Leo de Sousa

Career Paths – Project Management

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Career Path for Project Management Roles There are two job descriptions in the project management career path for our IT department.  The entry level position is Project Manager.  This role supports the Director of Information Technology with small project management functions. The next and final level is Senior Project Manager.  This role continues to provide […]

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Career Paths – Administration

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Career Path for Administration Roles There are two job descriptions in the administrative career path for our IT department.  The entry level position is Administrative Assistant.  This role supports the Director of Information Technology with basic administrative functions. The next and final level is Technical Services Coordinator.  This role continues to provide all the basic […]

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Deming’s 14 Points for Management and Team Development

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Dr W. Edwards Deming’s work on quality control provided guidance for management and team development.  We reviewed Dr W. Edwards Deming’s work on quality control in Japan in one of my project management courses.  Deming is best known for his focus on quality and improvement.  Many of us are familiar with Deming’s Cycle for Improvement: (PDCA) […]

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Building IT Career Paths by Standardizing Competencies

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This post describes our journey to building standardized IT career paths.  When I joined the American University of Sharjah in September 2012, I booked one to one meetings with all my staff.  One of the predominant themes from our talks was the lack of clarity on what their respective career paths looked like.   In […]

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What does Excellent look like? Improving Performance Appraisals

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What does Excellent look like?  I have been doing performance appraisals over the past few weeks for my IT team at  the American University of Sharjah.   In the past, there was no guidance or standards for how to evaluate our team members’ performance consistently.   Previous appraisals were done more to make people feel […]

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Devoted to Dawn

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This post is my devotion to the love of my life, my wife Dawn
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Leadership Quotes

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Here is a compilation of some quotes on leadership that I like.  It is far from being extensive … enjoy! “Real leaders know the difference between leading and commanding. Leading results in people wanting to follow your commands. Commanding results in people having to follow your leadership. Which of those two are most likely to […]

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A Project Portfolio Management Approach

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I introduced an approach to project portfolio managment (PPM) to my IT team at the American University of Sharjah.  After 9 months here, I have a real sense that we were doing too many projects for the resources that we had available.   The result of trying to do too much was that our planning […]

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What are Your Services?

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We discussed Who is Your Customer?  in my previous post, now it is time to start to think about what services we deliver to our community.  After running an exercise on identifying our customers and the categories they fit in, we started to work on the services we deliver to our University community. The IT […]

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Who is Your Customer?

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Who is Your Customer?  This may be easy for many businesses especially if they are selling consumer goods.  If you ask any service organization at a University, the standard response is “Students are our main customers”.  The rationale here is that without our students, we wouldn’t have a university.  At a very high level this […]

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Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus

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When I joined the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah as the Director, I was presented with an organizational structure challenge.  I found out that I had 21 direct reports and that my department did not have a concept of operational management!  I had just come from being the Manager, Business Application Services […]

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