I mentioned that I had a few mentors in an earlier post, and in a recent conversation with a new coach – I explained how I tend to be attracted to strong leaders that go first with integrity.
One of those got me hooked to join his team with the promise to build something from scratch leveraging what was known as the Rational Unified Process at the time. This was before they were acquired by IBM, and even after they were acquired by IBM – they were able to maintain the culture for awhile longer after the deal closed.
I met some exceptionally talented professionals during my stint at Expound and at Starwood. In both cases, I was truly blessed to learn from season professionals that gave a damn. They were concerned about wanting to do a quality job (pun intended) and the teams were exceptionally concerned about the well being of their peers.
Looking back I definitely burned out at Starwood Hotels towards the end of my run there, as the environment was a heaving dynamic that was doing all sorts of cutting edge things while I was serving in my first senior leadership role. In revisiting those days on more than one occasion with a few peers, team members, and former bosses – I definitely have taken a few lessons learned from that assignment. I certainly was a self inflicted victim of busyholicism.
We had an incredible team, and we had some of the best folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with. To this day, many of those folks are considered personal friends, and it is fun to see how things have progressed for the gang based upon the Facebook and LinkedIn feeds. Hell, I now that I live in Texas, I have managed to have a revisit with one or two folks from the former team. Always real, no bullshit conversations with the team. That was our makeup.
We also had some especially strong partners at other vendors, and in some cases – I developed friendships and mentee relationships there too. We were doing things with virtualization coupled with integrated change management, unified process management, and multiple / concurrent software factory lines for months on the back of some substantial investments into ClearQuest, RequisitePro, and a slew of other engineering toolsets aiming to support localized engineering centers in White Plains, Braintree, and the emerging development center in Bangalore – via our partner – HP back in 2004.
The team we initially started with and then built upon was exceptionally well regarded in the hospitality industry. We had some founding members of the Westin team and of the Sheraton team quarterbacking many of our efforts. We had some incredibly talented folks that just knew, and I am doing an exact quote here – how to break shit – no matter how good our requirements, dev efforts, and continuous build management processes were at the time. We had what I now refer to as – deep domain expertise – on the team. We had members of our quality assurance function that were former vice presidents, and they knew the business.
These folks thought by default, and in this case the default thinking was exceptionally useful default thinking – from an end to end perspective. They talked in terms of capabilities. The team knew that the business was multi channel, even as the Sheraton.com site was tipping over every now and then given the strain on the mainframe. Rate plans and revenue management had substantial variability depending upon the involved channel and resell rights through that channel. Some rooms were never to be sold through a given channel.
Tons of business rules.
Tons of integrated thinking required.
Yet, this was not enough given the demands being increasingly placed upon our team.
We had a couple of strong leaders within our CIO office, including our CIO that were absolutely committed to transforming our business from a multi channel enablement standpoint down to new bare metal running a mixture of hardware-based appliances and this newly emerging (or recycled paradigm depending upon your epoch) compute approach known as hypervisors with VMWare as the known leader.
Investments were made to bring some true process rigor into the mix.
Investments were made to bring some cutting edge tools to underpin the unfolding processes that were being rolled out.
Investments were being made to hire key leaders to help drive the change and inbound transformation of the teams.
Investments were being made ultimately to deliver new business capabilities as the end results.
The goal for me and the team that I was on – was to ultimately become a professional engineering organization focused on infusing quality from the outset by leveraging not only the deep domain knowledge of the hospitality industry – also by leveraging the deep process and tooling knowledge by leveraging the Rational Unified Process as the base framework for our efforts on a going forward basis.
Now to be fair – we increasingly tailored the tools and the process models as we continued our journey over the years that I was there. However, I have found myself returning to this notion of a ‘leveraged framework for jumpstart purposes’ in a few areas in my life over the past few years.
The RUP has some core best practices, some core building blocks for process modeling
- workers as the who
- activities as the unit of work – the how
- artifacts as the output from the activities – the what
- workflows as a sequenced set of activities to produce observable value and artifacts – the when
At its core – the RUP process model is this — building blocks are used to describe what should be produced, who is in charge of producing it, how production will take place, and when production is complete.
As a model, it is exceptionally modular, simple, and easy to interconnect multiple workflows and to discern linkages that may not be obvious unless you are a founding member of the Westin team or someone with two decades of hospitality experience. To be clear – those with that level of experience are without peers – and when you couple the domain expertise with a construct like the fundamental RUP process model – seemingly magic erupts.
In my work life back in 2004 – on one of my first major software development efforts – this framework-based accelerants notion was crucial in scaling the team.
I have since returned to these roots of frameworks, patterns, and acceleration in a number of areas of my life – in and out of work – and even beyond this false dichotomy.
I will be sharing some of these lessons learned in a future post, where integrated thinking, deep experience, and ready made acceleration is possible based upon framework and tooling leverage.
There is so much goodness to share!