describes this as the "Created Identity" in his book.  This positioning is critical because it sets the foundation for the job you select and the behavior you are looking to model.

 

I package this all up in what I call a Personal Profile. It's "you on a page".  This artifact is powerful tool to help you select a career role that maximizes your personal attributes while also providing you with the needed happiness and meaning to feel fulfilled.  This ensures "fit" between what you need out of a job and what the job needs.

 
Your ability to feel that positive spirit each day and impact the world around you is partly a function by how well you have defined who you are, what is important in your life and acted upon this to drive change in your life.  Remember you are the only one who can describe what success is and feels like. Don't leave it up to your stakeholders to define who you are or your manager to assume he or she knows the type of role and day-to-day responsibilities that will maximize your Mojo.

I have the privilege to career coach colleagues as a part of my job and I am intrigued by cases where colleagues are not feeling the career Mojo.  In many cases people have a hard time to quickly describe their life mission, what is important and what in their life is currently out of balance and causing their career depression. In some cases they need to change and in other cases they have been in the same job for too long and need a change in their environment.  I would say in all cases they need a better career plan!

If you are not feeling the Mojo on a regular basis in your personal life or career then I recommend you take a timeout and read Marshall Goldsmith's book Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It. I would then recommend you create your own version of a life mission, critical success factors and identities.  You are then in a position to define your professional identity and the first of four key ingredients to creating Mojo and a great career plan by following the Target, Roadmap, Develop and Sell steps.

Feel it, understand it, and capitalize on it!

IT's Role in Delivering BI for the Masses

As a IT practitioner delivering enterprise information and analytical solutions inside of Microsoft, I am very impressed by our business intelligence product strategy including the upcoming releases of SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010.  The opportunity to put BI capabilities in the hands of information workers could not be greater as recently outlined in the InformationWeek article Global CIO: Microsoft Pushes BI For The Masses: 500 Million Prospects -- InformationWeek.

I see the role of IT as both an infrastructure provider as described in the article but also a trusted advisor that serves as a change agent to derive the value of the BI investment across the organization. A powerful self-service BI strategy is not for IT just to provide data to the masses.  The upcoming Microsoft releases set the foundation for a powerful self-service BI strategy when IT assumes the following responsibilities in partnership with the business:

• Act as trusted advisor – IT must have a deep understanding of the business to deliver solutions that are required today and anticipate future needs.  
• Understand personas and self-service scenarios – IT must conduct user centered research to validate the roles, information needs and scenarios that establish the set of data and capabilities that must be delivered.
• Drive an enterprise perspective – IT must drive and facilitate an enterprise perspective to data modeling and integration.  This will ensure IT can deliver on both line of business and enterprise scenarios.
• Enable a collaborative network- the power of information and analytics is when you have a highly connected set of end-users that can share content, insight, and best practices across the organization. IT should enable this community to collaborate using SharePoint 2010 as a foundation and harness the power of the hearts and minds of these change agents across the company.
• Ensure data quality – the delivery of timely, high quality data is required for business users to have confidence using the information for decision making and insight.  IT must integrate data quality processes into the self-service strategy and pro-actively communicate the data quality status and issues to the user base.
• Integrate BI capabilities into business process enabled applications – IT can drive high-levels of adoption by integrating self-service analytical solutions into the familiar applications relied on by users everyday.
• Manage critical, highly standardized BI content -  every organization will have reports and analytical solutions that require formal control and distribution.  IT should focus their expertise on delivering this highly standardized enterprise content and enable self-service for ad-hoc, highly flexible and custom solutions.
• Master data management services – putting the management of business rules and data in the hands of business users is an important element of self service.  IT should integrate the use of SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) into the solutions and enable the agile business to govern this data.
• Services to co-locate IT and business data– IT systems will likely never include all of the data required for information and analytical solutions.  We have started to roll-out a set of capabilities in our EDW platform that enables the business to master and manage business-owned data (e.g. models) on IT servers. This approach reduces data replication and shadow applications, as well as enabling self-service for business users to augment the data and BI solutions.
• Change Management– self-service can thrive when information workers and highly skilled analysts are operating with the sanctioned, single version of the truth data set. IT must facilitate the change processes that migrate users from the shadow solutions under their desk to the secure enterprise solution. PowerPivot for SharePoint provides a great set of capabilities for users to collaborate using enterprise data assets and IT to monitor and manage the infrastructure.

PowerPoint 2010 Co-Authoring Enables Simultaneous Editing and Collaboration

I use Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 every day and one of my favorite features is co-authoring.  This feature enables multiple authors to simultaneously edit the same PowerPoint file and collaborate in real-time.  This time saving feature eliminates the need for one author to check-out the file and resort to serial updates when there are multiple colleagues that are required to contribute content. Your PowerPoint 2010 view shows the author names and a visual icon on each slide that others are updating.  You can simply refresh your view to see the new updates made by these authors.  PowerPoint 2010 integrates other collaboration features such as using Office Communicator or other IM applications to view the status of other authors and initiate conversations directly from within PowerPoint 2010.     

Why Business Executives Should Care about a High-Level Data Model

The Information Management post Why Business Executives Should Care about a High-Level Data Model provides a good reminder why business stakeholder involvement is critical to an information strategy. Strong business engagement from the executive level and down is required to ensure the data represents the business and this shared representation is consistent across the organization.  Data models are clearly the foundational prerequisite to transforming towards an analytical culture. A key point from an execution view is the trap that companies fall into by taking a "project" or "line of business" approach to their information strategy and data modeling. The result is siloed solutions that do not enable powerful analytics across the entire organization.

At Microsoft we have begun a multi-year journey to holistically model data that enables key decision-making processes across the sales and marketing organization.  Our approach to the data modeling process is collaborative including key members from the business, business architects, information architects, solution managers and program managers. Although a "project" may be driving the data model for specific subject areas, these projects are steps in the roadmap to building out our Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).  Microsoft's EDW standardizes and integrates data to eliminate legacy siloed solutions managed by both IT and the business. The business outcomes include reduced costs, sales and marketing productivity, and improvements in customer and partner satisfaction.

Our progress over the last few months has reinforced how powerful business engagement is to standardizing data model definitions across multiple sales and marketing operating models that in the past have operated independently. Strong business and IT leadership is a catalyst for this collaborative approach to our data modeling process and the journey to integrating the organization silos that exist today.

Career Planning Step 5 - Sell

Selling yourself every day is an essential part of career strategy execution.  Many career planning frameworks fall short by not outlining what is required to effectively promote your brand promise in the eyes of potential customers.  All successful products and services have a marketing plan and so should you. 

Your marketing plan should describe what you intend to message, who is the audience and the vehicle that will be used to deliver the message.  Here are a few selling methods I have found useful:

• Blogs - blogs are great vehicles for showing thought leadership and collaborating with a broad network to share information.  I use TypePad's blogging service for its ease of use, integration with other services such as Facebook and Twitter, and the value for its cost.  I also rely on Google Analytics to give insight to web traffic and user profiles that visit this site.
• Twitter - use microblogging to easily collaborate with your network and push messages to a broad ecosystem. 
• Linkedin - an online professional profile is a way to communicate your brand, grow a network and have colleagues validate your brand promise through recommendations they post to your profile. I have used this site as a reference for hiring managers to clearly show experience, accomplishments, and credibility.  You can integrate Twitter into your Linkedin profile to show status updates to your network as another way to deliver your key messages.  I also like the "export to PDF" feature that packages up your profile and recommendations into a Acrobat file that can be easily shared with colleagues and hiring managers.  You should always be adding recommendations as a normal course of business and not just when you need a new job.  Ask colleagues to highlight successes and qualities that reinforce your brand profile.
• Resume - a resume is a basic given, but ensure it's up-to-date and available for prospective hiring managers.  I have my resume hosted on this blog site and referenced in my Linkedin profile.
• External Conferences - professional conferences are an excellent method to grow credibility and sell your value.
• Internal Presentations - when was the last time you gave an informal brown bag presentation?  Whether informal or formal, presenting to an audience is an effective way to communicate your knowledge and grow your brand worth.
• Webcasts - video webcasts are a scalable method to communicating thought leadership to a broad audience.
• Articles / Books / Newsletters - writing is a time-tested method of building your brand and net worth.  Consider writing an article for a trade magazine, company newsletter or even a book.
• Lunch / Social Outings - it is very easy to put off a lunch with a colleague or bail on a social outing but sometimes these are great opportunities to sell. 
• Your Environment - use your office environment to reinforce key qualities and personal brand themes.  This may come in the form of visuals, books or general appearance.
• Your appearance - the reality is that people may perceive you in certain ways given your appearance and how you show up each day.  Be conscience that you are not sending mixed messages between your appearance and the brand you are trying to sell. 

Many people shun from selling given its negative consequences such as nauseating colleagues who are always telling others how great they are. This is not what I am talking about here.  Effective selling is authentic and generates value for both you and your network.  The bottom line is that you will not get what you want unless your needs are explicit and positioned with your network.  One of my favorite selling books is You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself and its short summaries to guide personal success. 

I hope you will find a nugget or two from this six-part career planning series and be sure to share any of your secrets to success.  Be remembered by the legacy you have outlined in your career plan and not by the forces of your environment. Life is too short so be sure your career is a passion you experience each and every day.

 

Career Planning Step 4 - Develop

This post is the fifth of a six-part series dedicated to career planning.  Step 4 of the career planning lifecycle is focused on learning - the lifeblood of your brand value. 

A balanced career development plan outlines the opportunities to learn on the job, learn from others, and learn through training.  Most people typically associate a development plan with "training" although the majority of learning happens on the job.  I encourage people to be explicit on what they want to learn on the job so as a manager I can be sure to align work opportunities with the career plans across my team.

Learning must be a relentless pursuit to be better than yesterday if you want to stand out above the competition. The following areas should guide the definition of your development plan:

• Competencies - the previous parts of the career planning process defined the competencies that are required to achieve success in the target market you have identified. The development activities should support the enrichment of these competencies.
• Assessments - formal assessments provide a way for managers and colleagues to rate you against various criteria. The assessment results may provide insight into blind spots that require development.  I use assessments to validate my progress and focus my learning plan.
• Feedback - often the best way to understand where you need development or improvement is to ask for it.  Asking for feedback may be uncomfortable at first but it will become easy and effective if you integrate it into everything you do and not as a special one-time event prior to performance reviews.  I would also recommend you take advantage of anonymous 360 feedback mechanisms for additional insight - perception can be reality!
• Mentors - identify people who have a competency or experience you want and ask them to be a mentor.  This is an effective way to give you perspective you don't have and coaching recommendations to develop the muscle you are looking for.  Finding a mentor willing to support your development can be one of the most important influences on your career. 
• Mentees - mentoring others can be not only a great opportunity for you to develop coaching skills but learn from others who work in a different part of the organization or company.  The best mentorships are when there is value to both parties.
• Personal Network - a broad and diverse network is one of the most important elements to being successful. Make it a point to become a "connector" by developing relationships and making effective use of your colleagues and talents. Develop your network each day whether it's adding new members or just casually pinging them to stay in touch. Strong collaborative networks are required to be effective in any large worldwide organization.
• Certifications - certifications represent an independent acknowledgment of your competence.  Pursue formal certifications to build an arsenal of industry-recognized knowledge.
• Job Shadowing - a breadth of experience is critical to become an effective leader at whatever you do. Ask colleagues and mentors if you can shadow them to experience a typical day and gain a perspective that would help you in your current role.
• Presenting - there is no better way to learn than if you need to teach it. 
• Writing - I find that I learn more when I write it down.  Look for daily opportunities to write including blogs or even an article in a trade magazine and company newsletter.
• Personal Board of Directors- identify 3-5 people who are committed to your success and development - roles can include people who are highly connected, recognized as a company or industry expert, or those who can give you honest direct feedback.  I would recommend Keith Ferrazzi's book Who's Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success--and Won't Let You Fail for a deep dive on this topic.

Helpful execution hints:

• Document and track your development plan - I track my activities as Outlook tasks so they are in front of me each day.
• Schedule learning activities in your calendar well in advance - ensure learning time is integrated into your workload and not canceled at the last minute.  I color code development activities in my Outlook calendar to ensure each week includes learning opportunities.  
• Stretch yourself - the best learning happens when you take on new opportunities or hard challenges that others do not want to - stretch, stretch, stretch.

Invest in your greatest asset by having a well balanced development plan that is actionable.  The world keeps changing so you need to as well - but at a faster pace.