Jen’s PASS Diary: A week in the life of a PASS Non Executive Director

As always, I don’t officially represent PASS here. As you will know, this week the application opens to be on the Board of Directors for PASS. I’ve held my post for two and a half years, and I am not up for election this time. If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I also help run the London Power BI User Group, where I am responsible for the sponsors and I help recruit and manage speakers.

If you are considering the role of PASS Director, I thought you might be interested in what a typical week looks like, for a PASS Director.

First things first; please don’t think that the role involves kudos.With PASS, you aren’t building your own empire, but you are building an empire for the community as a whole. This can mean putting PASS first, and putting the team before yourself. If you are doing it because you think it will help build a business, then you need to rethink that. As an independent consultant based in Europe, I have had no business at all from being a PASS Board Director. PASS are still fairly nascent in Europe, and organisations over here don’t seem very interested in that part of my life; they are mainly concerned if I can deliver for them whilst having this commitment.

I certainly do not feel that I have kudos from it, at all. If you have an ’email signature’ career strategy whereby your objective which is led by having more and more titles on your email signature, I can see that the role might be attractive. However, I personally don’t see any kudos from the role itself and I think that I get kudos and thanks for the things that people can see; events, speaking sessions, books, webinars and podcasts. If your career strategy is led by titles, then I think you overstate the importance of hierarchical roles and job titles; people are more interested in what they can hold in their hands, and see, as a consequence of what you do.

So what about the stuff I do, that you can’t see?

I have had three evenings this week, used up with PASS Meetings: Monday, one with the BA team, Thursday, with the Exec, and Friday (Today) I will have another meeting with one of the PASS Summit Sponsors over one of their activities at PASS Summit 2016.  I am going to try and squeeze in a fourth meeting with another PASS HQ member tonight as well, but that has to be confirmed.

I say ‘tonight’ because PASS are based out in the PST timezone, and I am based in London so they are eight hours behind me. So basically, the PASS ‘day’ starts at 5pm for me. I try to hold my meetings from 8pm onwards (12pm PST) because I usually have to travel home, and this can mean problems in participating effectively over Skype. I also try to get ‘family time’ in the early evening and I try to carve out this time so that my family don’t lose out.

Note that this doesn’t include the work I do outside of these meetings:

• setting up Thought Leadership podcasts for PASS BA
• creating a BA strategy
• setting up a PASS BA Advisory board and interacting with the potential members for that
• preparing for the sponsor Skype meeting on Friday.

It’s a lot of work and it’s stuff that people can’t see, which is why I mention it here.

What am I working on?

A Business Analytics strategy document that outlines where I think PASS should go. This is particularly important now that we are not having a PASS Business Analytics conference in 2017. What does this involve, in terms of skill set?

Defining a strategy is based on knowing:

• where your organisation is today
• where you want it to be
• how you want to get there

The risk of not changing and improving can be as significant as the risks which may affect your plans to develop and grow an organisation. I take after one of Steve Jobs’ Crazy Ones; this is a risk in itself. Although I will never achieve as much as the Crazy Ones in the video, these are the crazy attitudes that I bring with me; the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

There is a lot of ‘noise’ in the data world, and I am particularly concerned with trying to ensure that PASS continues to change and move ahead in terms of efficiency, reputation and meeting the PASS Goals of disseminating high quality community education in data. It is an important exercise since it forms the blueprint of the strategy. To do this, I need to  learn lessons and appreciate what factors may influence the likely success in delivering your goals and success for PASS. This is what forms the basis of my thinking for BA.

Defining a strategy is a process, and this is one key area where a PASS Director adds value to the organisation. The objective of the process is to pull together the activities of the various areas of PASS that touchpoint BA, so that it is in a good spot to achieve its organisational objectives. Once the strategy is in place, it will help to specify how PASS organises to incorporate BA, set objectives and point community and team members towards those objectives through a commonly held vision.

You’ll notice that this isn’t a technical skill; this is all people and process. As a Business Intelligence professional, I think about the people and the process, too. I’ve said before that Business Intelligence is often change management in disguise, and part of defining a strategy is that change management necessarily follows. I lean towards a more agile delivery, and I am working with PASS right now to point the ship towards a more agile delivery where the BA Strategy definition and process is concerned. It’s not enough just to be agile; you have to pay attention to people and process, too, and it can be more difficult when the people are volunteers who don’t need to do anything that you ask of them. It’s a sensitive balancing act.

To achieve this well, the execution process needs to be separated from the creative process of generating the strategy. As a ‘doer’, it can be hard to excise yourself from the execution and it is tempting to do that, because you see short term results. However, I am focused on long-term results, and strategy definition is a longer-term process that looks further into the distance, and has the objective of pointing the organisation towards that vision.

To summarise,  hope that gives some insight into what I have been doing this week. Any questions, let me know!