Employee Spotlight: Sui Lau - SYSCOM GLOBAL SOLUTIONS

FEATURED EMPLOYEE

How Sui Lau’s Tireless Drive Makes SYSCOM Better

Role:	Project Manager
Division:	ESI (Enterprise System Integration)
Location:	NY Office
Expertise:	Waterfall and Agile methodology, procurement
Experience:	7 years at SYSCOM
Hobbies:	Digital art

Role

Project Manager

Division:

ESI

Location:

NY Office

Expertise:

Waterfall and Agile methodology, procurement

Experience:

7 years at SYSCOM

Hobbies:

Digital art

When Sui Lau started at SYSCOM Global Solutions in 2014, being a Project Manager on the ESI team wasn’t her goal. She was an associate on the Sales-Operations team for six years first, learning valuable skills. “Sales operation was a great learning opportunity,” says Sui. “I gained first-hand experience maintaining vendor relations and developed my communication and coordination skills.” Those fundamental skills, combined with her artistic nature (she studied design and sculpture in school), helped her understand the needs of the person behind the lead. As a sculptor, she knows how to envision an end state and work with the material in front of her to bring that vision to life. And as a procurement manager, she learned how to not just close a sale, but begin a long-term partnership that would continue to reap benefits for both parties for years to come.

That work inspired her to make a change. She wanted to go farther than the close of a sale—she wanted to work with those clients, understand their problems, and help solve them. Much like a client’s needs and goals evolve, so too were Sui’s. And just as Sui wanted to navigate her clients’ shifting needs alongside them, she found that SYSCOM wanted to do the same with her. “SYSCOM has been so willing to invest” in her career, according to Sui. “They encouraged me to pursue a Project Management certificate and enrolled me in classes, and want me to learn more about the technical side as well. And the more I learn, the more interesting it all becomes.”

Helping talented team members learn and grow as their career goals change has proven beneficial to SYSCOM and our workforce time and time again. It’s far better to be flexible and help our staff navigate that process than to lose talent to career shifts. Not only do we keep that experience in-house, we find that the workers we do help end up even more committed to our team. For Sui, “that flexibility is very beneficial, both to young people and to people looking to make a shift.” She sees a future here. “I can build something here. I can have opportunity here.”

It also influences how Sui approaches her own projects, too. For example, when strategizing and implementing IT security solutions, she says: “I don’t believe we will ever have a ‘fully secure’ system.” A good IT partner has to understand it’s not a one-time solution, but “a continuous learning process. The same way we have defenders, we’ll always have people trying to break in.” Just as keeping a talented employee happy is an ongoing process requiring communication, listening, and collaboration, so too is securing a client’s IT stack.

Improvement is a continuous process
that never ends.

Sui Lau

Project Manager

Sui focuses on learning what she doesn’t know or can’t control first, and builds her projects’ strategies around that. In a recent project, her team had to replace expired hardware for an end user in another state. While it’s a service SYSCOM has done countless times before, the pandemic threw her a unique curveball: no one on her team could physically be on site to install the set up. They had to innovate, figure out what they had available to them, and work to solve for the rest.

“Due to travel limitations, we had to complete the task remotely,” says Sui. “We had to use a different communication approach, planning protocol, and diagram structures. I was excited, but unsure how we’d pull it off.” The key was to figure out how to simplify the process so that the end user could do it without shouldering too much of the load themselves. “It was a smaller project, but we communicated extensively, provided detailed diagrams, and put together a step by step guide. We made it as simple as putting together a bookshelf you got from the store.”

“We weren’t making this guide for people like us, who do this kind of thing regularly. We were making it for someone who has no familiarity with this, someone who pays people like us to do it.” They went out of their way to address any questions and avoid as much human error as possible—and in the end, it worked. “In the current climate, we have to be innovative in how we provide our services without compromising quality. I would love to do this more in the future: implementing creative approaches to each project, so it’s not just one method, or one set of steps.”

In a world of technology that’s progressing at an ever-increasing rate, we need more people like Sui—not just a tech expert, but someone who can bridge divides and facilitate communication. Sui sums it up very simply: “Improvement is a continuous process that never ends, and lines of communication need to remain respectful and open.”

It works for Sui as a Project Manager and it works for SYSCOM as a global provider of IT solutions. And maybe, it could work for all the rest of us, too.

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