Speaker 0 | 00:00.448
That’s just, it’s just how it goes, right? You know, like a, like an ERP implementation, right? It’s going to take us, we’re going to be done in eight months, right? Multiply that by at least two, I would say. Yeah. This is how we forecast, right? No, honestly, accurately though, when we’re forecasting an IT, how should we forecast time to project completion? I’m thinking You’ve got to at least pad it. You’ve got to pad it, and then you’ve got to sell the time. Anywho. Now,
Speaker 1 | 00:36.095
let’s try and use the Scotty method.
Speaker 0 | 00:38.316
Oh, what’s that? That sounds like Scotty Pippin.
Speaker 1 | 00:41.658
From Star Trek?
Speaker 0 | 00:43.119
No, go. Please, what’s the method? We need more methodologies and frameworks, especially related to Star Trek. Go.
Speaker 1 | 00:52.020
So Scotty, the engineer from Star Trek, used to always double his estimates of how long it was going to take anything to happen so that he could always appear like he was a miracle worker when he pulled it off in half the time.
Speaker 0 | 01:03.506
That is brilliant. How did I not know this? The Scotty Method.
Speaker 1 | 01:09.209
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 01:09.769
The Scotty Method team. Rocking team of developers. That’s the name of this podcast right off the bat. The Scotty Method. And how to succeed in… I don’t know, deliver on projects in a, I don’t know, in a winning method. Double the time. Know what you can, know where you could possibly maybe get it done by and then double that time and get a standing ovation when you complete it.
Speaker 1 | 01:39.127
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 01:39.908
Yes. Everyone, Dewar, right? Am I saying this right? Dewar or Dewar?
Speaker 1 | 01:44.791
Dewar like the scotch.
Speaker 0 | 01:46.252
Dewar. Everyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. today covering the scotty method with tom doer he’s a doer and i’ve been doing things for a long time uh and i don’t mean any offense by that i don’t mean any offense by that but the fact that you were in it back in november of 2000 coding things is uh i don’t tell us a story let’s go back in time let’s go back in uh you know the i don’t know star trek probably had some back in time episode right didn’t they have time time warp yeah they did they had time travel episodes for sure yeah for some reason the first thing that always pops into my head with star trek is either klingon and the the dictionary or the wrath of khan that’s just the first thing that pops into my head all the time with uh star trek but so let’s go back in time to 2000 coding in 2000 um none of my children were born yet I had not graduated college yet because I transferred and did like a five and a half year degree, a little revealing myself, truth be told. As an English major, you were, you were from talking earlier, you’re a psychology major. You did, or you took psychology or something like that, which is going to be very-Psychology major,
Speaker 1 | 03:04.720
yep.
Speaker 0 | 03:05.300
Yeah, we need to get back to that because the IT people have a lot of psychology issues, psychological problems and issues that we need to, the second, the other- Possible name for this podcast would be, yeah, like the IT shrink. We should shrink some people. We should do that. That should be like another side show. Like, come on and we’ll deal with your IT psychological problems. And what’s interesting is a term quite highly caffeinated at the moment. You can tell because my ADD is coming out. We’re jumping around from all kinds of subjects. The. psychological protection of our people underneath us is something that’s coming up. The psychological safety of the people on our IT team, creating a psychological safe environment. This topic has been coming up a lot and I’m wondering why it does not get… uh covered that often so we need to talk we need to talk about one on this episode psychological safety and i already forgot about the scotty method and where we were but i know it’s about just doubling things but maybe we just start off with um oh yes back in time let’s go back in time first before we had all these psychological problems and we were just uh uh nerds uh nerds that could plug something in figure it out and everyone else just wanted us to do that and that’s somehow how we landed in it let’s go back in time how’d you get started in this whole thing
Speaker 1 | 04:37.388
Well, I started because I had a computer at home. My dad was a gadget geek, and he decided that a good excuse to get a computer that he could play with was that I was starting high school, and he thought that that would be a good excuse for him to buy one, was to blame it on me. So he got a computer for me to use for high school, which he also used as well, and the two of us shared it, and that’s how I taught myself how to program, was on a computer that I had at home, but that was back in 1979.
Speaker 0 | 05:06.291
oh um let’s see i was three uh okay so what what did we do on said box with uh keys that plugged i’m assuming plugged into electricity yeah yeah so
Speaker 1 | 05:22.095
um initially what i learned how to do was to um you know back then they used to have computer programs that were in magazines and you would type them in right so um so i would type in you know like games and stuff that I wanted to play and that kind of thing. And that kind of taught me, you know, like from learning, you know, what I was typing, I was, I was learning how to code. And then I started to code stuff. And then I started to get some programs that was interesting. I got programs that came in other languages and I would go into the machine code and change them to English.
Speaker 0 | 05:56.551
Yes. So give me an example. How would we even get a code? How would we even get a… what was the most common other language?
Speaker 1 | 06:07.837
Oh, they were from all over the place at the time. So, you know, but, but like you’d get something like, you know, a word processor that, you know, like only existed like in Europe, you know, and, you know, you’d look at it and I, you know, I figured out that, you know, um, Hey, you know, copy paste, you know, delete, you know, I mean, these things, you know, are pretty universal. I just got to figure out what the heck key you got to hit to do it. And then I would look and I’d figure it out. And then based on that, I would sort of backtrack and then change the menus to make them English.
Speaker 0 | 06:43.300
Super cool. What was the game? What was the first game that we programmed in? Was it like Hangman or something like that? Or was it, you know?
Speaker 1 | 07:00.215
Probably something along those lines. I know at one point I typed in a generic version of Frogger.
Speaker 0 | 07:06.700
1979, it just seems almost impossible to me. Well, 10 years after we landed on the moon. So what kind of computers did we have then? We had a calculator, basically.
Speaker 1 | 07:20.511
Well, I was using an Atari 400 and then an 800 computer. And believe it or not, they had pretty good graphics. And four channel sound.
Speaker 0 | 07:33.313
Frogger’s amazing. Yeah. Loved it. Loved it. Still do. Still do.
Speaker 1 | 07:40.337
They actually had a version of Pac-Man that looked exactly like the arcades.
Speaker 0 | 07:45.561
That we could copy. Frogger would probably be a little bit harder.
Speaker 1 | 07:49.563
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 07:51.745
Okay. So first technology job.
Speaker 1 | 07:55.643
so then so then what you did you decided like i’m just like i learned this in high school i’m going to go into psychology well what happened was um and and that’s why you’ve got the the cobalt thing on the list is when i got into college um a friend of mine was his brother was already a computer science major and so he knew the computer science program head so he introduced me to him when i first got to college And he said to him, he said, by the way, he said, he’s got a home computer. He’s had one for four years now. And the head of the computing department looked at me and he said, oh, home computers, that’s just a fad. Nobody’s going to want those. So I looked at him and I said, what? And he said, that’s just a fad. He said, you know, that’s not going to last. That’s why you’re a teacher.
Speaker 0 | 08:42.776
That’s why you’re a professor stuck in college.
Speaker 1 | 08:45.657
How could that not last? That doesn’t make any sense. I said, you’ve got students who are buying terminal, you know, terminals, you know. what they were doing they’re buying terminals back at the time that could only connect to the college network and they cost almost the same amount as my computer and i could still you know use a terminal emulator to connect to the college network but i could do all these other crazy stuff too like play games and things like that so i said you know of course it just makes more sense i said you know i i think the future is going to be both you’re going to have stuff that you run locally and then stuff that you run over you know over a network I said, you know, I think that’s going to be the future is to go back and forth between those two things. And he said, no, I said, you know, without the network, it’s nothing. You know, I said, you really you know, you really need to connect to the network that the local stuff isn’t going to work. So I said, really? And I said, you know what? I said, I don’t think it makes any sense for me to take computer science here because I don’t think I’m going to learn anything. And sure enough, the only person that I know of that graduated as a computer science major at the same time is now a Toyota salesman. So it did him a lot of good.
Speaker 0 | 09:49.771
It’s pretty, that’s pretty amazingly short-sighted.
Speaker 1 | 09:54.735
It was amazingly short-sighted, but I looked back at what they were teaching at the time and, you know, it really was at the beginning of, of computer science as, as. you know, something that they taught in college. So they were still teaching like, you know, primitive programming languages and stuff like that, you know, things like, you know, old programming languages like COBOL and Pascal and stuff, you know, and that’s basically what they were teaching. It was either that or, you know, heavy duty engineering where you were learning how to like, you know, build chips and stuff. So stuff in the middle just wasn’t there really yet, you know. And so that’s why I thought, you know, it was pretty useless, but I was interested in psychology. So I…
Speaker 0 | 10:34.899
took psychology and made that my major instead so i just i’m trying to grasp why why he would even think like that why would why would you not think that a computer would at least be a step up from a typewriter at
Speaker 1 | 10:50.490
the bare minimum spell check did we have spell check i don’t remember did we have spell check back then i don’t think we did we did we had spell check back then yeah i actually i actually had a word processor with spell check back then
Speaker 0 | 11:03.023
So obviously right away, that’s going to be game changing for anyone that has to write.
Speaker 1 | 11:08.647
It was game changing for me writing papers in college. That’s for sure.
Speaker 0 | 11:14.591
We still had to use the Dewey Decimal System back then, though. That wasn’t upgraded yet. Yeah. I remember in college, professors were like, you can’t use the internet for research. It’s not trustworthy. You cannot use that. Now you still have to go to the library. We will not accept anything but a bibliography with books from the library. You cannot cite XYZ website. So it did take a while for that to, it did take a while for that to catch on that this is where you would grab information. Although it still plays true to this day because of whatever fake news, whatever is being pushed out over the, I don’t know, matrix of… different players how do we find good information on the internet how do we verify how do we trust but verify do i.t guys have trust issues oh yeah they do for sure they have to yeah we have to zero trust the from
Speaker 1 | 12:16.953
as a psychology major what do you think i.t guys deal with the most what what what big psychological problems do we do we deal with um well one one big one is that you know users users are always blaming IT for their behavior.
Speaker 0 | 12:32.863
Ooh, what does that mean? Does that mean we take responsibility? Does that mean we have a lack of responsibility for our own actions? Or does that mean we are, I don’t know, martyrs falling on the sword all the time? Or what does it mean?
Speaker 1 | 12:50.189
Some combination in the middle.
Speaker 0 | 12:52.509
So-Some combination of truth and weakness.
Speaker 1 | 12:56.151
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the hard things to do is to, you know, and it’s something that I find is one of the hardest parts of my job is to sit there and say, okay, well, you know, is this a user error? Or is this something we screwed up? Or is it something that’s wrong with the programming or the hardware? You know, and if it is something that, you know, is a user error, is there a way that we could avoid it and try and make sure that the user doesn’t make that error again in the future? But, you know, you know, you get you get stuff like, you know, where, you know, And I think that gets into the whole thing about protecting staff is that a lot of times people will lash out at staff because something happens and they lose data. And sometimes it’s because of some bonehead thing they did. You tell people not to do something. Like I know, for example, saving stuff to the desktop, right? That’s something people used to always do. They would save all their files straight on the desktop because they thought that was a great place to put it. But then. If that’s the one thing that’s not being backed up, you know, if their documents folder is being backed up, but their desktop is not, you know, then all of a sudden something happens and their computer gets fried. And then they blame the IT guy because all their files are missing because they were saving them to the desktop, even though they were told not to.
Speaker 0 | 14:11.350
Yes, we should. So we should have the don’t be a bonehead Q&A section of the IT library slash learning. What do we call that? The learning base, the. you know what’s wrong with me can’t think of it off the top of my head you know place where the employees go huh like a fact yeah yeah you know they ask questions yeah yeah you know like the it should almost be a like something that you sign off on when you become an employee like the non-bonehead it things that you should not do click on links with there should be you know like security policy you It should be like a security policy, but we should take a new policy. But no, seriously. So where do people hurt in IT mentally? Where do people struggle the most mentally and hate their job? And how do they overcome that?
Speaker 1 | 15:04.443
Well, I think one problem particularly now is that a lot more companies are doing things where they’re paying people as full-time employees, but trying to squeeze like all this crazy overtime out of them. You know, so I think that’s a pain point is that there’s a lot of companies that, you know, are trying to cheap out on staffing. and get people to do stuff you know like i i know a company that um a friend of mine works for where all of a sudden they just decided that they wanted weekend coverage and now all of a sudden they want him to be you know answering help desk calls over the weekend that he never signed up for in the first place and you know he’s like well you know what happens if i’m like you know with the movies with my family you know and a help desk call comes in you know i mean i’m not you know going to be at a computer able to help you you know that doesn’t make any sense you know if you want you over the weekend, you should hire somebody to sit in front of a computer all weekend so that, you know, they can actually help somebody. You know, so it’s interesting how, you know, management sometimes has these unrealistic expectations of IT and, you know, expects them to just, you know, be on call 24-7. And, you know, I mean, it comes with the job to do things 24-7, but at the same time, you know, that doesn’t mean that, you know, you should expect that, you know, they don’t have a life either.
Speaker 0 | 16:24.195
yeah like password resets and stuff like that um massive ddos attack i can understand but uh i need my password reset or i threw my laptop out of the computer out of the car in a fit of rage and i need one right away exactly yeah and that’s that’s exactly the kind of thing that they’re now expecting this guy to take care of on weekends that you know so that’s just a matter of how do you deal with that it’s kind of like I’m at the wrong company or the wrong place. Is there a way to deal with these things? Some of the things that I see in whatever, the Reddit sysadmin forum is just, we’re tasked with doing everything, all of these crazy things. And we’re just expected to know the answer for every minute technical problem in detail. And that’s just completely unrealistic. And we’re expected to manage hundreds, literally hundreds of different, we could say applications, updates. I would say it’s in the hundreds for almost every mid-market company, the number of tasks and responsibilities that the IT department is responsible for. Whereas sales and marketing is responsible for what? Well, sales is responsible for driving sales and training salespeople to reach out to IT directors on LinkedIn. And marketing is responsible for quite a heavy lift, you know, but it’s probably still five to six categories, whereas IT is responsible for a hundred. I would say a good hundred plus categories. What do you think?
Speaker 1 | 18:03.073
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 18:04.733
So that can be psychologically overwhelming.
Speaker 1 | 18:07.975
Oh, yeah. One funny thing that I just thought of when you were talking about that is I have a friend who was saying that, you know, he’s a CIO and he was saying that his CEO. was complaining about the fact that the Bluetooth in his car wasn’t working and that he wanted the guy to come in and troubleshoot it because, you know, he’s an IT guy and he should know how to fix that.
Speaker 0 | 18:28.313
Yeah, of course, along with the, you know, the HVAC touch panel display.
Speaker 1 | 18:36.596
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 18:38.356
I mean, for real, that’s what the tickets are going to come to that, right? Doesn’t it, isn’t it like the internet of things? It attaches to the Wi-Fi access point, right? So clearly. you’re gonna get a ticket for that on saturday at 11 30 p.m yeah sounds about right sounds about right so is there anything is there anything to what what do we what do we get what do we do how do we give back so we have so that’s more of like that’s more of like uh just i’m in a in a bad place is there uh uh any suggestions for how i.t people should position themselves and hold themselves in the company and set the right expectations with upper management?
Speaker 1 | 19:19.302
Yeah, well, I think that’s the key, you know, is setting the right expectations and, you know, really explaining, you know, the reasons for things, you know, I mean, I think communication is key. You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that, you know, IT people have to be good at is communicating. Because if you’re not a good communicator, you know, you’re in trouble. You know, I mean, that’s, you know, we talked about, you know, time frames before, you know, I mean, you know, expectations for time frames for projects, expectations for, you know, what it is staff does and doesn’t do, you know, trying to clearly delineate that kind of stuff, you know, is something that you really have to have good discussions about, you know, and continue to evolve those discussions.
Speaker 0 | 20:01.036
So around communication, is there any kind of frameworks for communications that you work with or anything like that? Things that we should address. How should we report to executive management? Here’s all of our antiquated silos. This is why we’re overloaded. This is why we’re getting so many tickets. And this is what we need and how we get money to fix this. Or here’s what’s the framework. You come into many IT guys come in and it’s a mess. I come into an organization. It’s like, oh my gosh, what was this last guy doing? And then the last guy is leaving and going to another organization. He’s going to one. He’s like, oh my gosh, what are these guys doing? And it’s kind of this revolving. door of, I would say 80% of the industry is probably jumping from job to job. And there’s the top 20% of IT directors that are actually leaders and can communicate well. So that leaves 80% of the industry that we should probably have to fix. Is there any framework around this?
Speaker 1 | 20:58.092
Can’t think of anything specifically.
Speaker 0 | 20:59.513
On communication, like if you’re communicating to executive management, how do you do it? What’s most important?
Speaker 1 | 21:07.472
I think, you know, one thing is trying to, and this is hard for a lot of IT people, is trying to simplify things in ways that, you know, you’re not talking about jargon. You know, you’re saying stuff that they’ll understand. You’re explaining it in a way that makes sense to somebody who doesn’t understand IT. But the other thing is, you know, it’s really important that you understand the business and that you can, you know, relate, you know, the IT to the business so that this way they kind of understand the functions of the two. and how the impact that it has, you know, because that’s, you know, like a lot of times I’ll say, you know, look, we could spend money on this or we can’t. But, you know, if we don’t spend money, this is what the implications are. And this is the impact it’s going to have on the business. And if we’re OK with that and we sign off on that and we say that this is good, we’re OK with that, that’s fine. And I mean, a lot of times, you know, like in companies, you know, it’s OK, you know, they’re OK with saying, you know, look, you know, that’s a risk I’m willing to take because it’s not that important to me. You know, because in other cases they’re saying, oh, wait a minute. No, that’s no good. You know, like we need to talk about that because that’s not a risk I want to take. You know, and it’s better to have that discussion, you know, beforehand than waiting until something hits the fan. And then all of a sudden, you know, now, you know, everything’s broken and now people want to spend money because they got to fix it. You know, you don’t you don’t want to get there. You know, you want to try and do it, you know, proactively if you can.
Speaker 0 | 22:31.412
I feel like we should have like a current state of the union. We should like the I.T. should have like a. like a quarterly state of the union of where we’re at and communicating clearly all these different aspects of the business around security network. I don’t know, applications, current spend, antiquated silos. You had a very interesting metaphor the last time we spoke about loving it or listing it, you know, like, like the show, like the building a house and I’m currently remodeling a kitchen right now. Don’t know if I’m going to love it or list it, but I’m definitely going to, it’s definitely a love it or list it situation. How does this apply to IT?
Speaker 1 | 23:17.203
So, you know, just like the TV show, you know, where they take a house and they, you know, give you a choice between whether you’re going to take your current house and fix it and live in it, or, you know, you decide you’re going to get rid of it and go for a new house. You know, we go through those decisions all the time, especially with computer systems, you know, where. Um, you know, I’ve been in places, it’s what, um, gave me the idea for the, the metaphor in the first place was we had a computer system that was in house. Everybody, you know, liked it, but it was getting old. It really needed a lot of work. And the question was, are we going to go through the trouble of doing the work to make it what we need it to be? Or are we going to get rid of it and take something off the shelf instead? You know, and sometimes the off the shelf solution sounds simple, you know, like going out and listing it and, you know, getting something new. But sometimes there’s a lot of, you know, hidden, especially if you’ve got an in-house system you’ve had for a long time. There’s a lot of different things there, you know, and I equate it to, you know, buying, you know, the house, you know, like now all of a sudden you’re in a different neighborhood, you know, so now your kids have to go to a different school. You know, now all of a sudden, you know, like you don’t have that, you know, bedroom that you had before, you know, you’ve got some other kind of a house and, you know, like maybe the way that it’s set up, you know, is different. you know it doesn’t accommodate your needs the way it did before you know that kind of thing so you know there’s all all different things about you know changing a house um same kind of things happen with the system you know where um you know like for a lot of times systems um they uh dictate business practices you know because you know like i i remember the new york state changed the system one time where they actually had to change a law because the system the new system wasn’t able to do what the old system used to be able to do And they actually had to change the law because they couldn’t do it the way they used to because the new system couldn’t do it that way. So, I mean, sometimes it’s that drastic in terms of a business process change when you change a system. And if you’re used to having a system of your own that does everything you want it to do, that’s sort of a pain point. You know, and it may be a problem. So it may be a reason to want to love it instead of listing it. But, you know, you have to kind of go through that process and figure out, you know, like as you as you look at both sides, what ends up working best for your situation and your particular.
Speaker 0 | 25:31.530
company you’re getting remarried and now all of a sudden you’ve got this like uh i don’t know mno and we’ve got uh they’ve got a whole group of new users coming in with different needs and everything and uh can they move into the new house and live in the new house or do we need to get a new house to meet the needs of all these extra people exactly the uh again what’s the What’s the decision matrix or framework or any teaching moments there?
Speaker 1 | 26:09.214
Well, I think, you know, like I said, you know, one of the things I try and do is I try and make things understandable for business people, you know, because they don’t understand IT. And using that, using the love it or list it concept, you know, it’s easier for me to kind of talk to them about the decisions they need to make, you know, you know. When you start looking at, you know, look, this is the business practices that may have to change because, you know, we do it this way and the new system may not, you know, and how important is that to you? Is it okay if you want to change those business practices or not? You know, so being able to use that metaphor to be able to relate to them what changes they’re going to have to look at and, you know, what they would prefer, you know, I mean, there’s advantages and there’s disadvantages and you get to look at the both of them and, you know, figure out, okay. Now, how do we make the decision and what do we decide we want to do?
Speaker 0 | 27:02.607
And a lot of times this costs money.
Speaker 1 | 27:05.168
Oh, it always costs money.
Speaker 0 | 27:09.569
How do you, what’s your, what’s your methodology for convincing? I don’t know. Convincing is really not the right word. um, selling executive management on the benefits and growth of technology as a business force multiplier? Is there any points that you break things down into? Do you have a typical presentation? Do you have a typical place you start anything like that?
Speaker 1 | 27:43.477
Well, it’s funny you mentioned the word sell, cause that’s, you know, like how I think about it as it’s a sales job, you know, I mean, I think that, you know, a large part of it is, is selling, you know, um, So you want to try and find a way to sell what you’re trying to do. You know, and I do try and, you know, give them, you know, examples of, you know, like, look, if we spend this much, we’re going to get this. If we spend this much, we’re going to get that. If we spend this much, we’re going to get that. You know, and let them know, you know, what they’re going to get for those dollars as specifically as I possibly can and what they’re not going to get if they don’t spend those dollars. You know, what the ramifications are. um so that they can make the choices of you know okay look you know i’m okay with not spending that money and having that problem but you know i’m okay with that problem but you know um on the other hand you know um if i don’t if i’m not okay with that problem and i want to solve it then you know this is what we’re going to have to do to get there and this is why you know and i also think about it you know another metaphor for that is um you know when you go into a get your car fixed right you know you don’t want a mechanic who just you know upsells you everything you know because that’s the way a lot of executives feel with it they think you know yeah you’re just trying to upsell them everything right so you know you want a mechanic who’s going to be real specific with you and show you you know look this is the reason i’m telling you you need this you know new part is because if you look at this one you know this is what’s wrong with it and this is what’s happening you know and and try to you know like make it so that they understand it and show them you know in this you know um In a way that they can see, you know, exactly why you’re saying what you’re saying and it makes sense to them.
Speaker 0 | 29:18.399
I think we used to have an acronym for this. It was like the WWW, like the what, what, why. This is what it is. This is what it does. And this is why you need to invest in this because it’s going to, you know, do X, Y, Z and cost you this. And there’s an ROI and blah, blah, blah. Kind of the what, what, why. This is what it is. This is what it does. And this is why you need to care about this. And we have a good, better, or best option for you, but not a no option, but not, there’s no no option. You said something interesting. You said the executives are always skeptical that you’re trying to get every dollar possible. And what’s interesting is that Again, back to the psychology of all of this. The IT director is always skeptical of every, of every salesperson showing up in his inbox, trying to get five minutes on his calendar or get to the top of your calendar or whatever it is, you know what I mean? Five minutes of your time to talk about the next AI super bot or whatever it is. How do you choose who gets the right to sell to you? When you also have to sell to executive management and there’s this weird duality or dichotomy, whatever we want to call it here, between IT getting hammered, hammered every day with tons of different sales things. I get, I get a million every day and I get, hi, dissecting popular IT nerds. We really loved your episode with, you know, with, with Tom Dewar. And, but you said high dissecting popular IT nerds. So I already know right away, this is a bot. So that’s the worst. That’s a joke. Or it’s like, hey, Phil, really, you know, really love listening to your show and, you know, would love to connect. And then, you know, I connect with them and immediately I automated three paragraphs of something with links in it. I’m like, that’s just not how people interact. That’s not how they talk. So that’s a complaint. So there’s this constant barrage of like things that we don’t trust. And then you’re saying the executives don’t trust. So how do people build trust with you? Because maybe that’ll give insight into how we build trust with executives or it won’t give any insight at all because everyone’s different and we have to really learn and discover and how do we say connect, discover, respond with each individual because they all have different motives and different desires and reasons for wanting or needing something, right? for the executive, it might be, look, I just want to build this company and sell it. Might have, you might care less about the, the, whatever burning edge of technology might just be like, what’s, what do we need to just keep doing what we’re doing so we could sell. So anyways, how do people build trust with you in a very zero trust, non-trusting environment? And how do you then build trust with executives? Is there any commonalities there.
Speaker 1 | 32:32.122
Well, like I said earlier, one thing is I try very hard to understand the business, you know, and like you said, you know, I mean, if there is a big difference between whether or not they’re just trying to, you know, make a quick profit or whether or not they’re actually trying to build the business, you know, so if you understand what it is they’re trying to accomplish, if you understand what their pain points are, you know, and if you can sort of speak their language in terms of the business as best as you can. It does help to build trust because they understand that, you know, you’re trying to understand what they’re going through and what they’re doing. And, you know, you’re on the same page. You know, that’s the other thing is, you know, like you’re unlike, you know, that salesperson that cold calls you and has no idea what the heck you do. You know, if you actually know the business and, you know, understand it and you can actually explain, you know, like this is what this is going to do. And this is how it’s going to help the business. And this is why. you know it’ll it’ll help resolve this pain point that you’ve had you know it really does help and you know i mean trust is something you need to earn and it takes time what do you guys do at your current at your current place are
Speaker 0 | 33:45.563
we allowed to talk about that um if it’s if it’s look if it’s a highly confidential we’re not doing it so that’s fine um I’m just wondering, how about this? Who’s the last person that reached out to you and why were they successful getting through?
Speaker 1 | 34:07.451
In terms of sales?
Speaker 0 | 34:08.791
Yeah. Let’s think of the last sales guy that reached out to you. How did he do it? And how did he build trust?
Speaker 1 | 34:17.293
Well, one of the best methods I ever saw was a conference I went to. where the way they had put it together, they, first of all, they had specific topics that, you know, we, we would list what topics we were actually interested in that we were actually expecting to spend money on. So that this way it wasn’t, you know, you were just looking at any old thing, whether or not you cared about it, you know, you were actually saying, you know, like, what, what is it that you’re specifically interested in? So then they would take based on that list that you prioritized, they would put together these groups and those groups. would be this other people that were at the conference who were interested in the same exact thing you were. So for example, business intelligence was one of them, right? So at the time I was looking for a business intelligence solution. So what they did. was they grouped me with a whole bunch of other people that were looking for a business intelligence solution and they put us together for three hours and for three hours we had these different business intelligence um companies come in and pitch to us and show us you know like these 20-minute presentations of what they would do and then after they left we would spend 15 minutes amongst ourselves talking about what we thought about that pitch and whether or not anybody had used that product before and what experience they had with that product or if based on previous experience you know they thought that product would or wouldn’t work based on certain things that they heard and then once that was over they’d bring in the next one and you know we would do that you know and then if you wanted to um you then had an ability during the conference to have a one-on-one meeting with one you know whichever ones of the the vendors that you know pitched that you actually thought that, you know, you really connected with and really were interested to learn more about. And you would have to set that up ahead of time. And the good thing about that is because you set it up ahead of time, they would actually do their homework too. So, you know, it wasn’t like, you know, you’d walk in and they’d have no idea what it is you did. You’d actually go in and they would start saying to you, you know, look, I looked, you know, I looked you guys up on the internet and I saw this is what you do. And, you know, Let me see if I got a good understanding of your business. And they try and explain it, you know, and they’d ask you questions, you know, and then they would talk about, you know, what they could do for you. But, you know, for me, what I liked about it was that, number one, I was, you know, spending my time learning about something I actually cared about and thought I was actually going to invest in, you know, as opposed to, you know, who knows. And then the other thing was having that combination of the vendor presentation with what other people, peers, you know, from different industries thought. you know, was really useful. And it was interesting because they were from all over the place. You know, I mean, we had people that worked for public schools in the group. We had people that worked for, you know, huge, you know, corporations that were international, you know, but they still had the same problems in terms of trying to, you know, come up with business intelligence solutions. And it was interesting to hear, you know, their perspectives on what they picked and how they picked it.
Speaker 0 | 37:26.447
So awesome. And we’re building a community right now. And one of the ways that we want to treat, we’re building a community that only like, you know, mid-market IT leaders, CTOs, CIOs, VPs of IT are allowed into. And we’re not allowing vendors into it, but we are having a vendor section where you can talk about the vendors behind their back and they can present a, like, you know, have like give something special to the group that only is, you know, unique to us, but they’re, you know, not allowed in the group. They can provide, you know, like a recorded demo of sort, and they can allow IT leadership to rate them and talk about their behind their backs and give experience on it. And IT leaders can, you know, tag their technology stack so everyone can kind of interact and say, oh, you’re a Fortinet guy. I’m looking to move from Meraki to Fortinet. You know, how did it go? Blah, blah, blah. But there very well could be a live event. which is if we just you know because the group’s all the community is going to be all about all about you guys so if we said hey would you guys for your next major forklift or the project that it is what are the major projects you guys have going on would you want to have an event where the top How many vendors are there? Five? Three? Would you want the top five vendors to come and present and allow us to then have 15 minutes to talk about them behind their backs after and then have the opportunity to reach out to them and set a one-on-one with this unique, special, extra options that you get for the community? It sounds pretty… I think we could integrate that as well.
Speaker 1 | 39:09.507
Yeah, I think we had four, I think, is what they had at the group. So we had presentations from four of them and then…
Speaker 0 | 39:15.782
so like 45 minutes long 15 minutes to talk about it q a and then move on or something like that yeah it’s beautiful it’s beautiful hold on one second um we’re gonna edit this out i just have there’s someone at my door i just have to go i’m gonna pause this recording for a second i just have to go find out what why they’re ringing the doorbell so many times hold on one second sure so Love the, the, so that worked well for you. What was the, what was the product or thing that you were looking at purchasing at the time? I mean, what was the situation again?
Speaker 1 | 39:54.765
It was a BI solution.
Speaker 0 | 39:59.146
So who presented?
Speaker 1 | 40:02.988
Jim, I’m trying to remember. It was a while ago. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 40:04.628
it was like Microsoft or something.
Speaker 1 | 40:07.569
Domo was one of the vendors. Um, I think Tableau was one of the vendors and I’m trying to remember who, I forget who the other two were, but the other two were actually more interesting because they were ones I’d never heard of before, but they were actually really good.
Speaker 0 | 40:27.124
Okay. Excellent. So anyways, it’s, it’s about, first of all, I always find it, um, most successful when we, when we ask, when we communicate clearly. what are your needs, right? Because versus like just randomly firing off into the dark on, you know, people are often just kind of, they’re just firing off into the dark and hoping that, I don’t know, they hit something, which is I get a ton of just ridiculous requests every day. Like, are you hiring overseas? Like, no, I’m not hiring. Although ironically, I have a team overseas and no, I’m not doing that right now. So obviously they’re hitting on something, but it’s, uh, It’s not asking me, I always love asking when it comes to like for you, for example, or anyone, and we could use an imaginary situation. When it comes to technology in your organization right now, what is your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern that you’re trying to solve? I’m really digging deep psychologically here and asking you to be vulnerable. Myself, Phil. Myself.
Speaker 1 | 41:41.899
We’re in the middle of migrating some older software that’s in-house software. And it’s just challenging to put up with having to do the changes and stuff.
Speaker 0 | 41:54.626
Always is.
Speaker 1 | 41:55.847
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 41:56.547
It’s never easy. That just always seems to be the answer. But keep going.
Speaker 1 | 42:01.330
And the other part of it is just the knowledge transfer. You know, like we have our senior developer retired, but agreed to work with us part time. And, you know, being that it’s a part time thing at any point, he could leave, you know. So we’re always trying to make sure that, you know, everything that he knows, we know, because, you know, we want to make sure that we have that information. And. I’m always horrified because I always find out that there’s that one little thing that, you know, we didn’t know we didn’t know. And we find out that, you know, when it breaks, you know, it’s like he’s the only one who knows how to fix it.
Speaker 0 | 42:36.337
Yeah, that’s that is kind of wild. That’s that’s like the Phoenix Project type of. But in real life, that’s the. Yeah, there’s one guy that built it and knows it. And what happens if he dies? Mm hmm. Or there’s this one thing that’s, I don’t know, running on a AS400 that was built in 1979. I don’t know, were AS400s around back then? Probably not. What is the age? What is the history of that? I don’t know. But I’m making myself look stupid right now by not knowing that. Let’s see. I must know. I must know.
Speaker 1 | 43:23.255
I don’t remember myself, so I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 43:26.517
You know, I should, I should have, we should have like a, pretty soon it should be a 1940. No.
Speaker 1 | 43:35.401
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 43:36.941
Okay. So I’m way off the, there should be a, there should be like, you know, my, my son, they’re forcing him to take art history in high school. Shouldn’t there be a computer history or a technology history? I would think that that would be much more useful.
Speaker 1 | 43:51.116
That makes sense at this point.
Speaker 0 | 43:52.116
All these people out here are like, history? Are you kidding me? How dare you? How dare you make fun of art history? Let’s end with this. Pokey Oak. What the heck is that?
Speaker 1 | 44:09.503
So it’s mistake-proofing. And the place you see it the most is the car industry. So what they’ll do is they’ll try and do things to make sure that you don’t make a mistake in your car. So, you know, the things like, you know, now you can’t lock your keys in a running car, for example, the doors won’t lock. That’s because people kept locking themselves out of the car with the car running. So,
Speaker 0 | 44:30.177
you know, in the car.
Speaker 1 | 44:31.778
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 44:33.079
And it’s going to be fun to like drive off. That would be that would happen to me.
Speaker 1 | 44:37.643
Yeah, exactly. So they’re constantly trying to, you know, look at. situations like that and figure out how they can avoid it it’s one of the reasons why they’re looking at self-driving cars because they realize that the only way to completely stop people from making mistakes is to get them the heck out from behind the wheel but anyway um you know so there’s always these different things that they try and do so i i try and adopt that same philosophy to my it environment i try and constantly look at tickets and look at things that users do wrong and think to myself how could i avoid that in the future you know what is it that you know um i what kind of you know guard rails could i put in place that make sure that you know the user can’t do this anymore and this way they don’t have that happen you know as a as you know an example um we had these dell laptops at one of the places I worked. And strangely enough, one of them went up in flames because somebody plugged in the wrong charger. And I thought that was the strangest thing until I looked at it and found out that there were two different models of laptops. Both of them used very different voltages, and yet the way the laptops were designed, the plug fit in both. So if you had these two different chargers, you were able to plug the wrong charger into the wrong laptop and start a fire. which is a terrible design. But, you know, from my perspective, I was like, all right, I need to make sure that, you know, I standardize things so that my users, you know, can do that. You know, they can take a plug from somebody else’s laptop and plug it in and not do something wrong.
Speaker 0 | 46:05.678
Yes. They’re still going to do things that are unexpected. I can’t remember who it was that had a, I don’t know, admin front desk lady plug a bunch of tablets. into a cardboard box and drill holes in the box and run the cords through the box and they’re all stacked on top of each other so of course it heated up into a fire and burnt half the building down how do you poke that one yeah that one’s just gonna know where people will do great people will do crazy things um maybe they’ll put a dummy in a self-driving car and have a remote to speak through it or something and i don’t know the the charger thing it just made me think of like what about uh the apple chargers they’re all different sizes i can use my macbook charger to to charge my phone or a um or cell phone so i’m wondering what happens i know there’s some kind of there’s some kind of idea that it’s that it’s frying my computer and being overseas with a completely different electric um thing plugging a computer and entire workstation and multiple laptops into all kinds of different uh conversions and i’m sure that that’s not that’s not good i already had to have electrician come and redo the ground at this house because i was getting electrocuted every time i touched my keyboard oh lovely everything still worked computer still working uh can still see everything just doesn’t feel good doesn’t feel right doesn’t feel like the right thing so uh Tom, it’s been a pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Any final thoughts of wisdom or advice to the listeners out there?
Speaker 1 | 47:51.443
Just, you know, I think communication is key. You know, it’s really important. I think communicating with your staff, communicating up and down in both directions, you know, to staff and to management is really important to surviving the job.
Speaker 0 | 48:07.324
And surviving probably shouldn’t be the word that we use to survive. What’s the end game? What’s the end game? How do we, if we do survive, so if you do survive, like, you know, like we’ve made it up. What is that? Survival, like survivor, right? Like we’re the last man standing, right? Like there can only be one, you know, like, and if you do survive, then what?
Speaker 1 | 48:28.839
Well, what you really hope is to enjoy the job, really. Yes,
Speaker 0 | 48:31.661
please. Why do you enjoy IT?
Speaker 1 | 48:36.732
Um, I like solving problems. And, you know, I think that, you know, in IT, a lot of times you’re solving problems. You know, on a simple level, you know, I like certain programming and stuff, because, you know, like, I’m a control freak. And, you know, like, if you program something, something, it tends to do what you want it to do. You know, very, very rarely do computers think on their own and do things on their own. Not yet. So.
Speaker 0 | 49:06.260
you know if you’re a control freak then you’ve got yeah and they take over in the future then you’ve got problems yeah what you’ve got will now become what you hate um maybe that’ll be just like control me please um the uh that’s that’s a good answer it’s uh it is for control freaks that should be the that’s another great headline for this it is for control freaks are you a control freak you’re for it are you not then you’re in the wrong place Thank you very much, sir.
Speaker 1 | 49:37.467
Thank you.
