Speaker 0 | 00:05.483
All right, welcome everyone back to Telecom Radio 1. We are continuing our series titled Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today, I’m very fortunate to have Michael Moore on the show. He has a lot of great experience, great experience managing upwards of 11,000 end users, revenue. within the $1.8 billion range and some great stories. But Michael, welcome to the show. Actually, I’ll let you give me the bio. Why don’t you give me a little bit of your background, where you come from, kind of how you got started, and we’ll start there.
Speaker 1 | 00:43.545
Oh, thanks a lot, Phil. Great to be on here. I really appreciate it. In fact, I’ve got an interesting story. I actually started over at Linkcare about 16 years ago, and how I got hired at Linkcare was… Actually, I was working in the cafe at that corporation during my college days. And while I was there, I networked my way into the help desk manager and got hired on the help desk. So when I was in there, I worked on the help desk, sysadmin, team leader of the help desk, a team leader of the system administrators group, was a fan. guy for a while then um you know then basically moved it more into the management and started management about the infrastructure and then management of the support and then became a a director which uh basically took over the telecom network infrastructure uh support all in one so that was that’s you know to sum it up quickly that’s the uh um that’s my linker experience but that’s banned over a period of 16 years
Speaker 0 | 01:57.800
That’s actually super awesome. So that’s, you know, cafeteria to, you know, IT director. That’s actually pretty, that’s actually a pretty sweet jump. And because a lot of times on the show, I’m talking about, do you, what kind of, you know, what’s more important experience, certifications, or MBA? So clearly in this situation, it sounds like it was experience and personality, to be honest with you, probably leadership.
Speaker 1 | 02:27.212
I think that’s actually pretty accurate. One of the things that I try to do in the companies that I work for is focus on the people. I think that the company’s best asset are the hard-working employees that promote a positive culture. And they’re kind of a fuel that powers its engine. So my goal is to retain the employees that I have and then train them up. And when you say, you know, the experience, I hold that pretty high. I think not only experience with IT, but experience within the business itself. A lot of times if companies focus is put on the, you know, how well somebody is technically. But I’ve found that some of the most adept people that I’ve had, have had a clear understanding of what the business does and been able to translate that technically.
Speaker 0 | 03:22.854
Very important because a lot of… And the other theme is quite often there’s a lot of technical managers that may fall into the engineering mindset. And I don’t want to stereotype engineers either because they’re humans too. But what would you say your philosophy is around communication and user communication? Because a lot of times we hear my network or I’m engineering my network. I’m trying to engineer. the dream network or the perfect network, but it’s really not your network. It’s our network, and it’s a network that everyone has to use. And if that network doesn’t support people and support their jobs well, then what’s the point?
Speaker 1 | 04:05.073
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Actually, I think of all the things I’ve done, the help desk job that I had was probably the most important. And in fact, it’s kind of the face of an entire organization from an IT standpoint. You get the interface. with the people that are working. And I would find that when I go and speak to support folks, they tend to have a clearer understanding of what the business is doing than sometimes the engineers and system administrators and architects. And that’s not a knock to them. It’s just that from a help desk standpoint, they’re in it every day. They’re talking to the end user. Sometimes their conversations are that they have with them. It helps fuel that understanding. Wow.
Speaker 0 | 04:55.478
Wow. That’s really cool. I’m actually really into surveying lately. I think there’s a lot more that can be done with surveys, whether it be surveying end users, obviously just speaking to them one-on-one, answering the phone, but actually capturing data, even recording calls, recording help desk calls, I think would be pretty cool. And I’m sure people do it, but what about recording calls and then… really transcribing those calls into words, really looking at what our end users use from even a keyword standpoint, really getting very granular about it. I’m pretty sure no one does that. And I’m working on implementing a program right now where we get real granular with end users so that we’re speaking their language and really understanding what they do on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1 | 05:32.840
That’s a really interesting thought process.
Speaker 0 | 05:38.122
I kind of fell upon it, to be honest with you. And it’s the more I dig into it, it’s… the crazier it gets. And I start to, I actually did it in reverse engineering as well and did it with IT directors to figure out, you know, and start asking them, how do you communicate with your end users, which is actually what we’re doing right now. And you get a lot of words like the right vibe, or you get struggling with speaking technical to people. That’s one is how do I explain technical to people? Because every organization has a different group of end users. Some might have a group of truck drivers. Some might have, you know, doctors, all these different end users, and they all speak different languages and need products to do things differently. So becoming the end user whisperer is a big job for IT directors to do.
Speaker 1 | 06:26.395
I think you might have stumbled on a concept, automated knowledge base. So I think that’s where you’re headed with that.
Speaker 0 | 06:34.901
Yeah, so I actually do have something that I do for IT directors. This is not at all where I thought this conversation was going to go. But I do do… I do do a special survey for IT directors and help them survey their end users. And it goes beyond the survey monkey approach, right? I really want to survey end users. We want to find out what’s your single biggest struggle, frustration, X, Y, Z, whatever it is. Take that information, keyword it, and find out what those keywords they’re actually using, and then feed them back to the IT director so they can speak to their end users so they really feel like they’re being heard. Now, obviously, you’ve done that naturally. And it… may come from, like you said, working in the cafeteria, sitting on the help desk and really kind of getting the live feedback, people’s frustrations, what they’re hearing every day. I think it’d be interesting if you called the IT help desk and they answered really, really exciting. One of my first jobs was working at Starbucks as a manager. So I remember calling the help desk and it was like, who am I talking to? Imagine if they were the most exciting person in the world to talk to. That’d be cool. Anyways.
Speaker 1 | 07:40.928
I also worked at a Starbucks.
Speaker 0 | 07:43.350
I think it’s like one third of the population has at some point in their life. And then I think that’s their trick to get people to buy their coffee. Because once you’ve worked there, you get coffee for free and then it’s like you’re addicted for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 | 07:58.842
Well, you say this, it’s actually an interesting piece. If we step back to what you were just talking about, about listening to end users, right? I think you can… Start a conversation about innovation just there. Because innovation, I believe, comes with listening to the end users and understanding what they need to succeed. I think that’s a big piece of it.
Speaker 0 | 08:29.845
That’s huge. And then, if you really want to get crazy and blow this up, how do we take that, give them what they need, and then track it? So that we’re actually showing measurable results that drive the business forward and take a business acumen standpoint versus a IT as a cost center. Where can we cut costs and cut the budget?
Speaker 1 | 08:51.992
Absolutely. IT needs to be a revenue generator.
Speaker 0 | 08:54.754
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 08:54.994
it can be.
Speaker 0 | 08:56.415
Yeah, absolutely. It can be in every single situation. I think you just got to find. You know, I was talking with John Santee last week. He said, just find the small wins. He’s like the difference between like the regular IT director and the guy that comes in with business acumen is he’s going to find some small wins, be able to correlate and show business growth. So, hey, we are actually supposed to talk about a challenging project that you dealt with, how you dealt with it, how that, you know, how kind of like the whole project, how we put that, how we project management, how does an IT director take a large project? project management, communicate with the end users, deal with the vendors, and kind of make this whole thing happen. And you have one that’s right up my alley, which is a large telecom deployment. So I’ll kind of let you give the general overview, and we’ll go from there.
Speaker 1 | 09:43.902
Absolutely. The company that I worked for had probably a little over 700 locations all over the United States. They were all using local phone lines, which meant they were all dialing long distance back and forth throughout the company. They had multiple lines at each location. It was a very, very disparate system that they were using and clearly not one that’s hard to keep up because you’re constantly trying to call different vendors. And we’re talking about at some point there was over, you know. I think 300 different vendors of phone services that they were using.
Speaker 0 | 10:30.387
Now, let me, this is like a dream job for me, just so you know, this is like, this is like anyone could come in and make the situation better.
Speaker 1 | 10:37.593
But are you telling me
Speaker 0 | 10:40.796
POTS lines, analog, like copper T1s, T1CAS, or did we have PRIs? What were we dealing with there?
Speaker 1 | 10:46.721
No, we’re talking about POTS, plain old telephone service. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 10:50.724
All right. So this is going to be like a slam dunk. I can’t wait. I can already tell, but the changeover is not going to, is, is a totally different story. But as far as money wise, I’m assuming you killed it.
Speaker 1 | 10:59.553
Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I mean, we were able upon project completion, we were saving the company over $3 million annually. So it’s a, it was a massive win on our end. Um, but it was clearly not an easy project.
Speaker 0 | 11:17.071
Don’t get me wrong. I mean, you probably, you had MCI, AT&T, you probably had Verizon, you had, you know, Southern Bell, you probably had every I-LEC that you could have met that you could deal with.
Speaker 1 | 11:26.873
There were so many moving parts to this project. You know, the big deal on here, and I think, you know, as we kind of step through this, the first part that really saved this project, and I can’t stress this enough, is how clearly we established the return on investment. The ROI was… was, you know, decided upon, thrown to the leadership, and they said, yes, we want to move forward with this. That was a big, big deal, because as we moved forward with the project, we hit several unexpected balances. You know, things that, you know, we didn’t even know would be a balance.
Speaker 0 | 12:09.520
For example?
Speaker 1 | 12:10.601
Oh, for example, you know. You kind of I think people kind of take advantage of internet connectivity I listen I you know how many people at our house you sit there and you I’m connected to the internet I can stream what I want and I don’t ever think about it until it goes down Right, I don’t think about it until it starts my my show since they’re at 30% and it won’t show it well, what we ended up running into is Not bandwidth limitations of latency problems on the internet campus connectivity. So um what would be you know broadband working in you know let’s say tampa um and it would work great you know we’ll go out to walla walla washington and try to do internet connectivity and now you’ve got uh um you know latency problems so um milliseconds round trip or something and they would affect uh it would affect the performance awful i mean you know you’d have people sounding like robots you know i mean we didn’t expect that but if you think about it it makes total sense you know if you’re a uh if you’re doing web in a in walla walla washington your internet is slow you know it takes longer to open if you experience latency yeah it’s not like it disappears it’s not like drop a dropped call right right so if you’re on a phone and all of a sudden you’re experiencing latency all the your your voice cuts in and out or your or the drops completely um or you get even phantom calls people would call up and they would just drop So, you know, pacing this down was also a nightmare because we also had over 200 different companies that we use for Internet service. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 13:52.406
God. So were you doing like Wiresharks and MozScores and running all kinds of different stuff like that? Yes,
Speaker 1 | 13:58.788
nonstop. Exactly what we’re doing to try and find the latency. We actually purchased a product that would allow us to measure this.
Speaker 0 | 14:09.571
as well and in different pieces so we could actually put um you know a computer from on one end and a computer back in the server room and we could measure end to end simulate calls and you get you end up you basically you had the ultimate finger pointing the ultimate carrier finger pointing problem or call an
Speaker 1 | 14:26.802
internet vendor like hey it’s not us it’s you know and as you step through this and and our pace that we we moved at was was very aggressive in fact um we were able to do about 700 locations in just over a year. So if you put that together and start looking at how fast we were moving through doing 30 or 40 sites every week, it was painstaking. We’re doing this. the same people that are working on this project to turn around and supporting, you know, and taking calls from end users that are unable to, you know, taking cell phone calls from end users that can’t use their regular phone. Right.
Speaker 0 | 15:09.153
Well, let me ask you a question and please forgive me just because I do this all day, every day. And I always, you know, so I see things from doing these, from doing multiple projects like this. So are you telling me you guys cut over? Before with, with the latency issues, or did you still, were you still using the old kind of like prem based PBX and you had like a digital phone next to that, like, like a non hot cut, or you guys did a hot cut in many situations.
Speaker 1 | 15:36.152
We went entirely over to VoIP and a complete cut. No, not keeping the same phone over. So it was, it was put the stuff in and move on.
Speaker 0 | 15:48.278
So it was drinking from the fire hose when the problems came up.
Speaker 1 | 15:50.760
Absolutely. So. So now we have people calling us and we’ve got issues. So we actually had to slow down the project and turn around and figure out, you know, what we’re going to do on that. So what we ended up doing to fix the internet connectivity issues is we went ahead and established a, you know, based on. And the problem is, is that, you know, once you put in voice, you have a lot of reporting that you can get about phone calls. But before that, you don’t have a lot of reporting about phone calls. So we didn’t know the volume of phone calls per. We knew that some were bigger than others, but we didn’t know how many calls were coming in. So we had to go back and pull the reporting and figure it out based on the reporting of the size of sample that we had already done. We were able to figure out based on how many customers each location had, how much call volume they were going to get.
Speaker 0 | 16:48.203
Bandwidth needs.
Speaker 1 | 16:49.503
Absolutely. And then we translated it. Yeah, then we translated that into bandwidth needs and we actually set up tiers of locations where you had the larger locations that, where I said, these are just going to require MPLS regardless of any type of broadband, we’re going to hit at it, it’s not going to work, it’s just too big and too much volume coming in at the location. So we had a certain cutoff for MPLS and then after that it was high volume. broadband, you know, and then we would go down from there.
Speaker 0 | 17:24.606
But the cool thing is you had the, you had, you had the budget. I mean, you, you had already, you’re already saving. I mean, the savings is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 | 17:31.428
Not only,
Speaker 0 | 17:33.068
not only can a project like this, which I run into a lot, not only can a project like this, save the company a lot of money, be fraught with various different issues if you have not been through it numerous times, but in the end it can actually. increase your network speeds as well because you’re reinvesting in your core network um maybe taking voice off of it maybe segmenting it or you know whether you’re doing you know sd-wan or like you’re in your case mpls uh you’re also creating uh redundancy network redundancy but probably increasing your your network speeds along with it you’re
Speaker 1 | 18:06.160
right on you’re right on the same page exactly we did we uh in some cases we were increasing them in some in some cases we were completely segmenting the voice off to an mpls circuit um and now splitting the traffic so you do have some redundancy in that point.
Speaker 0 | 18:20.692
Awesome. So, okay, so go on with this wonderful story.
Speaker 1 | 18:25.215
So if we had not established that ROI, I wouldn’t have been able to pitch the MPLS circuits to like the top 150 locations. But we were able to do that and then I was able to pitch that cost and even with that, we were supposed to end up saving the free mill. I mean, it was that much of a… different but uh you know some other challenges we get were user adoption and there’s an interesting one about this um even though we were putting in these these tiny new phones right and our executives wanted this and it was going to save the company money right um nobody wanted these phones no system they want line one line two line three exactly they really they love their own phones so we had to actually create a need and a want for these phones And we basically had to go back and almost remarket why these phones were good for the organization and why they would ultimately be good for the center. And I ended up doing that in a couple different ways. We worked with the communications department to put out several communications out to the end users so they saw them. Once we put in the new phones, what we did is we sent them links. so that they could look at the number of phone calls that they were getting on a database and actually keep track of it. And one of my talented employees actually created a website to do this so that they could they could actually pull from via via pieces and fill the data and it was it was a fantastic way the once they once they started realizing that they could get the numbers on how many phone calls I’d say how many phone calls they were taking but it almost turned out to be a muscle phone calls they were not able to take they were able to turn around and go look at I’m you know I’m You know, I need another person. I’ve got more, I know I’ve got more calls than I need. So it ended up actually creating a rework of the, you know, of the, you know, of the FTEs out in the organization based on how many, how much volume they were getting that they couldn’t get before.
Speaker 0 | 20:43.995
Well, I mean, Lincare, I would assume is a very labor intensive business in general. I would assume that… But obviously with this number of users, staffing appropriately due to call volume, they weren’t able to do all that before without the reporting. If they don’t have the call volume, how can you staff appropriately?
Speaker 1 | 21:02.906
Absolutely. And that was, I mean, they had some idea based on the orders and stuff that they would parse through. But yes, it was very challenging to staff appropriately based on that. I think that was one of the major pushes. from that time, the CEO, that reporting was the number one reason why he wanted this. Yes, he saved money, but it was actually reporting that at the end of the day actually sailed this project through. Once they started seeing the reporting, they were able to make massive changes and improve customer experience.
Speaker 0 | 21:38.863
Yeah, data. I mean, it’s data that you didn’t have before. I mean, even fast forwarding to today, if you look at how fast unified communications has evolved, you know, even today. You’ve got that whole kind of omni-channel experience. You’ve got, you know, and even in call centers and even just general users, like what we’re talking in this case, you can have, you know, live, you know, live call bars and reporting and real-time reporting, you know, across the screen at the same time. Not only that, you can have, you know, chat integrated and numerous other things. So, awesome.
Speaker 1 | 22:11.020
Interesting you bring up the omni-channel. You know, that is a concept that, you know, we took while we were there. And, you know, basically started to champion the difference between the multi-channel and omni-channel. Multi-channel allows you to use any medium, right, you want at a time. Omni-channel, right, is being able to take those mediums and pass through them seamlessly with a user, right? So you take a, you know, a user at a contact center and say, and I call them contact centers now instead of call centers, right? because that’s where we’re going with Teleton. It’s just merging with infrastructure. You take a person that is chatting with you and all of a sudden has a question that requires engagement and you can seamlessly get them onto the phone and talk with them. It’s a big deal. And where people come from is a big deal, right? So if you bring them in via phone and the only thing you can engage with them is a phone, You can bring them in as a phone call. You don’t really know is their phone number, right? Maybe you have a database on the back end that’s able to pull that phone number and start to get some information about it. But if you can get a customer coming in through the web or coming in through a mobile application, the amount of information that you know about them is endless. And you can use that information and design some revenue-generating ideas to help sell them. And it’s good for the customer and good for the user.
Speaker 0 | 23:49.660
Yeah, the applications are endless. I mean, real estate obviously is one big one. Like look at Zillow, for example, right? Zillow, someone gets on, they’re like, I’m looking at houses for fun, or I’m looking at a house, or I’m looking to move, or I’m looking to rent a place. They enter in their phone number, boom, the next thing you know, there’s a real estate agent on the phone.
Speaker 1 | 24:04.571
It’s amazing. It really is. It really is. I attended a conference with, it was a buyer, probably about a year ago. And they seamlessly showed me, um, chatting with, uh, with a robot, you know, uh, and moving on, uh, when the robot didn’t know the answer seamlessly changing over to an agent that had all that history. Right. And then when they were ready to place the order seamlessly, uh, jumping onto the phone with that same agent, it was, it was remarkable to see that displayed, uh, you know, in real time, uh, sitting in the room. And it was, it was. pretty impressive. So where telecom is going with this merger of infrastructure and mobile is a pretty exciting place.
Speaker 0 | 24:54.126
It’s awesome. I’m actually redesigning a website right now and I contemplated doing all chatbots. I don’t think people are using chatbots. I think chatbots could be hilarious, could be really great. I think your theme around a website could be chatbots, could be really funny. It’s actually one of the top themes of the year. One of my friends, Jesse Nolan, who runs up Tab Geeks and has a really cool no sales guys allowed Slack group. he, he sent, has sent that to me, but like one of the top themes of the year was, you know, a website that’s just all chatbots.
Speaker 1 | 25:29.935
That’s amazing.
Speaker 0 | 25:30.515
Um, you know, and then those chatbots, like, you know, couldn’t, couldn’t link with a live human being, the whole omni channel experience. Anyway, a little bit off track, but yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:38.842
but some of these chatbots have some better social skills than some of the people that I’ve talked with. So true.
Speaker 0 | 25:46.769
Like I said, it could be funny. Uh, so anyways, you’re I like the end user piece and we’re trying to resell it to the end user. So you had to resell to key stakeholders on this big project, resell to key stakeholders. And you did that via reporting and, you know, the value around whatever saving on labor. And, you know, so the hard costs where you saved them $3 million, that’s the hard costs. But there was a whole nother level of soft costs that people like to talk about that are probably unmeasurable, especially when it comes to labor, because labor is really the biggest controllable cost that I would say. just about every business has. It’s their biggest controllable. So if you helped in that situation, then it was much more than 3 million that you saved them. So that’s cool. So you get all these phones rolled out, you slow it down because you start having some of these, you know, garbly latency, jitter issues, et cetera, et cetera. When you ran into those latency and jitter issues, you know, let’s just pick one that was like the worst one with the people complaining and driving you absolutely nuts, I’m assuming. how quick was the solution to fix it? And how did you pinpoint the issue? How did you fix it? Did you just throw bandwidth at it like so many people do? Like so many people are just like, screw it, just throw more bandwidth at it and that’ll fix the problem. Or how did you kind of diagnose?
Speaker 1 | 27:04.516
Well, there’s always a couple. So how I fix issues is an interesting thought. I always try to fix a couple different things. Obviously, you’re always trying to fix the technical issue, but there’s also a component where you have to fix. the perception as well, right? So what we did at some of the locations that were really bad is we actually sent out a presence there so there was a person on site. Remember, we did all these things. Since they’re all remote, we had to do all these remote. So there was a website that we had with information and directions on how to swap over phones. The employees actually swapped them themselves and got through these. And we had a… third-party services that assisted in walking people through this procedure.
Speaker 0 | 27:54.261
Always fun.
Speaker 1 | 27:55.461
Yeah, always fun. So when they got to a point where they actually had major problems and it wasn’t an easily diagnosable problem, we would actually send people to the location so that they were visible. And that’s the biggest piece. When it comes to troubleshooting, the biggest piece of troubleshooting is ensuring the customers that you’re working on the issue. I don’t care. You know, that comes from help desk mentality, but I think some people kind of forget that sometimes.
Speaker 0 | 28:26.862
No, it’s like respond to the email with working on it or I got it or answer the phone. Don’t go dark. Going dark while you’re working on the issue is not acceptable.
Speaker 1 | 28:41.274
Yeah, absolutely. And then also taking that while you’re working on the problem. providing updates right so we we would we would up our communication with these locations that were having these problems and we would involve them in the process we would bring them in say okay hey listen we’re gonna we’re working with this third-party entity and they’re gonna test this and we’re gonna run there at some point we were actually dialing you know and we had some third-party third parties that were helping us dial over and over locations just to identify, you know, if we were getting dropped calls, you know, and there was, you know, we had, I remember having, you know, little parties afterwards where we were sitting there doing nothing but, you know, calling on our cell phones and phones, different locations to see if we could get them to fail and then recording that and seeing if we got any dropped calls. So, you know, and then we would, and then once we identified what the problems were because some of them were random and trying to identify it. Then we would hone in on those pieces and start knocking off one by one what was or could not be the issue. Internet connectivity is one problem, but how do you sometimes decide if it’s the carrier or if it’s the local network that’s having a problem? I mean, we went all the way from the carriers all the way into the actual phone firmware. So, I mean, we went all the way through the problem, you know, getting and ensuring that, you know, the wall jacks were fine and going through that piece. I mean, we just sailed through a whole bunch of different spots. We ended up getting it through that troubleshooting and always is the case. We ended up strengthening the local network at the locations and the carriers. So, you know, it was a win-win.
Speaker 0 | 30:35.999
You’re just mapping everything out, you know, absolutely where everything is. There’s no longer, I don’t know, like you said, like, well, a bunch of pot signs, maybe sitting with some dust on them and paying for pot signs. They do something, who knows? It was a fax machine from years ago. Now, you know, everything, you mapped everything out from this entire project. Not to mention save money. The headache factor was you had to have been very patient through this entire thing. I’m sure there’s a few days where you’d rather crawl back into bed under the sheets.
Speaker 1 | 31:06.108
It was one of those projects that was very challenging. But at the end of the day, after we kind of got through the major issues and brought in multiple resources, we actually at one point had created a Venn diagram of all the suggestions. from all the different vendors and basically mapped it into a cluster. What are most of them saying are the issues. And then we used those and we just cleared through each one and knocked them through. And at the end of the day, we were able to kind of push through that entire project and through completion.
Speaker 0 | 31:42.903
So you’re telling me you got multiple different answers from multiple different vendors, all various different ideas of what it could be, and you put them all on one page.
Speaker 1 | 31:51.625
That’s absolutely. Right.
Speaker 0 | 31:54.391
That’s classic. Who said we could get the same answer from someone that knows what they’re talking about? Okay. Awesome. Now you’ve got a lot of other projects, obviously that you took through that we could talk about. I say, I think it’s better to say what’s your general philosophy when it comes to when it comes to project management or or planning, right? Like everyone has strategy. I’ve heard people say before, you know, I’ve got all the strategies. I got that. What I need is planning. What I need is good planning. So, um, what would you say is your philosophy around planning?
Speaker 1 | 32:33.578
So that, I mean, that’s a, that’s a really good one. Um, I think for what you need to do, uh, right off the bat is put down everything you possibly think that a, uh, that even if you’re just jotting things down, But every possible thing you think you’re going to have to touch, you’re going to run into, who you’re going to need questions from, you should just list it all. List all this stuff. And do this in a meeting with multiple people because one person’s not going to be able to understand everything and everyone’s got different experience. Take all of that and start listing it all down and get it almost a brainstorm of what you need. Once you get that. list down, right? Then you can start to organize and prioritize that list and build your dependencies. Put the durations of things and when you think that they can be completed by, you can start to assign costs and resources, right? Because that’s another piece to it, on that mix. So this project is not only going to cost me this much money, it’s also going to require that I use these many people that I already have and on top of that turn around and spend you know X amount of resources I come out on professional resource this is needs to be all mapped out before you have that on top of that on top of that you need to make her that you have accurately defined what the business wants from this project and that they’ve signed off on that uh, on that one.
Speaker 0 | 34:17.679
So clarify that. And because to me, that means to me, when you say what the business wants, that to me means what are the expected results and how is this helping the business drive revenue?
Speaker 1 | 34:27.466
Yeah, you’re, you’re absolutely or save costs, but yes, absolutely. Um, you know, that is a, uh, um, it’s important concept because, um, at the end of the day, uh, you know, I’ve seen projects where, uh, this has not clearly been mapped out and, uh, and they’ve been redone, you know, or they’ve had to stop them in the middle and say, Hey, this is, this is not what we wanted. And in some cases, that, you know,
Speaker 0 | 34:51.864
can you give me an example of that? I want to, I want an example, just so we’re real clear on this. At what point has a project been developing something and someone’s saying, no, this is not what we want. Um, this is wrong. It’s like, you know, that, that cartoon, that, that viral cartoon, it’s like, you know, you know, here’s the wheel and they leave me alone. We’re doing work and they’re pushing something around with like a square wheel type of thing, you know? Um, but give me an idea. Where’s this project that was off track and you had to say, stop, this isn’t, I just need a picture of that.
Speaker 1 | 35:18.915
I’ll give you, I’ll give an example. There was a project that was being worked at Link Care, a fairly large project. But part of that project was taking paper forms that our drivers would go out and fill out for people at their doorstep. And then they would have those people sign those forms. And there was lots of forms, but they’re all paper. like come with your oxygen tanks yeah absolutely come with a clipboard sign here now sign here now sign here now sign here right it’s really uh it’s really cumbersome and uh and also doesn’t kind of provide the the you know the right uh look to to a company hey here’s all my paper nobody does that right so so then so in turn they said you know what we need to uh move these tablets we’re going to basically make these forms electronic and put them on tablets and here you go so i did a ride along with the organization at one point. And because I wanted to see how this tablet, these new tablets worked in the field. I got there and I watched a woman, it was an elderly woman, and she was going through this tablet. And I watched her try to sign this tablet once and then they passed it back to the tech and then he hit a few buttons and then… pass it to her again and we continued doing this for the better part of 10 minutes back and forth with her signing on a tablet now back increasing time increasing and it actually increased i was at that house for like 35 minutes for one stop and uh i know and the the service rep is a uh you know 30 year service rep and then we got back in the car and he’s just like this provides no uh it’s harder for me so here we we think we’re innovating right but but we’re not we’re actually going backwards and making it harder uh so they they paused it and they went back and looked at that uh and and what they’ve decided to do was consolidate all even though we you still have to go through all the forms legally to consolidate it to one place to uh sign so that uh um you know they’ve acknowledged that they’ve gone through all the forms but they only have to sign one time and and that’s really where that benefit got changed. But that was an example of somewhere where someone said, here, now it’s formed, but yet it still didn’t meet the business requirement.
Speaker 0 | 37:58.398
It’s classic. Yeah. And otherwise you end up with a bunch of people rolling their eyes and you end up with some equipment. I can feel that. Healthcare is a big one. And my father’s been, every one of my family is a doctor.
Speaker 1 | 38:16.736
Um,
Speaker 0 | 38:17.797
and I remember he’s older now, he’s 82 now, he had his hip replaced and I was in the, in the hospital and there’s just, you know, a machine sitting in the corner with like all these cords unplugged. It was like, it was a mobile, um, you know, like a mobile EMR type of record system machine, brand new sitting in the quarter unplugged. And then, and the nurse rolls in another one that she’s actually working on. I’m like, Hey, what’s this? She just, you know, rolled her eyes. She’s like, that’s the new system. And, you know, obviously, um, it didn’t get rolled out that well.
Speaker 1 | 38:49.912
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 0 | 38:50.493
So, you know, anyways, um, so great example, um, actually need to, and that’s just more examples of communicating with end users and making sure we get it right.
Speaker 1 | 39:01.342
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 39:02.883
Awesome. Um, the, we, we were talking before you, you’ve gave me some bullet points before about just in general, encouraging new ideas. um, you know, recognizing, celebrating people, um, maybe just give me a couple ideas there or what’s your best, what’s your best practice there? Because I think a lot of times we might have, again, fall into the engineering mindset, fall into the typical, maybe stereotypical IT director mindset. What are some things or any tricks or things that you do that might be unique to you around encouraging new ideas, celebrating people, that type of thing, innovation?
Speaker 1 | 39:38.829
Uh, so when I was in, uh, college, um, Even though I graduated with management information systems, I actually took several marketing courses. And this is something I would, you know, even if you don’t take the marketing courses at college, I would encourage people to go and look at marketing because I think it’s a big deal when we talk about how to not only sell the project they’re working on, but afterwards to ensure that they’ve been communicated. Because if you make a win like this, right, you need to turn around and you need to communicate that you made that win to everybody. you want to celebrate that you want to uh you want to show that look at how we’re making the company better look at the the staff that helped to do that right it it helps the comp it helps everyone in the company feel better about the company um it helps a uh when we talk about this innovation culture it helps promote that you know interesting statistic by the way uh there is a survey uh done with uh deloitte in 2018 and they they found that 43 percent millennials expect to leave with their job within three years and 28% of Millennials expect to stay beyond five years after it you know if that doesn’t scare you the Gen Z’s even worse 61% expect to leave the job within two years and 12% expect to stay beyond five years so we’re looking at a retention problem in the future well almost now and in the future and what they found is you know for innovation the prioritization of innovation was stronger with the loyal millennials, the ones that expect to stay beyond five years, at 35% is what they gauge that. And ones that were wishing to leave at 28%. So the way to sum that up is if you want to keep loyal employees, especially millennials, you better innovate. And when you do innovate, you better celebrate that, both on the people that are innovating and the company that’s… It’s done the innovation. Everyone needs to be involved in it. And we need to celebrate that. Even if it’s just recognizing them with a, you know, with a, um, uh, an email, you know, I mean, you’d be surprised how much of Pat on the back, uh, it goes for, uh, for your employees, but. Hey, look,
Speaker 0 | 42:04.146
I like burritos and I’m sure millennials like Chipotle, a free burrito every now and then wouldn’t be bad either. Um, so, but no, that’s important. And the idea of having cheerleaders and users within cheerleaders, that kind of goes back to what I was talking to beginning with a lot of surveying and kind of getting in depth is once you find someone that’s really kind of a hyperactive and user. And I mean that in the best of ways, like someone that’s passionate, someone that’s really kind of like, you know, like really gets into your survey and answers it and just giving you the feedback, recruiting that person to be your internal company cheerleader for the project.
Speaker 1 | 42:44.347
Absolutely. That’s a great idea.
Speaker 0 | 42:46.308
You know, so as we’re getting all this information, how do we grab that person and then get them to go cheerlead us? Because, you know, when we say it, it’s suspect. When someone else says it, it’s true. So it’s just, that’s awesome. I don’t know what to say about your statistics. That’s completely believable and obviously true. So innovate and celebrate. So I guess I’ll end with this. Do you believe in the saying, never reinvent the wheel, and if it’s broke, don’t fix it?
Speaker 1 | 43:24.266
Never reinvent the wheel. If it’s broke, don’t fix it. Now, I subscribe to a theory of always looking at what you’re doing and looking at it again. I have a… I actually, I have a, um, saying in my, you know, that it’s up on and I got it, I got it like the Hallmark store. Right. But it’s just a piece of wood in my office that I, I have, and it says, do not be afraid of pain, be afraid of not painting. Yes. And I have that on there so that everyone knows, um, you know, the whole point of being relevant is to continue to improve.
Speaker 0 | 44:10.086
And that’s, that’s, that’s, um, I mean, that’s it. I think the old mindset is when we get stuck in our IT silos and we get overloaded with a to-do list and a project that might be needs hyper-focused, but then we’ve got our help desk getting overloaded with tickets and we’re trying to deal with all these things and manage all this stuff and we’re really swamped with context switching being taken from one task to the next, then the other things that are not broken don’t get fixed. And it’s really not about not fixing, not broking. It’s about always staying ahead of the game. It’s always about innovating, always being on top of your game. Um, and, but I can’t tell you how many times I hear if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Or I run into that type of mentality and it might just be, you know, human nature because they’re overloaded and really don’t know how to kind of get, get a handle on everything.
Speaker 1 | 45:01.773
No, I, I, I completely hear you there. And I, and I agree.
Speaker 0 | 45:05.255
Um, so, okay. So what’s your, what’s your one thing? I need one thing from you. This is a, some sort of trick tactic, best practice, whatever you say it is. What’s the one thing that you would. um, that you want to give to anyone listening to the show right now, that’s just real easy, might be different that they can take back and implement right away.
Speaker 1 | 45:25.291
Well, I’ll tell you this right now, the most important piece to anything, uh, related to, uh, management or, uh, um, it director or whatever you want to, uh, talk about is, is leadership and focusing on your employees. Uh, the idea of leadership for everyone is to make sure. And I, and I. explain this to everyone that I work with. My goal is if, and I’ll give you an analogy, is if we’re in a, let’s say we’re walking through a rainforest and my team needs to measure items and measure all the different pieces of stuff in the rainforest, what a leader could do to be at the front of the line with a machete, putting and making a path for everybody, getting bugs on them and making sure they take all that. stuff that way their team can walk through unscathed making all those measurements and I really think that people need to focus on that when they focus on leadership turn around put the you know put your needs of the people that are doing the hard core work and and make sure they have the tools and the resources they need to do the job and stand up for them when they say hey I need your help with it that’s the job of a leader and I need to make sure that If anything, that comes over to the leaders that are out there. And in fact, even the newer ones that are going to be coming and entering the workforce.
Speaker 0 | 46:57.210
Yeah, that’s awesome. So encouraging people to ask for help. A leader should be encouraging people to ask for help.
Speaker 1 | 47:03.655
Absolutely. That’s awesome.
Speaker 0 | 47:06.077
Hey, it has been a pleasure. I am sure I actually know for a fact I could talk for a lot longer with you and ask endless questions about the phones and go over how you developed. put together your Moz scores and probably elevator lines and all kinds of other stuff that might, might’ve been missed or fax lines that weren’t, weren’t delivering correctly. That would be really exciting for me and boring for other people. So thank you. Thanks, Michael, so much for being on the show and you know, all of the best to you in the future and your future roles. And please, the next, the next big thing that pops up, I want to have you back on the show.
Speaker 1 | 47:42.773
Thanks Bill. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 0 | 47:44.406
Yeah. Thank you, sir. Have a great day.
