Speaker 0 | 00:01.020
Hi nerds,
Speaker 1 | 00:10.163
I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popularity Nerds. I’m here with Chris Holler, Director of IT at Diamond Sea Trailers. Hi Chris, how’s it going today?
Speaker 0 | 00:19.926
Good, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Speaker 1 | 00:22.507
Excellent. Is this your first time doing a podcast?
Speaker 0 | 00:26.488
Yes, this is pretty much my first time, so I’ll make sure I try to talk a lot and it’s not a whole lot of dead air on your side.
Speaker 1 | 00:33.153
Fantastic. I’m going to start off with our icebreaker segment. It’s called Random Access Memories. I ask a question, you respond with whatever comes to your head first. It’s a fun segment, so just have fun with it. What’s your favorite website?
Speaker 0 | 00:50.047
My favorite website? Right now, I think I’m doing a lot of shopping on Amazon. plug to them but uh with everything going on in the day and age of tech of you know tech back orders and stuff i always seem to bounce back that way right now so it is my number one everything is i don’t understand every time i turn around i owe amazon money i don’t understand what’s going on with that when
Speaker 1 | 01:14.144
you uh when you think of the pioneers of i.t uh who comes to your mind
Speaker 0 | 01:20.788
Oh, that’s good, because I just finished reading the book Build not too long ago. So Tony Fidel is always sitting in the back of my head right now just for the fact that I read that. But I mean, just hearing the stories of how he kind of came up with the iPhone and then Nest Thermostat. I mean, to me, it’s trend setting. But Steve Jobs, just Apple in general. I’m a huge Mac guy.
Speaker 1 | 01:45.501
You saw that they’re paring down the iPhone production. Right? I did.
Speaker 0 | 01:51.717
Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1 | 01:52.998
If anyone could see the sad little face he just made when I gave him that news. If you had one IT superpower, what would it be?
Speaker 0 | 02:08.190
You know, I think it’d almost be like, I’d like to read people’s minds sometimes. Because it cuts down on a lot of question asking or maybe like a Mr. Liverable or something. But. Just a little bit of mind reading, I think, would be kind of nice here and there.
Speaker 1 | 02:22.520
Only a little bit, because I feel like if there’s too much mind reading, we all go crazy.
Speaker 0 | 02:27.942
That’s right.
Speaker 1 | 02:30.183
All right.
Speaker 0 | 02:30.483
Well,
Speaker 1 | 02:30.683
listen, we’re glad to have you on here. I was looking at your LinkedIn, and I have a lot of questions. First of all, I don’t know, what is Diamond Sea Trailer? What is that? Tell us a little bit about what that does.
Speaker 0 | 02:45.728
Okay, well, I’m kind of relatively new there, but we are a trailer manufacturer. So for commercial gauge trailers, so car haulers, goosenecks, dump trailers, our kind of niche is all of them are like custom built. So it’s not like a typical, it’s not like your cookie cutter trailer. So when you go to your dealer, you’re specifying exactly what you want, color, you know, axle size, DDWR,
Speaker 1 | 03:11.995
paint,
Speaker 0 | 03:12.555
all of that.
Speaker 1 | 03:13.544
Okay, see, so already, you know, way more than me about trailers, because I could, you know, those were a bunch of acronyms. I have no idea what any of that means. I’m assuming they’re just customizations on the on the specific trailers. Now, let me, let’s, let’s dive a little bit into this. Because I, why, why now? I’m like interested here about IT and custom trailers, right? So where, where does that fall? So you’re, I understand you’re new, but when you jump in, And what were you surprised by when you started, you know, kind of jumping into the trailer business?
Speaker 0 | 03:52.659
Well, I was really surprised. The customer service they have there is just phenomenal. The way they talk and interact with customers and the community. But it’s just a big family atmosphere and everyone’s just kind of going along trying to achieve the same goals. But it’s just amazing how fast they will. muscle memory and knowledge how fast they can just build stuff by looking at a sheet of paper.
Speaker 1 | 04:18.906
That is remarkable sometimes to do that. Now, when they’re building stuff from a sheet of paper, as you say on this, is this coming from a custom app? Is it people putting this information in, or are they just emailing specs in and they have to put them down? How does that work? How does the order start, and how does it flow through the system?
Speaker 0 | 04:43.256
I gotcha. So we have a trailer configurator on our online website and then that will get tied into our ERP which then gets a build of materials that kind of flows out through the shop.
Speaker 1 | 04:55.985
Gotcha. So the ERP is huge, right? Because now it’s already tied in with your order taking. So you have an ERP system that goes down, all of a sudden you can’t take orders, right?
Speaker 0 | 05:07.488
That’s right. You don’t want that.
Speaker 1 | 05:11.369
So let’s talk a little bit about it. When you start to kind of work your way through these steps, for instance, some client going to the configurator, putting all in. the fancy options for their custom trailer and and putting that info in and it ties into that ERP. What are you intricately involved in the in the infrastructure that it takes to get to move that from A to B?
Speaker 0 | 05:46.684
Yeah. So I’m kind of I’m a little bit over the infrastructure support and training over there. But so. We had a huge server overhaul not too long ago, which is awesome. But definitely, it’s a lot of data.
Speaker 1 | 06:03.052
I bet. I bet. I used to work for a company that did custom orders, something completely different. But same kind of thing. It was just orders came in and there was just so much information, so much options. In fact, there was option sprawl, so to speak, right? i don’t know what other word to use for it but there was just too many options uh and uh you know somehow sometimes that would you’d end up conflicting right because someone would order one option but it wouldn’t be you know if they ordered one option but it wasn’t available uh you know um for the other option and if there was no like way to um you know have a you know a select one option and then these options are no longer available based on what you just ordered we would run into the issue where it would have to be corrected. And so we had a massive customer service that was set up to be able to go back and edit, change those orders, modify them before they got out to the building materials to be able to get it done. You guys got something similar?
Speaker 0 | 07:11.874
Well, being so customizable, we have an engineering team, too. So if it’s not on that list. The engineers will get involved into seeing how they make that work. Wow,
Speaker 1 | 07:24.832
okay.
Speaker 0 | 07:25.033
A different design, maybe adjusting the axles or something.
Speaker 1 | 07:29.155
Very, very neat. Very neat. I was looking at your background on here. And you have some bunch of, it looks like there was a network is where you started off when you were a network tech back when you first started.
Speaker 0 | 07:48.025
Yeah, I wasn’t your traditional IT guy first starting. So when I was going up, going through school, I was going through construction management and architectural technology. And my internship was at Delphi in their service and aftermarket engineering. So I dealt with customers like AM General, NASCAR. It was a whole lot of fun. But when I graduated, the housing market collapsed.
Speaker 1 | 08:09.153
Oh,
Speaker 0 | 08:09.674
yes. Yeah. No crystal ball there. But so. applied at Michigan Sugar. They, with the VP of the warehousing over there, really liked me and they created a position for me in IT and I kind of been there ever since. I kind of, I like the same concept of a little bit of construction management with IT, just no days ever the same, but there’s a lot of different little projects that I like seeing it from the start to finish. So that’s where I kind of, that’s my passion.
Speaker 1 | 08:42.507
But that’s, you know, I’m glad you mentioned that because… Um, so much of it is, uh, understanding the, you know, where it starts, where it ends and how to get through there. Cause we’re essentially information movers. So, so that’s actually really kind of cool that, you know, that you mentioned that because that actually shows me that you’re, uh, um, instantly involved in understanding the business portion of the, uh, of the business, which, uh, I, in my opinion, and I think others too, it just makes you a better overall, um, at the overall it. strategy because you’re mashing the strategy up with the business strategy and helping them out and sometimes staying ahead of them, which is always hard to do in this day and age when things move so fast. You want to maybe just give us some examples of some of the projects you work on at DiamondSea, if you could, because I’d be interested to kind of hear those and kind of what types of challenges you experience when you walk through some of that stuff.
Speaker 0 | 09:45.817
Okay, so some of our projects now is just we kind of curbing the growth. So we have as you talked about like leading that curve a little bit. I kind of look at IT projects is kind of like skeet shooting. If you’re following the target and you fire it, you’re going to miss it. But if you’re leading the target and you shoot, you’ll hit it. That’s what we’re trying to do right now. Well,
Speaker 1 | 10:07.588
I’m going to jump in real quick because I’ve done skeet shooting. And I only ever hit one in the entire time I’ve done it. I was ecstatic when I did it. So now I know what my problem was. I’m shooting four and I should be shooting ahead of it. Thank you. I think.
Speaker 0 | 10:26.996
now i’ll let you know if my skeet shooting improves now yeah let me know because i’ve only been out a few times you know since i’ve been to texas a handful of times but it’s a it’s a fun hobby to get into it really it really is because they shoot the two the one that goes out i forget the name of the one the one on the ground they shoot is the rabbit right yeah
Speaker 1 | 10:45.466
the rabbit and then i think it’s a bird or something that goes up top i’m sure i’m sure they’ll correct this whoever’s listening to this wait a second um but uh not that No, but so it’s a great idea. Great point. Stay ahead of the stay ahead of them. Right. And that way you’re you know, you you’ll either meet them there or, you know, at least the infrastructure will be there beforehand. Are you are you only it’s easy to said infrastructure support and was the third thing training as we’re talking about.
Speaker 0 | 11:20.120
Yes. Yep. So as we’re talking about leading that curve. As we’re talking about leading that curve, we had year-over-year growth, so like 30 to 40% year after year. So we really have to lead that target. So a lot of our projects, when we went back to it, is trying to figure out like SaaS applications, desktop as a service, a lot of those things that are easy to scale and grow.
Speaker 1 | 11:41.987
Yeah, no, that’s a smart move to move over to some of the solutions that don’t take too long to pop up and are easier to kind of, like you mentioned, scale it. uh, the way you need to, um, especially if you’re, um, if you’re doing that kind of a growth, I’m sure you’re man, uh, not only that, I’m sure that there’s a huge kind of development and, uh, um, um, for your engineers and stuff that, uh, um, playing around with a bunch of different, uh, options and, and tools and stuff. Are you guys just constantly customizing that ERP? Uh, um, is that a big piece of what, what goes on or, or the.
Speaker 0 | 12:23.800
the parts static so um we just got we launched not too long ago with it so about a year in but still kind of going through making sure all the departments got everything that they need but uh it’s a it’s a lot of bombs of constantly
Speaker 1 | 12:40.989
you know updating parts or revisions yep yeah i can imagine that be i imagine that being the case um you know for anybody that you know it’s interesting because IT runs the gamut. There’s so much. I mean, I’ve talked to people on here, did dairy, talked to people on here that have done all sorts of things. And when it comes to manufacturing of anything, it becomes such an all about all the different pieces and parts that you have to put together, building that bill of materials, getting all that put together. But that is such a. such a strain on the ERP system, especially too, if you’ve got hooks in to be able to pull those parts from a website, right. Or vice versa, having the website pull the parts from the ERP list and getting that customized and then getting that information shot through. And I’m sure that’s not the only hook in you have to the ERP, right. Because on the backend, I’m sure there’s some type of a ticketing systems. That’s kind of the support and customization, right?
Speaker 0 | 13:57.755
Yeah, we have our own ticketing system. Obviously, it’s a cloud application, but yeah, we have our own ticketing system, but also trying to be just best of breed. So it’s not one thing that’s going to run everything. So trying to tie in all these other pieces of software and just make everything work.
Speaker 1 | 14:17.984
That’s really neat. So you’ve been with Diamond C for a little over a year, right?
Speaker 0 | 14:26.792
Yes, sir. Yeah, it’ll be two years in December.
Speaker 1 | 14:28.933
Check it out. You’re getting close. I haven’t been there for that long. Two years in IT time is like, you know, ages.
Speaker 0 | 14:36.239
It’s like dog years,
Speaker 1 | 14:37.180
right? I mean, the amount of things you can get done in just months is impressive sometimes. So… Let’s talk about when you got there, I think you were an information manager and then it looks like you were promoted. fairly quickly in. Let’s talk about that. When you came in and did the information manager, what was that entailing?
Speaker 0 | 15:05.815
So that one was first kind of just being ready for the launch of the ERP, training staff, learning how to use the modules. And then from there, that was pretty much the whole piece of it. It was really just making sure everyone knew what the tools were and how to use them. And then from there, it was kind of… IT was a little carved out and then you had the information, the infrastructure side. But it just kind of made sense as we’re growing to just get to kind of merge them. I mean, we still have a business system laying off to the side that reports to the VP of IT. But it just made sense to bring in to move me over to that area to focus on the infrastructure training and then the support of it.
Speaker 1 | 15:48.197
Yeah. You know what I love about that? And very similar had a piece where I was able to. jump and do all of those, the infrastructure support and especially the training, they’re so interconnected, right? I mean, one leads to another, you can find patterns and support, you know, fix the infrastructure in that case, fix the infrastructure to help reduce support things. And then training is such a big piece of it that a lot of people sometimes I think overlook, but it’s such a huge. piece to adoption and getting folks trained the right way. What’s your thought process on this when you look at that? Are you relieved and happy to have all of those under your wheelhouse?
Speaker 0 | 16:38.075
Oh, yeah, I’m ecstatic. I mean, really, when you think of like ticketing that comes in, it’s usually break, fix, or I don’t know how to do X. I mean, you know, that message that pops up, but I mean, having it all there, it’s a great way to grow the team. Just full circle. So our training and support techs are now, they just kind of are fluid, move back and forth between training or support. So they know how to teach it and they know how to support it. So, you know, that’s the best way to support anything, really, is you’ve got to know it fluidly enough to train or support it.
Speaker 1 | 17:17.040
Very nice. Let’s, you know, it’s on my. What’s on my mind recently is I just came out of a hurricane, Ian, over the past few days. And I appreciate you, by the way, being patient while I figured out whether or not I’d have power or not to be able to do this podcast. But, you know, disaster, recovery, business continuity, these things now pop into the top of my mind more than usual. And I wanted to take this chance to kind of. talk to you about it right as well because um i’m familiar i know you said you got some infrastructure uh that seems like it it’s up in the cloud um uh maybe there’s some on print i don’t know uh how do you manage that and come up with the best case of um you know first being able to uh keep going during an event right the business continuity piece and then if uh uh you know you have a disaster uh you know unfortunately, like the folks down south of me, you know, what’s the long-term resiliency plan? How do you begin to put that together? And this is going to be a two-parter question, right? First is how do you begin to put that together for what you got? And then how do you get the executive team on board and getting their, you know, their support on this? There’s a loaded question in that question. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 18:51.621
that’s right. I mean, I kind of look at, I’ll take it a few steps at a time, but the way I look at it at first is just like the business threat or a business impact. So which key departments do we got to make sure that are up and how fast do we need to make them up? And then from there, that usually drives with executive leadership in there too. Once they know, once everyone knows, you know, what sites are, key what what departments are key and then if it just drives technology backups however you want to do it but i mean i’m a belt belt and suspenders kind of guy we got stuff going the cloud off-site replications you know you got your your um rest on transit backups i mean you name it as long as as long as you’re covering all your options right because you never know what’s going to hit or how it’s going to hit yeah you want redundant And it’s a redundancy on top of that.
Speaker 1 | 19:50.625
I like the belt and suspenders analogy. It’s actually a good, it’s a good point. I’m a big fan of diversification and not having all your eggs in one basket and being able to fail over and move to something else. It’s a good strategy to be as redundant as possible on that. When you’re putting together, and I love how when you were talking about it, you said, listen, let’s identify our assets that we have and then categorize them by business risk. Right. So then let’s talk about that, because this is a piece that I noticed that sometimes IT folks will get stuck at, because in IT, we may think that a system is extremely important, completely needed by the business, and then turn around and realize that that is not. And there might be another one that’s even more. you know, it’s bringing in more revenue, it’s, it’s got an impact on the clients, that’s really huge. You know, there’s so many different ways to determine whether or not something is important, and has a, you know, critical business application to it. Do you work with the business teams? You know, to identify that? And how do you do that?
Speaker 0 | 21:22.228
I think a lot of it is just kind of knowing the team knowing the business. know in the business but um i like i kind of like to i don’t i don’t book a lot of meetings i do a lot of walk-ups this is the easiest way because if you start booking a lot of means that they’re you know they might get like oh i gotta get prepared for it but if you just kind of walk up be really nice be friendly and just get to know people it kind of helps you they might start talking about different things a different way and you might see like oh this piece wasn’t it isn’t as important as i thought but this other one that i had no idea really is but it’s just kind of just getting to know people a little bit just to kind of that’s that’s how i kind of tend to figure out where the where most needs are at and what level of importance because i mean something in it usually don’t hear about stuff when it’s working fine you hear about it when it’s broken yeah yeah that’s i mean that’s true you i mean speaking
Speaker 1 | 22:17.289
to um, speaking to the individuals and, uh, learning what they do, um, uh, becoming, you know, familiar with what, with them, this, these are, these are all fantastic ideas. I love the walk-ups. So, you know, uh, I’ve, I’ve done the old fashioned walk-ups too. Hey, how’s it going? How can I help you? What’s going on? What’s your, you know, uh, tell me a little bit about what you do and you get so much information, uh, from that to be able to come back. And I know what I would do is I would go out and I would. I would talk with folks and I’d come back and I would just have like a paper of just extra things now I needed to look at. I’m just like, oh, it just it never ends. It’s just more problems, you know. But that’s what you end up doing.
Speaker 0 | 22:59.552
The honey do list just grew. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 23:01.794
Yeah. But you realize that a lot of people just sit there and they just deal with these issues and problems and and they won’t come to you. Right. They’ll just they’ll just. Well, I’ve been dealing with this. I mean, I’m sure you’ve gotten the. Oh, I’ve just been dealing with this. the same issue over and over again when it can easily be fixed if they if they bring it to you but they feel like they don’t need to it’s like this is our job this is what we’re here for let’s let’s you know let’s make sure we can uh um solve your issues uh do you get a lot of that do you um people kind of holding back oh yeah i yeah
Speaker 0 | 23:34.010
i mean i seen it just everywhere it doesn’t matter you know where i’m at now to where i’ve been it’s like this has been down for like three days i’m like call me Call me when the house is on fire, not after it burns down.
Speaker 1 | 23:47.316
It’s so true. It’s so true. You know, I think they’re trying to be nice and and stuff. But but, yeah, I think it’s you know, and this is a message for the you know, the non I.T. business individuals that are actually listening to this podcast. And we and we do have some that are, you know, take advantage of I.T. team. They’re there to solve problems, you know. If you’ve got an issue, call your IT, go to the portal, create a ticket, do whatever your IT team has to be able to contact them and make sure you get that submitted so that we can get that going. And I guess why that’s also important, too, is that’s where you get patterns, right? Maybe other people are having it.
Speaker 0 | 24:31.211
Exactly. Yeah, you can start seeing if it’s a problem or it’s a recurring instance, and then we can kind of take care of it and nip it. Right. Um, yeah, that’s where everyone in it. It just has that mentality to help everybody. So we’re just here to help. So just got to let us know when we can help.
Speaker 1 | 24:49.357
Yeah, that is a great attitude to have from a support standpoint. Um, what you’re, uh, um, Speaking of support, what do you do to make sure that you make sure that your internal clients, you do an internal support, right? Or do you also do external support? Yes, sir. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 25:11.990
So just internal support.
Speaker 1 | 25:13.251
Just internal. So internal support. What do you do for your internal clients to keep them happy, keep them supported? What are your kind of your support wizardry that you do that? that keeps everything running well.
Speaker 0 | 25:29.817
We have that magic wand that sits in the back corner.
Speaker 1 | 25:34.998
Don’t tell anyone about the magic wand. What are you doing?
Speaker 0 | 25:38.039
I’m sorry. They’re going to give out all of our secrets now. Some things that we do to help out is we implemented SLA’s. Even though our customers are the business, Just SLAs to make sure that we’re resolving tickets, responding to them timely. We did automatic bumps. So if one’s sitting in hold or pending for too long, it’ll alert the agent or even the requester. Like, hey, we haven’t heard back from you in a little bit. Just checking in again. And then we take it a little step further after that just to make sure that that’s going good. We’ll do what we call RTAs. Me and the managers will do random ticket audits. Just making sure that it’s… they’re being documented correctly if it’s the right time that’s going to them. We’re not micromanaging, but what we’re trying to get to is if the tickets are well documented, another agent that may not have known that issue knows how to go back through, know how to fix it.
Speaker 1 | 26:40.308
Yeah, you know, it’s so many good things you mentioned that. I think the first one was SLAs. I’m going to ask you a question about SLAs in a minute. uh, because, um, I’ve asked a few people on here and I really, I just like to get that, um, you know, get those questions about SLAs and figure out, uh, you know, what different people do to create SLAs. It’s always a big topic because I’ve had a lot of questions on it, even from other individuals, um, that are not in IT that need to do SLAs as well. Um, but prior to that, uh, you also, um, uh, you also mentioned these, uh, RTAs or the random ticket audits. Um, um, These, you know, when we look about random ticket audits and, you know, sometimes people go, yeah, are you here to critique me and stuff like that? But I found, too, that I’ve done random ticket audits and I’ve come up with some amazing tickets that have shown great support. And I’ve turned around and given people, you know, praise on that kind of stuff. So it really if people are doing their job right and and following the rules of. creating tickets and documentation and stuff, fair to say that they can also turn out to get praised for some of these audits.
Speaker 0 | 27:58.982
Exactly. So, I mean, with the RTAs, we’re growing really fast. We have a lot of new team members. A lot of our team members have less than three years of experience. So we’re trying to have this in place to develop KBEs, external and internal, just to help grow everyone as a whole. Like I said, fast and rapid growth. But we also do CSATs. And then I’m sure if you look through my thing, we have an award called the DaBomb Agent of the Week. So we’ll do KPIs around ticket resolutions, logging time correctly, everything that you want to see in the tickets. We’ll do KPIs, and then we’ll have fun bragging rights. You can take your picture in front of our scrum board, and that’s the new wallpaper for the week. And then the agent of the month will get a gift card. So we make it fun. That’s great.
Speaker 1 | 28:52.535
No, that’s great. And that’s also promoting the processes and getting that stuff done right. Let’s go back to my SLA question. I field so many questions, even internally from non-IT departments, about SLAs. So I create SLAs just like you. I created SLAs. because it’s like the first step in being able to basically make a handshake with the business and say, yes, this is what we’re going to do. You don’t create SLAs. You have no basis to track your tickets on and nowhere to go. So in creating your SLAs, though, this is where people kind of get stuck in the mud because they sometimes don’t work with the business to identify realistic goals and SLAs. And. Um, on that, probably we run into issues where different priorities have different SLAs and, uh, businesses may think that something or different priorities based on what they are. Tell me and our audience here how Chris does this. How does Chris create SLAs that business likes and stick to them?
Speaker 0 | 30:12.771
Well, we kind of learn from our mistakes a little bit. But, I mean, at first we kind of set SLAs off the standards. And then as tickets are coming in, we’re hitting our CSATs. We’re seeing what’s done correctly, what we can improve upon. We then start… tweaking them so you know at first we had like a 15 minute first reply time it was good monday through tuesday but wednesdays and thursdays were a little bit rough because it was a heavier ticket flow so we’re like oh you gotta take a step back readjust and just just make it all it’s got to be good for the team uh the team and it or the business so you don’t want to have the you know it stressing that they’re not hitting slas if they’re and they’re not achievable so that’s kind of how we did it we first you know we first started with like just industry standards and then we kind of tweaked them to what the business needs around it and and does the business um is the business satisfied with the slas that you’ve created yeah does that mean i know you’ve had i haven’t had any yep yeah c-sats have been really good so like knocking on some wood no um we got almost 100 c-sat and and we launched earlier beginning of this year with the new enterprise solution of the ticketing system we have. So that, that’s awesome. Our ticket intake is huge. We’re probably hitting like 1100 tickets a month. So it’s good for us.
Speaker 1 | 31:37.886
That’s so, that is,
Speaker 0 | 31:39.126
we’re fielding a lot. We’re fielding a lot of tickets. Um, but I, on the backside, um, we’re, we’re, we’re talking and touching everybody. So, um, I, I, we don’t hear back saying like, oh, they’re not getting to us or anything like that. Everyone, everyone’s getting. a resolution and really fast. Good.
Speaker 1 | 31:59.940
Good. Well, that’s fantastic. I mean, that’s how you know you said it right. And, you know, harping back on those customer surveys, that’s such a huge way to track your success, right? I mean, you know, you throw those customer surveys out and, you know, if you’re getting five out of five, five of five, five, five, five stars, and all of a sudden you’re down, you see somebody throw it. one out of five star you’re gonna be like what’s going on you know have you gotten some of those have you gotten some of those uh lower uh um ratings and been able to learn from them yes exactly yeah that’s exactly right so
Speaker 0 | 32:39.511
i mean i i don’t even like i don’t like the feel good ones if you want to give us a bad review give us a bad review just so we can learn from it um but yeah it it could have just been i i could kind of think right now but it could just be like They didn’t talk to me fast enough or they said they resolved it, but the issue came back up. So it’s just kind of you learn from it and then you adjust just how you’re resolving or how you approach a ticket every time from it. It’s always a constant, you know, constant evolution of tickets.
Speaker 1 | 33:09.791
So in speaking of support, how do you use support to improve your infrastructure?
Speaker 0 | 33:20.366
That’s a good one. So right now, kind of how we have it structured, our infrastructure team is kind of like our IT engineers in a sense. So you got your sysadmin, our network and security, and then the infrastructure manager on that side. But we’re doing tiered levels under that for support. So how we’re trying to leverage that for the infrastructure side is making sure like… say like 80, 85% of the tickets are getting resolved before it hits those guys. So they can focus on the projects, more of the day-to-day, like the updates, upgrades, or rapid growth as we’re trying to, as we have new sites going up, they’re able to focus more on that stuff. And the other teams can keep the business running.
Speaker 1 | 34:06.298
So you had mentioned that you try to keep about 80 something percent of the tickets, you know, controlled before they hit.
Speaker 0 | 34:15.782
uh you know the sys admins and the system engineers how do you accomplish that we’re still learning through it right now but uh i view like i said i
Speaker 1 | 34:31.490
view everything as a work in progress anyway so you’re always there’s always a chance to get better and and get through it but like how what’s it what’s when you are um looking at this trying to control this because i know from doing it that it’s not easy, right? How are you trying to make sure that you can keep those tickets resolved at the support level and not… and not interacting and taking away from your engineering and administration.
Speaker 0 | 35:03.753
I got you. So we focus heavily on like continued education and cross training. So that helps a lot. We were doing like a donut channel of pair up. So you just randomly pair up with another IT member and you guys get to job chat to each other for like 30 minutes or so. Very cool. But also, as I said, like training and support, we’re going to start doing rotations where Training techs are not only doing training, but they’re doing support. Support’s now doing trainings. And then obviously the job chatting. So if you’re working up, you can go hang out with the system engineer for a little bit or the sysadmin and just see how they work and what they do. Because as everyone grows, then we can add more permissions and everyone grows together. The other one we do is we gave everyone in the team a Coursera Udemy account so and I made sure everyone books an hour of their time a week for continued education so there’s always a lot of education going on so that’s what really helps not all the escalations going up now that’s that those are really good really good pieces to that
Speaker 1 | 36:16.285
I think on top of that too you had also mentioned that you had knowledge base going
Speaker 0 | 36:23.806
Yes. Yep. We have a internal knowledge base and an external one for our customers. So the internal one obviously is just the IT notes, how to do X. And then the other, and the other one is what our training team uses. They can’t, they build SOPs around the certain modules within the ERP and that’s how they train upon. But if a ticket comes in, like, Hey message, this message, this ticket says, this message says X it’s the, the answer bot’s going to catch that knowledge base and throw it, throw that, throw that article at them. So hopefully that resolves it. Or we’ll just go and help out wherever we can.
Speaker 1 | 36:58.055
Very neat. Very neat. So what I’m seeing here is a big piece of what you do is that support role. That’s a big piece. And I feel like in what you’re talking about, I mean, yes, we got the infrastructure and that piece runs as well. But controlling that support piece. Because it’s internally customer facing and it is such a key to allowing your engineers and your administrators to maintain the systems and create new systems. It seemed to me that that is a really big and important piece to keeping going right in that environment. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 0 | 37:51.098
Yeah, we’re definitely trying to make extraordinary customer service. So support’s big. I mean, with an ERP, all the computers are in the shops and stuff of that nature. The data is only as good as getting out is what we put into it. So that’s why we have to really rely heavily on support and training just to make sure everyone knows what to do and how to do it in the system.
Speaker 1 | 38:17.349
When you… you know, in, it may not be in your current role, you could say in previous roles, what have been some of the challenges that you’ve faced within IT? I mean, and they can be support, infrastructure, and any type of things you’ve previously done. I see you’ve got a bunch of different items on here that you’re endorsed for, and, and quite a different, quite a wide array of experience. So, Tell us a little bit about some of the challenges and stuff that you’ve run into in your career and some of the ways that you’ve kind of overcome that.
Speaker 0 | 38:57.273
Okay. Well, previously, just casting visions a little bit. Sometimes IT, it doesn’t matter what part of IT you are, you might be doing a little piece, but you don’t know the whole picture. And it kind of really helps having the whole picture into play. It doesn’t matter where you’re at in the level of IT. Knowing the outcome is usually pretty good. It gives you a sense of ownership. So that’s one thing. And then in the past, some of the hard parts were you see common trends, but nothing ever gets done about them. So it’s just a reoccurring cycle. Like every August, you know, this is going to happen. But nothing was ever done to fix why X happens. We’re just going to get ready and fix X again.
Speaker 1 | 39:43.929
I see that so much. I see that so much in IT and for various reasons. One where either you don’t have the money to fix it and to put at it right now, or you don’t have the time, right? Or you know eventually you’re going to replace the whole thing. So it’s like just keep it running until we get to that point. Any other reasons why you think that that occurs? Because I think that happens everywhere. You know, the bucket of… projects that just kind of linger.
Speaker 0 | 40:19.182
Yeah, I think it does. I mean, it could be a mix between either budget or maybe once you start accepting it, it becomes the norm and they’re okay with it. It’s hard to say, but I mean, I think it’s a little bit of just acceptance, budget, or maybe they just are afraid to take action and go after it.
Speaker 1 | 40:42.849
How do you personally, how do you… you know, kind of when you identify some of these things, how do you try to knock them out and reduce that bucket of unfinished projects?
Speaker 0 | 40:55.887
So I talked about the vision and just not knowing, you know, where certain projects are going or the direction is we heavily involve our team fully. So I will call meetings and we’ll just sit there and do a brainstorming. Like, hey, what kind of IT projects would you want to see on the roadmap? for next year. If you’re in the shop, what kind of grumblings have you heard? Let’s add those to the board. Let’s see what we can try to achieve and help out all the team members. And then when I talked a little bit about ownership is we kind of do our own version of Scrum a little bit. So you’ll have a story on there and someone will own it. And it’s kind of up to them to figure out how the outcome is going to be. They know the picture and where it needs to go. but we’re not going to tell you it’s up to them how to figure out how to do acts and i think having that ownership puts a lot of pride in the in the work that’s done very nice um do you get any assistance and help from the business and trying to um
Speaker 1 | 42:00.755
you know organize some of these uh these projects and and uh prioritize them uh right now right it seems like right now everything kind of just
Speaker 0 | 42:12.466
it just happens. And then it just, you know, we get a lot of projects at once, but, um, it’s something that we’re, we’re working towards right now. We just brought in a project manager for it. Um, but it’s just making, I think with the growth, it just, it’s acceptable because we really need to be agile and fluid. Cause I mean, we have so much growth going on right now. It’s, it’s hard to stick to a plan.
Speaker 1 | 42:37.492
Yeah, no. Um, I’ve been in, I’ve been in that before where you’ve got just so much. so much going on that it’s it’s tough to kind of you know figure out where you’re going to put your uh um you know your time and your assets um you know you have a fine in it you have a finite amount of people you have a finite amount of money you have a finite amount of time um in trying to you know kind of uh you know work through a myriad of problems all at once um you know, especially on the, you know, on the infrastructure side, right? Because it’s kind of really where it all kind of eventually goes. How do you identify the biggest priorities, risks, you know, etc. and, and communicate that out to the executives so that you can, you know,
Speaker 0 | 43:29.722
get them resolved? I guess. Where I’m at right now, it’s really easy because everything’s kind of like an open door policy. I can just kind of walk into anyone’s door. We can have a quick conversation around something if there’s an issue. So that’s very helpful to kind of go into how we’re tackling a lot. I mean, we take this big overall team project and just break it down into bite-sized chunks. When you come into our side of IT, it’s kind of like check your title at the door. It doesn’t matter if you’re the director of IT or an infrastructure manager or support. We’re all pulling cables, doing whatever it takes to keep knocking out these projects.
Speaker 1 | 44:14.990
Yeah, that’s a great mindset to have. Coming from where, you know, my first IT gig was a, you know, a help desk technician. I always kind of had that mentality of, listen, let’s just do whatever we can, you know, to help. push everything forward. And if that means I have to roll my sleeves up and replace a computer, I’m going to do it, right? Anything. And I always felt like that was such a… a good um you know a good kind of uh thing to have in you because what it gives you also is uh you stay connected right you stay connected with with your people and and you understand um that’s where you can have some of those conversations while you’re fixing something and and start to understand that you know oh okay here’s the real issue here’s some issues that i really need to look at you find you get that a lot too when you when you’re working on something
Speaker 0 | 45:15.356
Oh, definitely. You might get called over to fix a printer, but as you’re just kind of having those friendly conversations fixing the printer, they’re like, oh, by the way, you know, have you heard about this? You know, this has been broken for a little bit. So as you talk about that honeydew list growing, it’s like, okay, I’m going to fix these too. But I mean, you feel it’s definitely invigorating just to kind of know what’s being achieved because you’re really helping a lot of people.
Speaker 1 | 45:41.639
I’ve… Over my career, I’ve been banned from fixing printers because I try to fix them, and I always end up with, like, an extra piece left over, you know. And they just take it out of my hands and say, no, Michael, go away. Well, you can do something else. Go stick to what you’re good at, fixing printers.
Speaker 0 | 46:00.521
There you go. We used to have some of those. A long time ago, we had those toner ones where you had to open the toner and release it into the drum. We stopped having those because I was pink one day. Or magenta, I should say.
Speaker 1 | 46:12.760
And Magenta. I want to talk to you a little bit about the segment I got. It’s called IT Crystal Ball. Right. And kind of the idea here is I just like to hear from people that are in the field doing it and where they think that IT is going. But, you know, in during our conversation, some of the biggest pieces that I saw for you was. support, you know, that was huge. And, and, you know, the working with the client and working with the internal clients, right, to ensure that they’re getting their problem solved in general. I mean, this, it seems to be you are a problem solver. That is true, trying true. So what, you know, what is the future of customer service, problem solving? you know, support, where are you seeing all that go? It’s a loaded question.
Speaker 0 | 47:18.418
That’s a good loaded. I see a lot of it going more towards automation and it’s just like take, taking some of the mundane tasks and just automating them. So we don’t have to worry about those ones, but we can focus on the, on the bigger picture, the, you know, the best bang for our buck. But I think a lot of looking in the crystal ball is just. Getting rid of some of the processes that no one really wants to do, like driving or onboarding. I don’t want to create all these little accounts. Just automating the little things to kind of make everyone’s life a little easier.
Speaker 1 | 47:57.468
It’s funny because I get that answer a lot. Automation, automation, automation. So, I mean, you mentioned onboarding, which is a big one. uh, uh, onboarding and offboarding are, you know, uh, to the most biggest time, uh, uh, you know, timely and, uh, time consuming, you know, uh, pieces. I mean, cause you know, yeah, it is, I mean, not, I mean, you have to be, you have to be a Johnny on the spot right off the bat to make sure that somebody gets onboarded and, or the other way around offboarded on time from a security standpoint and, and onboarding is such a, um, first kind of uh uh first impression for the um person coming on board right it’s like the first thing that i see uh when i started with the company that i’m at right now um i got a i got an email right off the bat um uh they told me hey here’s what’s gonna go on it was very detailed here’s the equipment you’re gonna get here’s where we think you’re gonna get it um got that information they were super detailed already said hey listen here’s going to be the the um meeting that you’re going to join on that day and here’s the time you’re going to join uh make sure you have this stuff set up and that i can help you um it was it was super detailed and they’re asking me you know what kind of a computer do you want it was just i mean it was down to that and i was just like what kind of amount do you want a wired or a wireless mouse you know do you want i was like oh you’re catering to me right you know i felt like wow yeah And so we continued that. That was something I absolutely loved when I jumped on and we continued and we still continue that to this day, offering those, you know, those choices. And sometimes people don’t take it on it. Sometimes they’re like, whatever, just pick something for me. I’ll, you know, I’ll use it. But sometimes people are like, oh, thank you. Yes, I’ll take a wireless mouse. Thank you very much. You know, and just that little teeny small little piece is what makes everyone kind of. smile. But that is a manual piece. Yes, we have it copied and pasted and we send it out. But that being able to customize it and go, well, this person’s going to need this piece and this and then sending them and then moving back and forth. That is not automation. That is all manual. So what do we lose? Do we lose anything going from automation? Or do we gain more? Because we’re able to have the time to do some of the manual communication. What’s your thought on that?
Speaker 0 | 50:40.858
I think it’s a balancing act. Because if you automate it too much, it’s probably going to sound just like a cold shell. But if you can have it just there enough where all your accounts are created, you’re in the right email groups, you have all this right from the start, that’s where it needs to be. And then you can add the personal touches after. after you know on top of it but just keeping it nice a nice standard consistent rollout for everyone it sets the tone and then obviously the personal touch on top of it so you I mean like that I never see that personal touch not going away you got to have that there you go automation but
Speaker 1 | 51:22.271
personal touch that’s from Chris Haller uh director of it at diamond c trailers um uh nerds this has been michael moore your host for this podcast and dissecting popular it nerds chris holler thank you so much for joining i really appreciate it and it was really good to have you on
