The "Leadership" that I perceived

Recently, I made a casual invitation to my friends on the discussion of "Top 3 Leadership Attributes". My friends are really good and enthusiastic. They gave me their answers quickly.

During this little exercise, I learnt 2 things:

1. Everybody expects differently from "leadership"
2. Surprisingly, we could apply a well known requirement management technique - pairwise comparison - to more scientifically evaluate our personal priorities.

Guess I don't need to talk about (1) as it's obvious.

For (2), my way on doing pairwise comparison is like this:

For the first step, I write down all the attributes that I think important for a leader, like the following:

• Adaptive to changes
• Appropriate use of talent
• Charismatic
• Clear and efficient communication
• Decisive
• Empathetic
• Forgiving
• Honest
• Influential
• Innovative
• Open-minded
• Persistent
• Positive thinking
• Problem solving
• Self-discipline
• Visionary

Then I do a pairwise comparison using a spreadsheet (it takes me about 20 minutes) and get the following:
(Here, I compare them one on one and give a score for each pair: 2 for the winner, 0 for the loser and 1 for each attribute if they tie.)

• (Score Attribute)
  
• 28 Visionary
• 27 Influential
• 27 Persistent
• 26 Positive thinking
• 24 Decisive
• 21 Innovative
• 19 Problem solving
• 16 Clear and efficient communication
• 15 Open-minded
• 13 Appropriate use of talent
• 10 Charismatic
• 9 Adaptive to changes
• 7 Forgiving
• 7 Honest
• 6 Empathetic
• 1 Self-discipline

So my answer is:

1. Visionary
2. Influential
3. Persistent

When applying back to requirement management, imagine if you have tens of requirement items (if too many, you may need to group them first and compare the groups) and if we would like your stakeholders to prioritize, give them a task (or most of the time, you need to work with them or interview them) to do this pairwise comparison. And you have strong justifications for the priorities yielded. Most of the time, with a not-too-emotional stakeholder, you will get a comfortable compromise among related parties.

Enjoy!

IT Professional Certification in Hong Kong

Today I joined the HKITPC (HK IT Professional Certification, http://www.hkcs.org.hk/itpcrs/eng/) launch. I knew it was done by a marvelous team. People in the team are very dedicated.

I have gone through the whole program of the launch and indeed it was wonderful. Not wonderful because of the program, it's because I see the passion of the industry to build its own recognition, just like other professions of longer history. You can easily find examples like accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects and many other professions that are well respected around.

Certainly, they have their professional skills and know-how that worth much respect. However, much more important is their professional pride, discipline and ethics. These enables them to form a standard. A standard for being a qualified professional.

So, can IT gain a professional respect like others? My answer is 100% sure.

But how can the IT practitioners achieve that? In other words, how could IT practitioners be one day be referred to as IT professionals (with respect!)? I think there are several keys:

1. The practitioners should be demanding on their work products, work process & work ethics
2. There should be independent bodies that set the expectations on these aspects
3. There should be independent bodies that assess the level of performance
4. Practitioners realize the importance of building a professional respect in others' eyes
   

I see HKCS is doing a good starting job. They build a certification program that could achieve 2 and 3. To achieve number 4, I believe it's through more marketing and education, especially targeting for employers of IT professionals. Only 2-4 be done well before number 1 could be achieved.

Being an IT practitioner, I realize one thing important: we have to participate and unite in order to make the profession gain respect. If we do not step forward and participate, if we do not respect our own profession, can we hope to gain others' respect?

How could we be more participating? I think probably one way is to apply for the certification, be it deem to be successful or not.

Look, a simple chemistry is there:

• A certification program gains its respect and authority by
1. not easy to pass the assessment (of course, cannot be too difficult also)
   
2. having a transparent, accountable and quality process in certification
3. desired or supported by a lot of practitioners
4. gain a legislative position, i.e empowered by the law and government
• A practitioner desires to be certified because
1. he/she is capable enough to look for differentiation from others
2. his/her employers or clients recognize the certification
   
3. he/she thinks the certification agent is trustworthy, prestigious and authoritative

At the end, it becomes an chicken-and-egg problem. The certification agent has to be authoritative to attract practitioners while the practitioners have to participate to make the certification agent authoritative. Now, a certification agent (HKCS) is trying hard. Should the practitioners also play their part?