A short, sharp tool kit to get you to the top in financial IT

Praising God

'All the deliverables you could want, by delivered by a team
that delivers. Quote me on that.'

Praise everyone except God, Lady Luck, or yourself. By saying one of your team delivered the goods, you make yourself look good for driving that team. Word then gets back to them that they are valued and more good people will want to join your gang. Saying in one week that five different members of your job did well makes you look good. Saying it about yourself make you an arse.

Business correctness

Hopefully you’ve noticed I’ve used the word “delivered” far more often than good writing style might dictate. OK, I’m no Terry Pratchett, but I am making a point here. You need to reprogram your speech for the business buzzwords that currently prevail in your firm and in 2013 “delivery” is the big word. When you warn of potential issues, use faux-Taleb language like “tail risk”, “black swan” and an important synonym for “flexibility” is that you are “buying options”, referring to a direction change as “swapping fixed for floating” is the ideal here. Try harder to use and abuse finance terms to express tech ideas. They get the message across better and make you look good.

This is both important and insufficient. What I can’t tell you is the local business correctness at your bank or hedge fund. At one firm I worked at the BC was “we are a Tier one Bank”. This was hilariously false to me until I discovered I could win arguments simply by saying “as a T1, we should…” which left my opposition faced with the equivalent of a BBC reporter being sceptical of global warming. At your firm at this time, the BC may be “reducing costs”, “expansion”, “China” or “making sure the regulators don’t find out”, but a gentle seasoning of your speech with BC will help your cause at least as much as actually doing anything useful.

Visible productivity

One of the biggest threats to your empire building is too much of IT is invisible, with the worst case being to prevent some problem which consumes money without delivering anything (that word again). MS Project makes this worse by helping you structure projects based upon dependencies, resources, costs etc, whereas your advancement is achieved by orienting your work by observables, not functionality.

Following my doctrine of open-handed integrity, share this with your users. Don’t say “using the Azul JVM will kill the jitter in the CVA valuation engine”, but “you’ll see the valuation adjustment in real time”. Yes I know you can’t do real time in Java, but part of your role is to use words in the way that users understand.

Risk and compliance

Part of the new political reality at banks is that risk and compliance are now taken a bit more seriously. You should be angling to pick up more of the risk projects because for the next few years that is where much of the growth in headcount and budget is going to come from, even though we both know that being part of the process that makes money is always going to be a better place to be than if you are stopping a bigger sum from being lost through poor risk management. For the avoidance of doubt, sticking the word “risk” on proposals and deliverables as much as possible won’t hurt, the idea of course being a project funded as part of risk but wanted by the front office.

As you can read in “How City IT is under attack from politicians, diesel bugs, HR”, compliance is feared more these days, but it will never be loved. The less you get involved with them, the better. The tech reasons are the most obvious, since the monitoring and analysis experience you and your team will get aren’t highly portable. Also, you will find that you have mastered tools and techniques that are used in few other places and are “one-off”, the worst sort of skill to have.

Today there is work running these projects because all the banks and HFs are upgrading, but it will stop dead when they’ve got them going and then just require care and maintenance. You will then find yourself in a glut and that you will “have your expectations reset” on projects that follow on from this. Although I push integrity hard here as good for you, don’t expect it when being offered a “great opportunity to run a strategic project” of any kind - unless you have some visibility on what you will do next. A low-level manager whose reputation is managing something the bank doesn’t want is a dead man walking.

It may feel cool to be on the inside of some compliance issue and I really enjoy my expert witness work when tech and law clash. But I have the luxury that I walk away when it is over with a gentle but firm reminder from corporate counsel that I’m not even allowed to say that I have a non-disclosure agreement with that bank. I’m no longer there to remind anyone that I know their dirty secrets, nor do I really care all that much about which particular individuals get wounded. The people who lose their jobs are not your problem, but those you hurt either by choice or by the side you find yourself on will remember. Like HR, the job of compliance is to protect the senior staff and the firm in that order, not you.

Don’t trust vendors

When you were a junior cog you typically only got to choose between suppliers chosen by others and your spend was pitiful, but you’re now increasingly playing for big money when you start to make major decisions. Do not think for a femtosecond that a vendor who loses out will take it on the chin; if it is a strategic vendor with its claws deep into your firm expect them to go over your head and they’re playing to win.

You need to have prepared your position both financially and politically. So when Oracle wanted a truly outrageous amount of money in my biggest project and tried going over my head big-time, I was able to point out to the CEO (did I say they were hard?) that despite their view that I was going to destroy the bank with my “reckless” choice of Sybase, this was saving a big pile of money. A more senior manager who hadn’t hardened his position against Oracle left the bank shortly after under a bit of a cloud after he tried standing up to their pressure but then buckled. Changing your bank’s database is the corporate equivalent of an organ transplant. Keeping them sweet is often more important to the firm than some junior IT manager.

When the fan is hit

Your role in a clusterfuck has changed and there are two sorts of managers: victims and bounders. If you’ve got to top level management, you will have seen the dark side of IT, be not easily surprised and crave two things: a clear upper bound on how bad it can get then a plausible plan to move out of the shit.

Do not waste time blaming people. Perfection in this political arena is letting others blame each other for a while then grasp the nettle when all about you are losing their heads. Say “I don’t care whose fault it is, the way out is by X”, repeated quietly but firmly, where X has been supplied by the people whose job it is to make you look good. No, not business analysts. Your team must understand that their success and even survival in these tough times for banks is to make you look good so that you can get stuff for them.

One way I established this with my own gangs has been as a lightning rod, when traders or other self-important types start having a go them when they’re trying to deal with something that has gone titsup. It is absolutely necessary for you to defend your people when this happens and not by “having a quiet word” but saying “Joe is sorting this out, you do not shout at him, you shout at me, that’s what I’m paid for”, regardless of whether it’s Joe’s fault in the first place. Especially if it’s his fault.

That gets you credibility from the big swinging dicks - who may shout at you but in a more respectful tone - and loyalty, because when a problem hits you want your team at your back and feeding you ammo because we both know that everyone outside IT treats its chain of command with contempt and the scapegoat-hunters will be talking to them.

Politeness

As a cross between a headhunter and tech journalist I get to meet highly successful people, some of whom have earned reputations for nastiness. We’ve all had bosses who seemed to take pleasure in being rude to juniors. Yet when I meet leaders, some of whom you’ve read about or seen on TV, they are unfailingly polite even before they recognise me from The Register with the respect that commands. That’s not coincidence, you need to save sarcasm and snide questions for when they will have most effect; the contrast with standard politeness then has more effect. ®

Dominic Connor is a City Headhunter whose misspent youth includes being a head of IT, C++ programmer, quant developer and Excel hacker, you can connect to him here.