Day in the life of a tech leader: Chris Helderman, Director National IT, ALDI Stores Australia

What does a typical day look like for you as a tech leader? How do you balance technical responsibilities with leading and inspiring your team?

No two days are the same in my role. My focus is on looking strategically at key topics, supporting key-decision making, and influencing outcomes that drive value for the organisation. Each day is a balance between participating in team, committee, and project meetings, and ensuring that both daily operations and long-term strategies are delivered effectively. Staying close to the operational business allows me to leverage technology to deliver our broader organisational goals.

How do you identify opportunities where technology can create the greatest impact, and what strategies do you use to turn those ideas into reality?

My core skill is to translate business problems to operational and technology based solutions. How are these opportunities found? I personally find success through conversation and close connection to the operational business. Building a strong professional network and trust, enables tailored solutions to enhance business processes. It can be as simple as automating an email workflow, through to delivering a new hardware or software solution. What matters is how you can help enhance and improve ways of working. Staying close to industry news through technology blogs helps me continue to learn and evolve, enabling me to recommend small and large enhancements to support teams.

What’s the toughest challenge you’ve faced as a tech leader, and how did you navigate it without losing focus on your team or goals?

My toughest challenge was losing a key resource mid project, weeks out from the planned pilot go-live date, with key-knowledge leaving to another internal team without the usual handover period.

My approach to help navigate this was in three ways:

• Firstly create the status quo in consultation with project team together. Understand where the team needs support, and what impacts to timelines it can have.
• Secondly, communicate internally and highlight where support may be needed. This establishes trust and enables transparency on timelines and deliverables.
• Lastly, support where you can help to achieve the outcomes. By creating the status quo in the first step, it enables you to offer and provide support to continue to deliver the intended goals.

For me this event highlighted the need for further cross-training, and documentation of key project activities. We were able to deliver the project on-time through the team coming together knowing they had all the support available to be successful.

What’s something most people don’t realize about how tech leaders make change happen in an organization?

One of the most overlooked aspects is the importance of showing the value of change as part of building a compelling business case. Tech leaders translate innovation into measurable benefits, clearly explaining why a change is required. This enables leadership to understand and support changes as part of a company strategy.