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Role #1: Executive
 
Client: Board / CEO

Time allocation: 10%

Deliverables
  • Technology vision
  • Long term high - level roadmap
  • Technology to Business alignment
  • Innovation to Revenue business case
  • Strategic innovation, research and competitive positioning 

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Responsibilities
  • Talk about future possibilities in a positive way. Creates milestones and symbols to rally support behind the vision. Articulates the vision in a way everyone can relate to. Creates organization-wide energy and optimism for the future. Shows personal commitment to the vision.
  • Has a strong bottom-line orientation. Persists in accomplishing objectives despite obstacles and setbacks. Has a track record of exceeding goals successfully. Pushes self and helps others achieve results.
  • Represent technology within the senior leadership team of the organization.
  • Strategic leader working with company executives to identify important technical trends in the future and how these will impact the company and the industry. 
  • Businessperson who measures innovation, research and experimentation by the company's revenues and future competitive advantage.
  • Assess technological aspects of major strategic initiatives.
  • Align the company's product mix with business priorities.
  • Advise on the long-term technical strategic direction of the company and where to, or to not, make large strategic technical bets.
  • Oversee technology steering committees.
  • Provide with different “options” on the technical direction of the company and provide sufficient information for deciding what is the best option to take at any given time.
  • Be a sounding board by providing a neutral view, putting the company’s long-term interests above all else.
  • Participate in the assessment of candidates for mergers and acquisitions, investors, partners, suppliers.
  • Provide objective insights about strategic technology challenges in the business and economic environment
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Role #2: Administrator
 
Client: CFO / COO

Time allocation: 10%

​Deliverables
  • IT Budgets / Financial objectives
  • Roadmap versus resources
  • Governance, policies and standards
  • Intellectual property
  • Service level agreements
  • Supplier / partner due diligence
  • Optimized system efficiency

Metrics 
  • Annual sales / change in sales / per employee 
  • Annual profits / change in profits / per employee / % of sales 
  • Capital expenses / as a % of sales 
  • R&D expense / future revenue = efficiency
  • Reduction of costs 
  • Discretionary IT Spend)/(Total IT Headcount
  • Percentage of discretionary spend categorized by type. Infrastructure | . Transactional | Informational | Strategic
  • Percentage of projects using enterprise HW/SW standards
Responsibilities
  • Sets objectives to align with broader organizational goals. Breaks down objectives into appropriate initiatives and actions. Stages activities with relevant milestones and schedules. Anticipates and adjusts effective contingency plans.
  • Develop, track, and control the Information Technology annual operating and capital budgets for purchasing, staffing, and operations.
  • Accurately evaluate vendor proposals and claims for their products, facilitating the selection and identification of technologies to enable strategic innovation.
  • Guardian and watchdog over the organization's selection and use of vendor technologies. 
  • Oversee and develop patenting of intellectual property, inventions, and business processes.
  • Direct the development and execution of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
  • Analyze, establish and improve upon technology standards and processes across the organization to maintain a technological and competitive edge within the market. 
  • Coordinate among business units’ technological efforts to leverage synergies and create economies of scale. 
  • Ensure continuous delivery of technical services through oversight of service level agreements with end users and monitoring of systems, programs, and equipment performance. 
  • Ensure equipment and software operation adheres to applicable laws and regulations. 
  • Develop business case justifications and cost/benefit analyses for technology spending and initiatives. 
  • Review hardware and software acquisition and maintenance contracts and pursue master agreements to capitalize on economies of scale. 
  • Define and communicate corporate architecture, procedures, policies, and standards for the organization for acquiring, implementing, and operating new business-enabling technology systems, equipment, and software in support of all business operations. 
  • Provide technical due diligence of partner technologies and acquisition targets to make sure they properly fit with the company’s platforms, offerings, and culture.
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Role #3: Director / Coach
 
Client: Employees

Time allocation: 20%

​Deliverables
  • Services proposition
  • Job descriptions
  • Culture definition
  • Systems architecture
  • Continuity and Security plan

Metrics
  • Team Utilization: Do people have enough work?
  • 30/60/90 Day Team Utilization: Do we have enough work coming up?
  • Team Net Promoter Score: Is our team happy?
  • Number of hours/days of training per person/team/area. 
  • Number of projects in each phase and average times in each stage (view of overall project pipeline, identify bottlenecks, etc.) 
  • Percentage of projects who deliver 100% of their planned scope or %scope delivered.  On-time/on-budget doesn’t mean as much as “did i deliver what the business needed?” 
  • Achievable milestones 
  • Number of hours/days of training per person/team/area.
  • Average hours/days to close critical/high support issues
  • Employee turnover
  • Internal customer satisfaction
  • Specific departmental metrics (IT, Development, BI, QA, Infrastructure, Security, Support, Production, Project management, Product management...)
Responsibilities
  • Works cooperatively with others across the organization to achieve shared objectives. Represents own interests while being fair to others and their areas. Partners with others to get work done. Credits others for their contributions and accomplishments. Gains trust and support of others.
  • Relates comfortably with people across levels, functions, culture, and geography. Acts with diplomacy and tact. Builds rapport in an open, friendly, and accepting way. Builds constructive relationships with people both similar and different to themselves.
  • Forms teams with appropriate and diverse mix of styles, perspectives, and experience. Establishes common objectives and a shared mindset. Creates a feeling of belonging and strong team morale. Shares wins and reward team efforts. Fosters open dialogue and collaboration among the team.
  • Manager of corporate research projects and investments.
  • Build capabilities and a research organisation and target technologies that have a direct contribution to the company's financial performance.
  • Build and implement the full technology strategy.
  • Consider whether great technology can be manufactured efficiently, priced competitively, delivered to the customer, and whether it will be a product that a customer will embrace. 
  • Continually check to ensure the company is continuing on the path to achieving technical vision.
  • Implement different development methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, Hybrids)
  • Rally the engineering organization towards the long-term technical goals of the company.
  • Create an environment in which others are enabled to do outstanding and valuable work.
  • Develop and maintain a sustainable, positive and delivery focused culture.
  • Lead by personal example and encourage all employees to conduct themselves according to not only corporate standards, policies, and laws, but also those standards associated with being a good human being.
  • Supervise recruitment, development, mentoring, retention, and organization of all technical staff in accordance with corporate budgetary objectives and personnel policies.
  • Inspire new engineers to join the engineering organization and must help in the sourcing/identification of such talent.
  • Set and maintain the technical culture to make sure the company can continue to retain and attract top technical talent.
​People don't care what you know until they know how much you care. - Teddy Roosevelt
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Role #4: Innovator
 
Client: Customers

Time allocation: 20%

Deliverables
  • Sprint planning / delivery
  • Full technical roadmap
  • Developed, enhanced, scaled and optimized commercial solutions
  • Long term roadmap

Metrics
  • R&D Investment / Annual change
  • R&D investment per employee, % of sales, % of profits 
  • Introduction of new products 
  • Selection of research areas that prove beneficial 
  • Number of bug fixes and enhancement requests for top 20 systems.
  • Observed tech trends
  • Number of new users or customers, and the cost of finding them
  • Percentage of retained users or customers
  • Profit
Responsibilities
  • Anticipates future trends and implications accurately. Readily poses future scenarios. Articulates credible pictures and visions of possibilities that will create sustainable value. Creates competitive and breakthrough strategies that show a clear connection between vision and action.
  • Comes up with useful ideas that are new, better, or unique. Introduces new ways of looking at problems. Can take a creative idea and put it into practice. Encourages diverse thinking to promote and nurture innovation.
  • Match research ideas with company's strategic plans.
  • Envision, create and champion new opportunities, its application to company products and services while evaluating risk.
  • Assure development of fundamental technologies offering clear competitive advantage for current and future business.
  • Define short, medium, and long term high-level technical goals annually.
  • Develop and own the technical roadmap, product innovation, for R&D and services to achieve those goals annually.
  • Conduct research to remain up-to-date and knowledgeable in regards to industry trends and emerging technologies in anticipation of new business processes and potential future commercial product enhancements.
  • Predict long-term competitive trends due to the constant shifts in the market.
  • Define requirements for new technology implementations, either for ongoing business operations or for enabling technology-based commercial product and services offerings.
  • Constantly push the organization and present ideas leaders might not otherwise consider
  • Support the organization in achieving its strategic objectives by helping design and implement large transformation programs
  • Identify, access and investigate high-risk, high-return technologies possessing potential application within existing businesses or for creating new businesses.
  • Support the marketing team with collateral/white-papers that articulate the company vision.
  • Keep track of all the technology startups in the same space.
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Role #5 : Advocate / Evangelist
 
Client - Time allocation
Sales/Customers - 20%
Marketing/Evangelism/Analysts - 5%
Business Development/Partners - 15%

Deliverables
  • Marketing documentation . Branding / Presence
  • Conferences
  • Client Meetings

Metrics
  • Customer/user measure
  • Client Net Promoter Score: Are our clients happy?
  • New Business Pipeline: How much potential new work do we have?
  • ​External customer satisfaction

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Responsibilities
  • Builds strong formal and informal networks. Maintains relationships across a variety of functions and locations. Draws upon multiple relationships to exchange ideas, resources, and know-how.
  • Serve as public face of technology for the company.
  • Focus on the applications of technology to improve the experience of the customer. 
  • Leverage technology to create a competitive advantage for the company through its relationship with customers.
  • Promote the company to governmental, academic, marketing, media outlets and professional organizations.
  • Communicate with external parties, engaging in industry groups to promote the company, gain useful insight into the industry's needs and capture useful data. 
  • Represent the company at select technical associations to re-enforce the company’s presence and voice with partners.
  • Inspire/excite people internally around the long-term vision of the company, as well as convince outsiders that this is where the world is going to be, and that our company is the best choice to take them there.
  • Speak with authority about the market needs, must be credible with customers, and must be able to articulate the business value and ROI to a variety of audiences.
  • Listen to customer needs; quickly understand their issues; and give good advice on the company’s products to the customers.
  • Partner with the sales organization to effectively close customer accounts.
  • Participate in customer meetings to articulate the long term technology road map hence strengthening the customer’s confidence that our company is leading the industry.
  • Evangelize the company vision and technical direction through conferences, speaking engagements, and press/media/analyst activities.
  • Maintain good relationships with designated key industry analysts.
  • Support the marketing team in building a large active community around the company’s products (meetups, hackathons, industry conferences, etc).
  • Maintain social engagement marketing through twitter, blog posts, articles / whitepapers, etc.