• Accomplishability: your ability to accomplish valued results.
• Value/Cost: the value delivered perception relative to the cost.
• Supply/Demand: the market dynamics of your position, skills, etc.
• Likeability:  how others perceive you.

In this post, I will delve into and expand upon the fourth factor: Likeability. Likeability is defined as having qualities that bring about a favorable regard from others.  Likable people tend to get along with most people.

Some of the qualities of likable people include:

• Friendly
• Realness
• Authentic
• Relevant
• Emphatic
• Honest
• Trustworthy
• Positive
• Helpful
• Realistic

Truly likeable people are liked by everyone:  Friends, family, loved ones, customers, superiors, peers and subordinates.  They are likable all around!

In his book, The Likeability Factor, Tim Sanders points out four key characteristics of likeability:

• Relevance: your capacity to connect with others’ interests, wants and needs.
• Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge and experience other people’s feelings.
• Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity.
• Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others.

One of Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, “seek to understand then to be understood,” is a critical likeability factor.  When people sense you truly care about them, they will love you!  We simply and naturally love to be cared about.

One of the key reasons Likeability is important overall is because the choices others make about you tend to have a direct impact on the Key Quality of Life Factors:

• Your health
• Your relationships
• Your wealth

People tend to choose who they like. Think about it. You work for or with them, buy from them, vote for them, marry them, hire them, and so on.

Remember one important aspect of Likeability:  it is in the eyes of the beholder. That means you are only as likeable as others perceive you to be.

In the context of this blog series, Likeability is one of four factors of Indispensability.   If for any reason your Accomplishability is not where it needs to be, your skill’s Supply/Demand dynamic is not favorable, and your Value/Cost index is bellow 1.0, Likeability can save the day.  All things being equal, an honest and sincere 360-likeable person will be perceived to be more indispensable than the other less likable ones.

Well this brings  another blog series to a close.  I hope you kept up.  If you have, I thank you!!!  I hope you found some valuable information while reading along.  Now it’s time to develop your indispensability strategy:

1. Established what your customers expect you to accomplish.
2. Determine what your skill’s supply/demand situation is like.
3. Figure out your value/cost index.
4. Understand your likeability approach and make adjustments if need be.

Good luck!!!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

• Accomplishability: your ability to accomplish valued results.
• Value/Cost: the value delivered perception relative to the cost.
• Supply/Demand: the market dynamics of your position, skills, etc.
• Likeability: how others perceive you.

In this post, I will delve into and expand upon the third factor: Supply/Demand.  Supply/Demand refers to the market dynamics for your skills.  The supply and demand dynamic affects job availability and the respective salaries companies are willing to pay.  When there is too much demand and not enough supply, salaries are driven up and vice versa.  These dynamics also drive the risk companies take outsourcing certain jobs.  Sometimes these imbalances create bubbles that can cause havoc in markets, especially when they burst.  There are global, national, regional and local market dynamics associated with most jobs.  Everyone should be highly aware and keep track of the market dynamics that affect their job.  There are many sources of such information.  The US Department of Labor keeps what seem to be the best and most accurate data.  Also, a number of private web sites offer job demand information that can help you keep track of the dynamics of your skill area.

Labor Statistics

One of my favorite reports is the 10-year Occupational Outlook Handbook issued by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Office of Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections. This handbook is updated every two years or so.   It is a very comprehensive report and covers most jobs in the US.  You can see the current copy here.

Here is a sample of a detailed report for IT Management by Industry.

Job Demand Stats

There are several web sites that aggregate job postings and share statistics on national and regional job demand for IT folks.

Indeed.com

Indeed offers a number of job demand perspectives. Here is one for job postings per capita by regions of the country.

Here is a portion of the job market competition perspective.

They also offer charts that track job postings by job type.  Here is a graph for IT Managers.

There are several more things to look at on this site.  It is pretty cool and easy to use!  Visit them here.

SimplyHired.com

This is another cool site!  This chart on their home page tracks job postings trends by hiring segments of the economy.

Here is a graph showing programming job trends by platform.

There is a lot to look at here also. You can visit the site here.

Keeping track of the supply/demand dynamics for your skill set is critical to being perceived as highly indispensable.  My advice to folks whose supply/demand dynamics are unfavorable is to crank up their efforts to ensure they do more with the Accomplishability, Value/Cost and Likeability aspects of their indispensability perception strategy.  It is critical!

Do you know and keep up with your skill market dynamics? If not, get on with it, and if necessary, adjust your strategy to ensure you’re keeping the highest indispensability perception possible!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

• Accomplishability: your ability to accomplish valued results.
• Value/Cost: the value delivered perception relative to the cost.
• Supply/Demand: the market dynamics of your position, skills, etc.
• Likeability:  how others perceive you.

In this post, I will delve into and expand upon the second factor: Value/Cost. The Value/Cost factor is simply the perception your employer has of your worth.  While there are intangible aspects to this perception, the key determinant is the amount of money you bring in relative to your compensation and benefits. Depending on your job, making this determination varies in its complexity and accuracy.  The perception of sales people or billable individuals is much easier to establish than that of a support person.

If you are in a job where the connection between your perceived value and your cost to the organization is not clearly evident, it may behoove you to do some homework to figure out your impact on the organization.  This is especially true if the supply/demand ratio is above 1.0.  In such cases, this factor can become a key competitive advantage to help your indispensability. Let me try to illustrate this with a simple example.

Say your job is to provide IT help desk support to engineering folks in your organization.  Engineers typically make decent salaries and work on critical projects with big impact to the organization.  If their system is down and they cannot do their work, it costs money to the organization, literally lots of money by the minute!  You need to guesstimate that cost by keeping track of how much time your support approach and efforts either preventing or solving problems saves.  It would surprise you and your superiors in many cases to discover how valuable you are, assuming you are good at doing what you do.  Keeping track of such information and providing your superiors and perhaps even your customers with regular updates can add another layer of indispensability to your position.  There are many other ways to establish how much value you bring.  Know your value and communicate it to make sure the key decision makers are fully aware of it all the time.

Do you know how much value you produce?  Go do the math — and let others know as soon as possible!   If you find it’s not enough, take action to improve and increase it.  Keep the measurements going until it looks good and then show it!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

• Accomplishability: your ability to accomplish valued results.
• Value/Cost: the perception of value delivered relative to the cost.
• Supply/Demand: the market dynamics of your position, skills, etc.
• Likeability:  how others perceive you.

In this post, I will delve into and expand upon the first factor: Accomplishability.  Accomplishability is the perception others have of your ability to get things done.  However, it is not just your ability to get anything done. It’s your ability to get the right things done: Valued results!  Those are the results required and expected by your internal or external customers given your job function.  This factor is always critical but it becomes more so when the market dynamics of your job are not favorable.  If there is a lot more supply than demand for people with your knowledge, experience, skills, and abilities or if your salary is on the high end of the market, Accomplishability is more critical to sustaining your highest indispensability perception.  Finally, if for some reason your likeability is not the best, you must crank up the Accomplishability aspect to make up for any gaps given all other factors remain equal.

The first key to Accomplishability in this context is to identify the key valued results expected of you by your customers.  Customers are 360 degrees around you.  They include both internal and external ones when applicable as not everyone has direct external customers.  Internally, customers include your boss, your peers, and/or anyone who receives all or some of your work output be it a product or service.  Once you identify your key customers, then you can identify the set of valued results that would lead them to perceive you as indispensable.

Once you have your customers and their valued results identified, you need a strategy to deliver them.

At Remote DBA Experts, we deliver remote database administration services to our customers as either their sole DBA resource or as a supplemental resource to their internal individual DBA or team.  In these roles, we have discovered three highly valued results that our customers want us to deliver. When we deliver these results, our customers’ perception of our indispensability rises:

• Proactiveness
• Responsiveness
• Effectiveness

Proactiveness means preventing any and all possible database availability and performance problems.

Responsiveness means promptly acknowledging all customer requests, taking prompt effective action, keeping the customer informed of progress along the way, and bringing requests or issues to full closure.  Effectiveness means delivering the expected result. For Remote DBA Experts, this means delivering highly available and well-performing database systems.  This is the main focus of our DBAs, and as an organization, we must enable them to accomplish it.

Given the above, Remote DBA Experts measures Accomplishability based on these three service aspects. DBAs with the highest indispensability levels are those who have mastered all three.  Their customers love them and so do we!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

• Critical
• Vital
• Central
• Essential
• Necessary
• Required
• Crucial
• Obligatory
• Fundamental
• Key
• Must Have or Keep

There are many ways to develop such a reputation within your organization.  In this blog series, I plan to discuss approaches to help you develop a strategy to become indispensable in your job.  In this introductory post, I will outline the components that will make up a comprehensive approach to become and remain as indispensable as possible.

The following is a set of factors that influence how indispensable you are perceived to be by your organization. The value of each factor varies according to the situation and circumstances thereof:

• Accomplishability: your ability to accomplish valued results.
• Value/cost: the value delivered perception relative to the cost.
• Supply/Demand: the market dynamics of your position, skills, etc.
• Likeability:  how others perceive you.

In the following series of posts, I will delve into each of these factors and expand upon this subject to get you a better understanding and, ultimately, help you develop a strategy to become indispensable to your company.

I hope you will come back to read the rest of these posts.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

The most valuable employees tend to think and act differently than the average.  Interestingly, these individuals are not necessarily the most intelligent and/or highly educated. Yet, they tend to deliver the highest value and hence typically command the highest pay and job security in the companies where they work.

While they command the highest compensation and job security, their main motive is rarely making more money.  They seem to intuitively understand that money is just a result and they have a way of figuring out the approaches that result in adding more value to their customers and employers.

The following are some of their attributes:

• They focus on the processes and tasks that allow them to be most valuable and somewhat indispensable for what they do.
• They tend to be self-made and self-motivated.
• They do not need much supervision or direction.
• They actually lead by example with their attitude and disposition.
• They are proactive.
• They think ahead and prevent problems rather that react to them.
• They are organized and focused.  They set goals and objectives for themselves and others.
• They understand that knowledge makes them better and more valuable and thus they constantly learn and improve themselves.
• They communicate before, during, and after with all involved.
• They see feedback as “information to improve” and not as “criticism.”  Hence, they yearn it and constantly ask for more:

What can I do better?

What can I improve?

• They don’t blame others and take full responsibility for their actions, decisions, mistakes, etc.
• They typically begin with the “end” in mind:

What’s the goal, they ask?

What is the purpose?

• They pay attention and focus on the “vital few” or on those areas that yield the biggest “bang for the buck.”
• They tend to also network and share knowledge and become great team players.
• They are self-assured and confident and yet remain quite humble.
• They place their customer (internal or external) as number one.
• They exhibit high levels of passion for what they do.
• They align their talents and passion (things they love to do) with the needs of their clients and they under commit and over deliver by managing expectations.

Here are some questions to ponder:

• Are you one of these individuals?  Would you want to be?
• What do you need to think and believe in order to become one of them?
• What changes would you need to make in the way you think and feel in order to become like them?
• What good reasons can you come up to motivate you to take action?
• How would you feel if you became one of them?
• What if this could ultimately result in 20, 30 percent (or more) money in your pocket?
• What could you accomplish with that extra money now or in the future?
• What would that mean to you?

Remember money is the result of your attitude, motivation, strategies, knowledge, skills and actions.  Thoughts lead to feelings.  Feelings lead to action.  Action leads to results.   Think the right way, feel the right way, act the right way and you should get what you want and maybe even more!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

• Information
• Processes
• Skills
• Sub-Capabilities: methods, tools, systems, etc.
• Other: control parameters, attitudes, etc.

Let me illustrate the model using our Problem Prevention Capability as an example.  Let’s start with Information and work our way down the list.

Information: What information is necessary in order to predict and prevent problems from occurring?

The goal is to obtain and have available the right and most accurate information at the right time in order to prevent the most problems possible.  Thus, we ask these two questions for each of the segments we service:

• What are the most common problems in database environments we encounter?
• What information do we need to have in order to prevent them?

Once we gather this information, we can segment the responses by the level of maturity required to obtain and act upon such information.  We have chosen four information categories to organize the information at each level:

• Goals
• Strategies
• Plans
• Data

We focus our attention on information associated with two principal areas that are our key value drivers:

• Database availability
• Database performance

We then apply the same approach to the rest of the model components that remain:  Processes, Skills, etc.  Then, we ask a set of questions about each component and identify key categories to determine the maturity level at which each belong.  This provides a rich set of management items to focus our attention and investment on.  The capability maturity optimization process requires hard work and constant attention, but it produces incredible results and the payback is solid at many levels.

This is the last post of this series.  I hope you have followed along and gotten some value out of it!  Thanks for reading along.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In order to optimize, you need to know where you are and have some sense of where you need or want to go.  In other words, you need to know what level the capability is operating at currently and what level you need or want it to operate.  This assumes that a maturity road map exists to describe the aspects of the capability that need to be actualized at each level.

As I had mentioned in a prior related post, we chose five key aspects for the Remote DBA Experts’ maturity road map:

• Information
• Processes
• Skills
• Sub-Capabilities: Methods, tools, systems, etc.
• Other: Control parameters, attitudes, etc.

Let me use the Information aspect to illustrate the Optimization Process a little better.  The idea is that at level one there is certain information required for the capability to perform at that level and, as the capability matures, more information will be necessary.  At level five, all information that makes the capability perform most efficiently and effectively  shall be available to those who need it within the capability.  Because business is dynamic, the information needed for each capability will change and thus requires on-going optimization even after reaching level five performance.  This will also be the case for Processes, Skills, and the rest of the key capability aspects in the road map or model you use.

Furthermore, parts of the key aspects will also need attention.  For example, you may not need additional information but the source or method of information delivery may need optimization.  That is why it is an ongoing effort to improve or even maintain your level of performance.  Limited resources necessitate careful assessment of the things that make the biggest difference.  That way efforts and resources can be applied at the highest leverage points in the system and provide the biggest bang for the buck!

What do you need to optimize?

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

1. Initial
2. Managed
3. Defined
4. Predictable
5. Optimizing

A typical graphical representation of the maturity model looks something like this:

SOURCE: CMU SEI “Improving Workforce Capabilities with the People Capability Maturity Model”

The items under each level indicate the requirements for that level. For our approach to maturity at Remote DBA Experts, we developed six key service delivery Maturity Aspects as categories for each of the five levels:

• Key Information
• Key Processes
• Key Skills
• Key Sub Capabilities
• Key Tools
• Key Other

The concept is to identify the key aspects expected at each level of maturity as we move up the maturity continuum from level 1 to level 5.  For example, what key information, etc. is needed to operate at level one (or the minimum information needed to be in business).

Once all levels of maturity are defined, you move to assess your maturity.  In our case the assessment process involves the following three criteria:

• Approach: The approach taken to implement an aspect
• Implementation: How well implemented it is
• Results:  The results produced

This framework allows you to focus on the vital few aspects and actions that yield the best results to enable your key capabilities to reach the highest maturity level and remain at that optimized level.  That is they bottom line!

In my next post, I will delve into the Optimization subject.  Hope you’ll come back to read it.  THANKS!!!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

Proactiveness Capabilities

Proactiveness is first and foremost an attitude. Thus, it comes from people and it starts with them.  That means we must look for this attitude in our recruiting and hiring process.  We hire individuals who are technically capable and meet many other criteria (see our hiring criterion here).  That is where it all starts.  Furthermore, we provide the individual with the ability to be most proactive by enabling proactivity with key capabilities.  In the case of Proactiveness, our primary aim is internal and customer problem prevention.

In order to be most efficient and effective at problem prevention, we focus our attention and investment on the key capability components:

• Key Information
• Key Processes
• Key Skills
• Key Sub Capabilities
• Key Tools
• Other

The first step is to identify these key items and then to ensure they are in place and available to the team.  This is where we focus our optimization efforts.

Here at Remote DBA Experts, our monitoring capability is the primary tool that enables us to predict and prevent problems and we place significant effort to that end.  In fact, this year we invested a lot of money and attention to this capability.  We have also established a new internal organization that is completely focused on problem prevention and customer responsiveness.  It is working out to be one of our best ideas ever!

Responsiveness Capabilities

Like Proactiveness, Responsiveness is also an attitude we look for in the folks we recruit and hire. In this area we have also made significant efforts and investments recently to enhance this capability.  We implemented a new CRM that is the key to improving and maintaining our ability to respond to our customers both internal and external.

Responsiveness involves four key aspects:

• Acknowledging
• Timely Action
• Updating
• Closure

Our Responsiveness Capabilities are focused on enabling these aspects. This ensures that we acknowledge customer requests quickly, take timely action, keep the customer informed along the way, and close the matter to the satisfaction of the customer.

Effectiveness Capabilities

For Remote DBA Experts, Effectiveness means accomplishing two primary things for our customers: Ensure the highest database environment availability and performance possible. That is it!  That is what being effective means to our team.

Our Effectiveness Capabilities focus on two areas: Activities and Tasks.

Activities

Activities are what I call the set of “meta-activities” people must do effectively in order to accomplish value delivering tasks and achieve the key results customer expect.  Effectively completing them is part of the sequence.

• Effective Preparation
• Effective Learning
• Effective Communication
• Effective Documentation
• Effective Search
• Effective Analysis
• Effective Collaboration
• Effective Research

To execute these activities most effectively, you need to clearly define each.  You need to know and understand what Effectiveness means for every one of them.  You need to know which of them are more vital to the end result.  Spending too much time and/or effort on less vital activities will affect their proverbial strength as a link in the chain.

Tasks

Tasks are what customers hire us to do for them.  Each of these tasks breaks down into many more “sub-tasks” for the lack of a better term.  However, the three tasks listed below capture the essence of the services we deliver.  Their effective completion is the ultimate contributor to us being most effective as a whole.  Database availability and performance directly depend on how well we proactively monitor and maintain the databases under our stewardship.  Furthermore, effectively preventing and resolving problems enhances our effectiveness.

• Effective Database Monitoring
• Effective Problem Management (prevention and resolution)
• Effective Database Maintenance

I hope this post gives you a better sense of our Key capabilities and how we go about them.  In my next post, I will delve into the Capability Maturity subject.  Thanks for reading!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO