My daughter's summer reading assignment was The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I was thumbing through it and read Law No. 12: The Law of Empowerment. Those who are unsuccessful at this law usually fail at it for one of three reasons, one of them being Resistant to Change.
My leadership skills are a work in progress. I do some things very well, but one I don't do well is embrace change. So it's ironic that I work for a manufacturing ERP software company whose president firmly believes good change is constantly necessary.
Early in my career I worked for a large telecommunications company for 12 years. I was a teenager when I started and deregulation had just occurred. I helped guide customers through this huge change, but for me it was all that I knew, so it was not always easy to empathize with customers who had "always done it this way" and now had to do it differently. In my opinion, deregulation was a huge failure and consumers, who the change was planned for, suffered. This telecom company was like a huge ship that planned to make changes that would occur several years out from the planning stages.
How different it is at IQMS. Change occurs daily and it's almost always good change. As the Quality Assurance Manager, I see all changes to the software as they are being developed and designed, sometimes this is a week or two process, sometimes it happens in minutes! Since we use the EnterpriseIQ software at IQMS, I get to use the new software and many times the changes are so exciting and useful (and I know customers will think so, too) that I will email the developers and programmers with a big "I LOVE IT" note.
One of the significant and fairly recent changes IQMS rolled out was the Automation Department. The purpose and direction of this department has been exciting to watch unfold as the department designs and implements custom programming, web services to run our software on tablets, RealTime Process Monitoring and many other projects. But this department has also helped automate a lot of my responsibilities and I'm loving it.
We implemented the use of Final Builder to compile our suite of software written in Delphi, .Net and Visual Studio. I look back at how I used to do my job (it is unbelievable how we used to compile) and how automated this task is now - it's a lifesaver. We also implemented the use of Perforce to check in and out code, packages, scripts, etc. Oh, how I resisted moving to Perforce, never because I was worried I'd be automated out of job, just because it was new and different and even if the old way was time consuming and archaic, it was familiar. I am so glad we implemented Perforce, it has given me my life back. I cannot believe how much time was consumed maintaining the code before.
You would think after being at IQMS for 12 years and seeing that change can be good, I would have learned to embrace it, but as I've said, I'm a work in progress.
