Be a Solutionist!

This post is a bit of a culmination of a few disparate things that I’m going to try to weave together…we’ll see if it works.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I subscribe to a feed from Medium. In my case, it’s largely articles around Program Management, software development, cloud computing, and issues facing technical workers. As I reflect on the recent stories I’ve seen, they frequently fall into a bucket of people complaining about one of the following:

·         Agile is terrible and wrong

·         My company (or companies in general) return to the office plans are bad

·         My boss / coworker / different generational employee is horrendous

As I read thru these articles, they do a great job outlining the problem or the top five reasons in support of their argument but they one thing they lack is any sort of positive or actionable outcome. We all can complain and, apparently, we can do it on a large-scale platform like Medium but there’s no value add here.

Break Break

Recently, the company I work for, Iron EagleX, Inc. , was acquired by General Dynamics Information Technology . I’m really excited about the future and potential this opens up. As part of the due diligence, with a handful of the companies that were interested, many had a perspective that IEX is a services company. By that, I mean that IEX is, essentially, just a staffing agency where we get positions on federal contracts, and we hire people and put them in those positions. If the term “butts in seats” means anything to you, you know. But IEX isn’t that – not in the work we pursue and not in the culture that we build. IEX is a solutions company – we deliver solutions for our customers. Sometimes this is a hard concept to grasp in a space where companies are usually “services” companies or “product” companies. IEX would lean towards a “services” company but with very specific direction and execution.

This is a bit of side point though – back to the convergence: Be a solution provider. Whether it’s personally or as part of your job. Deliver solutions to your customers. Want to write a Medium post saying that the way you have experienced the Agile methodology employed sucks? Write about how you fixed it. You don’t want to return to the office and think hybrid is the right answer? Then write about the right solution for that.

And, if you really want to level up, be proactive about your solutioning. Before the problem manifests to drive you nuts, work a solution.

Be a solution provider. Maybe the next term we need is a “solutionist”….no, scratch that.