Speaker 0 | 00:09.847

All right, well, welcome everybody. Welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Tony Hart. And Tony, why don’t you give us a little bit of your background? Tell us about yourself.

Speaker 1 | 00:23.398

Yeah, sure thing. So, like Mike said, my name is Tony Hart. I am the IT Director. of a company called Ascentium. We are a 3D manufacturing organization, which means we manufacture industrial 3D printers. We create the plastic filaments that go along with them. And we’re also a Department of Defense contractor, which is a huge ball of hair for anyone out there that might also be a DoD contractor. I came from the software development and MSP space, so managed service provider for those who may not know. Kind of cut my teeth in that realm, which gave me a lot of experience across a number of industries and customers starting out and ended up working for one of my customers, which is Ascentium. I was one of the account holders for this company, worked with them for a few years until they… requested for me to come on board full-time and I’ve been here ever since loving it and hating it for a various number of reasons all along the way but it’s a ton of fun and I enjoy learning and doing my job here.

Speaker 0 | 01:41.877

Isn’t that too true about IT in general man loving it but hating it at the same time you know when we were talking yesterday you mentioned a book that you’re reading with your team so it’s a great book I’d like to hear a little more about that and why are you reading this book with your team and what’s it do for you?

Speaker 1 | 02:04.804

Yeah, sure. So the book that we’re reading is called The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and a number of other writers. It’s, I would say, one of the most important books I’ve read in my IT career. I had one of my mentors and previous bosses recommended it to me. I read it. And it just made so much sense the first time I read through. It’s this allegorical book about an IT director, or I think he was director of a smaller department within a large multi-thousand manufacturing company. And he got pulled up to be the main head honcho of an IT department for an organization that’s just in disarray. So you get to experience firsthand through his account. about what it feels like and kind of see the organization operate in disarray and then watch as he actually has an advisor himself and is working to improve IT operations and get the entire organization rowing in the same direction. So in that book, you’ll find that IT is treated kind of like an unfair stepchild, so to speak. in the organization. They’re not treated the same and they get information last and they are often putting fires out because of decisions made outside of their organization. And then they are blamed for everything that doesn’t work well. So if you ever, there’s a comic out there that I like, which has someone asking IT, like everything is broken. Why do we even pay you guys? And then in the next frame, it’s the same person asking the same IT individual, everything’s working here. Why do we even pay you guys to do anything? And I’m like, yeah, that’s what it feels like to be in IT. No one knows what we do. We’re blamed for everything, but never really recognized for the things we do well. And it’s just a story of how that feels so real and the efforts and projects undertaken in order to get the organization back on track and for IT to provide value. and be seen and understood by the organizational leaders. So it’s very relevant. And it introduces the concept of DevOps, if you’ve never heard of that, which is a really great concept.

Speaker 0 | 04:28.030

Yeah. I mean, it’s a huge concept and it’s so relevant to today because like within the book, one of the other things that they talk about is how they move from the monolithic project of, you know, we’ve got to put everything into this thing and it’s got to be perfect. before we can release it and it’s a huge release that’s going to take um a huge time to implement, let alone test and all of these pieces of it before they can move on to the next part of it. And the DevOps mindset is that minor adjustments, those quick minor adjustments, just like all of us get on our phones nowadays. You know, all of the different apps that we have, they’re constantly releasing it and throwing out micro updates. And so that changed from yesterday’s huge monolithic version update to… just the pinpoint updates that make huge changes in the delivery of the goals.

Speaker 1 | 05:30.951

Yeah. I mean, so it’s a lot about how do you create faster feedback loops to iterate upon what you’ve already released. And there’s also this concept around development, which is called atomic changes and atomic being. the smallest change you can implement, which I really like that kind of mentality, which is just make a small change that slightly increases the value or makes the system better. And when you do a whole bunch of atomic changes, the entire system is improved over time. And it’s easier to take a small change than it is a large change. And that’s true with changes. That’s true with projects. I think that’s true within our own personal lives even, right? If you want to make changes. at your house, it’s easier to do, you know, a small change rather than, um, okay, I’m going to, you know, start this new workout regimen and stick to it five days a week. And I’m going to do a huge diet. I’m going to do all these things. They’re like, Hey, why don’t you just start by going to the gym, uh, once a week and see what happens and just slowly improve.

Speaker 0 | 06:36.066

So yeah, I started with, why don’t I just get up and start walking a little bit and let’s prove that I can walk a mile consistently, um, before I. pay for that gym subscription that I’m going to, you know, make sure that I proved to myself that I’m going to get up and make that little bit of a change today and continue to do it tomorrow before I start to invest into it. So, and, you know, one of the other concepts that was brought up in that book that I really enjoyed, and I talked about it yesterday, was just optimization anywhere but the constraint isn’t, you know, the fact that if I make the order entry process better, but where the constraint is in the production of something, all I’m going to do is increase the backlog at the production location because we’ve just started taking orders in faster. So now all we’re doing is making things worse in one sense. We’ve got to find out where that constraint is, focus on that and do that atomic change that you’re talking about. But learning to figure out where that constraint is. and getting all of the other groups that are involved in that, looking at that and working with IT to do this, it’s such a relevant thing today because so many people say, you know what, I’ve got this problem. Here’s the solution I see. Go make it happen. And they just hand it to IT. And like, you know, I always equate it to the Excel thing. Somebody comes to us and says, I need Excel to do this. And so. So often my help desk team or my team will grab that and go, ooh, I can make it do that. And they run off and go do that without ever asking why. Why do you want it? What’s the goal? You know, what are we trying to achieve? And once they find out what the goal is, then they go, oh, it’s already been done. There’s a report for it. All you got to do is hit this button over here in this section of the software, and the report’s there. We don’t have to go build anything, but we get so busy running off and just trying to be helpful that we forget to leverage everything that we know. So behind all of this is another concept besides DevOps, or it really ties into DevOps, and that’s that business process management. And you mentioned that that’s a real passion of yours. Let’s talk about business process management, because I think that’s one of the largest things that we as IT leaders can help bring to the organization. And it’s not necessarily all IT, but IT, as we mature as an organization, if we don’t have that business process management, we’re running off building that Excel solution all the time.

Speaker 1 | 09:38.903

Yeah, so I think you… identify something that is so important in the IT space. So if someone comes to you and they say, hey, I’ve got, like, can you go do X, Y, Z? Like, can you go build or help my Excel spreadsheet do this? Or can you, you know, create a form that allows me to just intake this information? Or, you know, here’s my solution. Let me give you my solution. And then you go make my solution happen. And I think that’s what can hold back a lot of IT individuals from excelling at their job, which is your goal of an IT. provider isn’t necessarily to meet all the solutions or provide the solutions that you’re being requested to fulfill. The best thing you can do is understand how the business operates and ask a question based on the solution that they’re requesting. So really, there’s a great book out there called The Question Behind the Question. And sometimes people will ask you a question and then really you need to follow up with, well, what do you mean by that? What are you actually trying to accomplish? I think that’s true for solutions and questions. And so to delve into that a little bit further, if someone is asking you to create a solution, I think you should really ask, like you said, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? What pain point do you have right now that you’re trying to solve? Because you as an IT individual often understand how all the technology systems support the organization. And even if you don’t fully understand it, that’s okay. You just need to understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Because if you can understand what they’re trying to accomplish, you can provide a solution which may even be a better fit for them and the entire organization and even easier for you to do. Because sometimes people will just ask you to do something and you’re like, man, that’s going to take so much effort. That’s like a month worth of effort. And then you build it out for them and they’re like, actually, this isn’t what I wanted. And then you go into another conversation as to why it isn’t what they wanted. And you’re like, man, if you would have told me what you wanted in the beginning, this would have been a quick change that could have been done in 15 minutes, as opposed to this entire project that we built out. And so we ended up spinning our wheels, trying to do the right thing. And oftentimes, I can get caught in this where someone asked me to do something. I’m like, oh, man, that’s so cool. I’d love to do that. Sounds like fun. Let’s do that. And then at the end of it, we’re like, man, that was a terrible decision. We should not have done that. And so like you said, the reason why I’m so passionate about business process management is because it’s really understanding how the organization accomplishes work. So in the DevOps mentality, DevOps really comes from this concept of taking lean manufacturing principles and applying it to development principles. So in manufacturing, you have an intake. kind of like a warehouse where materials and equipment comes in. Think of it kind of like a workflow chart. On the left-hand side, something comes in and you have inputs and outputs. And so you go to one work center, you transform those materials a little bit, which then gets transferred to another work center. And it goes all the way across the manufacturing plant floor till it gets to the very right, which it gets put back onto shipping containers or trucks, and they get sent out to the customer. Now, processes work the same exact way. You have the start of a process or even a project, which is here is the information you need in order to start this project or process. And it goes from work center to work center. Now, those work centers are often technology work centers, as in technology itself. It could be Salesforce. It could be NetSuite. It could be applications. And then at each work center, you have. what’s called the four M’s. You have the machine, which is the technology. You have the man, which is the person that actually does the work. You have the method, which is how they do the work. And then you have the measure, which is the measure of success. So machine, man, method, and measure. And the same is true for processes. In a process, you have the machine, which is technology that… is actually being used, the man, which is the person that’s actually performing the work, and then the method, how they do it, and the measure for success. And if you create a process which identifies all of that information along the way, then you can quickly identify that, well, in order to, let’s say, submit a purchase order or purchase request for. some product. Well, your inputs would be the information you needed. You go to some software, you fill out the details at your machine, and then… And man, they know how to do it. That’s your method. And it goes to the next person in the process and they know exactly how they should do it. So you go step by step by step and understand how work is accomplished. And if we as IT individuals can understand how that happens in an organization, when someone comes to request a solution to you, request a solution from you, then you can more easily provide an ideal solution by understanding how work. is performed and how everyone’s measuring that work and the technologies and how they work together. And so it’s really just about understanding how value is created and how work is performed.

Speaker 0 | 15:28.697

And there’s, there was a couple of other things that I wanted to highlight that are hidden within all of that. So like without understanding how the solution that’s been requested fits within the whole picture. And if I go running after that thing, there’s been so many times in my career where, you know, I learned this lesson kind of early on because I’d go create that solution that was requested just as requested. By the time I got back to them, you mentioned it taking a month. By the time I get back to them, they’re like, oh, I figured a way around this because you were taking too long. I needed an immediate fix. So I found a way around the problem. So they come up with some other thing and all my effort was wasted anyway. So I started to learn to ask what the goal was, and then I started to understand the business better. And as I started to understand at least that piece of it, then I could start to see the pieces that you were talking about of how it comes into the warehouse and then moves across the floor, gets modified, and becomes the end product that’s then shipped out. Because so many of us get the blinders on for our piece of that process. And we’re only concerned about, okay, what’s the input for me? What’s the output for me? And how do I measure my success within just this piece of it? But IT, we have to have that higher level view and watch the whole process. And because as we get solution requests for process one, it’s feeding into process two. And we’ve got to make sure that it stays compatible and that it helps optimize process two. So it’s such a huge piece to… learn to ask that. It’s how I learned to get out of just being one of the geeks and to understand the business, to be able to bring more value, as you mentioned earlier, to the whole organization as a whole because of knowing what the long-term goals are or seeing how optimizing step three is going to be. is going to expedite things in step four. And they don’t even know what’s coming yet. But then that’s another piece of this is communicating that or bringing them in so that they see what’s going to happen to their workflow when step three suddenly gets optimized. So it’s such a fun thing. What challenges have you run into trying to implement business process management? Because I know I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to bring that into our organization and trying to add that and get people to adhere to it. And some people like the chaos of just, you know what, I want this, make it happen. And others understand the process or the need for the process, or they see it once it’s happening. But until they see it in work or until they see it working for them. They’re, they, they just don’t. So what, what challenges have you run into? What, tell me about some of the successes or, or the challenges.

Speaker 1 | 18:52.112

Sure. Yeah. I think you’re exactly right. I mean, I think some people love running around with many fire hydrants in their hands, putting out fires. I think they like working that way. And not that that is necessarily. a bad way to work. If people like working that way, then I guess more power to them, so long as everybody else is okay operating that way. And with the understanding that you’re going to hit a ceiling on how much work you can intake working that way. If you want to be a small mom and pop shop, feel free to work that way all day long. If you want to be less than 100 employees, or less than a certain amount of revenue. This is all depending on your industry, the employee size. It’s all about the complexity of the work that you perform, really. If you want to work that way, you can. And I think that’s going to be a challenge that you face if you’re trying to increase the overall output of an organization. Because in order to do something you’ve never done, you’re going to have to change the way in which you worked. So if you want to accomplish more, you can’t keep doing the way you do things now. And so you’re going to encounter people that like working the way that they work today. and they’re not necessarily going to want to change. And the way that I have found implementing business process management works well for me is finding those individuals or departments or teams that are either, one, really willing to change because they see problems and they’re wanting a solution. So basically strike where the iron is hot. Who’s willing to take on some of these projects and try things out? I think that’s the best thing to do. Or two, systems that may be, or maybe even departments or projects that may be new undertakings. So they don’t know how to work yet because it hasn’t been established yet. For example, we’re starting up a new business unit, which is more of a service bureau 3D printing environment. People can submit their files and we print it for them and send it to them. So they don’t need to purchase. Our 3D printers or configure a 3D printing farm, they can just submit the files to us and we charge per product. So that’s a new business unit. And I’m working directly with them to establish solid business process management in the beginning because we’re setting the foundations. But for many of us, we don’t have that opportunity to establish the foundations of work from the beginning. So I would say strike where the iron’s hot. Work with those who are willing to make changes now, even if it’s a small team. Show, improve how this helps increase work output through the entire system. And then just use it as a sales platform. Hey, we successfully did this here. This was the case study for them. Then let’s go work with somebody else, sell them on this thing, and then see if they’re willing to do it. And that, I would say, just start small and move forward. And if you can get some executive backing, absolutely do that. Sell the idea to the leadership first because it is a change in culture. Culture is just the way in which we work with one another. And so it’s going to be a culture change in your organization and realize that you’re going to have a lot of people who don’t want culture change. And so getting some executive backing and sponsorship and some key personnel on your team is really important to do that.

Speaker 0 | 22:42.314

It is. I mean, within my team, we’re around 50 people in our IT department currently. And as we started to try to implement more of these processes and really get rigid about these processes, I like to call them the cowboys. You know, the ones that want to be the superhero. They show up to fix the problem. Here I am to save the day. You know, here, just move. Let me sit here. Those kind of people versus the ones that say, okay, I want to walk you through this process so that the next time you run into this, you can fix it yourself and you don’t need to call me. So those, the hero type individuals have a hard time moving into these processes. And, you know, I already had a large established team of heroes and trying to get them to get into a methodology of. trying to churn through these things and set this process. It’s a huge change in culture.

Speaker 1 | 23:48.545

It is.

Speaker 0 | 23:49.005

And trying to recognize that and work with that has been interesting. And trying to change culture. How often do you hear change of culture and IT together?

Speaker 1 | 24:06.112

Not very often.

Speaker 0 | 24:07.592

Yeah. But it’s critical to… how we can work and how we advance and how I can become a better IT leader by understanding that culture, by helping create that culture and foster the correct cultures that, you know, I want to say it’s a movie quote, but, and it’s a SEAL team thing, slow is steady, steady is fast. And how, you know, trying to trying to get people to believe in that and get into that, that churning of all of the things that we’re trying to accomplish, because we can stay in the chaos and just continue to try to fight that. But you’re. You’re so right in that you hit a ceiling. You’re either going to hit a financial ceiling, or you’re going to hit a productivity ceiling, or you’re going to hit burnout, because you’re always running around trying to fix everything, and it’s chaotic. And sometimes it feels great to be able to be a hero within the chaos, but if you can calm the chaos down and get everybody, as you said, rolling in the same direction, It’s huge, and especially if the whole organization does it. But trying to drive that as the geeks in the corner or the nerds in the back room, it’s been an interesting challenge.

Speaker 1 | 25:36.339

Yeah, yeah. And I want to circle back to the point you talked about with Cowboys, which for anyone out there who’s really good at their job, that… is very intelligent, can understand the problem very quickly, and understand what the solution should be, and jump in and you solve the problem without helping other team members understand how to also solve that same problem, I’ll say that you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You are making it so that you are both invaluable to the organization and you’re showing high value, but also you’ll never be able to take a vacation. You’ll never be able to scale your team. You won’t be able to be a team leader because you are the hero or what the kids are calling you have main character syndrome here. You think that you are the main character. And if you want to work in an organization that is trying to accomplish something together, you can never be a main character. Everybody supports one another in order to become a unified. organization. And so the best thing you can do is yes, solve that problem. And then also ask yourself the question, how can I remove myself as the constraint? Because if you’re the one solving all the problems, you made yourself the constraint. Only people, people only rely on you. People go to you for the answers. People go to you for the solutions. You can’t hand it off to anybody because no one else can do it. They’re not smart enough. They just don’t get it. So You are in a unique position and ask yourself the question, how can I help other people learn? And oftentimes, it’s through documentation. And I know everyone hates documentation. Everyone hates writing documents. But it’s really how can you disseminate the information in your head to other people and empower them to solve their own problems? And if you can do that, you’ll be more valuable to the organization than you are today. Because you’re creating a team and a culture that can operate without you, and you will likely be put in positions. And in fact, I would encourage you to showcase what you’ve done to bring value to the organization, because that’ll put you in a better position for leading the team in the future. And that’s talking more on the management side. We can get more into the technical side if you want. So it also depends career-wise what you might be looking for if you want to be a manager versus a technical solution provider.

Speaker 0 | 28:13.816

Well, and even within there, if I become, and back to the culture and changing things, you know, I’ve got it up on my board over here, and we were reading a book, Leading Change. And one of the latter chapters in that one was changing the culture. And the culture that I’ve put on my board that I need to change is the only one. He is the only one who knows how to fix my problems. And if I’m the only one, and you were just talking about this, you know, back to the cowboy syndrome, the main character syndrome. I love that because I’ve heard that. If I’m the only one, then I can’t grow. I can’t get past this because they keep pulling me to that specific thing. So if I don’t teach anybody else how to handle that, how to take that from me, and how to… And if I don’t have that solution spread out amongst more people, then when do I have time to grow myself? When do I have time to learn something new? When do I get new challenges? Because they keep pulling me back and I can only solve these problems. So it’s huge to get away from that main character syndrome. And it will help you not only within… But if you do have a desire to get into any kind of leadership, whether it’s IT leadership, whether it’s the lead developer, whether it’s becoming a manager or a director or a. CIO, CTO, CISO, you know, any of these roles, you’ve got to be able to delegate and teach others. Because if you don’t, you’re only, again, that ceiling that we were talking about, you’re going to get to a certain level and never be able to progress more.

Speaker 1 | 30:12.740

Yeah, I think that reigns true for people as much as it does organization. If you can’t. take that information and empower others to do their job effectively, then like you said, you’ll reach a ceiling either in your career as an individual or as an organization. If you can’t empower other people in your organization to accomplish without you, then again, you’re the dependency. And so they won’t be able to.

Speaker 0 | 30:40.787

What’s the character’s name in the book in Phoenix Project? I think it’s Brett?

Speaker 1 | 30:46.370

Brant.

Speaker 0 | 30:48.031

Okay, Brant. Yeah, he’s the main character, at least in his world. And it was, they’d spent so much effort trying to free him up so that he could actually do what he was really good at. But he was so stuck and mired in fixing everybody else’s problems that they would give him a task. And he couldn’t focus and get that task done because he was the only one. And everybody kept saying, I need him. I need him to fix this. And I need him to fix that. And I need it. So they had to get him a second, a junior. And he also had to let go of those things. He had to recognize that he could provide more value moving forward than staying where he was, solving everybody else’s problems.

Speaker 1 | 31:36.956

Absolutely. And it definitely required everyone to understand the problem. It’s not that Brent was… better than everybody else. Although he was able to solve problems, he just understood it a little bit better. And he was not taught or trained on how to provide that information so other people can do the job as well. And yeah, exactly right. It took management some looking at the situation to understand it, to then create an environment allowing them to do that. So that’s the other problem. Because as soon as you do the work today, and this is… The difference between, I think, reactive versus improvement is we need to fix problems today, but it takes more effort to improve the way of which we work today, right? You can either do the job or you can plan and do. And planning and doing requires more effort. And so the question I would pose you even is, how do you move from reactive… which is you’ve got 40 hours in a week. Many more of us work beyond that. I understand that. But you’ve got 40 hours in a week. Then if you’re spending all 40 of those hours reacting to work, how do you even make time to improve things? So what does that look like? And the book talks a little bit about that, but I’d love to hear from you, Mike, what have you done to improve your team’s work and what’s that look like?

Speaker 0 | 33:09.003

Oh, man. Well, it’s… Like you’ve mentioned, there’s that building of the process, documentation, and the documentation, and just trying to spend a lot of time as the team looking at, okay, how can we become better? What do we need in our processes to be able to handle these things better? So we started off and kind of… I’ve designed the team with, okay, here’s Help Desk. And then above and beyond Help Desk is support and maintenance. And what is the definition of these and how are we working with these? And then development. And what does development mean? And, you know, trying to provide those roles, trying to provide the methods that those roles or those. I’m trying to look at part of the notes that are written from our discussion earlier and trying to define that work and get people to stick to those processes so that we get out of that main character or hero syndrome and running off and doing things. You make me… or I feel the need to talk about shadow IT within shadow or within IT. So I’ve got team members who go off and… have in the past created solutions and not communicated that to any of the rest of the team. So as we’re working on a process and we’re trying to refine this, we suddenly discover this thing that one of us built and never communicated to anybody else. And so there’s code out there that’s not saved in a repository that nobody else knows, that we have no documentation on. And, you know, You’re shaking your head and going, oh, my God.

Speaker 1 | 35:21.663

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 35:22.444

It’s, you know, I’ve got another leader right behind me. And our methods are so different because I came up from, okay, what do you need? What’s the goal? Let me go help you. And they’re going, wait a minute. What’s the process? How are we going to achieve this? And. You know, they’re much more structured and they truly kind of grew up embracing DevOps where, you know, I’ve been in this position for 20 years and DevOps is a new proposition to me. You know, DevOps is something that showed up in, God, when did it show up? Eight years ago and kind of really embraced in the last five years. It may be longer, but. But those are the times that, come on, I come back from the days of, I learned how to program with structured programming and object-oriented was the new thing.

Speaker 1 | 36:26.984

So,

Speaker 0 | 36:27.624

you know, the world that I started out in has changed radically and the speed with which we need to process things. What? what have we done to make the process better? There’s so many little things, but I think it’s trying to define that process and adhere to that process and communicate the value of that and show that because I can talk about what the value is, but until I can show that, it’s hard for some people to understand, especially when we start talking the… geek level and we start talking about devops you know most of the non-it people you start talking about devops and they’re just like and their eyes glaze and you know you mentioned something about you your wife’s involved with technology so it sounds like you can go home and talk to her about about your day at work and my wife has you no desire to hear about any of the technology that I dealt with. Now, if I came home and talked about all the politics and any of the issues that I was dealing with that way, she’d be in. But I’m always focused in on the, how do I fix this? How do I fix this? How do I make this better? One of my innate needs is to solve the puzzle. I like looking at that. And one of my gifts is being able to see five steps ahead and recognize. Okay, if we do this, we’re building a foundation that will allow for that in two weeks. Oh, man. It’s hard to put to words the exact changes that we’ve done within our culture to try to change these processes to get more into a DevOps mindset across the whole group. And to be able to show what we’re doing.

Speaker 1 | 38:36.615

I want to introduce some concepts here. Yeah, you’ve talked about a lot. And I think a lot of people feel that. You know, it’s like, man, everything feels chaotic. And it’s also hard to put words to things that we’ve done. When someone asks you, like, what have you done in your job? And you’re like, I’ve done so much, but I have no idea. Like you asked me and I’m like, it just feels like I’ve done everything, but I can’t articulate exactly what I’ve done. So I want to introduce some concepts from the book. There’s one about work. So there’s planned work versus unplanned work. If you want to hear more about planned work, go read about it. But the thing about it is unplanned work, also called anti-work, is something that we need to learn to get away from, which is all the firefighting. And there’s this quote that I think many people might relate to from the book. So I’ve even sent this quote to people within the organization. Even though it comes from the IT side of things, they relate because they understand the feeling. So I’ll read the quote. It says, unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. The more projects are crammed onto the plate with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code or problems, which means more shortcuts. As Bill said, around and around we go. It’s… the IT capacity death spiral. And I think a lot of organizations experience that, where we don’t know what we’re committed to. We say yes to the thing that’s put in front of us. We’re not tracking a lot of the work. And we’re continually just feeling overwhelmed and unproductive because we’re just reacting and responding. And so unplanned work is the worst kind of work that we can do, because the best thing we can do is plan our capacity. schedule that, hey, this is how much time I’m going to spend on these projects. This is how much time it’s going to take to complete these projects. Therefore, if I have, if this project is going to take 200 hours, then, and I only have one person available to work on it. If I send them on there full time, it’s going to take at least, you know, a month and a half to complete it. It’s like, now take that across all these other products that we do. And management doesn’t understand or see. all the work that’s being done. So it’s invisible. And I think the question I’d ask is how do we improve it? And it’s really the hard mental work required to schedule and plan and understand. So it’s turning invisible work visible. Often we do that with a ticketing system. Someone asks you to do something, okay, open up a ticket. That’s why we say that. Because if you don’t open up a ticket, I’m going to forget. And I’m not going to work on it. And I don’t know how much time. I put against this ticket. Therefore, I don’t know how much time it’s consuming in my work schedule. And so really, I hate time entries, by the way. They’re so cumbersome and burdensome, but they’re so valuable. It’s kind of like I hate budgeting my finances. I just want to go spend money. But I practically really need to budget because we only have a finite amount of resources to give. That’s true with our time. That’s true with our finances. That’s true with our mental capacity. You should only have a certain number of projects active on your plate today because you only have a certain amount of mental capacity that you can hand to each one of those projects. And when you overload your mental capacity, you start going into what is called technical debt, which is you have all this debt that you incurred about not upgrading that system because I was going to upgrade it. But then someone told me I had to go work on this project last minute because they didn’t tell me they were working on this thing. And this system is down. And suddenly there’s all these things that we were supposed to do that we didn’t do that we now have is debt, which is putting a burden on the entire organization. And I would say that’s true for financial resources in your personal life. That’s true with work debt in your organizational life and planning things out. It’s really identifying what. is pulling us down. A lot of it comes from unplanned work and to extend the analogy, unplanned spending. Where are you spending your time or where are you spending your resources?

Speaker 0 | 43:15.870

And this is not, you know, we’re breaking out of the IT world here. This is not just an IT issue. This is a across the board. These are some of the life issues. And you know what, that unplanned work, that… is so back to so many of the the things so many of the things um so unplanned work documentation scoping project planning you know nobody wants to spend all this time defining what are we going to do look we we’ve got the goal we know what we want to achieve make it happen just go go don’t bother me kid don’t don’t ask the questions but But if we don’t ask those questions ahead of time, then we don’t get a proper scope. We don’t have a proper plan. And we end up doing all kinds of rework and unplanned work. So, you know, the unplanned work is one thing. And then the rework is a whole other thing because half of the time the unplanned work turns into rework because we weren’t communicating in the beginning to figure out what the actual plans were. And we weren’t looking at the different scenarios. And then time entry. Oh, man. That has been one of the largest changes in culture that my group had to go through. You know, we had the tools. And it used to be that, you know, yeah, send in a ticket, send in a help desk request, send in. And we’d get all of those, but we weren’t tracking the time against them. So we saw all of the issues and we could tell you, hey, you submitted it at this day. We fixed it that day. What’s the problem? Now, we didn’t track how much time was spent on it. So now with those time entries, we can take and look and say, OK, these are the largest time consumers for this organization. or for this product or this project, or we have a better idea of that scoping of that, being able to guess that it’s going to take 200 hours to complete a task. If you don’t have that definition of work, if you don’t have the definition of what you’re trying to achieve planned out step-by-step, that 200-hour guess, It’s going to take two weeks.

Speaker 1 | 45:43.236

You know,

Speaker 0 | 45:44.296

the builder gets everything. It’s going to take two weeks. So we’ll get that done in two weeks.

Speaker 1 | 45:50.678

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 45:51.218

If we’re allowed to focus on it, if we knew exactly what we were doing and how late are we going to work and how, you know, how many extra hours are we going to put in during that two weeks to shove 200 hours into 80? So, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 46:11.172

No, that’s, yeah, I hear you. That’s absolutely true. And the whole estimation on time, I mean, humans are terrible at estimating long term, period. Doesn’t matter. There’s some law out there. I forget what it is, like some concept, which is no matter how much time you estimate it’s going to take, it will always take longer, even accounting for that concept. And so if you say. Well, this usually takes, you know, I think it’s going to take two weeks. And so we’ll double it to four weeks. Well, since you said it’s going to take four weeks, it’s now going to take six. Like that’s the kind of mentality that’s out there. So yeah, tracking time and getting some real numbers, especially on the way that I work in my IT department. We’ve got three different types of work. We’ve got tickets, projects, and service requests. So tickets simply means we have no idea how long it’s going to take because we don’t know what the solution is. We have to figure that out. projects are it’s uncharted territory it’s something new and so we can create estimations and the company knows that okay we’re going to provide the best information we know possible but we don’t know for sure because it’s uncharted territory and then a service request is a process it’s a predefined amount of work we know who all is involved all the steps required and so we’ve tracked how much time it takes to complete those steps so we provide better estimations based on people’s availability. So if you submit an onboarding request, we say, hey, this is going to take about three hours of IT time, of touch time to complete. Now, this is the difference because there’s touch time and there’s lead time. Because if you tell my IT department three hours before this person starts that we’re onboarding them, we’re not going to have their stuff ready. Sorry, HR and hiring manager, they won’t have a computer. Just because it takes us three hours doesn’t mean we have three hours available right now. And so there’s this concept of lead time, which is how long will it take for this person to actually start working on the problem or working on the solution after it’s been submitted. And that’s really important for, I think, turning unplanned work into planned work because they can submit the request. We may not be aware of it right now, something that might be unplanned last minute. actually needs to be scheduled and prepared for. So how do you take unplanned work and turn it into planned work? Which is why we go from a ticket to a project to a service request. Tickets, if we see there’s a specific issue, then we try to turn that into a project to solve the core problem. Or if there’s similar requests being sent through that we do all the time, why don’t we just make that a defined process, document how to do it and turn it into a service request so we can get… better clarification. Then we have standard operating procedures on how to perform each one of those service requests. So if my guy that does network infrastructure stuff is out of the office that day, but he’s got six service requests to upgrade switching, there’s the switches and we need to switch over some VLANs. If he has an SOP on how to do that, because we do it all the time, then I can step in and do it on his behalf because he’s out and he can have his day off and not worry about those things. So. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 49:29.952

enjoy a true day off. Set the phone down and just scroll on the things that he wants to scroll on versus answering the calls and doing work remotely.

Speaker 1 | 49:42.644

Exactly. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 49:43.305

man. Yeah. And so one of the other things is protecting. That the lead time and the actual time too, because that’s one of the other struggles that I’ve had within our organization is, you know, we allocate that three hours that you’re talking about for onboarding somebody. But if we keep pulling them off to do something else because somebody else is screaming a little louder because there’s more pain, there are times where that is the right move is to pull them off of whatever they’re working on and go put out the fire. But if you can. if you can reduce those sudden outbursts. Um, and, but you, there’s times where we have to protect the work that we’ve got planned. We’ve got to protect the plan so that we can achieve those goals. Um,

Speaker 1 | 50:35.652

yeah.

Speaker 0 | 50:36.132

So I, you know, I, I typically try to go around an hour with these things and we’re starting to approach that hour. So I wanted, I want to switch the tenure or the, the, tenor of the conversation a little bit more. And I want to hear a little bit more about what it’s like working in the 3D print industry, because I haven’t talked to anybody that’s done this. And so tell me a little more about that or tell me some of the stories. When somebody says, what do you do? And you want to explain it, but you’ve had a couple of drinks and you want to talk about something that was fun or challenging. or what’s one of those stories, man? What’s something that you’ve based?

Speaker 1 | 51:25.198

Let’s see. So I work IT operations. We have a separate development team that’s dedicated to the actual industrial 3D printers. So I actually step more into the information security role or cybersecurity role for those particular devices. So, you know, I’ll… Perform pen tests on them. We’ll do vulnerability scans and things like that. But one, I guess it may not be as fun because I’m not an engineer. I’m not involved in the 3D printing side. But one of the crazy things we had to do was, because we’re a Department of Defense contractor, we have a lot of regulations that we need to follow and a lot of cybersecurity controls we need to input. And I think one of the… biggest things for me that was just crazy was we we got a contract uh and and we didn’t end up winning the contract or moving forward with the contract which honestly thank god it was just so stressful but but the way that my because we’re a startup environment right so very much what you might experience in a mom and pop shop or startup it’s like hey there’s this new thing suddenly everybody’s efforts need to be focused on this thing because it’s highly important uh And I was unaware of a project that was going on until they were like, hey, we actually need to put a bid in on this and actually start moving forward and prove out that we can do this contract in the next three and a half weeks. And that required building an entire new defined process of exactly how we do it, make sure all the controls were in place. So it’s a lot of aerospace type prints, and we have to make sure that we retrieve the data securely. So. There’s a thing called CUI or classified uncontrolled information. So basically, it has a stamp on it saying only people that can access this are approved individuals from an organization that are United States citizens. And this data can’t touch any soil except for U.S. soil. And we’re very cloud-centric environment. And so we have a lot of SaaS applications, a lot of deployments. And I can’t actually at the time. I couldn’t dictate whether it was touching US soil or not, because I’m like, well, if we put it in Salesforce, I don’t know where that server is. And so suddenly I have to put in all these new systems within three weeks just to get everything up and running. And I’m like, yeah. So that’s more what happens to me on that side since it’s startup and new and they’re always wanting to try new things. It’s very, okay, here’s the problem. How can you provide a solution immediately today that meets all these requirements and even some requirements they’re not aware about that I need to go find myself? So that’s more what I’m involved in. Although I do, because my company is really cool, we do a thing called 3D Thursdays, which means every third Thursday, we get to go into the office and we have about 100 or so industrial 3D printers that are set up. And everyone can just print whatever they want. It’s just have fun. We use SolidWorks for some of our stuff, but we’ll also use… um autocad or you know you can really use whatever you want but people will have their own setups where you can go be a part of a class that day if someone chose that they want to teach on 3d slicing or how to do post-processing or whatever else so it’s just a fun day to get everyone into the office and do some cool prints people that printed things for their trucks and cars and things people have printed like practical you know storage unit stuff or storage components for their fist space or some people are printing like rc cars just for fun um and so yeah that’s a fun thing that we get to do and a nice perk of the job just learning 3d printing and slicing wow um yeah i can’t imagine having that

Speaker 0 | 55:34.664

access to that and being able to just go print whatever what kind of materials are you printing with is it always just kind of the uh the um the resin that or are there yeah

Speaker 1 | 55:47.322

Yeah. So we have, if you go to our website, we have all sorts of 3D filaments. So there’s your typical, I think PCTG is what it’s called. I’m not too familiar with all the terms, but there’s the classic plastics that everyone prints from. But we also, one of our business units is creating unique plastics because aerospace requires very unique type of filament. So there’s this one cool filament I like, which it’s a plastic that has a lot of aluminum properties or aluminum for everyone. else in the world that’s not US. So to the point to where you could drop it and it sounded like aluminum. It was very, very cool. So we’ll also create specialized filaments that have never been created before just for our customers in specific environments. So a lot of times we’ll have people creating new filaments as part of that. And then, well, the filament that didn’t go right, didn’t pass our quality assurance checks. But it’s good filament, just not… perfect for the use case. So then it’s free filament for just someone else to go pick up and use in their home space if they want and test out new things. So we’ve done all sorts of different types of filaments. I’ve got probably $1,000 worth of filament sitting in my garage with a 3D printer in there just because, well, we couldn’t sell it. And so it was part of the R&D cost. And now I’m like, oh, I could use that for this project. So I’ll just take it. And that’s just part of the culture.

Speaker 0 | 57:16.422

it’s a perk that sounds like fun i mean like one of the things that pops into my mind is you know having a drone and having the different propellers and using that kind of filament for those so that when you bounce into something on accident um that they survive and they don’t get the dents and dings and and then um so what is the 3d project that you’ve created for yourself that you’re most proud of

Speaker 1 | 57:47.446

Um, let’s see. I often don’t really print much myself. I much prefer doing software development. So I’ll go in on the 3D Thursdays, hang out with people, see what they’re printing. And I do more software development. But I do have a huge desire to 3D print either a Master Chief suit for myself or an Iron Man suit. That’s my dream. I told my wife about it. And she’s like, you’ve got so many other projects going on in the house. finish those first. Like I’ve got a motorcycle sitting in our garage. That’s my granddad’s. It’s like a 1976, you know, BMW cafe racer. Uh, and then I’ve got some woodworking projects that, you know, we’re doing in the house and she’s like, you can’t do anything 3d printed related in the house. That’s why I’ve got all the filament sitting in there. She won’t let me use it. Uh, and so it’s, it’s waiting for me to complete all my other projects before I get to move on to that. Um, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 58:43.117

Sounds like you need a little bit of a process at home.

Speaker 1 | 58:48.026

Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a lot of projects sitting at the 85 to 95 percent complete mark and they’ve been there forever. I just need to go finish them out.

Speaker 0 | 58:59.789

So talk to me a little bit about your entry into IT. What where was your intro and what what sucked you into this world versus. You know, being a starting off as a business process manager and just going in and working with that. How, you know, actually, I’ve been wanting to bring this up throughout the whole call and I didn’t really have a chance until now. One of my prior interviewees said that they thought that one of the best things anybody in IT could do is working for an MSP because you get such a broad experience across multiple organizations that it helps. broaden your your view of of it in general but so kind of two questions here what What sucked you into IT and what are your thoughts about that MSP experience? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 59:58.381

great question. So I went to Baylor for, at first, as a biology major to be a doctor. I did that because my mom really wanted me to be a doctor and my family was in the medical space, still is, a lot of them are. And so I was like, you know, I’ll give it the good old college try. And after a year, I was like, I hate it. this so much. I can’t do it. So then I actually went to be a business major. I went into the business school, spent a semester there, bored out of my mind. I think that’s what kept me from pursuing that. I was like, this is all common sense. I don’t know why. And I joined in on some MIS intro class and it was terribly named. It was basically just Excel. It’s just Excel and that was it. And I’m like, this is terrible. At that point in my career, I had that. four years experience in Java from high school projects. And I was on part of a competitive computer science team. And I started a website development business in high school and had experience in the terrible language of PHP as well as the typical HTML and CSS. I hate PHP. I’m never going to touch another line of code. You couldn’t give me enough money to do it. But anyway, so I got into business school. I was-Software development,

Speaker 0 | 61:16.469

but hate programming. Okay, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 61:18.670

No, I hate PHP. I love programming. I just hate PHP. So anyway, I landed in computer science because I had experience. And so I did that, really enjoyed it. Ended up joining a nonprofit organization because I wanted to volunteer there. And I volunteered my time as we did some overseas support efforts. for the Syrian refugee crisis back in 2016. If you remember the Syrian refugees fleeing and going into Europe and all throughout Europe. So joined that, did some work for them, enjoyed that. They asked me to come on board full time. I did that for a while and then eventually applied to be a software engineer for another software company based on the IT director. director’s recommendation from the nonprofit org. They did not hire me from the secondary, but the owner was in that meeting. He was like, hey, why don’t you come join me in starting this new company? It’s an MSP. He was acquiring an MSP and he was like, I want you to help lead this team on the sales side. Because he was like, you just don’t have the personality, which says IT. He’s like, I know this other guy. And he kind of told me. this story of his friend. And he was like, he was a software developer. He ended up being a sales leader. And then he was a business owner. And now he’s their partners. And I was like, oh, okay. He’s like, why don’t you just skip some of the software side and just go to sales? Because you have the ability. And I was like, okay. So I jumped into sales because I thought it would be fun. Did that for a while in the MSP space and got to know about a lot, about a lot of different companies, moved into technical account management. because that’s where I just seemed to thrive the most, which was operating basically as an IT manager all the way up to a virtual CIO is what they would call it for organizations, kind of planning their roadmaps and technology systems and coordinating with their internal IT staff and departments and things like that, which landed me into my job today because that was one of my customers, was Ascentium at the time. And they liked what I was doing. And they were like, hey, can you just come work for us full time because we like what you do. So that’s how I ended up where I’m at today. I highly, highly encourage for if you are willing to suffer and go into the MSP space. Most MSPs are terrible. I’ll say that because I and I’ll say that because I don’t know. businesses and MSPs that are integrated well enough for them to be successful. Unless there’s an internal staff and it’s kind of a co-managed environment, meaning the MSP is treated like a project and technical resource. But if they are leading the IT department of an organization, oftentimes it’s not going to be effective because that MSP is not in the meetings with all the business leaders of the organization. So the alignment isn’t really there, even though from a theoretical standpoint, it could be. it’s often not. But if you’re willing to take the lashes, I think you will garner a lot of experience from the MSP space. I think it’s great. And depending on the employer, it can be a really great opportunity. So it’s kind of a mixed bag. I would recommend it because I did it. I enjoyed my company that I worked for and really liked the team there. And because the leaders were so great, I was able to excel. But if they were not great leaders, I don’t think I would have had the same experience. And I probably would have left before I ended up where I’m at today.

Speaker 0 | 65:12.908

Yeah, I can definitely see that. And then the… Lots of fun in the middle of all of the things that you’re talking about. The fact that you were doing some of this programming in high school. So some of that introduction just happened through schooling where, you know, for me, it was more of a defined path that I had to put myself on versus just the incidental stuff. I think we’re in different generations. The color of my beard compared to the color of your beard tells me that. um so wow is there is there anything you want to promote is there anything for you that you’re proud of that you want to share with the world that you want people to look at um you know projects um personal

Speaker 1 | 66:03.632

things that a podcast say like popular it nerds uh you know uh nothing yet i mean i have ideas i’ve always wanted to do my own podcast sometime in the future I think this is a ton of fun. I have a business idea I want to start. I’ve got all sorts of things, but no, nothing really for me to promote. I will do a shout out. There is one. It’s called simplifyingprocesses.com. And that is, I think, the best blog I’ve ever met or ever read around business process management. Highly recommend it. And if you ever want to bring… The guy who writes it on board, he does not come from IT. That’s not his background. He’s more of a business leader. But yeah, just a really great blog for anyone looking to get into business process management. And I would highly encourage reading The Phoenix Project. But that’s, I think, for the benefit of the readers, nothing from my perspective. If anyone wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, feel free to. I’m always happy to have a conversation. I tend to tell… My team members treat me as their IT therapist. I love hearing them complain so I can look for solutions for them. But I think that’s just a personality bend of mine. I love helping people. I have been beyond blessed by the people in my life that have provided me resources or mentorship or help. If there’s any way I can do that with anyone listening to this podcast or anyone that reaches out to me, I love doing it. Because I’ve been built up by the community around me, regardless of how sparse that may have been or not as connected, if that makes sense. It’s not like they all come from the same town or something. But I’ve been built up by the people around me, and that’s the only reason why I think I’m at the place I am today. And so if there’s an opportunity that I get to build into somebody else or advise or help, I’d love to do that.

Speaker 0 | 68:09.396

Awesome. Well, that is definitely appreciated. I know it’s part of the goal that we have with Dissecting Popular IT Nerds is to help those that are following behind us learn how to get out from the back room and join the… Oh, man. I’m going to put my foot in my mouth and join those with personalities.

Speaker 1 | 68:34.813

I didn’t say it, guys. That did not come from me.

Speaker 0 | 68:37.835

All me. all me but but to help change that perception you know i i grew up in that generation where it was um oh god revenge of the nerds you know and and that that’s what nerds were and and the the ideal of what a nerd is for your generation and the ones and the main characters following you um it’s a completely different definition and and we’re a completely different group but there’s you um solving problems man i i love solving those problems whatever they happen to be so it’s that that puzzle give me that challenge um whether it’s helping somebody with um something in their personal life or or achieving a goal towards work or learning or you know trying to fix that process or create that that thing for for work um it’s amazing how much technology is in everything today I mean, I look across our organization and there is not one job that is not affected by the things that I’m responsible for in one way or another. And some days that’s daunting. Some days it’s encouraging. And other days it’s just like, you guys want what?

Speaker 1 | 69:58.362

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 69:58.862

But it’s been a great conversation, Tony. The hour has flown by. Thank you so much. And what was that? That simplifyingprocesses.com?

Speaker 1 | 70:10.809

Yeah, it’s just that simplifyingprocesses.com. I think the person that writes that, his name is Matt Spears. He works at a company called Nintex, which is a business process management company. I think he’s been there for about six years. He’s, he’s there, I think lead solutions architect or something like that. He’s got really great concepts. I highly recommend following his stuff. And just want to say thank you to Matt himself. He’s helped me a lot in a lot of trying to understand business process management, how to implement it in my company.

Speaker 0 | 70:43.851

Right on. And it’s such an important subject for all of us because as you’ve stated, man, it’s not just about, it’s about the people who are involved in the business. IT, but it’s about business. And if we’re not providing value, then what are we here for? And what’s the goal? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 71:05.861

Yeah. Funny. I will say one last thing. One last thing I would say is I would argue that business, I would say that business and finances go together like a marriage, right? That they are… And they’re interconnected in a way that you can never separate them. And I would say that that has become true for IT today. IT is the gas to the business that is a car. So the businesses can’t move forward without IT. And if you aren’t understanding how you’re propelling your business forward, or really, if you’re not understanding where the car is going and how it’s trying to get there, you’re not going to be a good fuel. for the organization to accomplish what it needs. And if you can do that well, you’re going to succeed and surpass all of your peers because you’ll have something that they don’t, which is context.

Speaker 0 | 72:04.230

Yeah, and you reminded me of something else. You were talking about that law when trying to guess how long something was gonna take. And the only thing that came to my mind, and I believe that I’m right when I say this, the Heisenberg principle. And the more I know about where I’m at, the less I know about where I’m going. And the more I know about where I’m going, the less I know about where I’m at. So, I mean, trying to figure out where I’m going to be in two weeks is, it’s, I have to know where I am today.

Speaker 1 | 72:35.531

So,

Speaker 0 | 72:36.912

it’s, oh man. Well, thanks again, Tony. It’s been a great conversation.

Speaker 1 | 72:42.036

Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.