7th Stage (Security) of IS growth, Part II

A little background:

Now that you’ve been in the CIO’s position for your first quarter, it is time to prepare for your first review with the board of directors.  The agenda for the IS presentation will cover key factors that you discovered in your operations, your accomplishments and your plans for the next year.  Since this is the quarter for your next year’s budget, it should contain the funding needed to accomplish the IS plan.

One of the key factors in the review of your operations was discovering the lack of security focus and non-compliance issues that made the operations vulnerable to unwanted intrusion in your network.  Listed in your accomplishments is the Security Assessment study and recommendations provided by PathMaker Group when you engaged them for a study of your IS environment.  One of their recommendations was to deploy IBM’s Security products for managing Identify and Application Access in your enterprise network.  This is an important undertaking as your company will replace the outdated security monitoring with IBM’s Showcase Solution to keep unwanted intruders out while making it easier for the authorized users to have easy access to their applications.  As a result of PathMaker Group’s findings and recommendations, you asked them to submit a proposal for the corrective solution using IBM Security Products and PMG Professional Services to deploy them in your IS Network.

This section of your review was very well received by the board of directors and they gave you the approval to get started.

Getting started:

With the go-ahead and notification to PathMaker Group that their proposal was approved, you now want to select your team to work with the PMG team.  In your experience with other similar projects, you will need a Project Manager, a Security Architect, and technical leads for both the network and the applications as a core team to work with the PMG team.

As you gather the team for the project, you recall your experience with different personalities and how people react to each other on a team.  The following covers many considerations in selecting the team.  It is the background to consider for the team members’ selection.

Because people are all individuals, they have a mixture of different personality traits with some more predominate than others.  We wonder why some people work well together and others seems to clash.  The secret is some personalities complement each other while others don’t. Knowing this helps us to understand how some teams work well together and other teams have conflicts.  This is key when we establishing a team for our projects.  Another secret is some people understand their own personality traits and learned how they can adjust to be compatible and complementary with other team members.

These personalities were observed years ago and various models were illustrated describing them.  The four basic personalities are (A) task oriented, (B) people oriented, (C) compliance oriented, and (D) creative oriented.  While people have some of all four, they usually have one dominating over the others.  When building a team the mixture of all four tends to produce a well-functioning team.

For example:

(A)  Two are more people that have task orientation personalities could lead to conflicts in the same project unless they recognize it and use self-control for the good of the project.  A good example comes forward for those of you who saw a conflict in the movie Patton.  Both General George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery were very task oriented and it took the skills of the Allied Supreme Command to keep them in check.  Both of them were most successful when they were at the top giving orders.

(B)  People oriented with high interpersonal skills can ad to the enjoyment of the project and are very much a part of a successful project.  If everyone has this trait, it can be a lot of fun, but getting the job done could be a problem.

(C)  People oriented with compliance personalities are very valuable to a project by keeping the project and output on track.  Often, they are requested for their insight to issues and compliance with established rules and guidelines.

(D) People with creative personalities contribute new ideas on how to accomplish tasks and find new ideas with “outside of the box” thinking.

This understanding will help in the selection of a winning team.