Speaker 0 | 00:09.503

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re doing a series talking with Philz. It’s a great name. Today we have Phil, let’s see, Zerang on the show. I just need to make sure I pronounce that right. From IT Director at Arizona Public Services. And we’re going to talk about all the nuclear facilities and top secret stuff that you have on the show today, correct?

Speaker 1 | 00:36.481

Yeah, that’s correct. And then we can have another interview from Gail.

Speaker 0 | 00:42.245

It’s awesome. Actually, you know, the reason why I was excited to have you on the show is a couple of things. And we’re going to talk about some of the other stuff that’s exciting for everyone. But one of them was you. have talked about kind of this like transformation of the ITI, you coaching people and make sure I get this right here in how to talk to people. Does that sound correct?

Speaker 1 | 01:11.514

That’s correct. Yeah. It’s real time, human to human interfacing. And this is from my, I’ll give you a little taste of it from my personal journey. I don’t know about you, but In corporate America, you get these annual performance reviews, and I’ve saved them from years. And I look back at some of them, and they said things like, improve your influence skills, work on relationship building, build stronger executive presence. And if you’ve ever Googled build stronger executive presence, it’s not really definitive. An engineer like myself would be able to follow the steps to achieve. So I went down this journey that led me all over the place through. behavioral neuroscience and all kinds of things to try to understand what does that mean. And after years of working on that.

Speaker 0 | 02:01.311

So you did it like someone that would not understand human-to-human interactions. You tried to engineer it.

Speaker 1 | 02:07.433

I totally did.

Speaker 0 | 02:09.513

How can I engineer this and learn this thing called, I don’t know, emotional intelligence? Um, so let’s just hit on those bullet points again, executive presence. What was the other one? Cause this is always,

Speaker 1 | 02:22.984

it was influence skills, relationship building. These were some of the things my, my annual review would tell me I needed to improve to move up.

Speaker 0 | 02:31.570

Great influence skills. Um, this reminds me again, I use Starbucks a lot as this, because we had, I worked for Starbucks for a long time, like multi decades ago. Uh, but then this is basically what it reminds me of the corporate reviews, which was like meets expectations on this. Does not meet expectations on this uses sarcasm as a B and sarcasm is in the behavioral derailer category. Like where did you come up with that? So I’m a behavioral derailer. That makes me feel great. You officially get your 25 cent raise. multiplied by, you know what I mean? Taken down from 30 cents. You got 10 second, 10 cent deduction. You know, nothing against Starbucks. I’m just using this as an example here. But anyways, so what did you find on your engineering of human empathy?

Speaker 1 | 03:30.584

Yes, I took all the classes. That was the obvious thing, easy thing to do. It was like, oh, here’s critical conversations. Here’s, you know, strategically leading people. Here’s, you know, these different, you know, the… stuff that’s out there a lot a lot of the books that were written and man they just i struggle with it you know i get into a conversation with someone and i you know i want to pull out my card and say okay phil when you said this that made me feel this way so what i you know i’m trying kind of apply this formula and it felt so awkward and and it’s like i can’t do that in real time it’s like that’s the key analytically i could understand like why the formula could work but It just wasn’t natural. It was so uncomfortable and unnatural that none of those classes, I felt really moved the needle for me. And I saw like Toastmasters and a lot of stuff on presentations, like formal stuff, but there wasn’t anything for like one-to-one, which is 90% of your day.

Speaker 0 | 04:27.273

Yeah. So let me ask you this though, because I used to say all the time, get comfortable being uncomfortable and just have those really tough conversations. And. Be ready to be really uncomfortable in those conversations because that’s where the real learning happens. Now, you tell me if I’m wrong about that or if I’m right, but give me kind of an idea of like, how did you progress past this boilerplate, can’t use a formula to have a coaching deep conversation and connect with someone one-on-one? I mean, where was the aha moment?

Speaker 1 | 05:00.772

I think the aha moment for me came from kind of getting frustrated with the fact that I go to these classes, you know, that the course, you know, company sponsored sort of thing. And I just wasn’t moving the needle. Right. I hit I would say I hit like a glass ceiling with my career to the point where I don’t think I was promotable until I approved my my interactive skills. You know, I’m an engineer. I’ve been in computer science a long time. Very analytically minded. And. And I would approach problems like, dude, this is an obvious problem with an obvious answer, just go do it. And you guys just don’t know everybody else so stupid, right? There’s this really common thought process a lot of folks have and when they’re not. What I learned is there was so much data and information that I was blind to because it was being nonverbal, being communicated to me. And I was just blind to it. And I started actually listening to a lot of different podcasts, learning about a lot of different TED Talks, consuming different things out there. There was a book by all butchers named Michal Dix-Sin-Mihai, I think, a psychologist that talked about flow and his focus was about how do you intentionally get into that flow state like a basketball pro or an artist or a coder that forgets to eat and just works all night. That you’re so… you’re still in the zone of what you’re doing. Everything else around you goes away. And the book was about that. But what I got out of that book was it made sense. You put the brain in terms of almost like an I&O machine where it’s like, okay, you only have so much intake, I&O bandwidth of your brain to consume what’s going on around you. And you have a system, your RAS system, that is going to filter that out. And so it’s, you know, it’s the… compression algorithm and so it’s filtering out stuff that you’re not actively looking for and and i and all that stuff started to come together for me and i thought dude okay so now i started listening to like all the way like all over the place like like um nlp the neuro linguistic programming kind of hypnotist sketchy guys do you know dating coaches do influencing to motivational speakers just consuming any content i could consume that has something to do with talking to people or you know sales guys you know all of those things that they ain’t need to do with influence i wanted to try to absorb it and see if i could put it to use in some form or fashion in my daily job and and i started to all make sense to me and then i started to see things um in human interactions that were totally invisible to me before like it was like the light bulb started going on and that that was a big moment give me an example can you give me an example of a moment where you’re just like like

Speaker 0 | 07:52.528

wow, like I never noticed that before. And I just noticed this.

Speaker 1 | 07:58.171

Yeah. So I noticed myself noticing a good example of that was I was at, I was getting physical therapy for a neck and shoulder issue I was having. I was like face down on this table with like the electro probe thing and the big feet pack. So you’re supposed to lay there for like 30, 40 minutes and it does its magic. And next to me on the, on one of the tables, you know, I can’t see him. So it’s just audio for me. I hear this, this individual. this uh this male uh receiving treatment and there’s a female at least according to the audio that was the physical therapist and they’re having an interaction a conversation while while she’s working on him and i noticed that there was a pattern to their interaction where he would talk about something or ask a question as if he was interested in what she was saying and she would respond and in that response i was hearing breadcrumbs I was hearing words that she would slightly change the volume or the inflection or the tone up. I didn’t know exactly why that was an important word or important thing for her, but I knew it had some emotion attached to it, like she was interested in. And then I noticed him completely missing it, not pulling that thread, not following that breadcrumb, not following up on that nugget. And then there would be a moment of silence, and then he would ask the next question of like, oh yeah, or statement like, oh yeah, I went to a concert. That was one of the examples. He said, oh yeah, I went to a concert the other night. And it was such and such and such. It was really good. And she followed up with like, oh wow, I just went to this concert with whoever and it was amazing. It was one of my favorite. And there were three or four things in there that you could have asked to follow on to that she was really excited about. You could hear the excitement in her voice. And she laid that out there, expecting him to have listened to her and then to follow up and engage in that conversation and let her tell more of the story. that he was excited to share. And it just went silent again. And then he changed the topic again and went to some other topic. And after that, I detected her completely shutting down. After that, it was one word answers. Uh-huh. Yes. Oh, okay. It didn’t say anything after that. And I would have never noticed anything. Well, what happened was he was trying to engage with him leaving hints and he was not picking up on the hints. Like he was just not understanding that her response. He was looking to have a conversation in that space. So after three or four times of. of her sharing and then him changing the topic, he concluded that he didn’t give a crap about her and just wanted to talk about his stuff. And I bet you, he had no idea any of that was happening.

Speaker 0 | 10:37.658

Wow. You should be a dating coach. Look at this. Look at this. I crawled out of the server room and now I’m a dating coach.

Speaker 1 | 10:48.123

Wow. That would be a test for me.

Speaker 0 | 10:49.343

That would be a, this is, this is awesome. This is a, this is really amazing because, uh, the fact that you are able to do that and be bold enough to do that and to go through the pain and suffering, because a lot of times psychological pain and suffering is much more than just punch me in the face. I’d much rather have that. Um, you know, it’s kind of like the person at the funeral would rather be in the casket than the person giving the talk due to the fear of like public speaking and stuff, you know, it kind of like a similar type of thing. So that, that’s a, that’s amazing. So, okay. So fast forward. Do you have like a team of people right now or a team of other technology-minded engineering people underneath you?

Speaker 1 | 11:35.226

I do. So my, you know, in the microbiome of what I do, I run IT for Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station. And I have roughly 4,000 to 4,500 endpoints, PCs, tablets, laptops that my organization supports. I have three, basically three applications teams. field services team, network communications team, project management office, et cetera. So I’ve got like a microcosm of a full IT team, but I’m a peer to the larger APS IT organization, which supports, you know, closer to six to 10,000 user base depending on time.

Speaker 0 | 12:15.591

So there’s got to be some end user interactions from time to time.

Speaker 1 | 12:22.897

Oh, there’s plenty. There’s plenty, absolutely. And that’s where we’ve got to focus in being less IT solution-oriented and being more business strategy-focused. And these kind of interaction skills are huge. There’s two things that you have to happen to be an IT strategic provider and not be the order taker. And one of those things is you have to have operational performance. Your food has to be good for you to take the best recommendation. If they’re delivering crap, you don’t care what you recommend. So if your systems aren’t running, they’re not going to see you as a strategic partner. So that’s the table stakes. If you get that right, you can start to have that conversation with them, but you have to be able to navigate them telling you what they think they want and extracting from them what they really want that they might not even know. And that is all about that. It’s all about that relationship and that conversation skill.

Speaker 0 | 13:19.540

I’ve got to bring this back to dating again. I’ve got to bring this back to our relationships again because just think about it. My wife doesn’t really know what she wants. She thinks she knows what she wants, but I know what she really wants, and that’s why she’s so happy. That’s kind of a joke, and if she ever listens to this show,

Speaker 1 | 13:39.134

she will laugh at that. She would laugh, but I was afraid to.

Speaker 0 | 13:44.518

You’re like, I can’t tell, is he being serious or not? Don’t go back into the engineering mindset now. That’s where you really just, you know, like, come on, you know, Phil, Phil and Phil. Okay, so I like this fact. So the food has to be good to begin with to get a strategic partnership at the table, right? Or to get a seat at the table. We all know that. I’ve been talking about this forever. Let’s kind of move into the next realm of kind of… I don’t know what we’re talking about, kind of like the process of business and the process of IT in the business and how you have these, I guess, these more kind of high-level conversations. Is that where we’ve moved into now?

Speaker 1 | 14:30.613

Yeah, let’s talk about IT strategy. That’s something that is so hard and so many places struggle with it. And then you talk to a lot of the big consulting firms, and all of them will come in and tell you how to do it. One thing that’s interesting for the industry I work in, and this is probably true for a lot more people than they realize, but the textbook version of IT strategy says, what is your business strategy? So your Starbucks, you know, example, Starbucks is look, you know, they’re quintessentially on that user experience. That’s where they’re differentiated as a coffee provider, as a enjoyment facilitator, is in that user experience. And so if your IT strategy is all about cost savings and virtually user experience, like I don’t care how good the Starbucks app is, as long as it’s cheap, operate, probably the wrong model for their business strategy. And that sounds clean and that sounds good. textbook and Starbucks might be one of the places you could do that. But for many other companies, mine included, what people don’t understand about regulated utilities is we’re a monopoly, but we’re a monopoly that is governed to not be able to change our prices, to not be able to make profit above the regulated limits set by the government. Anything above that goes back to the people, to the folks paying their bills. It’s very, very constrained. And because people don’t have a choice, we have… to be all things to everybody. We have to be the lowest cost providers best we can. We have to be the most reliable the best we can, the best customer services best we can. So we don’t get to differentiate on a particular focus that IT aligns to.

Speaker 0 | 16:06.371

It’s interesting that you say that because I would think you could absolutely tell people to pound send, you could charge them whatever you want, you could provide crappy service, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it because that’s what I’ve been running into lately. And I’m only saying that, I’m not saying that from a utility perspective. I’m saying that from a particular potential, you know, telecom has a, I’m good at what I do for a reason because I can provide good service, right? And telecom in general, I think if you ask 33% of America, who provides the worst customer service, period. 33% of America is going to say the telecom industry. And they, you know, and that means that’s also, you know, bulking in ISPs. And anytime you need to call your phone company and you need to call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND or, you know, whatever it is, 33% of America says telecom has the worst, right? So you just said we have to be everything to everybody. But in reality, I see that as, well, really, you can get away with some stuff because you are the only option. Is that what you were just saying? That you’re the only option?

Speaker 1 | 17:17.281

I don’t know. Yeah, we’re the only option. We’re a monopoly because…

Speaker 0 | 17:20.874

So good for you guys that care about that. So good that you do care. I mean, that’s amazing that you do care then, that you care about providing good customer service and that you want to be everything for everybody. That’s amazing.

Speaker 1 | 17:33.720

Yeah, we care a lot. And that’s actually a problem for IT because we don’t have a single VP executive at our company that wants to be bottom of second quartile as their stated goal. right they’re they’re not sitting there going like i want to be mediocre at customer service our customer service vp wants to excel at customer service i don’t think anyone does but you know most people say i want to make money maybe that maybe that’s the problem because we want to make the most money in our in our financial executives and our business executives they want to make money and good returns and return on equities and press shareholders and our ops vps want to be highly reliable and want to have solid operational performance the challenge is especially in today’s age is digital technologies can enable every single one of those VPs to excel in their space, which means everybody wants it to make them the best. And a company can’t afford to be the best at every single attribute of business.

Speaker 0 | 18:35.581

Say that again. Digital technology can, I can’t remember the word.

Speaker 1 | 18:44.564

Enable.

Speaker 0 | 18:45.265

Enable. Thank you. Such a simple word, but can enable, finish the sentence, digital technology.

Speaker 1 | 18:54.552

Can enable every area of the business. So if that’s low cost, if that’s reliability, if that’s customer experience, you can do all of those things with technology. And everybody wants it.

Speaker 0 | 19:04.620

The reason why I’m having you say it is because when you say it, it’s true. When a salesperson says it, it’s skeptical. Let’s be honest, right?

Speaker 1 | 19:14.388

Sure.

Speaker 0 | 19:14.968

When you say it, it’s true. When you say digital technology can enable every area of the business, it’s true. Because you actually pick, you actually evaluate, you actually study, you take in the data, and then you pick and choose and customize that technology to make it work for your unique business. When a salesperson comes in and they show you a PowerPoint and they say, we sit in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and they say this, this, this, this, and this. They’re coming under the guise of digital technology can enable everyone in every area of the business, but we still have to question it. I’m just saying that’s kind of like the stereotype, but I just love that you just said digital technology can enable every area of the business and help them to excel. So how do you pick and choose and where do you come in and how do you strategize?

Speaker 1 | 20:05.912

And how do you sell that?

Speaker 0 | 20:07.112

How do you sell that, right? You know, how do you sell like, look, this is where I think we should go. And this is why. And this is how, you know, and this because it’s good. And then how do you enable all those emotions and all those things that we were talking about at the beginning of this call, like kind of the nonverbal things, right, which you need to read. Kind of let’s pull it all together.

Speaker 1 | 20:30.266

Yeah, so you have to break it down into smaller pieces. And that’s the fallacy is that there’s one IT strategy. Because there’s not one IT strategy the same way there’s not one business strategy. There’s a lot of strategies under different areas of the business for how they sell in their areas. And you have to break down your IT strategy into chunks. I mean, imagine trying to lay out as a CIO or an IT director of a large area, trying to lay out, I’ve got 4,000 applications. I’m going to build a holistic business and technology roadmap for everything I do, which impacts the entire company. It does just, you can’t start there and everyone’s pride that I think at certain points.

Speaker 0 | 21:13.401

Well, I think every successful person or workaholic and again, we should, my own personal view of work is that we should work to live, not live to work. But the, Where was I going with this? I completely just lost the entire train of thought on that. So keep going. Anyways, it’ll come back in a moment. My brain will.

Speaker 1 | 21:42.996

A few things that have gotten in the way of being able to do strategies. One, trying to have one IT strategy. That is very difficult from a scale and scope perspective. The other challenge, especially for organizations that have been project-driven for a long time, is you have this mentality that I’m going to solve business. problem A with solution A, and it’s a tight one-to-one correlation with a measurable benefit. And as you know, in the telecom world, everything is connected. Everything goes together. And everything is, I can’t define an application obsolescence strategy without having the OS strategy, and I can’t have the OS strategy without my compute strategy. And so all of this stuff goes together, and that’s what…

Speaker 0 | 22:24.341

Again, you said it, so it’s true. Okay. Everything’s connected together. It is. It is unified. You said it, so it’s true. But when you were saying there’s the fantasy that there’s one IT strategy, at the same time, I’m thinking IT directors also hate silos. That’s just a thought that came into my mind. But the other thing, the overwhelm and the hundreds of applications and everything that you just… said, right. And trying to put a strategy in place and trying to take care of all of that. I have had a huge aha moment. And over the last, you know, it’s just been building up. It’s been building up. It’s a very simple thing. And it’s just take things off your list. Don’t put things on your list. For me, it’s like, it’s about taking things off my list. That’s really what it is. I don’t know if that rings true to you at all. But for me, it’s like, what can I take off? What can I take off? What can I take off? Or, and who can do this better?

Speaker 1 | 23:26.116

Yeah, it’s about having different lists. And so I’ll cut straight to kind of the change of how to look at the problem. The way I’m looking at the problem in my area is I looked at what are all the things that IT can enable for the business that the business needs done. But I didn’t do a traditional TOGAF enterprise architecture, you know, business capabilities map because I could do that. And it would give me things that look an awful lot like the org chart of the company. It would give me things like. We generate electricity. Okay, what are my IT systems for generating electricity? Well, they’re the same IT systems I have for all the other stuff I do. And the best example I can give you is field workers. So we have workers, a lot of workers in our company that don’t sit at a desk. They’re out in the field. They do physical work, but they have to interact with a computer. And sometimes they go away and do it. And we have this mobility need to give them the ability to interact with a computer and do work digitally from… the field where they’re not in an office or behind a desk. And so we’ve traditionally as IT professionals call that mobility. Well, mobility means something completely different to the customer service vice president who wants to give a customer a mobile app to pay their bill than it looks like to the facilities manager or the warehouse supply chain manager or the HR director. They all have different ideas. So when you’re trying to pitch an executive team on a mobility project and why I need to increase my… my wireless footprint and invest in angular and, and other and mobile data management product or mobile device management programs. They’re all coming at it from a different problem you’re trying to solve. And you don’t make me any, any. you’ll make any headway with mobility as a term. So instead you say, okay, I want to enable field workers. They’re half my company. They’ve been under service with technology. The technology can go in their pocket now. And here’s the different ways that a field worker generically can get value. Don’t care if he’s generating electricity or if he’s distributing it, or if he’s doing facilities work, line of business doesn’t matter because my IT systems, so this is where the the list comes in. My IT systems that enable a field worker are finite. It’s not my entire suite of stuff. It’s my mobile management. It’s my devices. It’s my Wi-Fi. It’s some of my asset and work management systems. But none of my customer service stuff, I’m putting in that category. None of my back office stuff, I’m putting in that category. My HR systems, my ERPs, they don’t go in that category. So I can really narrow down my technologies that are primary to a field worker. I can call that a product. I can product manage that. I can put an IT strategy, an obsolescence plan, a vision of the future, what’s the future field worker going to look like. I can build a compelling vision of the field worker of the future, what the technology is that enables it, what the roadmaps are, what the corresponding projects need to be. And I can do it in that smaller subspace of business capability of field workers with an IT lens. And, and to see there, there’s probably from my business, eight to 12 of those kinds of buckets I could create, but I got my executives together and I said, here’s the things that we could do, but here are the four that are probably under leveraged that we can move the needle bang for the buck. And we just focus on those four and I haven’t built roadmaps plans or strategies for the rest. I’ve only focused on those four because that’s enough to keep me busy for a long time.

Speaker 0 | 27:01.958

I’m going to summarize this. You just blew my mind, by the way. Absolutely blew my mind. And I don’t know if it’s me blowing my own mind or it’s just the fact that when you get filled together, when you get fills together, this is what happens. Okay, it’s like Phil squared. Except Dr. Phil, I don’t know if you saw his house went on the market recently. I just saw this weird blurb on Twitter the other day. It was really disturbing. For anyone out there listening, if you want to see Dr. Phil’s house, it went up for sale. Very interesting place. Okay, but how did you blow my mind? And I don’t, it’s, we talk, I’m going to summarize this, okay? Instead of taking, applying technology to the business, which is essentially what you’re doing, is what we’re talking about in this situation, we’re segmenting the business based on the end users and the humans that we need to support. And then we’re applying the technology to that group. So you could have, like you said, you could have gone and said, hey, we need a better… mobile device management, blah, blah, blah. And it would have created chaos and it would have been months of ridiculousness. But instead, you didn’t say, you didn’t use technology, the brainless, the soulless piece of equipment. Instead, you said field workers. You picked the group of people, you segmented, bucketed, as you said, the group of people and then applied the technology to their needs. Is that correct?

Speaker 1 | 28:35.468

That’s true for that example I gave you. But it extends. I’ll give you a second example. One of our other focus areas is equipment reliability. And I had this argument with one of our consulting helpers that folks are coming in and help us with some things. And he said, well, equipment reliability is an outcome. It’s not a thing. And I said, well, especially in the nuclear space, equipment reliability is a discipline in and of itself with methodologies and everything else. And so equipment reliability though exists in all aspects of the power industry, including facilities, including everywhere else. So how do I make my equipment reliable? So I picked that category because it’s important to the business, but it’s also a subset of IT technologies. It’s my IoT systems. It’s some of my real time systems. It’s my, it’s my metering and analysis and systems that might make my kind of my big data processing for, for. dashboarding and health monitoring. So a subset of my total suite of stuff I own that I can put in in this category of, yeah, these systems really support us understanding the equipment that, you know, the company’s equipment, the nuclear plant’s equipment, the transmission distribution equipment, we can use. These are the technologies that allow us to understand equipment health and equipment reliability for our systems, for our… are big, heavy assets that the company owns and operates. And that’s not everything. That’s a small subset. So in that space, I’m saying… I’m going to invest in more IoT and more sensors and more visualizations and more artificial machine learning to baseline equipment health. I can invest in that space with technology to move reliability pretty far in equipment reliability perspective. It’s really the Venn diagram of technology language that has a business language outcome that is a natural grouping or a natural silo, so to speak, a system that you know. already fit together, that already interface together quite a bit. Because I know that I’m managing these systems. I know the systems that talk to each other more so than others do. And those are the ones that I can put a business language outcome of and say, yep, these systems all together, let’s call that supporting equipment reliability. And let’s make that a product line. We offer equipment reliability, IT products as an internal service. This is what all those systems are. Here’s my roadmap and strategy for this. future of equipment reliability as far out as I can imagine it.

Speaker 0 | 31:11.979

And then, well, okay. So let me, so then we’re going to rewind segmenting, segmenting technology via business, via business outcomes. Just there happens to be, there just happens to be a human touch to that in a translation into I’m assuming return on investment and problems and numbers associated with you know, standard maintenance and maintaining equipment, you know, and making sure that you have continuous uptime and reliability, as you say.

Speaker 1 | 31:46.507

Yeah, the human factors piece really comes into play in clearing the roadblocks and getting the funding with the vision. And so it’s really hard to create an IT vision. It’s a lot easier to create an IT vision for a specific space. So I can create a vision for a field worker. I can create a vision for… Yep. Understanding equipment, health and equipment reliability. Everyone can,

Speaker 0 | 32:07.085

everyone’s going to say that. I think everyone’s going to say, I can do that. Let’s get to the important thing. Roadblocks. What? Um, and I’m not, I’m not, I’m not like short sighting that I’m not saying that I’m just saying roadblock. Like this is what everyone struggles with. Pushback. We don’t have money for that. You didn’t sell it good enough or you didn’t, um, segment correctly enough and you didn’t sell your story. Um, what’s the roadblock? Give me the biggest roadblock that you’ve overcome that you’re like, I didn’t think we would ever do this, but this is what we did. And we overcame this roadblock.

Speaker 1 | 32:42.908

We’ll bring it all the way back to coaching and mentoring and back to the real time human interface thing. And I’m going to tell a quick story and then tie it to why that matters and how you clear the roadblock. I had an individual, you know, in my career in the recent past that wasn’t performing very well. Super intelligent guy. Very, very sharp, good coder, got in his own way. Everybody else around him was stupid. Nobody wanted to listen. And he was frustrated and he was lazy and he wasn’t showing up to work because he was bored and frustrated. And he just had a hard conversation with them. And quickly I realized how smart he was and what the problem was, which was he just wasn’t engaged because there was nothing engaging him. And I understood that he had all of these ideas to help other… departments be more efficient, but nobody would listen to him and nobody would approve for him to go work on these things that he thought would make other people’s jobs either go away or much easier. And so we had, we’re starting to have this conversation and I let him run with it and I let him let the passing come out. I let him like, tell me about this, this thing that he wanted to work on that he thought maybe this is like three months worth of development time, but it’ll save us so much money. It’ll save the company so much money. It’ll, it’ll make this other department. you know, non-IT, this other business department run much more efficiently. And he went through and I’m smiling and I’m not and I’m kind of like letting him go with it. And he finishes and I look at him and I go, who the hell do you think you are? And I did it with a mean face. And it totally broke his frame. He was like, oh, didn’t expect that response. He expected that like, oh, you’re a genius. That’s amazing response. And I went the opposite way with it. And he just stunned him for a second. And I said, look, What you’re describing, I get it as an IT person, but I find that person sitting behind the desk that’s going to get this thing that you gave them. You just took away the stuff that was predictable and easy with their job. Yeah, you might have saved them two hours a day, but that was two hours a day that they were good at, that was easy for them, that they were comfortable with. And here you want to come and pick it up from some other department and you think that you know their job better than they do? How dare you? That’s what they see. That’s why they’ll never let you do it. And said, you weren’t thinking, you were thinking about the problem for what you think you can do and getting the accolades for it, not from what does it do for them. And he was just like, whoa. So we had a lot more conversations after that over and his performance got much, much better. But the reason that’s important is, yeah, I can put out, I’m a smart guy, I can write what I think a digital field worker strategy should look like. But I didn’t. But I’m smart enough to know that I have a set set of systems that I can manage. And I know if I work on those systems, I’ll improve in that space. So what I did was I took a shot at it, right? I wrote a paragraph or page that, you know, from my point of view, what it could look like as but I did that as an example. And I went to some of our maintenance personnel and some of our field worker leadership i did the same thing with equipment liability with our engineering folks and i pulled a couple of folks that were a little technology forward in their thinking and a little bit strategic and visionary and i said can you write this story for me like make this story yours i took the shot at it it’s terrible the internal make it yours yeah the internal cheerleader yep and they wrote it and they wrote the document a day it’s a day in the life one and a half pager of like you know you know what if you had any technology could work any way you can imagine it what would that look like to you so they wrote this story it’s just a story it’s a really easy to read story it paints a future of like hey that’d be cool if i could come in and my phone you know automatically signs me onto the clearance because the geospatial lean already knows where i’m at and it knows who i am and it knows what’s on the schedule for me and i don’t have to sign in and i don’t have to check all this stuff and it checks my qualifications for me and then it does you know all these automation and like ease of of life pains that they deal with now, he describes in this story how all that melts away and how much more productive he is and how much more work he gets done because all of that other stuff that you just have to go click and scroll through just goes away because the technology is so seamless. He writes this story. My team then breaks down that story into what are the capabilities that you’re going to get? Like what in this story it says, this is cool, What are those cool things? Okay, now what do I have to do from a technology perspective to make those cool things happen? And some of them are pretty abstract, right? Some of them are like, wow, I’m going to have to have a video digital library and search functionality in order for him to record his work performance in a video and have it searchable and archivable by the regulator. Like, okay, I need a video library. I’m not going to anybody to ask for a million dollars for a video library project. I’m going in saying. I’ve got this product vision and we’re not actually doing video libraries. That’s probably a bad example, but we are doing electronic work packages and field work packages. And it’s the same thing. And I’m saying like, this is where we’re at on this vision. This is what we’re trying to get to that we can all rally around. That’d be the coolest way to work. And here’s what it’s going to take for us to get there. And here’s the timeline that we’re on. And we invest and we accelerate it and decelerate it as we’re getting value out of it. Some of the key things to realize is it’s not a one-to-one. It’s not a project A gives result A. I have a vision. We collectively wrote this vision from a persona, from a user experience perspective. And I have to take that vision and have a capability roadmap that’s 100% separate from a technology roadmap. Because the capability roadmap defines the benefit, and you can give a hard dollar quantified benefit for each one of those deliverables. But the technology one… has a cost. I’m not putting the benefits on the technology stack. I might reference, hey, if I get A, B, and C done, capability D is now possible, but so is E and F. But it was a mini-to-mini relationship. In traditional project management and portfolio management, you can’t do good accounting on mini-to-mini relationships across all these interconnected systems. So you just have to lay out your capability roadmap, build value, lay out your technology roadmap, build cost, and then have a conversation with… with the folks that control the money to say, this is the order that I think makes the most sense. And we do that through steering committees and we invite people to the table to say, this is the path we’re on this year. We’re organizing ourselves to do that every 10 weeks in planning increments, aligning with Agile to say, every 10 weeks, let’s talk about our roadmaps and our value stream and talk about what work we have to execute on and how this is moving us towards that vision. that we painted in each of those four areas that we’re saying are key focus areas. Doesn’t mean I don’t have other random stuff and still doing Server 2008 obsolescence and still rolling out Windows 10. I’m still doing all the other stuff that we have to do, but if there’s any discretionary money at all, I want it to go towards this vision. And I actually want to use my obsolescence. That’s a key that a lot of IT directors don’t leverage. If I’m going to do Server obsolescence, if I’m going to do Windows 10, We always talk about it as, well, it’s security, I have to do it, it’s going out of service, it’s obsolete, I have to replace it. Okay, well, if I’m going to replace it, and I replace it in a way… that it’s going to move the vision further. So maybe there’s some small incremental costs I can add to this obsolescence program that moves. I’ll give you a great example. Imagine you have wireless access points that are going out of support. They’re old. They need to be changed out. You’re switching vendors. You’re going to a new one. Any good project manager worth their salt is going to control scope and budget. They’re going to identify the minimum that you have to have and security by default. Any good security person is going to disable every single thing on that access port that doesn’t have to be enabled and proven to have to be enabled. So you’re going to deliver the minimal thing that you possibly need to connect business with as much stuff disabled as possible. Well, if you’re now working on a, quote, mobility project that’s in another department in another part of your company and they roll out a mobile app, the mobile app doesn’t work because all the ports are disabled that it works on and it doesn’t have the ability to do other applications. And now you’re trying to get. security to change their mind, you’re trying to get infrastructure, and you just touched all these access points, and now you get to touch them all again, because you didn’t coordinate your mobile application with your wireless rollout. And that’s where, if I put those two things together as a product, I’m able to roadmap those things together, and I can convince security that I need these ports open when I first roll this thing out, even though I don’t need them today, I’m going to need them 12 months from now. I know that because I’ve built this vision and I built these roadmaps.

Speaker 0 | 41:35.480

Well, at least you have security truncated and you’ve got checks and balances in place. That’s huge, that alone. But the biggest thing, and I think we’ll end on this note, and to be honest with you, Phil, we could talk, I could talk with you for a lot longer, at least another hour, at least. But I think this writing a story about what perfect technology would look like, I think it’s just like out of all the best practices from listening to this show, I think that’s something that people could easily just steal from you and run with just have, you know, have people write a story about what perfect technology would look like if that hasn’t been done yet. And you’re sitting in an organization where it might be, I don’t know, just, you know, not, not super smooth or not where you want it to be yet, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 | 42:31.726

Yeah. And, and I’m happy to share those. We share a lot of this stuff. I’m in an industry that shares a lot because we are regulated monopolies and all of our goals is to provide better service at lower cost as much as possible. So we share quite a bit. So I’m happy to probably not applicable for a lot of folks to kind of get a better sense of the content and the context of what that story looks like.

Speaker 0 | 42:58.208

I think you’ve got an IT coaching and mentorship career on you later on in life. And we could rewrite that book. I can’t remember what it was called at the beginning. What did you say? Like something, crucial conversations. Crucial IT. Yeah, yeah. With Phil Zerang. Crucial conversations would be great. Man, thank you so much for being on the show. This has been, it’s been a pleasure. It’s an awesome show. And, man, just we’re going to continue this in the future, man.

Speaker 1 | 43:31.334

Sounds great.