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410- Not Everything Needs a Ticket w/Tim Armstrong · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome back to you've been heard. Today we've got Tim Armstrong who's joining us from Pro Con. Tim, go ahead and give us a little bit of an introduction and tell us about yourself.
• 0:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, good morning. Tim Armstrong. I'm the manager of IT here at procon and lovely hooks at New Hampshire. We're a design build company. So we take building design and the whole implementation process through the life of the implementation process to building, it's pretty magnificent buildings here in New England. So I've been here for just under 90 days now and it's been quite a ride so far. I come from a 15 to 20 years of IT background from tinkering with the family VCR as a wee lad to now managing an IT department.
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Cool. And you had some experience. Where was the prior location at? Because you were there for like seven years. Tell me a little about that experience.
• 1:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I was at Digital Federal Credit Union. I was the senior technical project manager there. A lot of that role was bringing a lot of the new technology. We were really technology focused. So bringing a lot of these technology projects to life and working with teams from across New England, across the country and across the world, especially since COVID when we moved to more of a remote workforce. So a lot of awesome technical projects, a lot of infrastructure based projects and a lot of custom development.
• 1:32
  Speaker A: Yeah, the LinkedIn stocking I did, I believe I saw that you went from that IT project management into IT project or not project, but IT manager. So how what'd you do that helped you transform from running the projects to running the department and having somebody I assume helps you continue to run the projects?
• 1:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, oh for sure. It was quite the transition. I was told early on in my IT career that once I made the step into IT project management, it would be really tough to go back into an individual contributor role. It would be tough to kind of stay in that technical role. And I gave it a lot of long thought. And my mentor at the time was my supervisor and the infrastructure manager back when I was working at a the college I attended, my alma mater. He gave me some really good advice and some really great mentorship that ultimately got me to the point of making the decision to move into IT leadership. So moving from the project focused world to the project and operations focused world was definitely a challenge. But fortunately the experience of working with teams from across a wide geographical area I think was definitely the biggest factor to help get from there to here. But I mean a good example thinking back to my time at Digital Federal Credit Union, the Fact that I was a project manager and the fact that projects lasted anywhere from six months to 18 months, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go through the team development stages. Storming, norming, the whole nine. Right. It's the whole five, if that were the case frequently. So when it came time to move into this manager of IT role, being able to do that with a team all over again, it was basically rinse and repeat. So repeating some of those lessons learned, repeating some of those positively contributing factors really helped get us from where we started three months ago to how operationally sappy we are now.
• 3:25
  Speaker A: Hearing you talk about some of that makes me think of the Phoenix project. Oh, you ever heard of?
• 3:30
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 3:31
  Speaker A: And the project management and the aspects of how wide of a conversation or a topic that is and how many different variables and not even variables, how many different ways project management can be approached. Just like programming, we've got the old school top down, and then we've got the new approach of the object oriented and now even vibe coding and throwing things in like that. So talk to me a little about the experiences that you had with your project management and growing through that. And what methodology are you using? Are you using more of the DevOps? Are you using more of the waterfall? What became your go to whatever worked
• 4:17
  Speaker B: was the correct answer. It's, it's funny because you work with teams from all over, right? So you work with folks who are exclusively agile. They've only ever known agile. That's the only practice that works for them. And then you've worked with the grizzled infrastructure, folks who have been there since the days of go back as far as you want, go back as far as mainframes, Right. So you're working with those grizzled folks who only know the chronological steps. So I've found that my project management passed. The wagile approach is the best approach. So fitting in the pieces where they work. Some things must be sequentially found a lot in infrastructure projects. You can't move a server until you have the server networking in place. You can't move a server until you have the physical server infrastructure where it needs to be, or if you're going a cloud option, the cloud infrastructure. But also you have the development side of the house and from the development side of the house how they work and how they commit to story points and what their workflow is. So it's all about finding the balance, but being flexible.
• 5:19
  Speaker A: Yeah, okay, cool. How have you dealt with those like the Kanban? Because that's One thing that I've struggled a little bit of myself with of trying to put together that Kanban board of okay, here are all of the sticky notes of all of the things and trying to get through some of
• 5:38
  Speaker B: that right when you say sticky notes, whether you're being figurative or literal, that is honestly a great approach because having something tangible to contribute to a work item is half the battle. Being able to understand and follow the logical transition of a work item through a Kanban board is whole crux of it. We recently deployed one here at Pro Con with my IT team and the whole goal of that is just to limit what work is in flight. So being able to set caps and be honest amongst each other that I can only commit to five tasks per sprint cycle. We're operating in two week sprints following the Kanban process. But it's kind of one of those things that you have to graduate into and ramp up to. So when I deployed IT here the team really under committed the first go around and that's good and that's purposeful and that's perfect. That's exactly what we want because the second sprint cycle we did we over committed. So now we're a few sprint cycles in and we're starting to understand kind of what our tempo is and what our baseline is, what our velocity is. Giving back to those agile terms, now that we have our velocity we can start to really roadmap what the rest of 2026 looks like. Well we have these strategic priorities coming down from leadership and following what our industry trends are being able to look back on. Hey, we can commit to 20 bananas of work per two week sprint. We know that these projects are going to take 100 bananas. It's about five sprints worth of work. We can have it done by X amount of time and there's some play and there's some wiggle room and there's some gotchas. But that's why we work in such a agile fashion. We have our daily standups, we have our retrospectives at the end of sprints to recognize the good, the bad and what could be better. So Kanban is definitely, I'd say it's a value add for IT leaders. Your CFO doesn't want 47 Internet bills. We help IT teams consolidate multi location Internet into parent child billing with coterminous contracts while still buying wholesale from the best providers. It gets control, finance gets clarity. No disruption, no sales pitch. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save two.
• 7:53
  Speaker A: Okay, now back towards that. Bringing a value it value versus being a cost center. And that communication and then communicating to management and executives the constraints of those sprints and of the team. Because I'm a year at a new organization, you're three months at a new organization. And I've still been struggling with the executive team making wild variations in the goals and the approaches and trying to calm that down so that the team can stay focused on the bananas. So thought about that communication about how to manage up on those strategies.
• 8:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, we actually probably shouldn't have used bananas. I'm not a big banana guy. I would much rather oranges or milky ways.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: A little bit to four month old. You're gonna have to mash up some bananas.
• 8:52
  Speaker B: So at this point we're just looking for any source of nourishment. I'll start chewing on bark if it gets to that point. But is something that will align with organizational strategy.
• 9:03
  Speaker A: Being three months in. How do you build that trust? I mean, there's a certain amount of it that they're just giving you because they hired you.
• 9:11
  Speaker B: Right.
• 9:12
  Speaker A: But. But there's always. Still. It kind of depends on your predecessor and those that tread before you.
• 9:18
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 9:19
  Speaker A: You're under their shadow for a while until you show them a new son, so to speak. Yeah.
• 9:26
  Speaker B: Exactly what you said is almost exactly my answer. I think part of it is you have to give a little bit of trust to get a little bit of trust. And I made it pretty clear when I had started. This is what I'm about. I will only ever be direct with you. I just expect the same in return. And that certainly was reciprocated. But also leading by example. Right. I would never ask my team to do anything that I wouldn't do. And I think that that just that effect is replicated throughout the organization and heard throughout the organization. Every day is another adventure.
• 9:58
  Speaker A: Okay, great. That's good to see. What's the rest of the building? What was it like for the rest of the building when your generator kicked in? Was it 100% coverage for everybody in your organization? Or was it the data centers protected and you happen to be within the data center realm? So you had power, you had lights. Because I've seen organizations do both.
• 10:21
  Speaker B: Yeah. Fortunately, I think it was just a flicker throughout the building. I was holed up in this little pseudo office at the time. But when we received the announcement, I worked with our infrastructure team to make sure the UPSs are in good shape. We have the necessary redundancies. In theory, nothing should happen. We do have a failover Internet. Shouldn't something happen with a fiber line when they're up on the utility pole? Any number of things. We wanted to make sure we had the redundancies built in. We certainly did and it seems to be the case so far.
• 10:51
  Speaker A: So, yeah, good job. Any other things for the 90 day horizon? What's it been like in that 90 days?
• 11:00
  Speaker B: A real learning experience. I mean, my background is not construction, my background is not architecture. So learning about architecture, construction, estimation, learning how a company like this works, how we take people, we take owners, we take people who want to build buildings from the process of how much will it cost? To here's what it could look like to here's what it could look like based on that cost to building it. I was at a a job site two weeks ago and I got to see them just doing demolition and what that entails. I think excavator, break the whole building down, smush it out, put it in a dumpster and you're done. Of course it's not that easy and it was kind of a naive opinion, but seeing some of the process and then seeing a week ago what a building looks like that's being framed and what the process looks like there, and some of the technology that we leverage to map how the building is going to be laid out, some of these modeling programs we use, it's incredible. And then seeing the final product was out of sight yesterday, seeing what the near final product looks like after a year and a half of hard work, that's been the most interesting part of the past approximately 90 days, but definitely something that's going to be built on.
• 12:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. So obviously some of the applications that your engineers and your designers and everybody are using are critical applications. I'm betting that you guys have a huge storage medium for all of those CAD drawings and all of the things like that. What's some of the unexpected technology that you've run into and seen? Because like the whole construction side of it being in logistics and transportation, I get to see some of that Iot. But I'm sure that you have a world of Iot that's completely different than what I've got.
• 12:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, I can call out two different examples, and the first being our BIM folks or building modeling folks and seeing how they walk around a building with a multi lens camera and take pinpoint imagery of the entire building and then render that and you could walk through the building as if you were them and see the different phases of the project as you go it's incredible. It's honestly incredible. And then the second thing being the use of robots to map the layout of buildings on the concrete. So I was at a conference a few weeks ago in the. There's a whole panel on AI and it was really interesting to understand technology in construction. And one of the vendors there had a little robot that drives around a pad of concrete and it's. I think it's HP and another company and they spray the layout on the ground and apparently that saves. It certainly must save a ton of time for folks that would have to then go about and follow a plan and spray out the layout versus having a robot do it that could do it with near perfection.
• 13:54
  Speaker A: That is something that I hadn't heard of, but makes complete sense.
• 13:58
  Speaker B: I mean, it's like a spray paint room.
• 13:59
  Speaker A: Bendable. Yeah. To leaving the mess instead of picking it up.
• 14:03
  Speaker B: But yeah, exactly.
• 14:04
  Speaker A: But yeah. Interesting. So what's one of the things that just really energizes you about it? What's one of the things. Actually, what's one of the things that you miss from transitioning from that? I see that individual contributor into the leadership role.
• 14:23
  Speaker B: Ooh, that's a go. I like that question though, because I. There are certainly aspects of my previous role that I miss and right off the bat I, I miss the team that I work with every day. We had a good cohort of experienced project managers there that if I didn't know something or they didn't know something, we can come together and put our heads together. My supervisor at the time, dude, our leader of our department, she meant, truly mentored me through my leadership career. She's the reason I, I lead the department the way I lead the department. She's the reason why I do a lot of the things the way I do. She was, quite frankly, an inspiration to how people should behave. But I do miss that camaraderie. I am the only IT manager here. Granted, I have great camaraderie with my department, a lot of bright people here, a lot of opportunity to put our heads together, but there's not a lot of opportunity for me to liaison with other IT managers because I'm the only one here, right? So I do miss that a lot from my previous career. I think that's something that a lot of organizations can find valuable. Building that professional network along with being able to see a single pro. Granted, you're managing multiple projects at the same time, being in a senior level role, but being able to see a project from inception to completion and build a team Every time you go, new team, new dynamics, new momentum, new skills, new opinions, 18 months onto the next one and rinse and repeat. So that was a lot of fun. But here, being able to stick to a single operational unit over the course of my tenure here is so far has been cool and will definitely be cool to continue with.
• 16:02
  Speaker A: And that brings up some interesting thoughts for me. You're talking about being the only IT manager and being isolated and just working with your team. How much are you working with the other managers and all of the other groups? And quick level set, how big's your team? How many knowledge workers do you have? And then knowing construction, you've got a huge population of non knowledge workers also. So what are those, three statistics or four statistics?
• 16:32
  Speaker B: Sure. So we're a department of four, believe it or not. We have more of an infrastructure role, we have more of a desktop role and more of a help desk role. As the organization grows, I certainly foresee this department growing as well. That being said, a lot of the other positions throughout the company are technologically savvy. I mean, we have a technology committee here and we meet monthly and talk about all things tech. We have a standing agenda, but of course it's an opportunity for those technical power users to share their opinions, have their voices heard and collaborate. One of our core values here at procon is collaboration, and that's something we need to be really good at, especially because we're designed to build a company. Right? So everything happens in house. All the collaboration must happen in sync, in unison, together. And so focusing that on the technology side, having that committee gives that opportunity for those voices to be heard and collaborate. So working with department heads is definitely something that's in our C suite, of course, is something that's a regular occurrence. But I do need to give a little shout out to our solutions architect side of the house. We have a lovely Scottish woman that works here that is the go to all things integration. And I firmly believe that any IT organization needs that person to liaison between the business and IT to understand the integration piece. We have an ongoing effort right now for a data governance process and she's been spearheading the way and is incredibly intelligent and knows how to position certain technical aspects with business. Certainly better than I could, certainly better than most could. Having that resource is critical.
• 18:12
  Speaker A: Yeah, it sounds like a version of the business systems analyst that's talking to the end users, the consumers, and then helping craft or talk to the IT department and then building the solutions. So four on your team, including you?
• 18:30
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 18:31
  Speaker A: Okay. And then the other ones, how many knowledge workers?
• 18:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, we have 175 staff organization here. But each of those roles is very specialized to what we're doing. And each of those roles has a very specialized technical component that they're responsible for. I mean, your project management team and the project management software there, they leverage our architecture team and the design software like Revit and some of the Autodesk products. I mean, our interior design folks in the Photoshop suite. Right. So having those embedded technical resources has proven to be a useful factor here. And then playing back to the technology committee, useful to have them all together.
• 19:12
  Speaker A: Are you guys subcontracting out the rest of that work, the deconstruction, those kinds of pieces, or is that staff that you have? Because I assume that there's a large chunk of that staff that is not using the computer every day. They cut the tool belts and they are running the cables. They're doing the answers of it.
• 19:33
  Speaker B: But yeah, I mean, it's folks like carpenters, for example, like, they're not on a keyboard every day, but we do issue out devices for them to use. They can access their email and payroll. And it's. It's proven interesting to manage a remote workforce, even if that workforce is still within an hour and a half of headquarters.
• 19:51
  Speaker A: Mm, yeah, yeah. We've got the truck drivers, so. And they'll get a device. And of course there's all of the sensors and everything on the trackers themselves, but they're not getting like corporate email and they don't have the true account that way. However they.
• 20:06
  Speaker B: I'm not to pick up rainbow. Those guys.
• 20:08
  Speaker A: Let's. Yeah, right. Oh, anytime you got contact information. Well, we can have that conversation at any given time. So what's a myth about IT leadership that you wish the industry or that the industry would retire forever? What's something that we can get rid of it?
• 20:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, that would be the fact that IT leadership is expected to know everything technology. I think that's. Well, it seems nice to be considered the IT messiah. I think it's more important to recognize the fact that we are IT leaders, not necessarily the IT doers. Right. The best way I think I can say that is, and I've been saying this for the majority of my career, is I know a whole little about a whole lot. I know enough about VMware to have an intelligent conversation with a vendor to say, here's what we need to do, here's where we'd like to go. Here's some potential models. Hyperconverge versus whatever. Xyz. But I'll never claim to have enough to fully integrate that top to bottom. So.
• 21:13
  Speaker A: Especially management and above.
• 21:15
  Speaker B: Exactly. So being able to be a resource for those doing that, being able to get your hands dirty is certainly an aspect I'd expect all IT leadership to have. However, not having all the answers and being honest when you don't have all the answers, but knowing who to go to get those answers is the operative.
• 21:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. And that's a key skill for us. But I think you're right in that because it's technology, we should know and have all of the answers immediately.
• 21:42
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 21:43
  Speaker A: My executive teams come to me about AI and oh yeah, and the developments that we've had in the last three years and it changes. It seems like it's changing daily, but it's not quite that fast. But it's definitely faster than hyper converged infrastructures. Since you brought that up. Oh yeah, it's definitely faster than the virtual technologies that we've been leveraging for the last decade plus. And although, oh man, it's leveraging virtual technologies like crazy too. So okay, since I brought it up and what kind of AI have they been pushing you for? What have they been asking you and telling you? Okay, why aren't we doing this already? Because that conversation has probably already had.
• 22:31
  Speaker B: I feel like you could have that conversation with a lot of different people. We obviously, everyone wants to get their hands dirty with AI. Everybody wants to start playing and tinkering. We have users that have never touched it before and we have users that have developed their own agents that have given themselves personalities and names and may identify as a French bulldog, which is a whole nother conversation and a nod to some folks here who have some great wild AI development underway. But as an organization we're still ramping up. We're still understanding the limitations and also the use cases for AI. And we have a great training department here that is helping build some of those use cases out and helping develop what our best practices for AI should be. With all that, and this is something I'm sure we're going to talk about a little bit later, but with all that understanding the safety behind AI and understanding policies and tacts behind using AI is something that I was tapped with early on, working with our legal department, working with leadership to make sure we have a grounded AI policy where everyone understands the expectations,
• 23:40
  Speaker A: I find that that interesting and I have a couple of thoughts around all of that too. The immediate question is how much of that is a corporate sponsored or an enterprise AI? Solution. How much of that is open source and freely available, and how much of that is personalized AI use? Because something tells me the French bulldog one is probably a personal account. Which leads me to a second level question of, like, what do you guys consider some of your intellectual property that you're trying to make sure that does not get outside of the walls? And how are you working with this? AI governance, obviously AI governance, we want to keep that stuff in. That's one of the fundamental parts behind it. But so what's the environment like? First, let's start there. How much of it's open source, how much of it's private, and how much of it's enterprise?
• 24:37
  Speaker B: I'd like to put my blinders on and say 100% of it is enterprise, but we need to accept the reality of the situation where that's likely not the case. We have, of course, Leverage Copilot and we of course leverage ChatGPT. We're primarily in Microsoft house, so leveraging Copilot is kind of it's given. Right. But ChatGPT was something that was brought in early on prior to my arrival that really took off. We, fortunately, our leadership and fortunately our COO headed that off early and made sure that we were using a business edition of ChatGPT and giving out licenses. And our little French bulldog pal does in fact live in the business world and is in fact protected and following the appropriate procedures and we'll say is a good boy. But the overall landscape of AI is really limited to what we're deciding as an IT department. We're deciding as an organization, as licensed tools. Outside of that is in violation of the policy. And of course, we need to address those as they come up.
• 25:38
  Speaker A: Okay. Anything else you want to bring up on the. The topic or questions or thoughts on AI?
• 25:46
  Speaker B: I think we are. Everyone needs to buckle their seat belts. I mean, we're going to talk, I'm sure, a little bit later about what the next 18 months looks like in the world of it. And I'll give myself my little segue there, but I think this is the best. This is exactly where I'm going to go with it. I think AI has scaled in an unprecedented rate greater than any technology we've seen since perhaps the inception of the Internet. And I was not alive for the inception of the Internet. However, I can only imagine that what we've seen then and what we're seeing now are comparable in how quickly adoption is occurring. I think at 18 months from now, we're going to be seeing a different Landscape. More of the. Oh no, what have we gotten right? More of the. We did not put the appropriate guardrails into place.
• 26:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. Let's start with some of the vibe coding and the fact that anybody can be a coder nowadays. Used to be it was a very select group of people who could envision and create code. You, you brought up Claude, AI and the singularity. So we talk about the Terminator effect, the Singularity, and. And I've started to hear the singularity referred to in a different way than like the Terminator effect or the, the Matrix thing where the computers decide that the best thing for you humanity is to control it versus to continue to augment it. But now I'm hearing singularity of more towards augmentation and changing that way. Any personal thoughts or feelings towards said singularity?
• 27:30
  Speaker B: Yeah. If AI told me what to do every day, it certainly would make my life a whole lot easier. But I, I making a bold statement here. But I feel as though we will never eliminate the human element from a lot of this. We talk about slide coding and all that. And recently you read an article recently about how AI is creating near perfect code. The age of the programmer may not be maybe over. It may be at this point you're not a programmer anymore. You're a reviewer of the AI generated code. Personally, I wish this happened years ago because I would have done much better in my computer science classes. However, I still think there's a human element that needs to be involved. And we're not quite there yet, but I think that would be more of an overarching IT concept. And my parting message, in a way, but we, we need to put the humanity back in technology. Leveraging AI, leveraging, you know, automation. Great. There still needs to be a human aspect to it because at the end of the day, there's still a human behind that keyboard.
• 28:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. And. Or a human receiving whatever the output or the outcomes of all of these things that are being done, it's being done for humanity in one way or another to augment, to complete said task, whatever that task happens to be.
• 28:49
  Speaker B: Right.
• 28:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. Our little Roomba going around leaving a trail of paint on the cement. How many technologies like that does Pro Con have? Are they playing with any of that stuff or. Because I assume that that was at the conference. Not something that Pro Con has.
• 29:05
  Speaker B: Right. So we are on the, I want to say on the cutting edge. We're certainly on the cutting edge of technology innovations and construction there. Our leadership does not put limits behind the stuff that we can experiment with. The best practices and use cases for all these technologies, really. I look a lot to our architecture side of the house and some of the renderings they do and some of the modeling they do. And I see a world where we do hologram visualizations of buildings, where we put somebody behind a meta glasses or VR glasses, right? And they can walk through the building virtually and see in near real time what's happening. Being able to say, I'm sitting in an apartment room, I'm in the kitchen. Let's try out different paint colors and being able to throw them up and see, take a look around the room and say, hey, this is what this would look like with this. These cabinets and this countertop. And we are moving that direction rapidly. And our leadership has given us the Runway and the bandwidth to experiment, which has been awesome.
• 30:08
  Speaker A: Man. Okay. So my mind just immediately spins off on the differences between, okay, you build the infrastructure, you've got the solid foundations, and now we're slapping on all of the fascia or the chrome of these different things. And recently was able to order some custom Nikes. So now custom apartments. And, oh, I want the marble countertops. I want to have the water feed over my stove so that I can just fill up the spaghetti pan and.
• 30:40
  Speaker B: But there's like a loss savings to that. Time savings. Think of all the value where you can say before you throw a coat of paint on the wall to say, well, let's see what it looks like in blue or purple or green or some other random shade. And having that happen in real time and then being able to apply it, it saves a ton of time in a process. It saves a ton of money and ultimately makes people happy.
• 31:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, it gets your customer what they want.
• 31:05
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 31:07
  Speaker A: Interesting and fun to play with.
• 31:10
  Speaker B: Some of these things are. I could not even conceptualize them. They're just so cool. And you have to see it to believe it.
• 31:17
  Speaker A: What do you think it gets wrong? And it's an obvious thing that we get wrong that for some reason, lots
• 31:26
  Speaker B: of us haven't learned that not everything requires a ticket. You think about the basics of it, right? It needs to be a ticket. You need to submit a ticket. Please submit a ticket. Yes. I think tickets are important. We need to understand our sla. We need to track known issues, develop, identify patterns, develop solutions, and track history. All of these things are incredibly important. But again, we need to put the humanity back into things. We should not be gatekeepers to support. We should be providing support and then worrying about the documentation later. If you call an ambulance, are they going to have you fill out a form while you're on the gurney? Of course not. Right. You're going to get the medical care you need and then you're going to do mountains of insurance paperwork later. But we need to be the humanity focused organization.
• 32:13
  Speaker A: Okay. So it's not necessarily that tickets are bad, it's that the prioritization of making the consumer provide tickets, the documentation prior to work happening and that's how you
• 32:27
  Speaker B: move away from being a cost center and into a strategic part of the organization.
• 32:31
  Speaker A: But how do you balance that against your sprints and your 20 bananas for the week?
• 32:37
  Speaker B: Yeah. So that's something I lean a lot back on my experience as a project manager and understanding, hey, the folks that are assigned to the projects you're working on are not just assigned to the projects you're working on, they're on other projects and they may have day to day tasks they need to account for for. That's part of building velocity and that's part of understanding. John may only be responsible for 10 bananas because he's also a team lead for the systems team. So he also has administrative duties to perform and he also has to manage his own tickets where I might have Jack, who's the senior systems administrator. And Jack may only be able to take 20 bananas or milky Ways, whatever we're quantifying now because he's not doing all the administrative work. So the same principle applies here at procon where we know, hey, our infrastructure folks can only take 10 bananas because they need to save the rest of their bananas for escalations. They need to save the rest of their bananas for architecture, for understanding what are we going to do about VMware. So having that knowledge, unfortunately it's a small enough team where there's pretty open communication on that. But having the knowledge that not all of our work is scoped project work, we have to put out fires. We have to understand that we serve at the pleasure of the organization.
• 33:49
  Speaker A: Yeah. And helping the organization with that again is building that trust, opening those communications and showing that value. How do you show the value? How do you communicate the value? What do you do for those pieces?
• 34:05
  Speaker B: Well, me specifically, there's the technology committee. Right. So being giving an opportunity for those not in it to be heard by it, that's a very immediate example. But giving a platform for those to share their needs outside of submit a ticket has proven very incredibly successful thus far. As part of my 30 days, my first 30 days of pro Con, I had worked with the team to develop a survey of what would we want to know from people if we don't talk to them every day? What are the questions we want to ask those we support that we can then quantify and then improve on? Should there need to be improvements or implement? Maybe there's a solution. We haven't heard of that. Hey, that would be a great idea. Let's see about going that direction. What? We had an idea for Lunch and learns that was submitted as part of the survey we sent out. It would be great if we had lunch and learns on some of the technologies we have that people may not have been here when they were deployed, so they need some training or there may be tips and tricks that we can share. So hearing the organization, giving it a platform for those to share their voices. Hearing their voices and then acting upon those opinions, that is not only builds trust, but shows that it isn't just a bunch of ticket takers. They're part of growing with the organization.
• 35:20
  Speaker A: Nice. Rando. What was your first computer?
• 35:26
  Speaker B: My first computer was an already outdated compact that came in the. Do you remember the boxes that were in the cow print? Yeah, like the commercial. I. I'm. I'm going way. Oh, yeah. I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be dating myself, but I guess we're dating myself now.
• 35:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit. At least you didn't have to deal with Betamax and.
• 35:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, probably slimming before my time.
• 35:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, probably didn't remember when we went from the four channels to a cable.
• 35:57
  Speaker B: No. Yeah. That would be slightly before my time, for sure. I remember hearing all about it. If I got to hear another story about my dad having to get up to change the dial, though, it's. Yeah. At this point I could probably just recite it back to him.
• 36:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, man. What lessons would you want to impart to somebody who is being currently an individual contributor and wants to progress? What thoughts? What. What mentorship. And that was something else that we talked about. So let's switch into that for a minute. Let's talk about mentorship. Right. So tell me a little about that mentorship. And what would you want to tell that aspiring person who's listening to us and is not yet an IT manager, let alone a director or chief information?
• 36:42
  Speaker B: I would say really think about it first. Right. But I look back to. I was so fortunate to have really good leaders, really good mentors to look up to throughout my career at each of the organizations I've worked at. There's always been one person that I know I can go to and count on and that'll guide me, whether intentionally or unintentionally, but a lot that I was able to take away from these folks. So I, for that I'm incredibly grateful. And I think the best service I could do back to them is taking what I've learned and then distributing it out in the role that I'm in now. So for anybody that wanted to move from an individual contributor role to an IT leadership role, I think there's really two or three things that, that stand out. And the first being you need to listen more than you speak and you need to, you need to hear those around you. And I'm sure I've heard that a number of times elsewhere. Right. But be a sponge and understand before you act, which goes into number two, where you want to mimic in a way what the leaders around you are expecting. If you understand and anticipate the needs prior to them meeting, then you've already positioned yourself not only as somebody who, who is forward thinking, but you're positioning yourself as a leader and understanding how leaders think, how technology leaders think. If you're able to say, hey, I know VMware is coming, end of life, or I know VMware's got brought out, bought out, if I know VMware is not going to be the solution we're going to go with, start to anticipate what those needs are and potentially have a solution proposed for when the time comes. If you're ready to go with the answer before there's a problem, you're already setting yourself up. And then I think the third would be at the end of the day, don't forget the technology, don't forget why you got into it. Don't forget the nitty gritty of taking apart a computer building one. Don't forget those things, but also keep the humanity in it as well.
• 38:36
  Speaker A: How many of those mentors or those leaders that you listen to or learn from had nothing to do with it?
• 38:43
  Speaker B: Ooh, that's a good one. I will say one specifically who claims that she has no technology knowledge whatsoever. But she's shown time and time again that she knows exactly what she's talking about. But she used to refer to me as her personal help desk while, while I was in my previous organization. And I would say she would not be the best technical example even though she truly is and doesn't give herself enough credit.
• 39:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, some of those people are wonderful people and they teach or we learn so much from them when we use the two ears and the one mouth in, in proportion.
• 39:17
  Speaker B: Exactly. And she, she was one where, and this is something I carry through, but she's the one that kind of helped me keep the humanity and things. And she's the one that always define project management as much so, if not more of an art, as it is a science. There, there's a methodology to project management. I have a pmp, we have the PMP certification path. But there's a certain art and a certain finesse to it that can't be taught. That's something that you, you have or you don't. And she helped instill that in me. And that's something I certainly carry with.
• 39:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, apparently. Well, Tim, great conversation. Truly appreciate your time today. Thank you for all of your wisdom and your experience and please interact with us at the you've been heard community. Other people I'm sure are going to be following along and would love to learn from your experiences within your industry and IT and maybe looking for a mentor to help them out.
• 40:08
  Speaker B: Absolutely appreciate it. Thanks for having us. It's been great.
• 40:10
  Speaker A: Yeah. And all of you listening, please leave a comment, put some stars or a like or a thumbs up or whatever. It's your podcast collection aggregator and and let us know how we're doing. And by all means, come by the you've been heard.com and and check us out. And we're an IT community for it. No vendors and just nerds and geeks helping nerds and geeks out. So have a wonderful day. Thank you.