Jumbo projects

When it comes to leaders, no two are alike. But while there are distinct leadership styles, there are also common traits among those who influence.

An ability to listen well, create or capture a vision, and be creative and open-minded while staying on task are just a few. These three Premier 100 honorees oversaw long-term, multistage projects that put their core leadership qualities to the test.

Ian S. Patterson

• Project at a glance: The online investment company built a 34,000-square-foot data center to help support annual double-digit increases in daily trading volume along with an exponential increase in the amount of so-called market traffic that it receives from financial data providers such as Bloomberg LP and Reuters Group.
• Signature leadership move: Kept up team morale by regularly communicating his support and appreciation.

Before Scottrade broke ground on a US$25 million (AU$25.2 million) data center last year, the company hired a project manager to oversee its biggest project ever and make sure all the deadlines were met.

With the necessary personnel in place, Patterson, 46, focused on other aspects of the project. For example, he made sure that vendors such as Cisco Systems understood the business context of the company's escalating network capacity requirements before

Online brokerages such as Scottrade often handle 10 percent to 20 percent of their daily trading volume right after the opening bell. "When the market opens, we can just get slammed," says Patterson.

The pace of trading can remain frenetic throughout the course of a day when the market is experiencing the kinds of gyrations it has undergone recently. Scottrade has seen a 27 percent year-over-year increase in daily stock trades, from about 170,000 to 190,000 daily trades in 2006 to between 230,000 and 260,000 trades per day this year.

Meanwhile, market data provided by firms such as Bloomberg and Reuters has surged from a high of about 4,200 stock quotes per second on a typical day in the summer of 2006 to 31,000 quotes per second in July 2007, says Patterson.

"This was not just a data center move, but building the [IT] architecture for the growth we see in the future," he explains.

So three months before Scottrade began designing the data center, Patterson brought in a group of Cisco engineers and allowed them to dig into its existing network "to understand our peaks and valleys" of data traffic, he says.

Once the new network was built, Patterson brought in other firms to stress-test it for six weeks before lighting it up. "What we did was test, test and test," says Patterson.

For an online brokerage like Scottrade, which also boasts 311 branch offices, gathering data and managing and executing trades is a business that requires a state-of-the-art data center where downtime isn't an option.

In light of that, Patterson believes his greatest contribution to the 12-month project was communicating each person's role and reminding them how much their contributions were appreciated.

"IT is a Rodney Dangerfield-type job," says Patterson, who left a consulting role at Deloitte & Touche to become Scottrade's CIO in July 2005. "It was really about letting everyone feel and understand that I was there" to support them, he adds.

To ensure that the transition between data centers didn't affect customers, Patterson and his team worked closely with AT&T and Verizon Communications to set up 10 Gigabit Ethernet pipes spanning the eight miles between the two data centers.

That kind of contingency planning paid off. Scottrade works with about 20 "market makers" -- broker-dealer firms that hold shares of a given security in order to facilitate trades. Each of them owns and runs its own data lines into the online brokerage. When Scottrade was ready to go live with the new data center in May, some of the market makers didn't have their communications lines ready. "So we used those redundant lines to transfer their traffic," explains Patterson.

The new data center is "essential" to Scottrade's capacity to offer new products and services, says President and CEO Rodger Riney, who sponsored the project.

Patterson's ability "to motivate and lead our IT staff," he says, "has been key to the successful completion and integration" of the new data center.

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Dwight D. Smith

Senior vice president of information resources, Marriott Vacation Club International, Orlando

• Project at a glance: Marriott Vacation Club International's IT organization moved quickly to identify, select and implement a points-based reservation system to help support a business decision to rapidly expand MVCI's presence in the Asia-Pacific time-share market.
• Signature leadership move: Played the diplomat to ensure that all voices were heard in the priority-setting process.

In late 2005, when Smith, 46, became involved in a fast-track project to support MVCI's expansion plans in the Asia-Pacific region, his biggest responsibilities were centered around balancing the priorities of key stakeholders. "The challenge was to make sure that everyone's criteria for success was going to be addressed," says Smith.

That meant harmonizing the needs of key stakeholders, such as the business executive responsible for MVCI's resort management activities. For Smith, it also meant determining which features were essential for the reservation system for the short term while limiting the level of customization done so that the system could be implemented fast.

"We had to get to market quickly," says Smith. "We demonstrated to people that this wouldn't be the 'be-all, end-all' system. We'd learn from the market and then add functionality" later, he says.

To identify and balance varying priorities from different constituents, Smith met early and often with a mix of business unit and business process leaders.

"The biggest thing that I needed to do in the beginning was make sure what 'success' was for [the Asia- Pacific business team and the business process owners] and create a bridge between what I was seeing going on in the market and what was going on internally at MVCI," says Smith, a 20-year Marriott veteran. That process included promoting the needs of MVCI's IT organization, he adds.

It also required diplomacy to ensure that those priorities were, in fact, balanced. The project "could have easily gone off track if any one group became the dominant voice," says Smith.

For example, he made sure that the software vendor MVCI selected didn't meet or speak solely with executives from its Asia-Pacific business unit and disregard the needs of the company's business process owners when designing the system.

Smith also played a central role in making sure that all of the key stakeholders were involved in the governance of the project. It required those players to study the market to determine which features would need to be added to the system during the first few years after its implementation and mapping that against available funding.

Smith's role in the effort has earned him praise from his boss. "Within an aggressive time frame, Dwight led a highly collaborative, cross-functional business team in implementing the technology required to enable a successful launch," says MVCI President Steve Weisz.

Although MVCI is still getting to know the Asia-Pacific time-share market, Smith says he's upbeat about its accomplishments thus far. "We feel pretty good about it," he says. "We've been able to achieve our plan."

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Adrian M. Butler

Vice president of IT, telecommunications and support services, Accor North America, Carrollton, Texas

• Project at a glance: The hotel operator expanded network bandwidth and made other technology enhancements, such as adding Wi-Fi for its Motel 6 brand.
• Signature leadership move: Marshaled support for a network upgrade by identifying key business-unit leaders.

Butler, 37, knew that the aging frame-relay network that had been supporting Accor North America's Motel 6 business "wasn't fitting the bill anymore," as he puts it.

Problem was, any proposal to upgrade the existing frame-relay network infrastructure would have to compete for funding with other projects throughout the company. And unlike the types of IT projects that would have a more visible impact on the business, a network upgrade didn't carry a clearly quantifiable return on investment, notes Butler.

"So I worked with business counterparts in dissecting their needs and worked through the organization politically," says Butler. "It came down to finding people in the organization with a voice."

For instance, Butler discovered that Accor's training department was in need of additional network bandwidth to support its use of e-learning tools. Through his legwork, he found that other business divisions also required additional network capacity. So he worked with leaders from those departments to solicit their support and began communicating those requirements to the company's top executives.

Butler's efforts included determining what changes Accor needed to make to its network infrastructure to support its expanding business and operational requirements. He did this in large part by listening to business advocates, Accor's technical teams and other people throughout the organization.

To devise a new network strategy, Butler put a lot of energy into educating business executives and key stakeholders on the need for a new network infrastructure -- in terms they could understand.

"I spent a lot of time at the beginning to make them comfortable with the language," he says. That included avoiding technical jargon and clearly explaining the benefits that a network upgrade could deliver.

Accor also wanted to increase its network bandwidth to support new customer relationship management and point-of-sale applications that are currently being added. For instance, Accor is beta-testing property management systems that will be rolled out to 100 Motel 6 locations by the end of this year, says Butler.

Around the same time it was upgrading its network, Accor was working on a separate project to encrypt customers' credit and debit card transactions as required by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard.

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Accor's CEO regarded the PCI effort as an organizational priority. And since Butler's project team was able to deliver encryption capabilities over the new network, the PCI effort, which earlier this year was named a winner in Computerworld's Honors Program, would be a side benefit of the network upgrade.

It took Butler a few months, but he eventually rounded up the support he needed in October 2006.

It certainly helped that he was able to gain buy-in from senior management, starting with his own boss, Accor North America Executive Vice President and CIO Jeff Winslow. "My boss was instrumental in being a sounding board," says Butler.

"Adrian's strategic and technical leadership, vision and ability to align business objectives with IT strategy are keys to the success of this project and our organization," says Jim Amorosia, president and chief operating officer of Motel 6.

"[The project] maps directly back to our customers' perspective," says Butler. "[So] when they come to Motel 6, their data is going to be safeguarded."