Project Management and Execution

In fast-paced environments where the transparency on potential barriers or risks is critical, daily management is a practice that can quickly bring line of sight to the forefront and unearth potential challenges early. Since arriving at Philips, I have learned to understand the power in daily management, not only from an individual standpoint during extremely busy times, but how that power can grow exponentially and drive trust, confidence and productivity when it becomes a shared practice across a team.

Continuous improvement is the key to success. I don’t think there are many who would disagree with that. At Philips, this is an integral part of our culture for 2 major reasons. First, we must continuously improve to stay in business (a necessity for any company). Second, we must continuously improve to continue being able to help our customers. Not only does a Lean-Agile culture encourage these necessities, it also encourages us to continue engaging with our customers, going to their “gemba” and truly learning more about their challenges, the context surrounding them and how innovations can make our solutions even more helpful to them.

One of the best ways to influence others is through data. One of the best lessons I’ve learned during my time at Philips is to let the data do the talking when you feel as though your voice isn’t heard. I invested several hours into doing a full product market analysis on our product competition, market share, win-loss ratio, implementation model, software pricing model, profit margins and more. I remain surprised to know how many people involved in the business were surprised to see some of what I uncovered. Since then, it's not only helped our team work more cohesively together, but we've been able to refer back to that analysis, keep it updated and continue to reference it in comparisons and new report-outs.

Especially in my time at Philips, I’ve learned that success is no destination, and it’s certainly no straight line. It’s a journey, and sometimes one to be taken day by day. I had a very successful 2021 at Philips, but much of it was spent "head-down" working through day-to-day challenges. At the end of the year, I felt proud to not only look back at the wins I was happy to have achieved, but also at the many headwinds and unknowns my colleagues and I were facing. It has given me the confidence to understand that, through collaboration, transparency and teamwork, we can find ways to meet our goals, even if that “way” isn’t what we thought it would be.