Career advice: Preparing for after the recession

Norm Fjeldheim

Title: Senior vice president and CIO

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Company: Qualcomm Inc., San Diego

Fjeldheim is this month's Premier 100 IT Leader, answering questions about preparing for after the recession, dealing with severe cutbacks and more. If you have a question you'd like to pose to one of our Premier 100 IT Leaders, send it to askaleader@computerworld.com and watch for this column each month.

New projects are hard to come by at my company these days, but I feel that when the economy improves, the dam will burst and we'll be flooded with initiatives. What would a wise integrator do during these relatively quiet times to prepare for the better days ahead? My thoughts would be to work on improving your "tool box" -- investing in tools to help your company put together and implement its SOA environment, integrate internal and external clouds, roll out SaaS solutions, deploy virtualized environments, etc. Tools you develop now will enable you to put together stronger proposals in the future, at a lower cost. The same thing holds true for developing your skill sets in key technologies, again to improve your competiveness down the road.

One other area to consider: open-source solutions. Having strong knowledge of open-source alternatives to purchased products can give you an edge over competitors that are only offering purchased package solutions. Giving your customers options, especially a lower-cost option, should help you get work from companies that can't afford a purchased package solution. Open-source solutions are going to be more and more viable in the future.

My company is in a highly seasonal business, and we've always hired contractors starting in June to help out, especially with the Web site, maxing out in November and December and then terminating them all abruptly in January. This year, no contractors. Already, the workload for the staff is crippling morale, but management says demand will be lower this season and we can't afford the contractors. I'm afraid we'll all be burned out before the holidays arrive. What can we do? This is a tough one; these types of downturns always are. I'm assuming that the rest of the company is dealing with similar demands. If so, the messaging to your team should be along the lines of, "We are all in this together." Getting your team some recognition for their efforts is important. If you can get the CEO or other high-level executives to stop by and talk about the business and the importance of the work on the Web site, that would be good for morale. At Qualcomm, we use something we call "QualStars" for exceptional work. There are different levels of "gifts" tied to these, anything from a $20 Starbucks card to a $1,000 check from the company. These are always given out publicly, sometimes to each member of a team for exceptional work as a project team. Sounds like your team might be able to earn something like this for everyone on the team.

If the team is working a lot on evenings or weekends, then providing some other benefits can also be of value. On a big project we did a while back, we had pizza delivered every Saturday. Toward the end, when it really got crazy, we also provided dinners every weeknight. We also set up break rooms where people could unwind. We loaded it up with games, puzzles, even a pingpong table, and of course, plenty of food and drinks. Coffee, popcorn, Mountain Dew, Jolt Cola, M&M's, Red Bull, etc. Anything with sugar and/or caffeine.