What is this “mission ” stuff, anyway? Part Two.

In Part One of this blog I pretty much blamed Steve Heye (our Web Project Manager) for making me question my understanding of “the mission”. So why is that?

Steve is a Y guy. The Y is in his blood, he wreaks of it. He grew up at the Indian Boundary YMCA and never left (at least in his heart). You can read more about him here, but my point is that he knows the mission. He gets it, because it has been a part of him since he was a kid. He knows how child care and day camp programs teach core values and developmental assets; how camping builds independence and self esteem; that the bonds you make with the other campers will be for life. He understands the power of being part of a swim team because his kids are in them and he knows you have to invest four hours on Saturdays to watch your kid swim for ten minutes. He understands about the difference volunteering in your community makes, because he does it with his family. So when Steve shows up for a web meeting, for example, he brings all of those years of personal experience with the YMCA mission to the table. He can focus on how to align technology with the mission because he really gets it.

Flickr photo by doc macaSTAT

In thinking about this post, I wondered where I missed out on opportunities to become more familiar with our mission, or if they even existed for me as an employee. When I worked in HR, I had been an admin assistant for less than a year before they asked me to implement a Y2K-compliant payroll system. Yes, you read that right. It was my first full time job, I was just out of college and 24 years old, making abut $11/hr and someone put me in charge of my first payroll system implementation. That’s a typical accidental-techie story.

 

Needless to say I was a bit busy after that… but in 2001 those systems were pretty established and I moved on to project management in the IT department. I was the only one who didn’t work with our legacy ERP or fixed computers. I mostly programmed Lotus Notes databases for a few years and automated many of our paper processes, and tried to streamline them. Maybe I did not stop often enough to ask why we did things a certain way, although I don’t recall an overwhelming desire by the Association to undergo any more major changes – they had just done a brand new membership system implementation that rocked their worlds like nothing before. So I spent a lot of time in my cube at the corporate offices. I travelled to the centers a few times to train people how to use the new PO system, etc. Not what you would call a “full immersion” into the mission.

 

I implemented a few more off the shelf systems until I was promoted in 2004. I inherited all the software development for our ERP and my life was a living hell. I like to think I took it all in stride and made a good impact on our processes. But it sucked the life out of me from 2005 through mid 2008. I cannot recall many days where I had the luxury of leaving the office to go “learn” about our work. I had hundreds of overdue projects to prioritize, almost everything was broken, people hated, REALLY REALLY HATED,  the system,

Flickr photo by pea2wenty3

and I reported to a CFO that – oddly enough – cared almost exclusively about cutting cost and mitigating risk. Her only “mission” was to save us from bankruptcy, and all her staff focused on that.

Once I went on a trip to the Camp Duncan YMCA’s“Burn Camp”, now called “Camp I Am Me”, for children with disfiguring burns. I had been encouraged by our COO to go to the closing ceremony, so I volunteered in the kitchen, and that was something I will never forget. It was an awesome experience that made me want to cry. One colleague that had wanted to come with me, but could not, was later accused of trying to slack off (paraphrasing). She caught so much flack just for asking to go, that she never tried to attend a function during work hours again. That’s the environment I worked in for years.

It really wasn’t until early 2008 that things changed for me. Over the years, I had built my little nook at the Y. My department ran the way I wanted it to, on most days, even if sacrificing quality and best practices for quick fixes was commonplace. But most people were not screaming, the system was reliable, and we could start to focus on delivering value, not just repairs. My CFO left and I ended up working for a couple other EVP’s. During this time, I was able to get to the centers more, and it gave me a chance to meet different staff. In 2009, the change has been incredible. I have gotten out to many of our business cabinets: sports, aquatics, day camp, etc. and met with staff from all our business lines. I think the epitome was a couple of months ago when I was at the Elmhurst YMCA, just working away in a borrowed office, when a lifeguard stopped by to get some supplies and we struck up a conversation about the website project. Something like that, so simple and straight-forward, had not happened before.

So in my ten years at the YMCA, it hasn’t been until the last year or so that I have been able to make enough time to really learn about the mission. And that’s still it – I learn about it like from a book, I don’t live it. I do find myself learning new things about our programs and services every day, and thinking about the ways in which I would have managed things differently if I had taken the time to listen to more staff more often, and not just take direction from a few senior managers. I think it’s my job to make sure there is a good balance between tactic and strategy, but when your core systems need so much attention, the problems take over. I cannot emphasize enough the value of having stable systems that are user friendly, coupled with the proper training and systems for consistent feedback to really allow IT to align technology with the delivery of the mission. I also would never have never gotten to this point without making friends with center staff along the way; those people that will tell you honestly what they think, and even though they require more attention and won’t ever call the help desk… they are the ones that help me better understand the role our technology plays in their daily work.

As a final note, I need to recommend you read Steve Heye’s blog on IT Alignment, as well as the NTEN’s book “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission”, which is great for both technical staff and “C” level leadership. It also has a useful wiki and an upcoming web summit  with great speakers.

Flickr photo by Judith Sol-Dyess