The importance of "The List"

I am a compliance officer.  I spend my professional life trying to make sense of the workings of a rather loosely structured organization.  More often than not, my job is to fit "our" way of doing things into some defined standard with which we are required to comply.  And more often than not, I manage to do it fairly well, without making my colleagues hate me.  I think this is because I always keep the existing company culture in mind, and don't try to force dramatic change.

The job can be stressful, as it involves interacting with every other department, asking them to define structures, roles, and processes, and then accepting responsibility for ensuring that what is defined becomes reality (or at least a reasonable and believable facsimile that I can "sell" to those who care about such things.)  But I've recently found a way to make it more manageable, by adopting an industry-accepted overall "master" security controls framework and mapping all the other standards to it.  I've hung a poster of this framework on the bulletin board in my office, and informed my team that it is my primary decision-making guide, and things are falling into place.  This may not make any individual task easier, but it helps me to fit all the puzzle pieces together, because I know what the picture is supposed to look like in the end, and I can see where the gaps are and look for the right pieces to fill them in.

Since the concept is working well for me on the job, I am now applying it to my life in general.  (Because that's how I roll.)

In my last post I mentioned defining some long-term goals for myself.  I'll be defining those in much the same way that my security controls framework is defined.  What are the critical things that I need to put in place in order to live a satisfying life?  In the past, I never mapped this out.  I just settled down after college, took a traditional life path and expected to stay on it and be reasonably happy, healthy, and comfortable.  But things change, people change, and I'm now in the unsettling situation of being involuntarily unsettled.  It has taken me a while to accept this, but the life I knew for so long does not exist anymore.  It is time to build a new one, and I am beginning to map out the specs.

I'm not going to force dramatic change on myself.  I have to keep my own "company culture" in mind, and ease myself into the framework once I have defined it.  And if I need to re-write some of the controls, so be it.  (Yeah, this compliance analogy is working for me at the moment.)

For that reason, I won't post "The List" here.  I'll find a way to make it visible and present in the background of my daily life (like the poster on my bulletin board) so I can refer to it when needed and keep my big picture in mind.