Speaker 0 | 00:09.706

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, I am going to try to not, I’m working on my ums. I’m going to try to not do too many ums today. I’ve been listening to my past episodes. There’s been a lot of ums. So we’re talking with Steve Myrtle. He is ed tech leader. Is that short for education? Yes, it is. Maybe I need some education. I probably need some education. So I really appreciate you being on the show. And the way that I get my news is through Twitter feeds. I probably shouldn’t be that way. I need to police my children’s social media more and more nowadays. But really, the only way I get my news is through Twitter. And you’re in. homeless services, which is a broad field, which we have not talked about yet. But I’m just curious what you thought about the California skid row coming in and just saying, you know, we’re going to give all the homeless people shelter all of a sudden, just like this kind of blanket thing that I saw on Twitter. I’m assuming you saw that, the fact that you’re in…

Speaker 1 | 01:16.741

It’s very much so what’s happening in all major cities. New York City, when the COVID crisis hit, they were like… figure out housing for everyone right now. And they just went and sent out contracts to every single servicer like ourselves, West have to go and find shelters. So I actually managed several hotels. I worked with IT people who manage hotels, goes into shelters.

Speaker 0 | 01:42.495

So that’s awesome. I don’t know why it took so long. I mean, we’re only the most, the richest country in the world with the, you know, drive down the streets of the richest country in the world. And there’s tons of poverty on the side of the street. For whatever reason that is, whatever we want to call it, social injustice or whatever. How’s it been? What are your general thoughts on that in general? COVID seems to have driven a lot of things. It’s definitely driven the move to the cloud. Who cares what IT guys have been saying for years? Who cares? Really, I love that meme. The multiple choice quiz, what drove your cloud migration? you know, three real smart answers and then COVID-19.

Speaker 1 | 02:28.713

So what’s interesting is I still have ed tech leader as my title because I recently transitioned into homeless services. So in education up until September, I ramped up an entire school network deal with COVID and they went remote. Then I jumped into homeless services and then the same issue came up. We needed to educate this families. who are living in our shelters that have no Wi-Fi setup, no infrastructure. That was never part of the plan when building all of these housing shelters. So now I come in and 100% of my time is spent doing infrastructure design for new buildings, new shelters, retrofitting all of the existing buildings rapidly, getting Wi-Fi up. And one of the biggest projects I’m doing now is a public-private partnership to get free Wi-Fi to an entire city. So the city of Yonkers in Westchester, New York.

Speaker 0 | 03:23.942

So what are we doing? Some sort of mesh fixed wireless type of thing with like, I mean, what are we using for devices out there? Am I even allowed to know?

Speaker 1 | 03:34.330

I mean, no, I can tell you it’s CBRS. And CBRS is something that I, you know, I had to really ramp up and try to understand what’s been going on with that recently. Because in 2019, it’s like as far back as I can see articles about companies being involved like Google. Yep. horizon um but folks like Motorola are going all in on CBRS you get about eight megabit download speeds but it covers about a mile range per antenna yeah that’s good antenna you put on top of our buildings which we have many or

Speaker 0 | 04:07.594

an entire area fixed wireless is a an old passion of mine I was in fixed wireless for years and Ubiquiti came out I remember Ubiquiti kind of came on the scene and like crushed a lot of people There’s the old, like the old Motorola devices. And you always run into an old, like an old, old man Marley, you know, is what we call him. You know, we run into like a guy like that that was in the military. I once did a 20 mile shot or like a 20 mile like line of sight shot with this three, three foot parabolic, you know, it’s, it’s great. And how’d you get into this whole mess? What was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 04:50.184

pro tech 100 megahertz pro tech from 1995 uh and i just tore that thing apart with upgrades back when We had AOL free internet access or 55K blazing.

Speaker 0 | 05:06.258

I can see you’re young.

Speaker 1 | 05:07.318

I’m not the OG yet. I’m not in that category.

Speaker 0 | 05:14.981

My dad still uses AOL. His still AOL address. I love it when I hear him give it out. Yes. He didn’t give out the AOL address. Awesome. All right. So you tore that apart. 95. If you don’t mind me asking, how old were you in 95?

Speaker 1 | 05:31.350

In 95?

Speaker 0 | 05:32.150

I was graduating high school.

Speaker 1 | 05:34.612

Oh, so you’re like five years in? I was in fourth grade in 95.

Speaker 0 | 05:40.775

I remember…

Speaker 1 | 05:41.595

Fifth grade, fifth grade. So what, 12, 11?

Speaker 0 | 05:44.517

Okay, so you at least had video games that were better than Pong. You had something…

Speaker 1 | 05:49.880

Atari at that time. That’s awesome. I have immigrant parents who were like, why would you buy a new game system? If you buy this game system, you can get a box of games.

Speaker 0 | 05:59.053

Atari. Where did your parents immigrate from?

Speaker 1 | 06:04.697

Haiti.

Speaker 0 | 06:05.818

Okay. Okay. Nice. And they’re right about that. Atari was awesome. I wished my parents had purchased an Atari. They weren’t that cool. They really weren’t. I had to beg them forever when that first NES came out. Eventually all the kids, you know. They bring in Nintendo Power. They’re comparing games. They’re talking about this, Mike Tyson’s punch out, all this stuff. And I’m like, ah, not me. I’m stuck with the antenna on the roof. Okay, so you rip this computer apart. You’ve built some teams from scratch. I think the thing that’s very valuable. to people listening out there. We’ll get into the meat of this show at some point. We’re going to get into something here, but the thing that’s really valuable about you, and a lot of people ask me this because they might even be in a high level of IT. They might be in a very good position and then the CTO gets whacked or the IT director disappears and they’re no longer the database admin. They know everything. They could easily be the IT director, but the one thing that they don’t have is how do I build a team and how do I manage people? And they might be the right person for the job because they’ve got the right personality. Everyone likes them. So obviously they become, they’re the guy that gets pushed into the position. And then they’re like, what do I do now? Like, how do I build a team? I need three more guys. Can you answer that question?

Speaker 1 | 07:45.592

How I moved into this position or?

Speaker 0 | 07:48.453

I’m just wondering, can you answer that question? How do I build a team? I know it’s a very broad question again, but let’s say I need two more guys. What do you do?

Speaker 1 | 07:57.439

I’m doing it as we speak. I’m building a whole IT department. And I sort of inherited a team that’s also very tenured, but is not interested in developing people and building it. That’s not the skill set. They’re very technical, database people. My passion is people. So what I usually do is I type my network. I draft up, you know, a job description, and I go on Slack or Twitter and reach out to my buddies all over this U.S. and say, I’m looking for a guy that can do this, this, and this, or a girl, and, you know, start from there. And I just, you know, I look for character more than anything because tech moves so quickly. I feel like everything I learned in college was obsolete by the time I was job hunting. So I feel like I learned it wrong.

Speaker 0 | 08:49.394

You probably learned it wrong. Let’s be honest.

Speaker 1 | 08:52.176

You learn at work. You learn at work. I go for like personality and temperament because, you know, the whole the IT person of old is gone. Like the you’re in the shadows, antisocial, the trope we know.

Speaker 0 | 09:09.787

Yeah, shoving pizzas under the server room door.

Speaker 1 | 09:13.297

That’s gone. And I come from education where you couldn’t lurk in the shadows. Education, you’re in classrooms, you’re in schools all the time. So that sort of honed my skill of building teams that were friendly, customer facing and could communicate.

Speaker 0 | 09:29.206

What’s temperament to you? Because people tell me I have a temperament. I really like when you look for something, what kind of questions do you ask? What kind of question? I came from Starbucks back in the day, years ago in a past life, and we learned a lot of behavioral interviewing. So I know what kind of questions to ask in an interview. I also have been tricked before. I’ve been tricked and had someone that I thought was the absolute best candidate ever for a job and had to fire the person in like three weeks.

Speaker 1 | 09:59.505

Oh, same. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 10:01.686

It’s not like you get tricked. Sometimes people are like professional interviewers. And then there’s the person that like, you’re like, ah, man, I don’t know. Okay. And you’re like, oh my gosh, like the star, the best person ever. What’s going on? So anyways, building a team, personality, temperament, what do you look for in temperament?

Speaker 1 | 10:20.536

So you see, like, they call me smiley. I’m smiling all the time. You could tell me that there’s a fire, which has actually happened in the street, in front of the building, all the

Speaker 0 | 10:29.882

fiber is like melted away what are we gonna do like it’s the world has ended and i’m like i’ll get on it that’s like yeah finally a challenge i want someone who will be in the foxhole with me and not lose their okay so smiling uh smiling is a good point smiling is like a it’s a form of charity it really is okay so you want someone in the foxhole with you okay you’re not and i don’t waste time on very complicated interviews we do a lot of role-playing scenarios okay like the the project and everything like that i just need someone to talk to how they think and problem solving i wonder if i have that ability let’s do it right now role play with me Ask me some questions. Let’s see how bad I do. I mean, how good I do. You know, you are what you put in your mind. So even if you talk negatively about yourself and you’re joking, you shouldn’t do that because your mind, your body doesn’t know the difference. This is what I heard.

Speaker 1 | 11:25.463

That’s true. Okay. Same thing with smiling. If you smile, you’ll feel better.

Speaker 0 | 11:30.386

I tell my kids that all the time, you know, a genuine smile is better than a, all right, what did I say? No, a fake smile is better than a genuine frown.

Speaker 1 | 11:39.554

What’s a question we bring up?

Speaker 0 | 11:41.175

Yeah, fire away, fire away.

Speaker 1 | 11:43.256

Okay, so this is like the prioritization exercise. Okay. CTO walks in, says network is down at one of your 30 sites. Okay. You know, it’s an emergency. Yeah. What do you do about that? The next thing that happens is you have on the phone while the CTO walks in, you have… you know, a customer from one of your other locations who you’re in the middle of a project with them, like building something out, trying to, you know, multitask there. And then you have tickets coming in to delegate to the rest of the team while you’re balancing those two. So how would you prioritize and how would you tackle that situation?

Speaker 0 | 12:31.460

Oh, it’s pretty easy. I call Phil Howard with the network’s gun. And the reason why I call Phil Howard is because Phil Howard’s my… My master agent, he manages all my network and alerts, and he bird dogs all of my ISP providers for me. So I call him and I say, my network’s down. Please take care of this right now. Escalate that all the way up to the VP level inside telecom or world, whatever that is. Because I’m not going to call 1-800-GOLD-POUND-SAND because if I call Comcast, they’re just going to tell me to kick rocks. So can you take care of that right now? I continue. I’ve already got another guy that is managing my help. desk that he completely trusts and put stuff in his hand so he’s taking care of the tickets and continue to serve the customer because they come first is that i mean is that like would that be okay to you that would be okay that’d be an okay answer okay just the approach so this and i’d probably oh and i would also i would also coddle the cto cio and give him full confidence that i’m already on top of it i know it because i’ve got alerts already that the circuits are down right and then Yeah, yeah, you know, and it’s got to be in there. But the thing is, is I’ll have an RFO to you, a reason for the outage. And on top of that, we’re working on our secondary and tertiary backups, because really, that should have been seamless, because we’re using SD-WAN to, I got to check in on our SD-WAN provider who’s supposed to be helping us. What’s wrong with me? Brain. I cannot believe my brain just stopped working. See, this is what happens. The brain just stopped. Aggregate our bandwidth. Our bandwidth should be aggregated. This should have never happened. It’s completely unacceptable. I apologize. Okay, next question.

Speaker 1 | 14:22.001

That response has a couple of assumptions there too, like the staffing. So because I’m in the nonprofit space, we get a lot of responses where we say like, it’s just you and this other person.

Speaker 0 | 14:32.886

Oh yeah. Well, you know, if we got the budget, you know, maybe this wouldn’t happen. So, but you need me, uh, and I’m not going anywhere. So, uh, you know, it’ll come back up when it comes back up. Yeah. Uh, and no one else wants this job. Okay. And I’m smiling.

Speaker 1 | 14:55.839

You have some years, you have some years. Um, That was a very realistic rendition.

Speaker 0 | 15:06.562

Okay. In the past, you have built an entire department in the past, so you’re confident that you can do it again. What was it like in the past when you built that entire department, you know, from scratch? You were at a bigger software company. Are we allowed to mention them?

Speaker 1 | 15:25.398

Yeah, you can mention them. Brain pop.

Speaker 0 | 15:27.499

Okay. And you, so you. Basically built that from scratch for like three months. Can you just tell me how you did that? How did you sit down? Well, I took my Franklin Covey course back in the day, and I know how to set goals and do this. Did you map things out? Yeah. Did you map things out on like a whiteboard? And did you have like a piece of paper? I can remember the first management job I got into, and I was so… I’m detailed about everything. I just, like, I needed to have this goal set. I remember I wrote down this paper and I had all my goals set on this goal setting on this paper. And I was going to do it this way and this way. And it actually went, like, really, really well. And I should probably continue to do that in life. But when you get older, I think people go lame. People just go lame when they get older. They get lazy. They get complacent. They do. They go lame. Maybe, maybe they just, they, maybe they just lean back on life and they realize that, you know, everybody out there is just trying to do the same thing. They’re just trying to make enough money to be lazy or they’re some really driven, crazy person that works until four o’clock in the morning all the time. They live, breathe and die like their work. But I, I mean, I work to live. I don’t live to work. That’s my philosophy. People have two different philosophies on it. And that’s great if you have that job and it’s like, this is just my lifeblood. That’s fine. That’s not me. But anyways, the three months you came in, you turned this company around three months. Did you do goal setting? How did that, what did that look like when you came in?

Speaker 1 | 17:08.162

Yeah. So there was a VP there that had already been there for some time, I think 14 years. So they gave me the lowdown on how things run. What? the goal was for the summer and we were launching the biggest software uh integration ever i’m a glutton for punishment so i get bored easily we have some attention deficit issue i definitely jump into jobs like this so like they were like build a team in three months i was like great so excited i just hit in three months is the perfect is the perfect time for anyone that’s like add or

Speaker 0 | 17:47.471

has that like uh tim ferris tim ferris for example He gets bored after like three to six months. That’s it for him. Like this would be perfect. Okay. So keep going.

Speaker 1 | 17:57.779

Yeah. Yeah. Just pound the pavement, right? Call people, hit LinkedIn, go to job fairs and, you know, get this volume. It’s all volume at that point. Yep. I’m getting content, client, I’m getting candidates. I’m sorting through resumes. I’m getting to meet tons of people in person. So I get that like first impression at these. job fairs and then in terms of scoping out the pro the requirements i knew because this every job has been like a stepping stone like i went from education to now providing software for schools so i knew the kind of person i wanted to hire for the role before even starting the job i was like this person needs to be like x y and z like the team i built before so they need to be an educator they need to be able to communicate they need to be able to speak to teachers and CTOs of large school districts. I narrowed down my scope based on those criteria. Then just rapid interviews. I’m talking about five minute interviews where I said, here’s a salary up front. Very, very unorthodox. Up front, I’m like, here’s the salary, here’s the cap. Let me know right now if you’re still interested or not.

Speaker 0 | 19:17.390

Don’t ever talk about money first. Hey, look, this is how much money you’re going to get paid. If you get this job, is that good or no? What? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 19:24.392

I need to get it out of the way and it went down my options.

Speaker 0 | 19:30.673

I love the reverse engineering backwards approach to everything.

Speaker 1 | 19:35.995

Get it done quickly. That’s it.

Speaker 0 | 19:38.215

First break. All the rules was actually a very good book for me. I don’t know if you read that.

Speaker 1 | 19:41.956

It’s very good.

Speaker 0 | 19:43.917

It’s very good. Okay. I’m up to three ums, I think. I’m trying to pay attention to this.

Speaker 1 | 19:51.045

That’s fine.

Speaker 0 | 19:52.988

So you ask them salary right out of the way, then what? Five minute interview. What’s next?

Speaker 1 | 19:58.015

So after they interviewed with me, I did a interview day. where I gave them a 90 minute interview block. I also hate like, cause I’ve been interviewing for jobs myself, right? I hate like three visits to a location. This is pre pandemic, right? So go to the location, taking time off to go and do three interviews, maybe spend a day or a half a day. Yeah. Well, waste of time. Yeah. I’m not going to tell you what you need to know. You need to hire the person, see them at work. And then if they need, let them loose, you know, six weeks of they’re not doing well. Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. That’s my philosophy because I’ve done it before. I’ve hired professional interviewers who then six weeks later weren’t with me and they’ve gone on to do like great things because I’ve said, you know, I’ll help you go do this photography thing that you love. Because every,

Speaker 0 | 20:50.059

every, the job, the last real jobs that I had, every, each interview was actually the last job that I had. I walked in and the lady said. I don’t know if I should be interviewing you or you should be interviewing me. Cause I had done so much, like there was so much upfront, so many people calling her ahead of time. You need to hire this guy. You need to hire this guy. So I walked in and she’s like, I don’t know. And I was like, Oh, that’s great. How much do you want to get paid? I was like, okay. That was the only question that kind of shot me. I was like, how high do I go? Cause too high is kind of my laugh at me, but I should go high.

Speaker 1 | 21:28.643

Funny. It’s funny you say that. I feel like we’re a lot of people in our community, right? The IT world, you’re not applying for jobs. It’s all word of mouth. So I have yet to apply for a job. It’s all been word of mouth, like, you know, speaking to someone, making connection, and then having that same conversation that you had and making sure I asked for the right amount. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:50.619

You want, like, trust me, you need to hire this. You need to hire this guy. I need you to hire this guy or I’m not going to do business with you anymore. That’s a lot of what it was like. And it works that way sometimes it’s, you need to hire this guy because I need you guys to finally have a good employee over there. So could you hire this guy so that I can continue to do business with you? That’s a powerful, that’s a powerful way to get pushed into a job.

Speaker 1 | 22:15.477

I mean, I’m sure you say this with your kids. I would love to hear like the kind of guidance you give them on like building communities and friendship. Cause like, those are the skills of life. Like all the soft skills, like. They’re taking over now because people realize.

Speaker 0 | 22:31.605

It’s funny that you say that. Yeah, okay, so the things that pop into my head immediately when you said that with my kids is responsibility. You have the ability to choose your own response. And the second one is you are who you surround yourself with, so choose your friends wisely. I mean, I hate some kids. I’ll tell the parents too. What’s wrong?

Speaker 1 | 22:56.154

I have a five-year-old daughter. I’ll see.

Speaker 0 | 22:59.676

five-year-olds trying to build a bubble around five-year-old right now yeah five’s great five’s a great age there’s nothing that they’re just wild she’s probably just wild right now that’s all it is it’s like a wild wild age yeah when they get to be yeah eight ten see twelve if you don’t if you don’t get them right before my oldest daughter’s like, I’m like the screw up kid. She’s like, I’m the kid that you like tested everything on. I’m the kid that was like the, I’m like the experimental kid. It’s, it’s kind of sad, but, uh, I tell her that like, yeah, you are, you’re the, you’re the one, but you’re the first one. Like you’re the first 17 year old. So I don’t know. Yeah. I’ve got to learn everything through you. It’s bad.

Speaker 1 | 23:46.121

Wait, so what happens? What, what’s the timeline until they’re big? Well,

Speaker 0 | 23:49.642

if you, once they hit puberty, if they don’t have, If you haven’t given them a solid base of how to judge character and value system and how to recognize people in the world and recognize a situation for what it is, like just a bunch of Justin Bieber followers. You know what I mean? Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don’t know how to describe. I don’t know how else to say that. Maybe it rings true. Maybe it’s like. Maybe it’s like, you know, it’s, I don’t know. They need to have a certain level of character at that point so they can judge on their own. Because once they hit puberty, their eyes are going to open and they’re going to start to get hit with all those hormones and all those emotions and all those things that make us a grown adult. And regardless of whether society calls them a teenager, I tell my kids all the time, just a teenager. I was like, I don’t care. You’re a grown adult now. Okay. Like you are a grown adult. You’ve got hormones going through your body. You’ve got all these different things pushing you, you know, desires. You’ve got all these things really just kind of raging through your body at this point. If you don’t have a real good idea at that point. to an ability to judge character and judge yourself then it’s going to be that much harder i think because you’ve got the real world pushing on you at that point you’ve got real you know grown i don’t know if that makes sense does that make sense to you it makes sense that my fear is you have sons because me and my brother were trying to like kill ourselves until we’re like well into our 20s i’ve got four boys and i’ve got four boys and four girls so yeah It’s interesting. The four girls are, that’s really, it’s really hard. The four boys, at least it’s like my oldest son is he has, he has his head on his shoulders and I think the other boys look up to him. So that’s good. But yeah, they’re wild. Like they’ll, you know, you’ll have holes in the wall or doing something crazy. I caught my son hanging off the, the, the five-year-old. Okay. The five-year-old. This is why I say the five-year-olds are wild. Cause I caught the five-year-old hanging off the edge of the second story. Like. porch. I saw some fingers. My older son Noah was like, what are you doing? I could hear some chatter going on outside. I’m like, what? I come around and I see my eight-year-old and then I see some fingers just hanging onto the edge of the balcony. If he fell, it would be bad. He could break his leg. If he fell, it would be bad, but it’s still a decent fall. I’m like, what are you doing? I grab his wrist and I’m like, like pulling back up over the edge. I’m like, are you crazy? And because it was just one of those points where you like get off and you’re hanging on the edge and you can just tell that it’s just time before like the fingers like get weak, you know, and just like fall off. What are you doing? Like, what if you couldn’t get back up? I didn’t really know what they were doing. I just know that I went into like, you know, like there’s a fire back to, it’s back to the fire scenario again. There’s fire, it’s melting the cables. Like you just, I don’t know. I just grabbed them and. there’s probably like a moment of parental anger and impatience and no learning moment happened whatsoever.

Speaker 1 | 27:10.971

I appreciate that.

Speaker 0 | 27:15.434

Yeah. It’s very real parent. You know, we screw up. It’s not, it is not at all like work. It’s not at all organized sometimes at work where, you know, you’ve got people are watching, you know, HR. No, let’s be honest, man. It’s parenting sometimes when it gets good. When you do good parenting is when you do bring work to home. I’ve got corrective action forms. I had to put in corrective action forms at home. That was very helpful. Corrective action forms with follow-up. And by this date, you will come back with these five things memorized. And you will have accomplished this. And if you do not, we’re going to move on to step two of the corrective action, which is going to be community service. And we’re going to go downtown. We’re going to find somewhere. I mean, that worked wonders.

Speaker 1 | 28:01.061

I’m taking notes.

Speaker 0 | 28:02.146

Yeah, that and then I also implemented, I implemented like the five ways of being in our family. I’m looking at the little cards right now. So I’ve got like a little knowledgeable award. So when they demonstrate knowledge or do good in school or something like this, let’s see, I’ve got that. We’ve got the knowledgeable award. We’ve got the good manners award because manners are important. And that can just, I mean, there’s anything you could put up for manners. Mentorship. So that’s when I want the older kids teaching. That’s when I get lazy. The mentorship really is the dad wants to be the easy one. That’s when you taught your younger brother how to wash the dishes. Congratulations. Let’s see. And we’ve got involved in the community. And then we’ve got, you know, anything that you’ve been, that you’ve got involved. How do you get involved in the community? How did you, you know, do something other than just, you know, I don’t know, maybe get in trouble. And then we’ve got the cleanliness award because mom seems to be running around cleaning all the time. And I’m always yelling at the kids like, why is your mother doing that? Why is your mother doing that? You should be doing that.

Speaker 1 | 29:04.977

You’re understanding incentives.

Speaker 0 | 29:07.458

It’s totally carrot and sticking. It’s carrot and sticking. It doesn’t, you know, I know there’s some other psychology. There’s some other child psychology where that’s the wrong method because. They should be doing this stuff anyways. They shouldn’t be getting a reward for living in the house under the roof that you pay for. I know there’s other deep psychology to it, but that takes a lot of time and reading. And we’re human beings, to be honest, you know. So back to IT somehow.

Speaker 1 | 29:38.295

This is IT. I was going to say that my household runs like a well-oiled machine. We run everything in the cloud. My wife and I are in the same house. But. have no time. We barely overlap. She’s a best-selling author. We’re over here balancing in-house schooling. We use the Google calendar.

Speaker 0 | 29:59.179

Nice. I would like to roll out a bunch of Chromebooks to all my kids and manage that and manage the security. My wife is always asking me, can we see what they’re doing on the computer? She’s like, can we look at their computer screen while they’re on their computer? How do I do that? Like, what’s the best application for that?

Speaker 1 | 30:22.098

Yes. So I would get… something called securely and of course there’s no e there’s no e in the name it’s very techy so secure yeah the curly yeah yeah you install that uh extension on all the chromebooks and you get to do like all monitoring you get to filter content filtering and everything you even get alerts about self-harm about inappropriate content you can block it you can track everything the gps location all of that when i deploy chromebooks for 20 000 students that’s what i use

Speaker 0 | 30:56.370

yo, this is great. This is like a sec. This is something that we could just put together. Nothing’s ever done for the consumers at home. Really, it is. It’s all done for B2B. This would be very valuable. We should just do another. We should do like a webinar on how to do this. And then we should sell that webinar for $1,000 to jump on and guarantee that your children will not do this, this, this. And we’ll use fear and… And… Whatever they call it, sell that. No, but seriously. So the software team, you pounded the pavement, you knew what you were looking for, and you basically were drinking from the fire hose for three months.

Speaker 1 | 31:41.714

The way I like it.

Speaker 0 | 31:43.135

Yeah? Yep. Yeah. For other IT directors out there listening, what kind of advice do you have for them building a team? For the new guy jumping into a new team? he’s in a role that he’s never been in before. Maybe you’ve got a systems admin guy that’s been in that role for a long time. He could do the IT director role, IT manager role, take the next step up, but he doesn’t know how to get there. He’s nervous. Or the guy that just jumped into that role, what advice do you have for them?

Speaker 1 | 32:19.676

I was thinking about this too. Consider yourself for the… you know first couple months at any job uh to be a solutions architect like you’re taking in a bunch of information you’re gathering requirements scope of work and all of these things and trying to see how the pieces connect and see where you fit in in that piece like i build a mental model of my like landscape when i come in like the first couple months is just talking to people and getting history and their gripes and what’s going on like therapy sessions And then I start building solutions. And then going back to them, I’m saying like, would you like it like this? Like you’re catering to the design. If you’re someone in the team, I did the same exact process, but managing up. So I would ask the manager, you know, I see these gaps. I can fill these gaps with these solutions. And within the context of the work we’re doing in the company, you know, this is how that fits. Like people want it easy, right? Your manager doesn’t want to have to think through how you should, you know. your career path, even though they should, they want you to like hand it to them, have them make some edits and then say, yeah, go.

Speaker 0 | 33:32.763

So true. That’s genius. It’s so true. No one wants to do anything. Your manager doesn’t want to sit down and actually do your review and write all this stuff down. So if you do it for him, he’s really going to love you. That’s genius. So true. So true.

Speaker 1 | 33:59.424

I talked myself into a role like that. It was like some, this is like the digital learning. So when IT and schools turned into digital learning, which was, it was a whole separate area focused on the classroom and the students and the students engaging with the technology and their performance. Like that was not IT. It’s ended up on IT’s lap. And this was like a new role. And I was like, I see this gap. I’m the director of IT, but I’d like to deal with this human factor. Like that.

Speaker 0 | 34:28.161

What’s the gap? What was the gap?

Speaker 1 | 34:30.542

That there was no one doing the measurement of computer skills for kids. No one was assessing whether or not teachers knew how to use the tools that we were launching. Like that kind of deployment, you roll something out, you have 2,000 teachers, and they’re like, I can’t get into Google Classroom. I don’t know how to use this. You have to get pedagogical guidance. You have to support them. you need to have teachers who are going to champion that product and go and teach other teachers Because like the lessons are being delivered, same content, different tool. So like that’s a gap. Like there was no one whose job was to analyze that information, deliver the training, build it into the IT ecosystem.

Speaker 0 | 35:10.005

Isn’t that wild? Isn’t that wild that something can just happen like that? It’s wild. It’s crazy. It absolutely happens. A couple of years ago, I surveyed, I guess is what you would call it, a ton of… IT directors just to ask him, hey, what’s your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern? And the one, only four themes came up. I spreadsheet all their answers. I took all their answers, I spreadsheet them all, and then I took the common themes and I put them into columns on the spreadsheet. Like this guy said, showing end users how to use the, open up their VPN, you know, something like that. Another guy said, end users and showing them how to use their Avaya soft phone. And then one was end users. And so they all got bulked into the training end users. That was one of the major themes. The other one was legacy technology, having to deal with a siloed legacy technology. The other theme was decision direction. And what was the third one? Oh, the third one was… crappy vendor support. Like just, they, they just deal with a vendor. Like they would ask a vendor and like, they can’t get through to the vendor or the vendors are like technical noobs or technology ne’er-do-wells that don’t know anything. Like they call into some department that just has to escalate it to here to escalate it to here. So I think you. knocked out two birds with one stone, at least with the architectural mindset, because we go in and start getting people’s gripes and doing all that. That’s going to help you with the decision direction piece. And it’s going to help you knock out the, well, I’m the end user. At least you’re going to know like what to do with the end user, at least around the training piece. When it comes to training end users, is there any easy way to do that or to deploy that or to come up with some sort of plan of how to teach people?

Speaker 1 | 37:16.434

Absolutely. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 37:18.215

great. I thought you were going to say no.

Speaker 1 | 37:22.218

I am a big proponent of just-in-time training. I know Apple, Tim Cook got the accolades for that. But just like, why are you doing data dumps? This is what schools have been doing for years, where they just say like, okay, it’s summertime. Let’s dump the entire year’s worth of knowledge on these teachers and hope they remember it by the time some winter hits. That’s not how learning happens.

Speaker 0 | 37:47.280

Wait, explain that. I don’t even get that. I don’t even get what you just said.

Speaker 1 | 37:51.361

So in the summer, you would have something called a large conference where they do teacher training. So teachers, when they go back to school, spend about two weeks cramming a bunch of knowledge on all the things they need to learn for the school year.

Speaker 0 | 38:08.205

Oh, yeah. That’s like the 2021 sales conference for three days. Okay. We’re going to make 2021 or like blah, blah, blah. And here’s the theme for the year. And three months into it, you’re like, what was that theme again? I don’t know the theme for the year. Okay, go ahead. So you got the same thing with teachers. That definitely is not going to work. I can tell already, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 38:31.751

Sales teams do it too. The same thing. Yeah. Summer sales meeting.

Speaker 0 | 38:34.673

Everything. Every company has some sort of expo. They’ve got it. Whatever it is. Kick off, kick off 2021, blah, blah, blah. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 38:42.900

So both with teachers and sales teams, what I do is I build some kind of dashboard. It’s a map. kind of in-house repository for information. It could be Azure. It could be SharePoint. It could be Google Doc, whatever you want, just somewhere that they know when they have a question, they go there. And then as things come up, you are sharing screen recordings and maybe one pagers on all these topics and you’re doing it in real time.

Speaker 0 | 39:09.261

So if you-Any kind of like Slack group, what about like a Slack group?

Speaker 1 | 39:12.384

Slack groups, depending on the company culture. So right now I don’t use Slack, but my company like- software company. We were heavy on Slack.

Speaker 0 | 39:19.609

What do you guys have now?

Speaker 1 | 39:21.610

Right now, we’re mostly Gchat. They just adopted Google, so Gchat, and we’re easing our way in.

Speaker 0 | 39:31.155

That could take me off topic. I’m going to stay on topic here. Anyway, so dashboard. Go ahead. Dashboard.

Speaker 1 | 39:39.280

You know that some topic is going to come up like maybe folks need to learn how to sell Google. Product A, we have a product package released coming out in December and this October.

Speaker 0 | 39:51.564

Specifically for teachers. How is this working for teachers?

Speaker 1 | 39:53.946

Oh, for teachers?

Speaker 0 | 39:55.067

Yeah. I want to know how we solved the August dump.

Speaker 1 | 39:59.414

Okay, so for teachers, the August dump do, they have pedagogical training. So they learn how to teach. And then they have systems training, which usually takes five minutes, right? So like tech never gets.

Speaker 0 | 40:13.483

We’ve got this really cool thing. Everyone’s getting Chromebooks. All right, next subject.

Speaker 1 | 40:18.007

Everyone’s getting Chromebooks. Okay, Chromebooks are out. You know, here’s the new Wi-Fi network set up. Here are your smart boards. Have at it. No training.

Speaker 0 | 40:26.873

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 | 40:28.054

So the follow-up to that is an email to everyone that says like, go to this dashboard. The dashboard is broken up into sections and there’s a smart board section. There’s a Chromebook section. There’s a laptop, a Wi-Fi section. And then there’s videos or resources like mini lessons because no one wants, like grownups don’t have, they have short attention spans as well. So every video is like two minutes. So you have to tell them up front, two minute video and how to do this one specific thing in Google Classroom. It’s not like a Google classroom tutorial. It’s how do I add kids? That needs to be a one minute video. How do I remove kids? That needs to be a one minute video. You need to break it up into bite size.

Speaker 0 | 41:07.194

They have to do all that. They have to do all that. It’s crazy.

Speaker 1 | 41:12.557

Because people are going to click it. You’ll see how many hits and views you get on the content. When you post the videos, like it’s like a season.

Speaker 0 | 41:19.460

So like the one went viral.

Speaker 1 | 41:22.341

Yeah. No one knows. Saying they’re like, oh crap, I have to figure out how to grade kids. Oh, here’s a little video about grading. Just in time. It just happens to be there. And you’re building that library of content all the time. It needs to be ongoing. Now I’m doing that right now, trying to build that up for HR, for finance, operations. Every system that we roll out needs that.

Speaker 0 | 41:46.593

Do you think most IT professionals think of that as part of their job description?

Speaker 1 | 41:51.957

No. I don’t think I’m most IT professionals. I’m a people person. I’m more like a therapist that became, who fell into IT.

Speaker 0 | 42:02.554

So you’re building a dashboard with, how are you making the videos?

Speaker 1 | 42:07.218

Screen recordings, quick and dirty.

Speaker 0 | 42:10.281

How long does it take you to build up this whole dashboard for all these different departments?

Speaker 1 | 42:14.584

I’ve turned it into Google Drive. So no time. I do team drives. Hey, everyone. Your contents and team drives, go there. Type in Google Classroom, find it. Type in the name of the system. There’s a folder for that. Watch the videos. Make sure the video titles are accurate so that people know it. Because even the content coming from the vendors, right, like a vendor will have a 60-minute video that’s broken up into timestamps.

Speaker 0 | 42:44.722

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 42:45.463

No one’s going to watch that. I don’t want to watch that.

Speaker 0 | 42:47.264

No, they’re going to have a bunch of marketing hype and other kinds of stuff too.

Speaker 2 | 42:51.306

Like,

Speaker 0 | 42:53.047

congratulations on having this new thing in your school. Did you know that we were part of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and blah, blah, blah? No, don’t care. Yeah, you know, and yeah, I mean, I want to hear some gripes. I have a part of the show that’s called a stupid thing. And just, yeah, what’s like the stupid? What’s a stupid, we need a stupid thing in IT. Like what’s one of the, I’m just trying to think of a, just what’s a stupid thing that you’ve run into lately? It doesn’t matter. It could be anything. It could be from a vendor. It could be a, I don’t know why we did this. It’s just a stupid thing.

Speaker 1 | 43:36.534

I came up, that’s every day. I came up with a stupid thing yesterday. So we get systems and forms for approvals so that when you need something done, you fill out a form and you fill out the information and you, it goes to the next person. Like there’s a whole automated script that runs the approval process and it moves up the chain of command. There’s one section that says enter your email address and people are putting in their personal email addresses, not their work email. It’s not something I thought of, but this is why you have to like build things quickly, break them quickly and iterate. So I saw people were putting like Yahoo and Hotmail accounts in there.

Speaker 0 | 44:17.113

AOL.

Speaker 1 | 44:19.543

It breaks the whole system. The script can’t account for that. The script is looking for…

Speaker 0 | 44:24.027

Work email. So you had to add in some text. Guys, we got to do this again.

Speaker 1 | 44:36.877

And you know the other things that happen, right? If IT is too knowledgeable about something or is driving a project forward, even if it has to do with some other department, you became… you become the owner so i always try to designate a champion on each team and i’m like i am very explicit about saying i’m not owning this i’m going to support you i believe in you

Speaker 0 | 45:02.216

All of a sudden they’re not smiling Like I see you smiling That’s why you’re smiling all the time You’re just king delegator See that’s another thing about parenting That’s the number one parenting skill I’m still trying to teach my wife that Like stop When she leaves and she’s gone for like three days It’s like let’s break all the rules Get out We’re going to get ice cream. We’re doing this. You’re not brushing your teeth. Nothing. All right. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Actually, very, not that I didn’t think it wouldn’t be, but this has been very beneficial. And I believe it will be very beneficial to other people out there listening. Is there anything else? Is there one final message you have to deliver to the…

Speaker 1 | 45:55.874

the people out there what is it uh i’m gonna stay with my the moniker break things make them better show people how you did it rinse and repeat nice i like that my

Speaker 0 | 46:11.460

my saying is break things because you need to so they’ll still think that they need an i.t guy to keep the lights on oh yeah break things because if everything’s working they don’t need you anymore Oh man, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 | 46:26.076

Thank you.