Politicians vs professionals

This weekend, I volunteered and support my government’s election for a new president in the Prague embassy.
My main impression is that people really want to help and all the volunteers were amazing.
The major takeaways are
⭐️Having a good volunteer team where people know what is expected from them is crucial for the “user experience” of the people who vote;
⭐️Having clear processes by the main election committee is another crucial step;
⭐️Having a smooth process to send the final reports is the thing that really upset the most people (waiting 4 – 5 hours for an approval is a lot);

Process needs to be governed by professionals and not politicians. Otherwise, they won’t ever be optimized. Politicians don’t understand how the real system should function.

There is a big place of improvement for introducing modern technologies to reduce the time for the ballots to be filled in the government system and make the volunteer life easier. At the same time, there aren’t enough incentives to create such system and optimize those processes. This results in people who volunteer to support the election process, especially if it happens for the 4th time in the year, to feel demotivated.

Now imagine that the government is a big corporation. What would happen if it forgets to improve the internal processes and make the life of the employees easier? This will eventually result in good people leaving for a better place.

What big companies usually instead is they accept they could waste the time of their employees in favor of higher revenue. But the reality is that nowadays is so much harder for a company manages to fill a replacement position. The saved money from lousy processes is transformed into a liability and more wasted time and money for the corporation.

If you are a senior company manager, you should not only think about the bottom line but also how you can re-invest some of the company revenue in making the environment better for your employees.

Having a transformation leader or experienced senior project manager as part of your election team should be the default approach if you want to create good processes and a smoother volunteer and voter experience.

Aleks Vladimriov is a Senior Software Developer, recognized Project Manager and Soft-skilled trainer and a coach.

Aleks Vladimirov

Solution Engineering Manager at Thales | Senior IT Professional | Startup Mentor and Product Manager

Bio

Aleks is experienced Product Manager with an engineer background and over 10 years of experience as a software developer. He works with different governments and is responsible for negotiation features and requirements, understanding the customers’ needs and supporting the senior management with regular reports and analysis. He held various positions starting as a software developer, moving to a team leader and software architect.

He strives in waterfall and agile environment alike. He is certified Scrum Master and Prince2 Practitioner and he knows how to design business processes and help teams optimize their work.
During his tenure, he had to wear many hats, prioritizing business requirements, delegating work and mentoring team members, creating mockups with Balsamiq, providing MS Project plan to the senior management.

He had worked in many international teams, located in the same city or distributed in different countries and continents. He had been a team leader of cross functional international team of 8 people.

In his current position, he is very much client focused. He has excellent presentation skills.
He delivers training sessions on presentation skills and leadership and he had helped hundred of people to improve their presentation skills.

He is also interested in creating more positive changes in the workplace by using entrepreneurship skills.
He had won startup competition where his team had validated and develop a business idea from scratch.

In his free time, he writes in his blog about effective product development.