Assignment Paper

Work Experience:
1. I’ve been working in Technology field throughout my career, and now with Cisco Systems for more than 10 years,
2. I’ve worked with different level of customers (Business Leaders, Technology Leaders, Engineers, and End users, through my roles of Systems Engineer, Analytic Team Lead and Software Architect. I get to see each PoV.
3. I’ve also been leading team members through most of my career as team lead and now an Architect. Team members are from US, India, Canada,and Mexico. I enjoy leading them, training them, and guiding them.
Example of my experience
1. As a person who implements technology, I’ve witnessed many challenges when technology and business vision misalign
2. When IT and business goal wasn’t properly communicated or defined concisely to the stakeholders, project get delays, pushback or failure
3. Furthermore, even after the project got completed, I have seen the solution being unused or never fully adopted due to incorrect business alignment.
4. some of root cause of these challenges I have witnessed are:
a. Business leaders were lacking the vision or resources to adopt quickly, thus remaining in older technology, and they became obsolete by competitors with driven by newer / better business / technology
b. In some cases, business leaders were afraid to take risk, because they don’t know how to identify the outcome due to lacking the data (or lacking skill to find or mine the data) to support the need of adoption with positive outcome
c. Also, even when the business leaders, make the adjustment, but was poorly communicated or without the consistence, so the stakeholders in the company were unable to understand how to perform to their highest level to optimize the outcome, or worst, missing the objective
Example to overcome:
5. I helped overcome some of the obstacles stated above
6. On a project that I joined, it escalated to me due to missed milestones and deadlines.
7. After I joined, I found the project was failing mainly due to business leaders and technology leaders in the company misalignment, and didn’t communicate well enough to understand the technology they wanted to put in is not in total alignment with the business outcome they wanted.
8. I worked with our project manager and met with every leader related to the project, to understand their current responsibilities, and draw out the requirements and the outcome.
9. This process helped everyone to come back in alignment with shared common understanding on the business objective. This alignment help drive the project objective and business outcome that was intended.
10. Moreover, I worked with the Project Management team to ensure they are in constant communication with both the leaders and the stakeholder, so they would constantly channel the message to stakeholders and other members related to the project to ensure a higher rate of adaptation when the project got completed..
Why MBA?
11. With my technical background, I would like to increase my business, so I transition myself to a leadership role, and I believe obtaining this MBA will help me accomplish this goal.
Challenge in life:
12. Undergraduate with low GPA – first generation college in my family. My dad and my mom were unemployed at different time during my undergrad, I had to work full time throughout to support me and also help my family.