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Transcript

🗣️ ALL NEW FROM THE DEX SHOW Introducing Parallel: S1E1 - The Phantom Lag · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Change makers. Tom McGrath here introducing something a little bit
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: different for you all today, and that's the first installment
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: of a brand new podcast by the creators of The
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Deck Show, which is called Parallel.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: It's one it story.
• 0:16
  Speaker 3: Told week by week, very much inspired by the popular
• 0:19
  Speaker 3: Murder mystery series podcast serial. If you know that, but
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: if you don't, don't worry. I think you'll be able
• 0:26
  Speaker 3: to enjoy it.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Either way, very much the brainchild of the main man,
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  Speaker 2: Tim Flower, who all listeners will know only too well
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: from The Deck Show and of course reality bites, and
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: indeed you should hear plenty of familiar voices pop up
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: here and there throughout the Parallel series. We're going to
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: post a couple of episodes here on the Deck Show feed,
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: which you can catch here of course, But if you're
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: enjoying it and you want to follow, and you want
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: to hear everything as it's released, check the show notes,
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: go over to the Parallel podcast feed where you can
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: give it a follow and keep fully up to date. Okay,
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Parallel episode one.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Let us know what you think.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: Whereny, Thank you so much everybody, Bye bye.
• 1:35
  Speaker 4: From next Think and the creators of the Deck show.
• 1:38
  Speaker 4: It's parallel one IT story told week by week because
• 1:43
  Speaker 4: technology problems don't happen in isolation or by themselves, they
• 1:47
  Speaker 4: happen in parallel. I'm Tim Flower. For the last ten years,
• 1:55
  Speaker 4: I've spent this part of my career helping IT teams
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: understand how product is is stolen both from IT and
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: from the employees we support. It's been a journey of
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: seeing workday has gone wrong, system's gone haywire, and the
• 2:11
  Speaker 4: lengths we in IT will go to for answers today,
• 2:16
  Speaker 4: we start with a story that began with a simple question,
• 2:20
  Speaker 4: what's been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting edge company
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: known for its efficient operations and innovation, Or if you
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: want to get technical about it, and apparently I do,
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: where do employees lose twenty four minutes every day of
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: their working lives. Searching for answers can sometimes feel intrusive.
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: I have to dig into how people troubleshoot, their lack
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: of tools, the lack of visibility, even their lack of
• 2:50
  Speaker 4: ability sometimes and that can be risky, especially when people's
• 2:54
  Speaker 4: careers are at stake. What I've learned during the course
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: of my career is that every technician is different, unique,
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: complicated even but they all want the same thing to
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: solve the problem. But how do you solve a problem
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: you can't find? Or in zen Tech case, how do
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: you solve a problem that's actually bigger and wilder than
• 3:18
  Speaker 4: what you can even see? And yes, it seems like
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: every day in my career, I've been looking for solutions too,
• 3:25
  Speaker 4: So let's look into this one. For weeks, the employees
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: at zen Tech have been struggling software crashes, system slowdowns
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: and inexplicably long response times, projects delayed, deadlines missed, and
• 3:43
  Speaker 4: frustration building everywhere. And the problem wasn't isolated. I heard
• 3:48
  Speaker 4: through some trusted sources of app startup delays of ninety
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: minutes or more and it was systemic. Yet no one
• 3:56
  Speaker 4: knew why, or at least that's what they want wanted
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: you to believe. But let's start at the beginning. Zen
• 4:07
  Speaker 4: Tech has always been a high performing organization. Their employees
• 4:11
  Speaker 4: are smart, dedicated, They work long hours creating the kind
• 4:16
  Speaker 4: of tech that keeps the world connected. But this past
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: December everything changed. I decided to talk with a few employees. First.
• 4:26
  Speaker 5: I don't know, it started small, you know, things started
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: to hang here, crash there. We would reboot and move on.
• 4:32
  Speaker 5: I know we should have, but no one called the
• 4:35
  Speaker 5: help desk, but we had already been impacted by so much.
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: And it's pretty common knowledge that the help disc can't
• 4:42
  Speaker 5: actually help. In fact, they usually end up breaking something
• 4:46
  Speaker 5: else in the process. But then it got worse and
• 4:48
  Speaker 5: worse and worse, until we couldn't move anymore and we
• 4:51
  Speaker 5: had to.
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: Call Employee one didn't want to be identified, but like
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  Speaker 4: so many at zen Tech, they found their daily routines
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: railed by an unseen force, A force that didn't just disrupt,
• 5:05
  Speaker 4: it dismantled, and for a company like Zentech, where time
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: equals money, this was no small disruption. And then there
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: was Susan, who voiced some pretty strong frustration.
• 5:20
  Speaker 6: You're staring at the screen waiting for something to load
• 5:23
  Speaker 6: five minutes fast and then ten, and the whole time
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  Speaker 6: you're thinking this isn't normal, something's wrong, but no one
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  Speaker 6: seems to know what it was. There's times when I
• 5:30
  Speaker 6: wonder if it really knows what they're doing.
• 5:34
  Speaker 4: So then I wanted to talk with the IT teams directly.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: They'd been tasked with finding the cause of these issues,
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: but they seemed to be in over their head, and
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: what started as a simple troubleshooting mission quickly turned into
• 5:48
  Speaker 4: something much bigger. Early reports from traditional IT monitoring tools
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  Speaker 4: suggested a hardware bottleneck, too many users with not enough capacity,
• 6:01
  Speaker 4: but when the data came back, they told a different story.
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  Speaker 4: This wasn't just a case of too many cooks in
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  Speaker 4: the kitchen. Something or someone seemed to be actively interfering.
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: So I decided to go right to the source and
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: talk with some of the engineers and technicians at zen
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  Speaker 4: Tech to get their point of view. Terrence was the first,
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  Speaker 4: and as smart as he is, he seemed baffled.
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  Speaker 7: It didn't add up. The spikes and latency weren't random.
• 6:32
  Speaker 7: They seemed targeted, like specific users, specific times, and the patterns,
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  Speaker 7: my goodness, they're not the kind of thing you'd expect
• 6:39
  Speaker 7: from normal wear and tear. As much tech as we
• 6:42
  Speaker 7: got in our command center, none of our teams can
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  Speaker 7: figure it out, probably because we're all troubleshooting to prove
• 6:48
  Speaker 7: it wasn't our fault.
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: A pattern, but a pattern of what and who would
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: want to target zen Tech's employees anyway. It's initial theory
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: was a rogue script code left behind by a legacy
• 7:02
  Speaker 4: application long since removed, or perhaps someone with an agenda.
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: PAM is the IT manager, responsible for not only managing
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: the team, but for also making sure that things stay
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: running smoothly and issues solved quickly.
• 7:21
  Speaker 8: We honestly started to wonder if it was an inside job,
• 7:25
  Speaker 8: maybe a disgruntled employee or maybe somebody who recently left
• 7:28
  Speaker 8: the company.
• 7:29
  Speaker 9: But there just wasn't any evidence like these.
• 7:32
  Speaker 8: Just these phantom processes slowing everything down, and we were
• 7:35
  Speaker 8: getting more and more pressure to figure out what it was.
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  Speaker 4: And while it searched for answers, employees were left to
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: grapple with the fallout. Jessica is a customer call center
• 7:46
  Speaker 4: rep who talks with Zentech customers all day long.
• 7:51
  Speaker 9: So here's the thing. You can only apologize to customers
• 7:55
  Speaker 9: so many times before they stopped listening. It felt like
• 7:58
  Speaker 9: every day something new was and we were the ones
• 8:01
  Speaker 9: left holding the bag. Our VP was asking everyone to
• 8:04
  Speaker 9: come in a half hour early, get ahead of any issues,
• 8:07
  Speaker 9: and be there for our customers, which we're happy to do.
• 8:11
  Speaker 9: But there's three thousand of us across the company in
• 8:14
  Speaker 9: this role. Do we all need to come in early
• 8:16
  Speaker 9: that's fifteen hundred hours of OT every day.
• 8:21
  Speaker 4: The company's productivity was plummeting, along with both its reputation
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: and employee morale. Zen Tech's leadership knew they needed a
• 8:30
  Speaker 4: breakthrough fast, and that breakthrough came not from traditional IT
• 8:36
  Speaker 4: but from an unexpected source, Zenech's digital employee experience or
• 8:41
  Speaker 4: De's team. Using advanced AI tools, they were able to
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: dig deeper than the command center IT teams ever could,
• 8:49
  Speaker 4: and what they found changed everything. Fred runs the DEXs team.
• 8:56
  Speaker 8: It wasn't just the one thing, right, it was a
• 8:59
  Speaker 8: company nation. You had devices that hadn't been rebooted in months.
• 9:04
  Speaker 8: He had employees struggling with apps they hadn't even been
• 9:07
  Speaker 8: trained to use properly. You got a rogue process then
• 9:11
  Speaker 8: installed on the devices by this roll up patch, but
• 9:14
  Speaker 8: nobody knew about. Unfortunately, we have this DEX platform now
• 9:18
  Speaker 8: just feeding us information like nothing else in the tech stack,
• 9:21
  Speaker 8: and we didn't even have to rely on the employees
• 9:24
  Speaker 8: for the data anymore. It was like peeling back layers
• 9:29
  Speaker 8: of an onion, you know, every single one revealed something new.
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: An onion or maybe a conspiracy because what the DEX
• 9:39
  Speaker 4: team uncovered wasn't just a series of unfortunate events. It
• 9:43
  Speaker 4: was becoming more and more clear that this wasn't some
• 9:47
  Speaker 4: normal run of the mill IT issue. It was sabotage.
• 9:52
  Speaker 4: But there was more work to do, and the Dex
• 9:54
  Speaker 4: team knew just where to turn to for answers. Next week,
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: we'll dive deeper into the sabotage, who planted the rogue
• 10:03
  Speaker 4: script and why, But more importantly, how did Zintec turn
• 10:07
  Speaker 4: things around. Stay tuned for the next episode of Parallel
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: Leave No Trace.