Pilot

Chip Allen is an Accenture manager who wrote a nifty application he called Pilot. In the face of Accenture's massive size and complexity, Chip managed to deliver a searchable, customizable directory than enabled you to find the email address and phone number of any one of the 180,000 employees in the company with ease. It was fast, simple, and extremely useful. It probably saved me over 200 hours of time since its initial roll-out. As I have moved to different institutions, it is the one tool I miss more than any other.

Along with each month's Pilot update, Chip would publish an email talking about whatever was on his mind. His posts were always funny and often inspirational and instructive. Chip was kind enough to keep sending me the posts after my ability to use the application passed.

I post Chip's latest email here. Thanks, Chip, for ten great years of entertainment and wisdom.
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…it’s with some sadness that I’m writing what may be my last Accenture pilot release note…seems I’ve been at my level in consulting too long and my inability to travel because of my kids situation leaves me in the weird position of having to take “the package”, one of those times when you have to decide if you want to keep trying to start the engine in the airplane or to jump while you still have time for the parachute to come out…I won’t say goodbye till I know it’s for sure, but that’s how it’s looking right now…

…there are two things that have made my 10 year stay here truly meaningful, first and foremost, it’s the people I’ve worked with, counseled and mentored…the second it this silly application and this “blog” that we call pilot…but how mushy can you get about an application that my friend ken called “the most…successful rogue application of all time” in a celebrating performance card he sent me…

…so I’ll focus on the people part and I will share some thoughts and advice to those close to me…over the 10 years that I’ve been doing that, I think the themes have been somewhat the same…

…don’t drop a turd on my desk and then just walk away…ok, that one may need a bit of explanation…never go to your supervisor with just a problem, always have some type of solution to propose…even if he/she doesn’t totally agree with your recommendation, you have at least given yourself the opportunity to be a part of the answer and you have proactively moved the situation from the “problem” phase to the “solution” phase…

…pull more load than your ‘role’ defines…when I came to Accenture back in 1998, I came from a company of 30 people…I was the IT department for that company, I built and supported all of servers, workstations, networks, applications that we used to buy and sell half a billion dollars worth of oil and gas…it was during the height of the dot com boom that one day, I found myself laying on the floor screwing a keyboard drawer onto the receptionist desk that I decided that there must be something better to do than what I was doing…when I left, they hired two guys, then eventually a third, to become their IT department…I never thought I was doing anything all that amazing, but looking back, we did some pretty cool stuff for a little bitty company with next to zero IT budget…the advice I give to my people has always been to do more than you are asked, but to be smart about it…

…know how what you are doing fits in the big picture… this one follows that last one for a reason…pulling more load does demands that you be effective, not “busy”…it’s easy to focus so much on making sure that your own “deliverables” are so perfect that you forget that we all contribute to something that’s much bigger than our own work…on a team, in your community, to your counselees, to people you mentor or those you support…I remember one project in particular where we said over and over, “nobody here is successful until the project is successful”…the culture there was different, everyone helped everyone, we all had had primary responsibility for our own area, but everyone had ultimate responsibility for a successful delivery...

…follow leaders, endure managers…I’ll make some of you mad at me for giving away the secret manager handshake and decoder ring…we talked about this a couple of years ago, but you will work with people in management that are going to try to keep you in the dark, THEY can only meet with the client, THEY take requirements, THEY hear feedback and issues, THEY (try to) micro manage their teams, they spend more time asking about status than they do trying to clear a path to successful delivery…they aren’t bad people, in most cases, they have been the ones who knew the least and the whole hyper management and information funnel was only a way to allow themselves to appear to be running the project…understand, the difference between these people and real leaders, leaders set direction, provide insight and clear obstacles so their teams can excel, managers spend more time with their plans and paperwork than they do with their teams.

…start, progress and finish with the end in mind…”start with the end in mind” is the common phrase, but it’s a bit misguided to just “start” with the end in mind…you have to focus on the end every step of the way…always ask “how does what you are doing help deliver the ultimate solution?”…it’s easier to ask this question of others than of myself on this one…there are times I’ve done things that were ‘cool’ or interesting or whatever on a project that really, didn’t have anything to do with speeding delivery or increasing the quality of whatever it was that we were trying to produce…

…don’t know if any of this makes sense…normally, I try to be funny but “funny” is somewhat hard to come by today…I’ll end by saying “make a difference”, in your work, to the people you touch, most importantly, to those you love…