IT Careers: 5 Tips for Charting Your 100 Day Plan

Today’s reading “IT Careers:  5 Tips for Charting Your 100 Day Plan“ by Mary Pratt, a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, MA, focuses on developing a plan for the next 100 days.  The point being that the more you have a vision of where you want to be in 100 days and a well thought out plan for how you might get from here to there, the more likely you will be successful.

Pratt suggests five action steps to guide you in developing your plan:

1.  Assess the situation.  Talk with peers, team members, your manager, and key stakeholders to get a more complete picture.  Kevin Sharer, after he became CEO of Amgen and after serving as president of that company for eight years, asked each of the company’s top 100 executives the same five questions:  What do you want to keep?  What do you want to change?  What do you want me to do?  What are you afraid I’ll do?  What else do you want to ask me?

2.  Determine expectations.  How does your boss define success for you?  Ask.  Observe.  What are the subtle unspoken expectations as well as those vocalized?

3.  Identify stakeholders and build alliances.  Identify those individuals who will directly and indirectly affect your ability to be successful.  Build meaningful relationships with them.

4.  Work to understand the culture.  Learn how things get done here.  Identify the artifacts, the espoused values, and the underlying assumptions.  How will you work in the context of the culture to reach success?

5.  Act on what you learn, tarteting an early win.  

Make today a day of action and start building a plan.  .  .  .  .   jim