Speaker 0 | 00:09.565

Welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. This is Mike DeGeek Kelly and our guest, Mike Silver. Hey,

Speaker 1 | 00:16.708

Mike.

Speaker 0 | 00:17.209

Nice to meet you. I hope you’re having a wonderful day.

Speaker 1 | 00:20.891

Thank you. Good to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:22.371

Yeah, thanks. So let’s just start off with some of the generic stuff. You know what? Tell me something that’s… a little different or unique about the industry that you find yourself in today?

Speaker 1 | 00:36.077

So things that I would think that would be unique in IT, it really becomes part of where the maturity of technology has really taken corporate business and our individual lives. I think that’s the uniqueness of our profession and career paths that we take. Not many folks in life get the opportunity to forcibly be pushed into change every few years, even with hardware or software or methodologies. And I think that that makes us a different part of society. And really the good successful folks, when you get down into psychological moments, you understand that those people that can grasp that as quick as they can are actually using the left and right side of their brain. more common than others. And I think that that’s a unique aspect to technology and the people within that industry.

Speaker 0 | 01:37.363

You know, funny that you say it that way. We’ve been doing a study internally lately on leadership and like the final chapter of the book was lifelong learning and to recognize that we’re just being forced into this learning to stay relevant within our profession. It’s one thing to go out and learn because you want to. It’s another thing to learn because everything keeps changing. Security. Oh, man, security. What about, have you run into anything security-wise? Any fun stories there?

Speaker 1 | 02:14.373

Fortunately enough, I have been pushing security for almost 20 years. And I’ve never been hit. too hard with anything other than the, you know, the older stuff. We’re talking 12, 14 years ago, where you might have found a virus inside or some sort of Trojan, and it never really got to propagate or do anything while it was there. And that was mostly because of the technologies that we used. We were in finance at that time. I was in finance at that time. So when you look at those systems you were layering securities on. So the worst I’ve ever had was I got almost home and it was about a 45 minute drive. And my boss calls and says, hey, we just got a triggered alert. Can you come back? And that ensued in about a six hour cleanup. So it was a very long day.

Speaker 0 | 03:13.811

Yeah, I had one of those a long time ago. We got one virus as an attachment. One person opened it up and then it. Went into their address book, sent to everybody, and then people kept opening it up. And at that point, we only had three locations. But they were 45 miles apart, almost an hour apart. And we spent 24 hours running from location to location. And just luckily, it was back at that point where you could just run a fix and remove it. So, yeah, back in the day.

Speaker 1 | 03:50.170

Yeah, right.

Speaker 0 | 03:50.590

Because the things today where there may not be a fix because it’s… either a planned feature or it’s just too soon. And the only thing you can do is remove that application.

Speaker 1 | 04:05.354

Right. And another funny counterpart to that is the evolution of technology and how things have changed so much where the times that we discuss immutable backups were the only backups, right? Those were the offsite taped backups that nobody could really touch. You couldn’t compromise that thing. You just… prayed and hoped that it actually worked right but nothing could compromise it so at least you had that but now they had to put a name on it of you know we have to make sure that digitized backups have that same replicatory structure to them and say they’re non-immutable or they’re immutable and and it’s it’s kind of comical because that’s how i grew up right you always had to carry literally

Speaker 0 | 04:48.277

carry your backups with you yeah well and that was one of the things that I was able to leverage having multiple sites. So we would. like send those backups from location to location so that we didn’t have to engage that mountain place and have them store everything and then have to wait for the recovery time of trying to retrieve that and then make sure that hopefully, you know, like you said, hopefully things have been actually backed up and was usable. Great. Yep, again, the old days. Yeah. So where did your IT career start? Where was like the beginning of everything?

Speaker 1 | 05:33.581

Well, the beginning for me was mid-90s, and I’m definitely dating myself at this point. But the beginning of time was the mid-90s for me. That was, I had already been thoroughly enthrusted in computers themselves as a consumer base, and I’ve always had the mindset of… I need to know how everything works and not everything in the universe, but everything that I’m touching. So if I’m touching a computer, I needed to know it inside and out. And that just really drove to a point of almost madness. And I spent way too much time on computers, learning them, figuring them out, understanding TCP IP on my own, how to put things together. And that went into college, that went into… After college, my own company. And that’s where it really kind of hit hard. That’s where I realized I still had a nine to five and I was doing this on the side. And that really, really hammered home that this is a hobby that I could make a career out of, which means if I can make a career out of something I enjoy, it’s going to be an enjoyable life. And that’s really where it started was. in the late 90s when people were just really starting to grab computers and really looking to bring them home and small businesses, mom, pa kind of businesses, were really looking for something to help them. It became that thing for me. I did that for a few years, realized that I should probably get better at this. I’m good, but I’m not what I would consider good enough. So I went back to school. got my degree in computer science and really felt I had a networking administrative securities background at that point once I got out of school. And that point on is really where it started to flourish. That’s where I started to grow, giving myself the ability to, I hand-selected the university to make sure that I was getting that hands-on physical and theoretical that I needed. I wanted to see things work as well. It’s just the way I’m wired. And that’s really where it all started. I got out of my business, sold that out, and went into the corporate life in 2003 and really grew from just being a network administrator to always overreaching as much as I could be allowed to overreach and take on as much as I could take on. Give me the responsibility of… system administration and the first company that I worked for. I’ll take all of that Windows administrative stuff off of your hands. And they needed a firewall. So that was the first firewall that I put in. And it was really just kind of stretch your arms as much as you could to grab a hold of everything that you could to make sure that you’re doing it the right way and to show that you have value. You can provide something for the business. And that just grew further and further as I went. throughout my career of constantly looking at what else can I provide for the company in a way of thought process or the way of project ownership or systems ownership, network ownership, whatever it was that I could do, let me help with that. Let me get my hands in there somehow, some way. I don’t need to run it. I just need to be part of it, right? I want to expose myself to as much as I can.

Speaker 0 | 09:10.587

So did you run into any… roadblocks or or it sounds like multiple different um specialties that you you went after and started working on and trying to learn about and as you were trying to take on that responsibility um you had to run into different managers along the way or different um supervisors leaders what kind of reception did you get i mean because i’m sure some of them were like oh you want to do this please take it off my hands and others were like you know i We all know those guys that like the system admins want to be the hero and they don’t want to share any of the information because if you start to know how to do their job, then they’re afraid that they have less value.

Speaker 1 | 09:58.403

So, I’ve had the opportunity to have, actually, the first three leaders that I had worked under were almost an amalgamation of both, where they had some self-preservance within them to say, no, no, no, that’s mine. I’ll always take that. That’s always mine. And you just have to learn to let go of those things. If you can win some of those things that you were looking for. realize you’ll never get all of it, right? And because it’s not your shop, you were brought into somebody else’s team and you were meant to be a contributing partner or a contributing factor to it. This wasn’t take ownership. So you have to be able to say to yourself, what are the things that I would like to see after you’ve gotten your feet on the ground? What are the things here within this environment that I believe that I could help with and have those conversations in a very non-impacted way? acting negative way and a very political science kind of way of just saying there are there are opportunities here that I think we can mature this system or we can help further develop that one or here is a process that I feel we could look at to see if there is a better way to to complete that and and really that’s how the first three were for me you And the third one was really the place where I spent a lot of time maturing my career. A lot of projects in a financial company that had been going through the early 2000s. There’s a lot that changed in finance around that time. That’s when you started to get smartphones and the internet was very popular. And now how can finance help that, right? So there were so many projects internally in that organization that allowed me to not only grow in his mind, but grow in the president and CEO’s mind. And that allowed me to mature into a very upper executive position through the years that I was there, because I knew when I should be quiet. I knew when I should say, honestly, I don’t know. And I knew when I should say, I have this step back and let me show you where we can take it.

Speaker 0 | 12:19.982

One of the things that you mentioned that I’d like to circle back to just real quick was you talked about being able to show the successes of the projects that you were running to the CEO and the other leadership. So how did you help get from the back room and from your leader being the one saying, here, let me take this and go in there and present it to being the one that was presenting it? And was there anything that? you pick up there or was it one of, were you blessed to have one of those leaders that said, come on, you’re going to help me go present this?

Speaker 1 | 12:57.021

It’s a little of both. So there’s an opportunity in smaller companies to allow yourself visibility throughout the entire organizational structure. There isn’t so much visibility in larger industrious kinds of folks out there and they do shelter or. or kind of segment out the leadership ladder. And you have to be willing to allow your work to be shown by someone else in the hopes and aspirations that they will do you right, so to speak, in that meeting. And that they will point out that these are the efforts of a collective group or the efforts of an individual or that they themselves were able to say, the only reason why we got here was because of you. my supportive team and the other opportunities in smaller organizations you do get those one-on-one contact points and not that you ever want to push anybody aside but you don’t want to negate the opportunity to thank them for allowing you to be part of that project and and just say i really enjoyed it or i learned a lot from that particular project let your let your direct supervisors or managers or directors know those things too. Let them know that you’re thankful for being part of a successful project that allowed you to grow as an individual. That person will feel more inclined to help your voice be heard when it can’t be in an opportunity where they’re presenting what happened or transpired. And I’ve had the opportunity of both. I really did just give it the best. I sure hope he did what I wanted him to do in that meeting and What I found was immediately the owner of the company came back to me, which I meant, it meant to me, my name was said, my efforts were proven. So the ability to step out is giving yourself the opportunity to think first about what you would say in that situation so that you don’t insert foot here. Make sure that you realize that this is a very tactful conversation that is almost a two-minute elevator speech, right? But you have to make it only about the things that you want to talk about, not about you. It’s not your time to, how can I get promoted or when will I ever be a director or VP or C-suite? You don’t want to get to that conversation. You just want to thank them for the opportunity.

Speaker 0 | 15:44.668

There’s definitely interesting points. I mean, I wanted to hit One Direction and now you bring up other really good points about Like the learning how to talk to them about the business piece and the value versus, you know, well, or recognizing what the goal was and how you and or we achieved that goal versus, hey, you know what I did or I helped make sure that this happened. And, you know, the elevator pitch that is surprisingly important, being able to. take a huge amount of work and bring it down to just a few moments and be able to communicate that. It’s a skill that many of us really need to cultivate. Because I don’t know how many times I’ve been told, tell me what time it is, but building me a clock. So now with that out of the way, you mentioned projects. And the. All of the different things that that brought out for you in the early 2000s or 2007 as all of the smartphones were really emerging. What did you learn in that realm and what did it bring to you? Because I know that project management is a sorely needed skill. We still struggle to find people to help us do that and to utilize that skill to help make things successful. So the fact that you picked up on it that long ago.

Speaker 1 | 17:23.437

Right. And it’s something that it’s another one of those terrible, great things that I have as a personality trait. And that is, I don’t like walking into something that I’m excited about. And I don’t want to say failing, but I’ll say failing. And the reason why I’ll say failing is because. projects have more than just your interpretation of success or failure to them, right? This is a collective company. This is a group of people. This is a departmentally, this is a focus of everyone, not you. And really what it comes down to is there are so many moving components within an organization on deep seated projects that are incredibly business impactive that there are multitudes of outside influences or inside influences that could make or break a project, whether your efforts were complete and whole and true the entire run. And so really what happens is when you find like a bad vendor that doesn’t own up to what they have and you have pushed and been able to successfully let ownership know that this is the place that we need to be and it doesn’t work out right. You feel like you failed. However, you had really no problem in the failure. It was an outside source. And so when you have a number of items go up or down or consistently see what ups look like and successes and wins and notice that this was a failure, are you going back and looking at what that failure was? Why was it a failure? Because that was the point where I decided, and this was early in probably 2009, that it had to be formalized in order to understand what were the variables that I’ve seen in the past that could influence a success or a failure. So that I can ask questions or dig into that information prior to really focusing energies or monies on implementing a project like that. and i think that’s really the struggle of a lot of companies is is do they really understand what their history is, right? Do they really understand how many of those projects were successful? If you had a bad vendor do something, or you had a team that was overtaxed and could not complete something, do we even know this before we step into a project like that? Do we even understand the triggers that could set us up for failure prior to start? And we don’t even recognize it because we’re too worried about what it is we want accomplished. We just don’t know that there’s so many… roadblocks in front of us to stop us from accomplishing that. And that’s, I think, one of the biggest things that people need to look at in technology teams is to say, what have we done in history? Let’s take the last 10 projects and let’s say, what is a very round, easy number to assimilate success to? Is it a 60% success? Is it a 70%? So you got six or seven out of 10 that worked well. And I mean, well, I mean, the whole company or the whole stakeholders of that entire project, including the head of IT, is all in unison saying, yes, we got everything we wanted. We got it in time and we got it within budget. Right. And and all of those super easy variables are judgeable and measurable very quickly. But the rest of it. Right. Didn’t. Did it become a project that we all know and understand? Is it a project that does not take on more administrative and managerial cost to any one department more than what was prior there? There could be a win and a failure behind the scenes, and people don’t realize that negative impact on the secondary market of that project, which is it’s harder to manage now than what the previous part was. And so those are things that I look at and say, What made this bad? What made this in my mind a failure? I don’t need the CEO to tell me it’s a failure. I can feel it by the way I see it. And I say to myself, that is something that I’m not happy with. We should have looked at that. We should have seen what that did in the end. Yes, the product works or yes, the process is better. However, we’re lacking over here and we need to make sure that we account for that next time. We need to make sure that we’re looking both upstream and downstream of where a project is really built within the organization. And by upstream and downstream, there are people that touch data or solutions post what you used or changed. And there are people previous that enter data that might go into that system. And what are we doing with those folks? Are we helping them? Are we allowing them to be part of the voice? Are we getting everybody together? And are we really successful? Or… did we just do what Tommy and accounting wanted? And we don’t realize that we just made life much worse for some other people or one other person. Those are the things that I dive into when I look at those project-oriented things to say that everybody needs to be involved.

Speaker 0 | 22:55.600

Yeah, and that is such a good lesson. And I’m wondering, was that just something that you naturally brought? to the projects because in my experiences, I’ve run into lots of people who will do some level of this, but it’s usually to figure out who was at fault versus, you know, where did the process itself not complete and who did we not get information from, you know, how can we do this better, you know, just exactly like you’re talking about the downstream, the upstream. We’re a black box to them, so the downstream is feeding us information. Upstream is receiving the output of whatever we’re creating. But I’ve seen so many times where people, when it doesn’t come out and everybody’s in agreement, that worked great, that everybody’s looking to point the finger somewhere besides themselves. So in your experience, when you found… people who were not willing to take ownership of their obvious piece in it. What was your approach then?

Speaker 1 | 24:10.207

So it’s difficult. It’s going to be based on personalities, right? People are still people, and you have to engage them as best you can to allow them the information that they need and try to present it in a way that they can not feel threatened. Because you are talking about potentially an opportunity of saying, Mike, you were part of this. We talked about this, but yet you negated this. It’s your fault. You don’t want to do that. You would rather say. Mike, this is a really good time to really circle back around. In our previous conversation, if you recall, we talked about some of the things that we are kind of seeing after this project. We really needed to spend time with those. Do you think that we need to reattach to this project and really work those through? Everybody’s a little different. You have to be able to convey a message and present data at the same time. And no, you’re not going to catch everything, but you should always be watching, right? You should always be mindful of those projects that, especially if they’ve just completed, that you should be making sure that you have your ear to the ground, so to speak, on what other people in the organization are saying. You’re in technology. You’re wrapped in this small little bubble of a side corner, let’s call it, of a company. You don’t necessarily get involved. operationally in what that business does. Not too much, right? There are folks within your team that could be more developed into it, but not even them are really enthrusted in every single part and aspect of it. Your leadership typically is in technology. But if you’ve been part of a project, you should reach out to folks constantly and just gauge where do they feel it worked. And those folks need to be the ones that were on the team. And then if you can start talking to their direct reports and say, how do you feel about this project? And you should always be able to round up, so to speak, how the company is doing with it and how the company feels about it. Because it is a cultural change to modify or bring new technologies to people. It’s a cultural change as well. People have to feel like. it’s going to be successful before it’s successful. So you have to know how to work in the negatives because not every project will be successful. And you really have to make sure that you can do that. And sometimes you just have to be raw and real and give them the hard-nosed facts and say, this project did not work well. Now, what can you take away from that as a department? that is a facilitator of those is that you should be keeping track of that stuff and you should be writing those things down those scenarios and those those issues that happened and try to find the root cause so that you can ask those questions on the next project if they become anywhere near apparent for availability in this project right you should always be saying look we’ve had this once before we need to be able to you know let’s talk about the elephant in the room you Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with this one.

Speaker 0 | 27:37.815

So you bring up an interesting point. And in our precursor, we talked a little bit about different things. And you mentioned documentation. And to me, this sounds like a whole subsection of the documentation that I’m not used to finding in documentation. I’m used to finding, okay, these are the systems involved. This is how it was built, set up, connected together. This is the SOP on how to use it. And this is why you’re doing it. But, you know, that debrief on the project and the success, the failures, the lessons learned. Where do you tell me a little bit more about the documentation of that? Because it sounds like you’ve done that.

Speaker 1 | 28:23.258

So one of the easiest ways to hopefully. Make sure that you are more successful than ever in future IT projects that have already been assigned, right? These are already one projects. We know where the direction is that we’re going with them. We understand that this is going to happen. There should be an internal RFP process. If you are looking at a core system like an ERP package or a TMS or a FinCEN, you are… Dealing with very large organizations that make software, those folks would have the opportunity to provide you what is called an RFP or request for proposal. And what that means is you need to get down to the most granular facet of every single component of what this change will do. What is it that’s needed? You need to provide scenarios in that. change of software or that project implementation of additional software, every single person that touches anything that touches that will need to have viable stake in this project and present everything that they need so that you understand that you’re capturing. at the best that you can, a new rebirth of what the company knows of itself in that particular area, right? And you especially learn this when you’re doing core systems, when you do your full ERP packages, TMSs, any things like that. You do have to realize and rediscover what your company is internally. And a lot of companies forget that when they’ve had a system in place for a long time, they forget that they’ve changed and they don’t realize it. You have to micro those down into projects. If you’re going to swap out all of your switches, that’s a huge impact to not only just TCP IP routing, but you have to understand that your access points are going to be different. What are the things that you need to tie these together? How is this going to impact certain departments or certain VLANs in your network? Are you allocating for everything, right? And so create yourself an RFP of… everything that that switch or all switches help do, right? And make sure that you have an answer for every single weird one-off or definite scenario of a departmental need, making sure that you understand, are these the right switches? Is this the right manufacturer? Am I working towards the proper configuration for them? Do I have enough port density that says, I need it for this bandwidth, things like that. And that really helps you understand. Formalize it in writing so that you can capture it and get approval from even your peers to say, this is what I have proposed. Can you just look this over and make sure that I’m not missing something to make sure that I’ve accounted for everything?

Speaker 0 | 31:32.567

And I’m so used to RFPs and in this case, the request for proposal versus pricing versus. I know that there’s another one. I can’t think of it at the moment. But I’m used to those being just such a small piece of that overall project that you were just talking about. That the RFP is like when you’re talking to HP and Cisco and one of the other switch vendors or switching vendors and just asking them for a proposal of all of the hardware you’re going to get from them. For this project, not taking and having the overarching project definition down to that granular level of all of those different things. You know, internally, we started calling that more of the project charter and trying to build out exactly what you’re talking about. You know, OK, here’s all of the steps, what it’s going to do, how we’re going to accomplish this. Although you’ve mentioned it in ways that I hadn’t thought of. of, you know, what are the impacts and what are the ways to document how we’re going to handle and work with those? Because I’m thinking about, you know, okay, these are the changes that we need to do to replace that networking infrastructure. But, you know, one of the other analogies we always hear in our industry is, well, you know, we’re changing out the engine on a plane while it’s flying. And switching out or changing out the network is a perfect example of exactly that. You have to keep everybody working. And you can’t just come in all nights and weekends, and both of us have worked in transportation. That’s another one of those 24-7 industries that there is no weekends. There are no holidays. I mean, the rest of the world gets to enjoy them, but somebody’s working, making sure those trucks are on the road.

Speaker 1 | 33:28.161

Right. Yeah, exactly. And see, that’s the problem, is a lot of people will go to granularity with a purchase. but they won’t go that granular internally. They feel like they’ve got enough information because they work within those four walls that they can answer it as it comes. But that doesn’t help facilitate when it comes if there’s a solution for it, right? And that’s why you bring out scenarios and you really make sure that you do regression testing against those scenarios prior to releasing whatever it is. That’s the whole point of making sure that you… that you try to get to the best successful scenario that you can before you even start to march forward and procure equipment or software and start your configuration and and do all of these things because you have to make sure that you’re on the right path before you even start um you bring up a term that i’ve been hearing more and more lately and

Speaker 0 | 34:25.513

i associate to the most current or um the newer methodologies that are out there. That’s that regression testing. My VP of technology was talking to me some about that. He said, you know, we need to start with our testing scenarios. If we start building how we’re going to test this stuff, then we can start to design how we’re going to build this stuff. And that’s a complete flip of what I’m used to. Okay, we’ve got to build all this stuff, and then we’re going to test it for these scenarios. So when did you start building? first hearing about regression testing when did you start bringing it in and and if you would for those listeners who aren’t really familiar with it define it real quick and then talk to me about the when it came into your world sure

Speaker 1 | 35:19.748

so regression testing is at best what you can with what you have test against some variable right you need to have x plus y equal 32. And how this new system will do that or should do that because you cannot comply with that right now is that you have to know the variables of X and Y to make sure what it is the output that will make 32. And if you cannot define that regression testing is going to be very difficult for you, you have to understand that there is a point of break on everything that you will ever introduce to a business. There is always some point of break. And. that point of break has to be discovered or will, in best world scenarios, almost never get discovered, right? You can push a switch to a point where you just can’t push any more data. And if it’s still working, you did what you could, right? I mean, you’ve given it the best efforts that you can to broadcast it and DDOS it and everything that you can, and it’s still pushing packets just fine. That’s great. But when you look at the solution of scenarios, and really trying to push them to the end is try to become the devil’s advocate, right? Think of, but why, right? You’re the most annoying two-year-old in a room of people that says, this is the worst thing that I can think of. Yeah, but why, right? Like, what if, what if what? Well, what if, what if anything? Let’s come up with what ifs. And those are tabletop tests, right? Those are the things that you say, if that’s the only thing that you can think of. Let’s come back tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to dream on this and it’s going to be, I can come up with demons coming up from the underworld. And what are we going to do about those? Well, that’s never happened. Well, we’ve got to account for it, right? I mean, that’s part of the testing that we’re trying to mirror here. And those are the things that you want to push on. You want to push as hard as you can on the ideas or the methods of what it is you are trying to accomplish with these projects. And what are the enhancements or improvements? What are the new things that are coming? And when you push on that, you push it hard enough. If you can find successes in all of it, then you know that you’re at that proportional step of saying we can move forward with finalizing, right? And really, it started with me. It started because I had an auditor in finance that would come to me. I had a federal auditor. Every year, I would see this guy. And… He would always come to me and say, but what’s next, right? What are you doing next for this? Well, this isn’t a topic for us. This is something entirely different. I don’t know why you would want me over here in left field when our industry looks at this. We’ve accounted for some of that in our firewall rules. Well, have you tested it? And so now I’m thinking to myself, now I’ve got to beat my firewall up to the point where I break it. in order to understand that my rule sets, which is maybe 3,000 rule sets, now I have to have 20,000 rule sets. Well, did I size and scope appropriately? Well, maybe I didn’t because maybe I didn’t ask the right questions. What are the things that I should have done? What are the things that I didn’t do prior to that? And that’s really where everything started to hammer home with, no matter what I could think of, there was always somebody else challenging me on something or anything. And sometimes they’re just asking to ask, right? Somebody’s challenging you just to ask a question. Have you ever thought of that? Maybe they just want to hear your answer on it. I took it personal and I went, well, wait a minute. We’ve got to find a way to beat these things and we’ve got to find a way to beat them hard and make sure that in our minds, we know that we’ve done it or within technology, we know we’ve beat it. And we have to know that we’re testing. And that’s what I consider regression testing. I consider that to say, are you challenging everything you’re doing? Are you challenging what it is that you’re doing it with? And to me, that is the point of saying we have thought about this as best we could. We have beat this against the wall and it still stands firm. We’re ready to move on.

Speaker 0 | 39:33.572

So that brings up an interesting point because lately I’ve been telling my team, you know, let’s not build the bridge until we get to the ravine. Because in my experiences, we start asking these questions just like you’re talking about. And actually, I guess what we start trying to prepare the solution against these questions versus just asking. And we get stuck in that other fun world of analysis paralysis. Right. That we sit there and, like I said, we’re trying to build the solution or at least mentally envision the solution for all of these different what-ifs. We never get started. We never do anything because we’re too busy. Well, what if this? And what if that? What if that? You know, we have the annoying two-year-olds, the committee of annoying two-year-olds. try to come up with all the problems and we never start. How do we have those questions without running into that? Did you find any tricks behind that? Or is it just the practice of asking the questions and not trying to create a solution for each and every question?

Speaker 1 | 40:51.325

Well, there is a bit of that. There is definitely a bit of that. You can always at least be aware, right? And as long as you’re aware, those are more. successful environments because they’re well thought out at least they’re aware right but to be aware and to be foolish is another counter to that that you don’t want to be right and so there’s always risk analysis involved in that to say how far can we or should we push an exposure or push a weakness and still allow that risk right you And make sure that stakeholders are in that to understand that business continuity planning and disaster recoverability is built off of those risk analysis kinds of scenarios to say, at what point do we have to move forward in that line of questionable, we have a weakness somewhere or we have something that we have to look at. And at least allow yourself the opportunity to say, if you write them up on a board and leave them up on a board and just say, these are the thoughts of the group, and you put them up there, you might find that during projects, you might end up erasing a few of those because they’ve been accounted for while you’re working on new, unknown projects that now have to account for that. So building the bridge before you get the ravine, right, well, we need a bridge for a ravine, right? And what you might not know is in 18 months, somebody is going to come up to you and say, well, I found a ravine. I heard you guys were talking about bridges. Do we happen to have anything that we thought of yet? Or I’ve got this project and we’re going to go down this path. And as you’re working towards finalizing what that will look like, they’ll go, yeah, by the way, we’ve got that ravine in there. Well, now you realize you will be making that bridge at that point or something along those lines. And it’s always good to have. the what ifs. It’s always good to have, we don’t have an answer for this yet up on a board so people can see it. The more people can see it, the more they’ll, believe it or not, the more they’ll think about it because you get stuck in a problem or you’re doing business analyst work and you just come into this equation that you’re just driving yourself nuts with. You’re going to mentally check out for a minute. You want something to distract you. And to have a list of stuff up there, they might just look at it and go, yeah, I’m going to think about that for a minute, right? And it becomes something that just kind of self-orchestrates, right? And it allows you to say, we are aware. We continually talk about those on a quarterly basis or something along those lines. We modify, change, add, remove, whatever it is. But we know, we understand. Don’t allow yourself to be caught just because you did get caught. Don’t allow yourself to stay caught, right? Open it up and just leave it there.

Speaker 0 | 43:46.648

it’s okay sometimes to put something on the wall that says we don’t know how to solve for x right now yeah yeah for sure you know and as you were talking i’m thinking to myself about how um it’s you’re you’re speaking my language in the sense that um i tell them don’t build the bridge until we get to the ravine well it’s it’s but be aware of the ravine and keep watching for it as we approach and then we can start to build the right size bridge and we’re not having to carry it along and we’re not it’s okay there’s there’s the potential for this Let’s not stop what we’re doing now. Let’s continue to focus on what’s this piece or this next step. And we’ll do that and gather more information. That’s one of the other ones that I try to tell the team. Gather more information and make a better decision with more information tomorrow as we’re headed that direction. And I like the thought of, you know, put that stuff. I’m pointing over here because we’ve got a whiteboard over there. I’ve got one over there. And just list those things out. So, yeah, it’s not wrong to have them in mind. It’s just wrong to start building solutions for things, problems that you’re not having yet. Because back to the analysis paralysis, like, start building solutions for all of these problems. And we find out that it’s an A, B situation where I’m never going to have to create the bridge between A and B because it’s an either or. It’s not a. And yeah,

Speaker 1 | 45:25.967

yeah. And that’s I mean, and to be aware of them, at least to be to be self-aware enough to say we don’t have all the answers yet. But in today’s world, there should almost never be a no. It should just be we don’t have it yet or we haven’t figured it out yet. Right. I mean, it’s not no, it’s just give us time or or give us efforts of some degree, whether it’s budgetary or tools or or what have you. You should be able to build. nearly whatever you need, obviously just throw enough money at it, right? I mean, it always starts there, but that is definitely something that I’ve always said is be wise enough to be humble, right? I don’t know everything, but I will sure find out the things that I need to find out when we need to find them out.

Speaker 0 | 46:10.957

Yeah. It was one of the things that I put in my notes from you, you know, know when to and not to be afraid to say, I don’t know. Right. And then go find out.

Speaker 1 | 46:25.857

Right. Take ownership for your successes and failures. Right. I mean, that’s that’s the whole point of being human. Being human is to fail. We learn best by failure. We don’t learn by example. We learn best by failure because you can tell your kids don’t stick your finger in the outlet a thousand times and they’ll learn not to do it. If and when they ever decided to challenge you a thousand and one times and truly do it. That’s when they realize I shouldn’t do that again, right? We learn by the fail.

Speaker 0 | 46:54.516

Not to.

Speaker 1 | 46:56.116

It’s not wrong. It just creates a better impact mentally. Be willing to know that you are capable of mistakes. Be absolute in taking ownership for those mistakes and be unresolvable in trying to find the solution for them and never replicate them.

Speaker 0 | 47:17.806

right make sure that you do that for yourself that is such a huge that one’s a life lesson you know being able to own your mistakes learn from them um and to hold yourself accountable for not repeating them again and there’s so many people in so many aspects of of my life that i run into those kinds of people that are completely unwilling all they can do is point to the external they can never say okay This is where I went wrong. This is what I did wrong. And, you know, it’s one of the things that I’m finding interesting and really liking about this conversation is as you’re talking about the successes, it’s we and all of the team aspects. But when it’s the failures pieces, it’s I. You know, and so you’re my kind of people. I like people who can do that. Because it’s so frustrating to run into those people who just will not take ownership at all. And I know some people think of it as a weakness, but I’ve always thought of it as a strength. Okay, this is where I was in from, and this is how I will make it better, and this is how I will keep myself from falling into that trap again.

Speaker 1 | 48:43.492

And be able to talk that at every level. be able to understand how to do that to the CTO or CIO or the CEO or the owner or just your wife. But in order to mature professionally, you have to be able to have those kinds of conversations as well, right? It’s a matter of ownership. It’s a matter of self-respect. If you want to get to the next level. You have to understand the responsibility of the next level. The next level means you’re going to have people relying on you. for instance. And if you do, you have to be good at self-realizing where you are good at and where you are not good at. And being able to openly communicate those ideas and notions of saying, I can show you a thousand ways not to do this. I can only tell you how I’ve been successful with it 10 different ways. But I can tell you a thousand ways not to do it. Because I can tell you those thousand ways I failed. I can tell you 10 ways that I succeeded, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. It just means it’s my successful way of doing it, right? So I can help educate you on starting a process, but should I go point for point on how to be successful for you? I say no to that for two reasons. One is it could have changed slightly and I might not know it, or there could be three ways to do it instead of my one. And number two is I want to challenge you, right? If you’re supposed to be part of my team, I want you growing. So I’m going to give you nuggets. and let you try to run the breadcrumb trail. I might not even show you how the breadcrumb trail was laid out in a certain direction. I’ll just say, here’s 10 things you need to know. Go. Because I think that it inspires people to be creative, right? Let their imagination work those. And hopefully you can then show them how my failures, and I own them for a reason, are supposed to be your inspiration, right? And I’m hoping that… You don’t think worse of me because I failed, because if you do, that’s I guess that’s a part where you’ll have to come to grips with that later on in life. But it is definitely something to be humble about it and help inspire people at the same time at all levels. Right. I mean, I want I want my boss to be inspired by the fact that I can make those notions, hopefully help people move along and get creative and mature and they can move up in life.

Speaker 0 | 51:19.816

So all of these things bring up one of the other points that we haven’t talked about. And, you know, we’ve touched it in so many different ways, but really haven’t hit the target on how do you measure? How do you measure these different things? So, like, you’ve talked about the financial impact. You’ve talked about the upstream and the downstream, making sure that everybody agrees upon success. And the. different aspects of the project management and being able to walk from, you know, the idea through the desired goals, through the implementation to the final kind of sign-off or hand-off of this. What are some of the things that you’ve learned about measuring and how to measure different pieces of it? Because I know like PMO and measuring the project management. They have all of these methodologies and formulas of how well you’ve done certain things. What if any nuggets that you want to toss out there from that? Are there any breadcrumbs that you want to leave on the path for others?

Speaker 1 | 52:36.989

Well, I think I kind of alluded to it before. IT is, they’re an asset for a business, but they are literally facilitators, right? They help technology become something for users and the business to use. It’s a cultural change too, right? So a lot of metrics are not designed on people. And metrics are, again, everything IT does should have some sort of impact to a P&L line item. If they did something and it didn’t change the P&L, what did it change, right? Because It should have done something to it. And the reason why is because if people are happier about what they did and you’ve created a better user experience or you’ve created a more efficient process, then there should be better work throughput. There should be man hours saved where you can leverage something instead of hiring someone or something like that. There’s measurements that you can take that are known for people, voices. cultural change moral you know how is the morale of of the business or that department and then there’s the growth opportunity of what that company has been able to do have you have you allocated again through your testing scenarios have you allocated a micro portion of the business based on what the project scope was a portion of the business that’s almost future proof right There’s almost nothing that can destroy this thing now. Nothing can break it down. And have you created something that is machine to machine or machine to person to machine? that you can say to yourself, the success of this project will be based on the usability, it will be based on the future proofing, it will be based on the budget, it will be based on people agreeing that the product has been completed. And then there’s the viability of it, right? There’s the viability of it that you have to kind of discern on your own to say, is it the best that we could have made? Is it the right? choice for us? Was it everything that we needed it to be? Did it function right? And are people happy with it? And in me, when I look at things like that, I also look at, did my team grow with it as well? Did my team get challenged through it? Did my team have forces through it? Did it help us as a team? Did it help us as a company? That’s kind of how I look at those things. Because again, there’s only so many ways a leader or an owner wants to look at. successes or failures. And that’s, you know, did it deliver the product on time and in budget, right? Do you have the tools necessary? Did you have the people necessary? Did you have the vendors in line? Did you have buy-in from stakeholders? Did you have outside sources, consultants helping with this? What is it that needed to be done that allowed it to be? That’s the stuff that they look at. That’s the easy stuff for them to look at. What we need to look at is, did we provide what they were looking for too? In that… We gave them everything we could, right? In IT, most of the time, we’re the ones that have exposure to 10 different ways of doing something. Nine of them are really good, but one of them is great, right? Because it’s two keyboards quicker or something like that, two keyboard strokes quicker or what have you. And we would consider that like that’s the only way to do that because it’s quicker and easier. where there’s nine other ways to do it, eight people might pick one of those nine. And so did you actually give them what you feel would have been the best way? Did you prove to them that that was the best way to do it? That’s the way I measure successes. I look at it as, did we change life? Did we change the P&L? And did my team get better for it? Really, that’s what it kind of breaks down to in my world. I want to know that the company got what they needed. We did it in the right way. We might not have hit budget. We might not have hit your schedule, but did we give you the best that we could give you for the time and the money and where we did actually come out, right? Did we give you everything we could? Did we exhaust everybody?

Speaker 0 | 56:58.768

So, I’m a difficult attack within all of that. So, now you’ve got all these different definitions of success. You’re starting to get those. You’re producing things. And as you get successful at that. Business will come at you and many leaders within the organization will start to come at you with more and more and more of more requests for help. And they start to see the value of IT and recognize how much IT can bring to the organization. So how do you navigate those waters of here are 30 requests, make them happen? And you ask people well what’s the priority and you go to the leaders over each one of those requests and it’s their number one priority for all 30 of those projects so now they kind of leave it at our feet to define um the order of operations of those 30 projects and trying to help set that path or to maintain that as new opportunities or new needs appear um how have you learned to navigate those waters?

Speaker 1 | 58:15.154

Well, that’s a difficult question because the last two have been a lot of very reverse funneling of requests and it really is an IT steering committee that has to kind of work those when they become like that. Individually, every C-suite or VP is going to have their list of top fives that they need. The best way that I would prioritize those are impact to business. And Mike, you’ve got a great idea and I love it. And yes, this will help your team. However, as review of what I have seen thus far, I have four other projects that are far more. impactful to the bottom line or the operational functional viability of the organization that those need to come first. So you are number five on my list. I only have X number of resources. We can take four at a time, right? So you’re in round two. That’s the best way that I can politically do that without hurting people’s feelings, without letting them think that I’m not going to do it. I don’t want people to negatively think that IT can’t perform. But unless the company is willing to grow the team or utilize better tools or more tools or whatever it might take in order to create a larger… well-oiled machine within IT. If those constraints are there budgetarily, then you have to take on what your throughput is. And you have to be able to organize that where I feel is best is where best impacts the business, best impacts the business. That just impacts that. I want the best impact for the business. I want the users to be happy and I want them to be happier tomorrow. Right? Every day I want my users to feel a little better about it. the business that they are in and the company they are in because of my technology team we are doing something for them yeah and you know the uh the top five is a perfect example um because

Speaker 0 | 60:37.022

well one of the other aspects that i’ve thrown at some of those users or or i’m trying to build that culture right now is number six shows up and they’re trying to force their way into that top five and they’ve got all of their reasons, whether it’s a compliance reason or they’ve got some kind of financial gain or those kinds of things. And I like to think of it this way because it just helps me alleviate some of the stress of it. I tell them, okay, look, there’s five other people in front of you in line. Go convince them. I’m here to make this happen for you. I will work and we will get that success that you need. But these other five have waited their turn. or are waiting their turn. And if you’re going to push in front of them in line, you need to get them to agree to it. It can’t be a unilateral decision by me. If you want me to go work with you to talk about these things and find the value amongst all six of you and me as the seventh voice, then I’m there. But, you know, it’s trying to get those guys to, trying to get all of the leaders to work together.

Speaker 1 | 61:45.698

so that we’re all rowing the same direction and all have the same agreed upon definition of where and when success is yeah and i think the best way to do that and govern those those kind of i don’t want to call it wild west opportunities but organizations that do have a very complicated infrastructure that success by committee is the only way that you can do that right if you if you’re number six and you’re trying to work your way up then this has to be a committee of decisions that everybody else that’s in those pipelines would understand why they’re being moved to the side and why their extended timelines are about to happen. Because the business together collectively has understood that a compliance project or something like that in this realm would be obviously far more important than… an operational change of my department’s needs or whatever. I’m willing to accept, yes, you need that. So I would say a committee, committee even in a small company is not wrong. A committee that knows and understands and agrees, that means leadership is on the same page. And leadership needs to be on the same page because ownership needs to be on the same page as leadership, right? If it’s a small enough privately held company, everybody should be on board with the changes that happen. We can do anything and we want to do everything, but we should be steered in directions that help best impact the business. And sometimes the business has to come to us with challenges and hurdles, too. And that makes a very loud voice if that’s all that’s going to be done is just, you know, barking and everybody screaming and yelling. The loudest one gets something, right?

Speaker 0 | 63:35.031

Well, and you know what? There was a hidden gem in the middle of everything else that you said, too. And that is that. When we get to this point where, you know, we’ve got all of those different projects, we’ve got all of these people asking for theirs to be number one, that this is one of the perfect times to prove and show this is the time to grow the team. You know, this is the time that you can show the value of the team, what we’re bringing, and if they want more throughput from the team, this is where. I mean we can only do so many projects or we can only do so much work and if you’ve got it planned out and you can prove it and you can show it and you can measure Um, and you can honestly have that retrospective look on successes and failures, um, and they want things more or they want more things and they want them faster. This is the time to show it’s time to grow the team.

Speaker 1 | 64:34.318

Exactly. Either that or outside consult or whatever it is that you, you know, you have to work with. Um, what you don’t want is you don’t want the ability or, or even the, the culture. to allow shadow IT, right? You don’t want that kind of stuff happening. So there always has to be a voice in that that says, we control our environment, but we are only X, right? And if you’re looking for Y as a result, then you can’t, you cannot have that with the team that we have, either we need tools or people.

Speaker 0 | 65:08.867

Yep, for sure. So this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Is there anything that you want to promote? Any, you know, as one of my co-workers likes to say, this is the time for the I love me page. You know, one of the things that I try to teach my team to do is build a portfolio. As you get through every project, you document the projects that you were involved in. Start sticking those into a portfolio so that you know you’re successive and you know your history. And one of the co-workers called it the I Love Me book. I think he learned that one in the military. So now’s your chance, Mike. Tell us.

Speaker 1 | 65:52.882

Well, so I do have my own consulting company. So I would just say if you would like to know more or if you have what you feel as an opportunity for discovery, you can email me. My email is Mike at. ITInnovationConsulting.com. That is a place where I spend a lot of my time working with owners and business leaders to go into their environments, discover whether they have been right-sized, rightly used, if they’re looking for overarching expectations that they don’t seem to have what I would call successful rates to them in their previous lives. And really just kind of work to find a better symbiotic relationship between business and the technology within that business. So if you have any interest in that, email me at mike at itinnovationconsulting.com.

Speaker 0 | 67:01.198

Awesome. Thank you, Mike. It’s been, again, a great conversation. And thank you, everyone, for another wonderful podcast.

Speaker 1 | 67:19.668

Thank