The Professionals...

...government IT professionals. Following on from my blog posts last week on mentoring and how good mentoring can only improve your professionalism, the theme for this week's blog posts is Government IT Professionalism.

On Thursday 27 January 2011, the Home Office Government IT Profession facilitated a Focus Session entitled "Government IT Profession as a Key Resource" by Kate Silver, Deputy Director of the Government IT Profession. The Government IT Profession is a team in the Cabinet Office responsible for leading government IT as a profession. Kate was keen to stress at the outset of the session that the "key resource" is not the Government IT Profession team themselves but the people who are IT professionals in government.

So, dear Reader, what is driving the government it profession and makes that resource so key in the first place? Well, there is a strong push in the current climate to achieve "Better for Less". Not more, better. There is also the need for transparency and open information management. And finally I should mention that good government IT professionals are key to putting pressure on suppliers in order for government to deliver better for less and be as transparent as possible.

Supplier pressure has seen 800m pounds shaved off contracts already. This is principly achieved by leveraging Crown buying power, delivering shared services in a more service oriented way, such as G-Cloud, and reducing reliance on external resource; consultants/contractors/interims.

Reliance on external resource has been brought before parliamentary committees by Sir Gus O'Donnell and Ian Watmore. 1bn pounds was spent on consultants/contractors/interims in the financisal year 2009/10. 60% of that, up from 50% the previous year, was spent on IT and Project and Programme Management (PPM). 4 out of every 10 pounds in the Home Office is spent on IT and PPM. So, dear Reader, you can see the importance of good government IT professionals as a key resource.

There are 7 government professions; IT, HR, PPM, Procurement, Comms, Analysts (statisticians and economists), and Knowledge & Information Management (KIM). Each of these are important in there own fields but you can see the importance of a strong government IT profession. It is possible to change profession in your career or even be dual profession.

If the government IT profession is a key resource then what is being done to make it as strong as possible?
The Government IT Profession, centrally from within the Cabinet Office, provides government IT professionals with a toolkit to enable them to progress and strengthen their career. This toolkit consts of; Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), qualifications framework, role profiles, redeployment service, knowledge bank, job space. In addition, the team are also responsible for the Technology in Business Fast Stream (TiB).

SFIA helps us to map out the skills we have and the skills we need and the qualifications framework helps to accredited those skills gained from professional experience. These both feed into the role profiles that describe the ideal model for staff to fulfil a position appropriately.

Once government has ideally skilled and qualified staff in the appropriate roles, then we need to ensure that this expertise is shared across and held within government. This is where the redeployment service, knoweldge bank, and job space come in. These are hosted on the Government IT Profession website http://it.civilservice.gov.uk

Government needs a strong resource of IT professionals and the Government IT Profession has provided a toolkit to enable those professionals to strengthen their careers. So what can government IT professionals do to help? What can we do to put ourselves in a position to go forward?

Firstly, know your skillset from:
- your current role
- your previous roles
- where these fit to SFIA
- your 10 strongest skills

Secondly, know your core competencies that can be evidenced from actiivities outside work or previous work.

Finally, take responsibility for your career. Know your current situation, the opportunities and threats. Keep your head up - do some horizon scanning and see where the business is going - sign up for Computer Weekly, it's FREE!. Invest now in your future career - don't expect to stay in the same department.

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Ask yourself a question...

While I am on the subject of mentoring, here are a few choice questions and techniques for you to take a look at your situation and progress your career.

What do you want people to say about you?
What do you not want people to say about you?

meetings with your mentor; first inrtoductions, second boundary setting, third objective setting (what do you both want from the relationship), fourth initial feedback.

Do a career decision tree
Work backwards from a possible and desirable future. Hypothesise; future, present, past - especially if you are unhappy with your current situation.
Reflect on not just why you went to your new job but also why you left your old job. This will stop you being confined by what you may have perceived at the time as one-way gates.

Who is your ideal mentor?
Who can you grow with, develop with, understand and relate to?

What do you want to get from your mentor?
Once you have identified the answer to this question, let your mentor know what you want to achieve.

Can you get everything you need from just one person?
Multiple mentors can be useful.
It is IMPORTANT that your mentors are in a position to observe you.

Should your coach or mentor be male or female?
What is stopping you from contacting them right now?


Find yourself a mentor, establish how you want to present yourself, develop your emotional intelligence, build relationships, build networks, do a career decision tree.

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The Importance of Being Mentored

At the Home Office they have allocated all of the Technology in Business Fast Streamers a mentor each. Six months ago I didn't appreciate the significance of this and today, dear Reader, I was clearly shown the reason why it is important to have a mentor, especially in the early stages of your career.

I was approached by my professional development manager, who asked me if I would like a mentor. I immediately jumped at the chance because I had been hunting for a mentor. I needed an insight into the advanced levels of my career and knew that a mentor could help show me more.

There is a big difference between Coaching and Mentoring, which I found out at an IntellectUK event on Wednesday 8 December 2010 with Jackie Elliott and Marina McGoldrick. Coaching is goal driven, whereas Mentoring should be mututally beneficial for both the mentor and the mentee. Mentoring is an open engagement that is usually industry, knowledge or skills specific and is relationship focused as opposed to being focused on outcomes of the relationship. This is where I have been extremely lucky. Purely by chance I met a manager who gave me some small tasks to do on the side of my main work. I was happy to help out and she seemed pleased with the first drafts of my work. When I was approached to become a mentee, I was really pleased when I was told that my mentor would be that enthusiastic manager.

Now, dear Reader, people who look for coaching are already confident & successful even before they are coached. Coaching is not remedial but accesses your strengths and develops self-awareness. However, mentoring is a soundboard for your reputation.

My first meeting with my mentor was focused on introductions and boundary setting for the relationship. What we could say to each other, what we couldn't disclose outside the relationship. What I could expect from and what I could offer to my mentor.

A mentoring relationship is heavily reliant upon the power of connections, business connections and personal connections. I am able to offer my mentor contacts and information from my network that she may not have direct access to and my mentor can offer me feedback.

Feedback is important because you MUST connect with people on a deeper level than just simple contact engagement. Just trading business cards or email addresses is not enough. You need to be able to open-up and be able to show your vulnerability, not just pay lip service to your mentor, your team, your colleagues.

The most recent meeting with my mentor has been an eye opener that I was not totally prepared for. We had built up a relatively firm relationship over four months or so. She had never been my line manager over that time but we had met up at work before and after the New Year in between our busy schedules.

So, after the IntellectUK Young Professionals Network event, "Mentoring and Coaching - why all the fuss?", and also a WIG Graduate Network event in January, I asked my mentor for feedback and I was instead given a double-edged question: What do you want people to think of you? What do you not want people to say about you?

It made me look at myself in a different way, through the eyes of my team and colleagues. Why is that important, dear Reader? Without fully appreciating how my team sees me, I can lose their respect for me. The team falters as a result and the project is less successful.

And that, dear Reader; is what happened to me today. I asked a team manager on my project what I thought to be a minor question. It must have been the way I said it or the timing but it was not received very well. I asked why we were doing something; why we were releasing something in a certain way. The question annoyed the team manager, who was clearly busy, and she told me as much.

This is the importance of being mentored. I considered how the team would see me as I reacted to this situation. I could feel adrenaline pounding through me has my pulse started to rise. I was ready to fight my point but knew that to "flip my lid" and let my brain become overloaded would be a very unprofessional thing to do.

I identified the emotion, gave it a name; anger. I calmed down and re-assessed the situation.

I don't want to be seen as hot-headed and unapproachable. I don't want to be seen as emotional and irrational. For a moment, while I tried to explain myself differently but failed, I lost the respect of my team. I could feel it. But I did not lose my cool.

You may not be able to see this connection, dear Reader. It did all happen in a flash and I did not pass the team feedback forms after the event to see how they matched up to my ideal model that I would like to present to my mentor.

Somehow pieces of the relationship that I have with my mentor and the lessons I am learning through professional seminars after work are making their way into my professional day and that for me, dear Reader, is The Importance Of Being Mentored.

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