This year QWANtify team members continued the tradition for another successful United Way campaign. Our kick-off was attended by 90% of our team. During the kick-off our team campaign manager outlined QWANtify’s corporate objectives, our United Loaned Executive outlined United Way’s objectives and goals, and a Girl Scout representative outlined her organizational goals and the important impact they have on young women.
QWANtify’s team once again rose to the challenge when every single person, 100% of our team, contributed to our 2009 campaign. Individual contributions rose 4.7 % over last year and corporately QWANtify again donated .50 on each dollar given to increase total giving. We have a great team of community leaders at QWANtify; something we’re very proud of.
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I’m so excited for Eric Sorenson, one of our team members. He was recently quoted in a Forte’ Madison article talking about building dialogue with superiors to ease the transition into management.
Check out the Tips for New Managers article.
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Our Community Involvement Committee has come up with some great ideas this year for QWANtify’s involvement in our local communities. Our committee is made up solely of team members. No one from management participates on this committee. That’s the beauty of the committee. They’re given unfettered responsibility to come up with what they feel is the best charitable causes for the company to be involved in.
This Spring, for example, we worked with Project Home painting basements and landscaping several apartment buildings in the Allied Drive neighborhood.
This Fall we’re going to be Salvation Army bell ringers for an entire day at West Towne Mall.
We usually also do a Winter event. Stay tuned to learn what it will be.
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Tammy Adler, QWANtify President/CEO, and Kacie Conroy, QWANtify Business Analyst, are very excited to have recorded a Podcast for Jody Glynn-Patrick’s and Joan Gilman’s On Air with InBusiness Podcast, August 28, 2008.
Tammy and Kacie talk about the information technology student shortage facing colleges, how it may impact businesses in the future, and how they’re attempting to education young women about information technology roles available to college graduates. More specifically, Kacie speaks about her GET IT program, how she came up with the idea, what the program provides, and local response to the program.
To learn more about the program, see.
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Yesterday our team went to the Second Annual QWANtify Brewer’s Baseball Game. This event is proving to be a very important annual team building activity. It is an opportunity for our team to gather for the day, talk about anything other than work, joke, laugh, tailgate and enjoy a wonderful National pastime.
Our entire team attended the activity, encouraged by an extra paid day off compliments of QWANtify. We once again left our office at 8:30 a.m. for the 1:05 p.m. opening pitch. Upon arriving at Miller Park, each team member was given a QWANtify bag chair for attending.
Once again the weather cooperated with sunny skies and warm temperatures. The Brewer’s won, which didn’t hurt.
This event is a great team building exercise as are many of our events. I hope it helps build a culture where team members are excited and passionate about their work, innovation is rewarded and everyone strives for excellence, team members are empowered and their judgment is trusted, team members are supported, and the team as a whole unselfishly serves and supports our communities.
I still honestly believe there is more to business than counting the number of billable hours and constantly cracking the “you have to bill” whip. While we all need to remain good business people, it is incumbent upon us to recognize the importance of leading by example and letting everyone know we value them as team members.
Team building reinvigorates everyone, lets them know we really care about them, and it is an integral part of building the type of culture where everyone thrives; something very important to us.
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Kacie Conroy, one of our team members, and I traveled today to UW-Whitewater to observe and present to their CyberGirlz Camp. This FREE Technology Camp for Middle School Girls runs from July 28 – August 1, 2008.
The camp is meant to be a hands-on learning experience for girls entering 6th and 7th grade. It is a fun and exciting way for girls to learn how to:
• Build your own website
• Create a digital scrapbook
• Learn to animate objects
• Build a computer
• Turn digital pictures into a video slideshow
• Share digital creations with friends
QWANtify monetarily sponsored the camp and Kacie delivered her GET IT program. The program teaches, through roll playing, the different types of information technology careers available upon college graduation. Kacie starts by briefly explaining the different roles (i.e., project manager, business analyst, quality assurance analyst, software developer, software architect, graphic designer). She then begins the roll playing exercise by explaining to the students she is interested in them making her a sandwich. She asks them to become business analysts and ask her questions about the type of sandwich she wants. What type of bread, is it toasted, does it have meat, what type of meat, what type of dressing, etc. Once the students get the hang of the exercise, Kacie proceeds with the next exercise. She has drawn a landscape picture. She asks the girls to ask her questions about the landscape. Is it daylight? Is the sun out? What color is the sun? Is it summer? Are there trees? What type of trees? Are there houses, how many, what color, do they have chimneys? Are there any fences, pets, what type of pets? Are there clouds in the sky? Is the grass short? This exercise goes on for 10 minutes, rotating among the girls to ask questions. The idea is the girls ask questions, listen to other’s questions and take notes. After the question and answer session is complete, the girls have five minutes to draw the picture Kacie has in her folder. The point is to demonstrate to students the role of the information technology business analyst. After the pictures are drawn, they are all gathered, mixed together and two are randomly drawn for a bright orange GET IT t-shirt.
There were about 40-50 girls at the camp. I was amazed and very pleased to see how excited they were about Kacie’s GET ITTM program. Kacie’s on to something here. We really need to, in a very simple way, educate students about the different information technology roles. As a result of the role playing, many students voiced their interest in information as a college and career vocation. Some were excited about business analysis, some about quality assurance; others were excited about graphic design or project management. These students, mind you, had no idea what information technology was prior to attending the GET ITTM roll playing exercise.
Kudos to Kacie and the University of Whitewater for putting on such a wonderful FREE summer camp.
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Today a new team member joined our company. We hired them three weeks ago from a competitor. After three-weeks notice to their former company, we were ecstatic to have them join our team. The team member is a very good business person and technologist.
Now here comes the rub. The team member’s previous consulting company thought it was in their best interest not to notify the client of the person’s departure until two days prior to the employee’s last day at the client’s. If I were the client, who so loyally stood by the consulting company and thought they’d do the same by me, I would have been livid that I only learned of the team member’s departure two days prior to their actual departure.
It amazes me how many times I hear of consulting companies treating their clients in similar manners. They take and take from the clients without returning common courtesy to those same clients. It makes me wonder why so many clients put up with this type of treatment.
I was taught at a very young age, with re-enforced throughout my career, that everyone is our customer, no matter what the situation. This simple core value means we should always be as courteous to clients as we hope others are to us.
Evidently the consulting company our new team member left doesn’t believe these core values are important. They should, because competition is so pervasive and clients have many choices among a wide array of consulting companies.
I really don’t care what our peers do or how they treat their customers. My only concern is for the customer. Suffice it to say we never treat our customers with such total disregard.
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I’ve talked in the past about the GET IT (Girls Educating Themselves about Information Technology) roll-playing exercise one of our members, Kacie Conroy, created. Kacie has met with three different local Girl Scout Troops, working with each of them to learn different information technology roles so they understand what types of information technology careers are available to them upon college graduation.
During these exercises, Kacie gathered some startling statistics that I want to share with you. She has asked the 21 girls, from her three sessions, a series of questions prior to and after each role-playing exercise. Here is a synopsis of the questions along with corresponding responses.
At the beginning of the sessions, none of the girls were familiar with information technology or the Business Analyst, Database Analysts, Technical Writer, Quality Assurance Analyst roles, though some had heard of the Project Manager, Developer and Graphics Designer roles.
Only 1 out of 21 students was willing to consider Information Technology as a career prior to the roll-playing exercise, and 17 of the 21 students wanted to add it to their list of potential careers after the exercise.
None of the girls felt, either prior to or after the roll-playing exercise that boys were a better fit for information technology roles. This pleased me.
While I didn’t think most middle school students would have heard about specific roles in information technology, I was shocked that none of them, prior to the exercise, could define what information technology was and that only one would consider information technology.
After the roll-playing exercise, students had a much better appreciation of the definition of information technology and whether the field interests them.
If young students know nothing about the information technology field, how may we better educate them? It begins with something as small as these roll-playing exercises and must extend to educators, guidance counselors, parents and all of us.
The one thing that is not going to change in business is the need for easily assessable information, and Information Technology is the answer to this challenge.
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