Speaker 0 | 00:07.961

All right, well welcome to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds where we’re allowed to geek out with fellow nerds and there are no eye scrolls or loss of conscious thought as people’s eyes glaze over. Today I’m proud to introduce Felix Duschotsky who’s going to talk to us about digitization, running a successful project, creating a mobile app, to solve a business opportunity. Not only will Felix talk to us about all of that, but he’s also the winner of the San Diego Tech Exec Award. Why don’t you tell us a little about that?

Speaker 1 | 00:40.083

Yeah, thanks, Mike. Yeah, a few years ago when I was working for ImpromiseRx, I was nominated for the San Diego Tech Exec Award, and there’s about 300 candidates. I ended up being lucky enough to be chosen as a winner for the category of a smaller public company. And they’ve just based that on, you know, a number of IT operational improvements that we made and just kind of the bulk of, you know, work that we were able to accomplish and really raise the company up.

Speaker 0 | 01:11.856

Cool. Right on. So that’s always nice to have that recognition, especially public recognition. Usually we’re lucky if we get recognition within the company, let alone publicly. So let’s… Let’s talk a little about this application that you developed. Tell me some more about the application and give us an overview of it.

Speaker 1 | 01:34.950

Yeah. So at the time that we developed the mobile e-prescribing app, it was one of several projects we took on to streamline the process for prescribers to be able to send over patient prescriptions. The company I worked for, like I just mentioned, Ipromiser X was a mail-order pharmacy. And so they… dealt directly with patients. They also did manufacturing of the products. The objective was just to make it easier for the prescribers and also for the patients to send over the required relevant patient drug details so they can spend more time with the patients, less time on paperwork. So it basically offered them an additional channel to send over the data. We had prescribers across various sectors, mostly all for ophthalmology. but outside of ophthalmology as well. And so we were just looking to make their lives easier. But then for the company, for our side, it enabled the pharmacy staff to have more comprehensive and accurate data. So it saved them time as well. They have an in-house pharmacy management program, and keeping that data as accurate as possible with less time was really critical for the staff.

Speaker 0 | 02:48.812

Okay, so now you’ve thrown a lot of different things in there that are going. huge pieces like okay e-prescribing so it’s um you’re going to be talking about personally identifiable information you got HIPAA requirements you talked about the PMS with oh wait a minute I just heard what I said but the uh for the patient management systems um and so help me understand a little more about the business problem what was you know I started to hear some of the solution but But how did you guys identify the problem or how was the problem presented to you?

Speaker 1 | 03:28.417

So from, let’s say, day one, starting at that job, we always had a lot of time spent for internal staff making sure the data is accurate. And there were always little projects here and there to help with automation, help save time. kind of focus more on patient safety, making sure we’re doing things properly rather than busy work. So one of the primary drivers was optimization among all the stakeholders. So patients, prescribers, and the pharmacy staff. We’re trying to solve that problem kind of more holistically than the little patchwork that existed when I came in. So one of the applications we’re not going to focus on today, but we also worked on at the same time frame was a… a prescribing web portal. We ended up hosting that on Salesforce. So whether it’s that one or an e-prescribing app, projects like this really enabled IT to help the business better with automation in general. Really, everyone in the prescribing chain is busy. The prescribers were unable to send prescriptions in a fraction of the time, whether it’s through the mobile app or a different channel. We, in general, we’re just working to make things more streamlined. You know, a lot of doctors still use fax order forms. You know, we know that’s not really efficient. The more we can get away from fax and IT, the better.

Speaker 0 | 04:57.196

Yeah, for sure. I know I hate those machines and just trying to deal with the phone lines and everything else. It’s still such a challenge and it should be, shouldn’t be. I mean, one of the things that I touted about this whole thing was the digitization. So you’re helping streamline manual processes for the organization and these people that you were helping with this, those were non-IT people, right? They were the regular operations. people, the order takers, the customer service people, not only at your organization, but at the customers too, right? And down the line?

Speaker 1 | 05:35.938

Yeah. So, you know, some doctor’s offices are large, but many of our customers, you know, did not have multiple branches, right? They were either a one man show or a one woman show, or they had an assistant and, you know, they have to run a business, do paperwork. you know work with patients so to remove some of the stress is best and then on the company side you know when i started we had a substantial um you know staff of customer service agents who really work their butt off uh you know on the phone all the time talking to patients prescribers just trying to make sure all the data is accurate and the more technology we’re able to

Speaker 0 | 06:20.904

in place for them the more efficient they could do their job and ultimately save you know the pharmacist time as well wait so between the doctor’s office the um the pharmacy and what was the other third party that was in involved here was it were you guys really kind of the other third party but yeah the information was the same so you mean you mean my my name and my allergies and my um uh potential side effects or reactions to the allergies to the medicines weren’t the same amongst every one of those systems?

Speaker 1 | 06:56.600

Well, they have to be. And so, you know, a lot of manual work went into verifying that. But I mean, if you imagine the doctor’s office has a patient management system, you know, hopefully it’s digital, not paper-based. And then there’s our system, the pharmacy management system. And then the data flows from one to the other, you know, hundreds of prescriptions a day through a third party middleware. And, you know, of all the different pieces of software on both ends and the middleware, you know, the mapping is far from perfect. And so we could help that without reinventing the wheel. That was one of the goals.

Speaker 0 | 07:30.876

Yeah, when we were talking about this in the pre call, one of the things that you mentioned was that there was a tendency for duplicate and triplicate and even more records to be created. And so this app was going to help identify those or… How did this app help address that issue? Or was it just helping make sure that one record was consistent throughout and then you guys had to help them identify the other ones to kill?

Speaker 1 | 08:00.202

Yeah. So, you know, when the prescription comes in, there’s a number of standard fields and a number of required fields. So if we receive the patient’s first name, last name, and then there’s the product and the allergies, how do we match the customer name? to the name you know and patient id in our system uh sometimes the pharmacy management system has some tricks like it could use date of birth um maybe the date of birth isn’t correct we have to correct it later i mean typos get made on both ends right uh and then there’s you know thousands and hundreds of thousands of patients over over time and so you’re you’re not gonna be able to match it perfectly in in some in some instances right and um if you end up creating new records like as a default behaviors like the pharmacy management system would just create a new patient record it wouldn’t necessarily uh populate the payment history right uh that we had on the previous record and so we had to go chase down the payment history um

Speaker 0 | 09:04.508

and that’s another manual touch oh man so you started talking about the web portal that you guys were creating was the web portal in tandem or was it a predecessor to the mobile app was it Did you layer them kind of together? Because, you know, I know that when my team created a mobile application, we had a web portal that way predicated the mobile app. But one of the things that we tried to do was we tried to make sure that the functionality was the same between the two so that if somebody was more comfortable going to the web portal, they had all of the same functionality that somebody who used the web app did. And we tried to actually flow things in. through the same channels, so to speak. Can you talk a little about those?

Speaker 1 | 09:53.873

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, I don’t want to say one preceded the other because they did essentially serve the same purpose. I mean, some people prefer to use the phone. Some people prefer to use a computer. The first version of the web portal or the web prescribing app, that was put out first. And then the mobile app took, I would say, a little less time to get to a really usable version. Because we went. through a lot more testing with the web portal. And I’d say just from the technical experience, it just took longer to get it right on that Salesforce platform. It’s just so customizable. It took longer for the developer to develop something, get released, we test it, we go back. The mobile app just seemed to be a little more bound to the restrictions and the flow for some reason. But in terms of the overall design for the solution, the pharmacy management system was essentially the ERP system for the pharmacy. And it was a central repository for all the records. It was the system of record for all patient prescription data. So with that being the single source of truth, the first thing we end up doing is to build out a secure API solution for data access. And so that was really the first thing. And once that was built in-house, it allowed for a number of these integrations to work. And so, you know, kind of sky was the limit after that.

Speaker 0 | 11:36.905

So building out that API solution, that’s one of the challenges that I see happening more and more today. Some providers are building and layering in APIs into their applications, but then there’s a lot of providers out there or software providers. who are not building in that and it sounds like that’s one of the challenges you had can you can you talk a little about um the process or the learning process that you guys went through to add apis onto a an

Speaker 1 | 12:10.464

existing system yeah yeah so uh just to go back even further about a year before we kicked off that api and completed it we were on a completely different pharmacy management software And that one was really closed off. And the company was on it for a long time. And there was some hesitation of moving on, but it really wasn’t scalable. So that was a really tough migration for everyone. But fast forward, once we were on the new system, I think everyone acknowledged that none of these systems are perfect. And this one allowed more customization and usability because the backend was all just basic SQL. It’s Microsoft SQL backend. And they enabled us to, I mean, the vendor worked with us closely to enable us to develop against it. I haven’t seen a solution like this out of the box where they provide a good API. They did provide one out of the box, but it wasn’t great. And if you think about it, the pharmacy management development companies, you know, they have to deal with regulatory and compliance in 50 states. Plus, do all this compliance work to work with e-prescribing platforms like SureScripts. So considering how expensive software development is, they’re on so many work streams that they can’t be pursuing the latest and greatest user interfaces and all this. So we kind of have to work with what we have. Because it was a really open backend and the vendor is very supportive, we were able to develop that API.

Speaker 0 | 13:50.574

Yeah, that’s a great thing because I know some of the stuff that we were working with, the back end was a black box. And half the time, you know, half the time I was afraid for us to do updates to the system because we didn’t know what processes got kicked off. And sometimes, you know, you write to a specific area thinking, okay, this is the full record and some other field in some other road. unrelated table as far as we knew was getting updated and it was critical so that you could ultimately like run financials or you know aggregate all of the records into the correct time period those kinds of things so um at least you guys had migrated to something that was a little more um modern because anymore is they have to applications have to be ready for um interfacing and integration And if an application doesn’t integrate, I’m like, black box, black box, head desk. Okay, so talk about the solution, because we’ve talked about the app, how you created, kind of what you knew it was going to do, a couple of some of the spider webs of how you were going to make these things to work. The designing of the solution, did you take that agile approach of, okay, here’s the next step, and we’re going to go do this? Or did you have more of a fleshed out design of we’ll start here, we’ll get to this step, we’ll do A, B, C, D, E, F, and continue releasing as we hit A, B, C, D, E, F. Or tell me a little more about the design of the solution and how you got to that point while working on this.

Speaker 1 | 15:50.132

Yeah, so I’d say I shared some of the project management role with… with another leader at the organization. I focused more on the integration work and the data requirements. And then he focused a lot on the look and feel of it. And I don’t know that we, I’d say we feel a label, I guess we did a combination of agile waterfall on this one, where we tried to put out a solution that we could hand over to our test group on the first release. And we pretty much got all the look and feel and fonts and colors and graphics, like 90% of the way there on the first release. And then the data requirements, we got correct after probably the third release. So it took… you know six or eight weeks on that one and and you know unlike the api where it was all internal development and we knew that the system really well um we ended up having a combination of in-house software development along with a external partner on this one so it

Speaker 0 | 17:12.386

was a little faster in that regard the uh the other gentleman that you were um and the other person sorry that you were working with uh on this um were they in it and focused on UI, UX, or was this another individual within the organization that was working closer with the teams or the prescribers?

Speaker 1 | 17:37.701

No, this person was not in IT. This person was just on the executive team and he was one of the sponsors of the project.

Speaker 0 | 17:44.864

Okay, cool. Well, then that’s a key piece actually too, because now it wasn’t just a project that was contained solely within IT. in itself can sometimes become a black box. Now you had an executive sponsor working with you, involved with the, I’m assuming involved with your test group or your initial groups of the prescribers, your groups in-house who worked with the data that was coming through. But that other, was he the one that was giving the updates to the rest of the executive team, or were you both giving those updates to the rest of the executive team?

Speaker 1 | 18:24.968

It was mostly him. And then on the final project completion update, yeah, we were both on it. But yeah, having that business partnership is pretty critical. I would definitely not label this an IT project because the success and failure depends on if you get the business involved. It’s just like that pharmacy management migration. A lot of people see it as like software and you’re moving data back and forth. But I mean, if you don’t get the pharmacist to buy in that we’re switching and leadership to buy in that, you know, it’s be painful switch, but we have to do it. It’s a business project, right? Not an IT project.

Speaker 0 | 19:08.248

And this is actually, you know, it’s a business project created by IT or built by IT. And this is this is one of those critical things. This is where we turn IT from being a cost center. Right. into a value for the company because we’re now we’re helping them with an issue that they’ve had um uh an opportunity as people love to call them those those business problems business opportunities and um and now you’re crafting a solution you’ve got your executive sponsor um people are how how well were people adopting it how well what you experienced with that and And talk a little about that, the user friendliness and functionality.

Speaker 1 | 19:56.636

Sure. But yeah, you’re absolutely correct. I mean, IT can’t just be seen as patching servers or creating problems by blocking websites, right? Or fixing the printer. I mean, this is a good example of revenue generation.

Speaker 0 | 20:12.002

Yeah, for sure. It’s critical. And it’s also one of the reasons that I was labeling this with that digitization, because you’ve taken a manual process or an auditory. process since you had customer service people on the phone validating all of this data and trying to make sure it was the same in all of the different systems now you’ve created a process that flows that information through that stays the same and

Speaker 1 | 20:40.564

and it’s now become modern and digital so yeah yeah but in terms of user friendliness like you’re asking um so we try to model it after kind of more reactive modern looking web applications. If you were to see one of the old PDF order forms, I mean, it kind of looks like an intake form at a doctor’s office, but way more fields. You go into a doctor’s office, you sit in there for 15 minutes filling out quantity this and this many and this and that. And this is really just, you put things in, it remembers your past order for the past patient you swiped. It goes to the next thing and it does auto-correcting, you know, some kind of logical things you can’t, you can put in the PDF form, but you really shouldn’t. Or some safety things like you can’t be ordering a thousand milligrams of, you know, product, you know, ABCD for this patient. That’s the board of pharmacy would never allow this, but you can put on the PDF, but, you know, digitally you can have those controls. Right. Or like a good modern example. We’ll be good. Most forms now on the web, putting your address, they just do a lookup on some API, like ShipStation, and it just starts autofilling your address. So it aligns perfectly when they go to ship and USPS and the shipping department. And that wasn’t super common even five years ago, but now it’s everywhere. But that was in the app. So just like little things like that.

Speaker 0 | 22:16.428

I can’t tell you how frustrated I get when I’m filling in my address and I put in the zip code. and i jump on and then it’s coming back and saying okay what city are you in i’m like i gave you the zip code come on yeah no or a lack of insight a lack of of thought forethought and user friendliness because put in the zip code i’ve got the city i’ve got the state i’ve got the country because canada’s zip codes are definitely a lot different than the us as our mexicos so And I haven’t had to deal with too much international myself, but I’m sure that the zip codes are a little bit different over in Europe, too. So talk to me. I mentioned it earlier on. What about the compliance? You mentioned something about the compliance, about having the patient management system having to be very aware of compliance per state. And. We both know HIPAA is going to be involved, whatever state it is. You’ve got TII, personally identifiable information. What kind of concerns did you run into? How did you do research on that to make sure that you weren’t putting yourself or potentially causing the organization pains tomorrow?

Speaker 1 | 23:45.084

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, you know, without getting into a lot of the nitty gritty details. you know, I’d say security around PII data and HIPAA compliance. It’s just a constant theme when working in this space. I mean, outside of the project, just many day-to-day tasks or bringing in a new piece of software or the way you run backups, I mean, ensuring privacy is just top of mind. So just by design of the working in this area, it’s, you know, we have a top of mind. And so we engineered the solution to make sure that we didn’t have data at rest. residual locations. We made sure to implement various security controls on both the front and back end. Like MFA was in the app right from the beginning. A doctor’s logging in, it’s a personal cell phone, right? And it’s this personal phone number, but it sends an MFA text and there’s an onboarding process for that. The API had a validated firewall security policy to make sure only certain sources are allowed. I mean, even basically things like that. were put in right at the beginning. We had… you know vulnerability scans um contracted for all that for all the endpoints and uh you know part of protecting the company besides you know these kind of standard security things that it does uh just having you know good business partnership and buying from the leaders make sure to consult with our in-house pharmacists uh consulting with legal um you know the pharmacists particular they’re ultimately responsible for dispensing the products to the patients and Even though everyone has patient safety top of mind, we wanted to make sure they were included in the decision-making process.

Speaker 0 | 25:32.982

What are the other things that we run into is the chance that if I’m filling out a form on my cell phone, I’ve got lots of other applications on there. It’s not, I mean, there’s as much computing power on my cell phone as there is in many laptops nowadays. But my ability to access that data or that data gets captured and stored on the local device. And typically other apps have access to any of the data that’s recorded. But you mentioned something about trying to protect that. What’d you guys do about that? And it seemed like it was more than just on the device.

Speaker 1 | 26:18.293

Yeah, I guess at a high level, the web. portal and the well i guess we’ll just focus on the mobile app so uh when you were to log into the mobile app it would download certain basic information like your information that um was on the administrative side but it wouldn’t it wouldn’t store the patient information it would do live lookups every time and then when you log out i mean it would time out you didn’t log out yourself um the information would be purged

Speaker 0 | 26:52.040

so it it didn’t retain it in the phone’s memory and then um i believe you’d mentioned somewhere that you guys made sure that the uh whenever the data was at rest or in flight you guys were encrypting it to make sure that it was secured that way too oh

Speaker 1 | 27:08.493

absolutely yeah i mean everything is encrypted right right from the beginning uh so you know all ssl communication uh the api only allowed ssl communication good yeah because that’s so needed with today

Speaker 0 | 27:21.964

I mean, there’s so many different places that people can, unfortunately, can listen in or see that data. And that’s kind of where I was trying to lead with that was that aspect of it. Talk to me about the adoption. How did you guys, what did you do about the adoption? And how did you find out whether this was successful or not? Because to me, I would assume adoption is the primary.

Speaker 1 | 27:49.596

a measure of success or did you guys have a different measure of success so adoption and measure of success go yeah yeah thank you uh so in terms of adoption when we were discussing doing the web portal uh basically you know a doctor could go in to the website log in see their order history see their patient details make corrections if they want to place a prescription order um There was a lot of outreach prior and some really expressed interest in having that versus like you mentioned, like a like a black box analogy. They send us stuff, they trust it’s all working. But to have a history of it, that’s that’s kind of nice for some for some individuals. And so because we already knew some people wanted that, it made sense that we would have an adoption base for it. And so rather than doing, you know, equal outreach for the mobile app, we went ahead and. started working on it and we knew that the original group of people might also be interested in it so um and it turned out that some were and then some smaller offices were especially interested in it because um the amount of time it took them to complete the same tasks are so much faster but you know like anything new um some people jump on board right away others are hesitant so people don’t prefer to use a phone but um one thing they got people on boarded was just asked them to try it and they realized how smooth it was and some and some really used it religiously um but in terms of a you know adoption success um like i mentioned no longer with the company but at the time i left my role i mean they were continuing to onboard you know between 10 and 20 new customers a week let’s say um you know hopefully that increased um you know so i can’t really comment on whether whether they got to a logical point and they said, you know, we’re done, this is the max. But, you know, I know the company goes through ebbs and flows with different. products, different specialties, new technology that they’re developing with their products. And so which ones would be a better fit for new prescribers that they bring on? I’m not really sure if there’s a certain percentage that they want using this versus a web portal. I guess it’s more about optionality and more about the journey and how they can bring more people on. But certainly it was a good chunk when I left.

Speaker 0 | 30:21.066

Did they have any kind of measures or KPIs on the reduction of people having to make those phone calls or all of that kind of work? Had they created any KPIs around the success of this while you were there, while you were still working with it?

Speaker 1 | 30:41.440

Somewhat, yeah. And I can’t tell you that the answer is seven or something.

Speaker 0 | 30:46.624

Right, no.

Speaker 1 | 30:47.805

Internally. We can only measure internal costs. They significantly increased their number of orders and revenue every quarter for multiple, multiple years now without necessarily increasing pharmacy staff. And it’s through some of these automation projects that they were able to just push through a significantly higher number of orders without increasing the number of pharmacists or pharmacy techs. uh in in proportion and then on the other on the other team the customer service team um you know ensuring good you know customer experience uh their their number i mean as people left the company they didn’t necessarily replace them one-to-one but same growth fewer people right

Speaker 0 | 31:37.234

on that’s always a good thing more with less that’s how long have we been how long has that been the uh the mantra for IT, you know, you guys can do more with less. Or we’re just trying to help make sure that more gets done. And it’s exactly that way of measuring it. We help, IT helps facilitate growth of the business without growth of the back office or a corresponding one-to-one growth ratio. What other lessons did you learn? What other, so If you were to, or as you’ve been given new projects and new opportunities, what things did this successful project and that implementation teach you? And what things did you grab from that that you apply to today’s projects and that you know that you’re going to layer into tomorrow’s projects? What are you carrying forth from this?

Speaker 1 | 32:44.574

So if it wasn’t clear, just clarify it now, this project and some of the ones around it, whether it’s a web portal or texting integration into our pharmacy management system, they’re all extremely custom. So there’s a lot of custom coding. I mean, everything from the graphics, fonts, application flow, database integrations, API security, the e-prescribing app in particular. I think we were very successful in keeping the scope tight, you know, from completion to end. But it is a lot of work. And so moving forward, I think with larger custom application proposals, key takeaways is to tighten down the development, make it low code or no code. And I think there’s a lot more technology available now kind of off the shelf to make that possible. But, you know, if you’re always doing custom code, you’re always at higher risk.

Speaker 0 | 33:43.001

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 33:43.550

That’s for scope creep.

Speaker 0 | 33:45.231

Right. For scope creep, for tribal knowledge that you have to maintain, that you can’t easily rebuild, or it takes time to bring a skilled person in and get them caught up on all of that custom information or the tribal knowledge again to be able to take over for somebody or to. allow for growth of somebody and so that you can move somebody to a new role or or change things out that way yeah i mean i think the average is something like

Speaker 1 | 34:20.776

80 of the time you spend on this project is after it’s completed if it’s if it’s all custom and so having a good partner is great but um you know you’re not going to align all these things every time okay so and i don’t know about you but to me this sounds like a painful lesson this

Speaker 0 | 34:38.068

is this is one of those things that okay Now that you’ve done this project, you’ve learned that, you’ve created all that custom. So tomorrow’s project, you’re working on using the low code or the no code to be able to create the solution. so that there’s a lot less of that customization in it so that it’s easier to maintain and grow?

Speaker 1 | 35:03.450

Yeah, I mean, for example, we slowly built up the different components and it kind of made sense to add this custom add-on or this custom application. But if you’re starting at a different point where maybe all of your data is in a SQL database in Azure, or… It might make a lot more sense to leverage the Office 365 and Teams capabilities to develop something that isn’t all custom. It’s just kind of a low-code solution. I think the capabilities are there now.

Speaker 0 | 35:35.106

Yeah, for sure on something like that versus a fully custom-built application that accesses that. Then now you use the, what do they call it, the automation tools or the workflow automation, all of those tools. Microsoft has been producing to help make this much faster too. You know, you don’t need to write all of the interfaces. All you got to do is start setting up the configuration and get the connections right.

Speaker 1 | 36:06.024

Yeah, absolutely. And then I, you know, I’d say the other, you know, thing to, you know, the other takeaway for next time is to make sure you have a really good racy chart of the project work and ongoing maintenance, right? Because we discussed it. having good business partnerships uh well if it’s not 100 clear who’s doing what before and after um you know you’re not gonna be successful and you know that’s another takeaway here just make that yeah you made me clear in the beginning um

Speaker 0 | 36:35.038

remember something that we always kind of talked about internally ourselves was that you know like the that development team those are those more expensive resources and and if you can take that development team and and complete a project And then they can take and disengage 100% and go over onto a new project. And now that the completed project gets handed off to the support group, and they understand and know enough about that project or that product that they can maintain it, then they continue to assume ownership of these projects or these creations. And that development team continues to add more value by doing the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. versus getting stuck on this one and having to put 80% of the time after the fact.

Speaker 1 | 37:26.397

It is nice if you have the opportunity to bring on like a DevOps person or a business analyst to help with some of the lighter loads.

Speaker 0 | 37:34.360

Yeah. Well, and you almost, at least one of the things that we found was you really kind of want that business analyst person up on the front end of this thing, helping validate the business issues, find out some of the, you know, the costs, the values, the potential wins that you’re going to get out of it, and then aiming towards those as you’re building it and having that constant feedback from the business side. But one of the other things that we talked about is so critical, business involvement, business support, business or the executive sponsorship, all of those. Because then it’s a business project. It’s not an IT project. And if the business… creates it, owns it, or if the business designs it and owns it and you create it, now the value of IT just grows so much more.

Speaker 1 | 38:30.408

Yeah, it’s a good point you made. It’s almost like a positive feedback loop, right? If you collaborate properly and it’s successful, it just kind of leads to bigger things.

Speaker 0 | 38:39.014

Yeah, for sure. Well, it sounds like a fun project to have done. Sounds like quite a few lessons learned along the way. Anything else you want to bring up? Anything else you want to talk about on it? As we come kind of to a natural conclusion on this?

Speaker 1 | 38:56.192

No, nothing in detail, but you know, just to wrap it up, I mean the company leadership was pleased by the look and feel and you know, the larger team spoke very gladly that we worked with them and when they presented it to customers, it’s nice to have that. uh you know that confidence that it’s working and that it looks good so you know it made everyone on the i.t side you know very happy the business is happy well did they did they give you any kind of a celebration did you guys get any kind of a win you at least get a pizza party out of it uh

Speaker 0 | 39:34.084

no no except for just respect right right well i mean and that’s that’s one of the things that um it’s on us to make sure that we help the team celebrate the wins So it’s definitely one of the things that being somewhat of an introvert, or at least I call myself one, and I know I’m not. Um, the, uh, it’s on us or it was on me to make sure that I celebrated with my team to help them feel good about their accomplishments, um, beyond just seeing somebody use what they did. Um, we need to acknowledge those wins so that our team feels proud about the work that they’ve done. I need to, let me put it that way.

Speaker 1 | 40:18.616

Yeah, I totally agree. That’s, you know, just part of, uh, it’s just part of being a good leader for the team. acknowledging the wins and your appreciation.

Speaker 0 | 40:27.570

Right on. Well, thank you very much today for the interview and the time to tell us about the successful project. And it’s awesome to talk to somebody about something that we’ve done in IT besides helping that user build something in Excel.

Speaker 1 | 40:48.889

Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 40:50.871

Yeah. Thank you. So as we come to a wrap, I just want to remind all of our listeners to go find us. And if you enjoyed the show today, make sure to give us a like or put a comment on the wherever you’re downloading the podcast from. We definitely need that feedback and appreciate you all. Thank you for listening to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.