May 27, 2025 • 10 mins
Introducing Parallel: A brand new IT murder mystery series by the makers of the DEX Show. Catch every episode by subscribing to Parallel on Apple Podcasts here (or simply search Parallel wherever you get your podcasts)
From Nexthink and the creators of The DEX Show, this is Parallel: One IT story told week by week. Because technology problems don’t happen in isolation. Or by themselves. They happen in parallel.
What’s been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting-edge company known for its efficient operations and innovation? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? Over the course of 5 weeks, you’ll see that answering that question uncovered all sorts of other unanswered questions, and we ended up finding more mysteries - crashing systems, failed updates, unhappy employees, and a strange reference to something called “The Foundation”.
Register for Nexthink Experience 2025 here
Download a free copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DEX Tools here (or head to Nexthink.com)
For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com).
To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform
From Nexthink and the creators of The DEX Show, this is Parallel: One IT story told week by week. Because technology problems don’t happen in isolation. Or by themselves. They happen in parallel.
What’s been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting-edge company known for its efficient operations and innovation? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? Over the course of 5 weeks, you’ll see that answering that question uncovered all sorts of other unanswered questions, and we ended up finding more mysteries - crashing systems, failed updates, unhappy employees, and a strange reference to something called “The Foundation”.
Register for Nexthink Experience 2025 here
Download a free copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DEX Tools here (or head to Nexthink.com)
For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com).
To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Change makers. Tom McGrath here introducing something a little bit
different for you all today, and that's the first installment
of a brand new podcast by the creators of The
Deck Show, which is called Parallel.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It's one it story.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Told week by week, very much inspired by the popular
Murder mystery series podcast serial. If you know that, but
if you don't, don't worry. I think you'll be able
to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Either way, very much the brainchild of the main man,
Tim Flower, who all listeners will know only too well
from The Deck Show and of course reality bites, and
indeed you should hear plenty of familiar voices pop up
here and there throughout the Parallel series. We're going to
post a couple of episodes here on the Deck Show feed,
(00:50):
which you can catch here of course, But if you're
enjoying it and you want to follow, and you want
to hear everything as it's released, check the show notes,
go over to the Parallel podcast feed where you can
give it a follow and keep fully up to date. Okay,
with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Parallel episode one.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Whereny, Thank you so much everybody, Bye bye.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
From next Think and the creators of the Deck show.
It's parallel one IT story told week by week because
technology problems don't happen in isolation or by themselves, they
happen in parallel. I'm Tim Flower. For the last ten years,
I've spent this part of my career helping IT teams
(01:58):
understand how product is is stolen both from IT and
from the employees we support. It's been a journey of
seeing workday has gone wrong, system's gone haywire, and the
lengths we in IT will go to for answers today,
we start with a story that began with a simple question,
(02:20):
what's been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting edge company
known for its efficient operations and innovation, Or if you
want to get technical about it, and apparently I do,
where do employees lose twenty four minutes every day of
their working lives. Searching for answers can sometimes feel intrusive.
(02:43):
I have to dig into how people troubleshoot, their lack
of tools, the lack of visibility, even their lack of
ability sometimes and that can be risky, especially when people's
careers are at stake. What I've learned during the course
of my career is that every technician is different, unique,
(03:03):
complicated even but they all want the same thing to
solve the problem. But how do you solve a problem
you can't find? Or in zen Tech case, how do
you solve a problem that's actually bigger and wilder than
what you can even see? And yes, it seems like
every day in my career, I've been looking for solutions too,
(03:25):
So let's look into this one. For weeks, the employees
at zen Tech have been struggling software crashes, system slowdowns
and inexplicably long response times, projects delayed, deadlines missed, and
frustration building everywhere. And the problem wasn't isolated. I heard
(03:48):
through some trusted sources of app startup delays of ninety
minutes or more and it was systemic. Yet no one
knew why, or at least that's what they want wanted
you to believe. But let's start at the beginning. Zen
Tech has always been a high performing organization. Their employees
(04:11):
are smart, dedicated, They work long hours creating the kind
of tech that keeps the world connected. But this past
December everything changed. I decided to talk with a few employees. First.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I don't know, it started small, you know, things started
to hang here, crash there. We would reboot and move on.
I know we should have, but no one called the
help desk, but we had already been impacted by so much.
And it's pretty common knowledge that the help disc can't
actually help. In fact, they usually end up breaking something
else in the process. But then it got worse and
(04:48):
worse and worse, until we couldn't move anymore and we
had to.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Call Employee one didn't want to be identified, but like
so many at zen Tech, they found their daily routines
railed by an unseen force, A force that didn't just disrupt,
it dismantled, and for a company like Zentech, where time
equals money, this was no small disruption. And then there
(05:14):
was Susan, who voiced some pretty strong frustration.
Speaker 6 (05:20):
You're staring at the screen waiting for something to load
five minutes fast and then ten, and the whole time
you're thinking this isn't normal, something's wrong, but no one
seems to know what it was. There's times when I
wonder if it really knows what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
So then I wanted to talk with the IT teams directly.
They'd been tasked with finding the cause of these issues,
but they seemed to be in over their head, and
what started as a simple troubleshooting mission quickly turned into
something much bigger. Early reports from traditional IT monitoring tools
(05:55):
suggested a hardware bottleneck, too many users with not enough capacity,
but when the data came back, they told a different story.
This wasn't just a case of too many cooks in
the kitchen. Something or someone seemed to be actively interfering.
So I decided to go right to the source and
(06:17):
talk with some of the engineers and technicians at zen
Tech to get their point of view. Terrence was the first,
and as smart as he is, he seemed baffled.
Speaker 7 (06:29):
It didn't add up. The spikes and latency weren't random.
They seemed targeted, like specific users, specific times, and the patterns,
my goodness, they're not the kind of thing you'd expect
from normal wear and tear. As much tech as we
got in our command center, none of our teams can
figure it out, probably because we're all troubleshooting to prove
it wasn't our fault.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
A pattern, but a pattern of what and who would
want to target zen Tech's employees anyway. It's initial theory
was a rogue script code left behind by a legacy
application long since removed, or perhaps someone with an agenda.
PAM is the IT manager, responsible for not only managing
(07:12):
the team, but for also making sure that things stay
running smoothly and issues solved quickly.
Speaker 8 (07:21):
We honestly started to wonder if it was an inside job,
maybe a disgruntled employee or maybe somebody who recently left
the company.
Speaker 9 (07:29):
But there just wasn't any evidence like these.
Speaker 8 (07:32):
Just these phantom processes slowing everything down, and we were
getting more and more pressure to figure out what it was.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And while it searched for answers, employees were left to
grapple with the fallout. Jessica is a customer call center
rep who talks with Zentech customers all day long.
Speaker 9 (07:51):
So here's the thing. You can only apologize to customers
so many times before they stopped listening. It felt like
every day something new was and we were the ones
left holding the bag. Our VP was asking everyone to
come in a half hour early, get ahead of any issues,
and be there for our customers, which we're happy to do.
But there's three thousand of us across the company in
(08:14):
this role. Do we all need to come in early
that's fifteen hundred hours of OT every day.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
The company's productivity was plummeting, along with both its reputation
and employee morale. Zen Tech's leadership knew they needed a
breakthrough fast, and that breakthrough came not from traditional IT
but from an unexpected source, Zenech's digital employee experience or
(08:41):
De's team. Using advanced AI tools, they were able to
dig deeper than the command center IT teams ever could,
and what they found changed everything. Fred runs the DEXs team.
Speaker 8 (08:56):
It wasn't just the one thing, right, it was a
company nation. You had devices that hadn't been rebooted in months.
He had employees struggling with apps they hadn't even been
trained to use properly. You got a rogue process then
installed on the devices by this roll up patch, but
nobody knew about. Unfortunately, we have this DEX platform now
(09:18):
just feeding us information like nothing else in the tech stack,
and we didn't even have to rely on the employees
for the data anymore. It was like peeling back layers
of an onion, you know, every single one revealed something new.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
An onion or maybe a conspiracy because what the DEX
team uncovered wasn't just a series of unfortunate events. It
was becoming more and more clear that this wasn't some
normal run of the mill IT issue. It was sabotage.
But there was more work to do, and the Dex
(09:54):
team knew just where to turn to for answers. Next week,
we'll dive deeper into the sabotage, who planted the rogue
script and why, But more importantly, how did Zintec turn
things around. Stay tuned for the next episode of Parallel
Leave No Trace.
Change makers. Tom McGrath here introducing something a little bit
different for you all today, and that's the first installment
of a brand new podcast by the creators of The
Deck Show, which is called Parallel.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It's one it story.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Told week by week, very much inspired by the popular
Murder mystery series podcast serial. If you know that, but
if you don't, don't worry. I think you'll be able
to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Either way, very much the brainchild of the main man,
Tim Flower, who all listeners will know only too well
from The Deck Show and of course reality bites, and
indeed you should hear plenty of familiar voices pop up
here and there throughout the Parallel series. We're going to
post a couple of episodes here on the Deck Show feed,
(00:50):
which you can catch here of course, But if you're
enjoying it and you want to follow, and you want
to hear everything as it's released, check the show notes,
go over to the Parallel podcast feed where you can
give it a follow and keep fully up to date. Okay,
with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Parallel episode one.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Whereny, Thank you so much everybody, Bye bye.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
From next Think and the creators of the Deck show.
It's parallel one IT story told week by week because
technology problems don't happen in isolation or by themselves, they
happen in parallel. I'm Tim Flower. For the last ten years,
I've spent this part of my career helping IT teams
(01:58):
understand how product is is stolen both from IT and
from the employees we support. It's been a journey of
seeing workday has gone wrong, system's gone haywire, and the
lengths we in IT will go to for answers today,
we start with a story that began with a simple question,
(02:20):
what's been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting edge company
known for its efficient operations and innovation, Or if you
want to get technical about it, and apparently I do,
where do employees lose twenty four minutes every day of
their working lives. Searching for answers can sometimes feel intrusive.
(02:43):
I have to dig into how people troubleshoot, their lack
of tools, the lack of visibility, even their lack of
ability sometimes and that can be risky, especially when people's
careers are at stake. What I've learned during the course
of my career is that every technician is different, unique,
(03:03):
complicated even but they all want the same thing to
solve the problem. But how do you solve a problem
you can't find? Or in zen Tech case, how do
you solve a problem that's actually bigger and wilder than
what you can even see? And yes, it seems like
every day in my career, I've been looking for solutions too,
(03:25):
So let's look into this one. For weeks, the employees
at zen Tech have been struggling software crashes, system slowdowns
and inexplicably long response times, projects delayed, deadlines missed, and
frustration building everywhere. And the problem wasn't isolated. I heard
(03:48):
through some trusted sources of app startup delays of ninety
minutes or more and it was systemic. Yet no one
knew why, or at least that's what they want wanted
you to believe. But let's start at the beginning. Zen
Tech has always been a high performing organization. Their employees
(04:11):
are smart, dedicated, They work long hours creating the kind
of tech that keeps the world connected. But this past
December everything changed. I decided to talk with a few employees. First.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I don't know, it started small, you know, things started
to hang here, crash there. We would reboot and move on.
I know we should have, but no one called the
help desk, but we had already been impacted by so much.
And it's pretty common knowledge that the help disc can't
actually help. In fact, they usually end up breaking something
else in the process. But then it got worse and
(04:48):
worse and worse, until we couldn't move anymore and we
had to.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Call Employee one didn't want to be identified, but like
so many at zen Tech, they found their daily routines
railed by an unseen force, A force that didn't just disrupt,
it dismantled, and for a company like Zentech, where time
equals money, this was no small disruption. And then there
(05:14):
was Susan, who voiced some pretty strong frustration.
Speaker 6 (05:20):
You're staring at the screen waiting for something to load
five minutes fast and then ten, and the whole time
you're thinking this isn't normal, something's wrong, but no one
seems to know what it was. There's times when I
wonder if it really knows what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
So then I wanted to talk with the IT teams directly.
They'd been tasked with finding the cause of these issues,
but they seemed to be in over their head, and
what started as a simple troubleshooting mission quickly turned into
something much bigger. Early reports from traditional IT monitoring tools
(05:55):
suggested a hardware bottleneck, too many users with not enough capacity,
but when the data came back, they told a different story.
This wasn't just a case of too many cooks in
the kitchen. Something or someone seemed to be actively interfering.
So I decided to go right to the source and
(06:17):
talk with some of the engineers and technicians at zen
Tech to get their point of view. Terrence was the first,
and as smart as he is, he seemed baffled.
Speaker 7 (06:29):
It didn't add up. The spikes and latency weren't random.
They seemed targeted, like specific users, specific times, and the patterns,
my goodness, they're not the kind of thing you'd expect
from normal wear and tear. As much tech as we
got in our command center, none of our teams can
figure it out, probably because we're all troubleshooting to prove
it wasn't our fault.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
A pattern, but a pattern of what and who would
want to target zen Tech's employees anyway. It's initial theory
was a rogue script code left behind by a legacy
application long since removed, or perhaps someone with an agenda.
PAM is the IT manager, responsible for not only managing
(07:12):
the team, but for also making sure that things stay
running smoothly and issues solved quickly.
Speaker 8 (07:21):
We honestly started to wonder if it was an inside job,
maybe a disgruntled employee or maybe somebody who recently left
the company.
Speaker 9 (07:29):
But there just wasn't any evidence like these.
Speaker 8 (07:32):
Just these phantom processes slowing everything down, and we were
getting more and more pressure to figure out what it was.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And while it searched for answers, employees were left to
grapple with the fallout. Jessica is a customer call center
rep who talks with Zentech customers all day long.
Speaker 9 (07:51):
So here's the thing. You can only apologize to customers
so many times before they stopped listening. It felt like
every day something new was and we were the ones
left holding the bag. Our VP was asking everyone to
come in a half hour early, get ahead of any issues,
and be there for our customers, which we're happy to do.
But there's three thousand of us across the company in
(08:14):
this role. Do we all need to come in early
that's fifteen hundred hours of OT every day.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
The company's productivity was plummeting, along with both its reputation
and employee morale. Zen Tech's leadership knew they needed a
breakthrough fast, and that breakthrough came not from traditional IT
but from an unexpected source, Zenech's digital employee experience or
(08:41):
De's team. Using advanced AI tools, they were able to
dig deeper than the command center IT teams ever could,
and what they found changed everything. Fred runs the DEXs team.
Speaker 8 (08:56):
It wasn't just the one thing, right, it was a
company nation. You had devices that hadn't been rebooted in months.
He had employees struggling with apps they hadn't even been
trained to use properly. You got a rogue process then
installed on the devices by this roll up patch, but
nobody knew about. Unfortunately, we have this DEX platform now
(09:18):
just feeding us information like nothing else in the tech stack,
and we didn't even have to rely on the employees
for the data anymore. It was like peeling back layers
of an onion, you know, every single one revealed something new.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
An onion or maybe a conspiracy because what the DEX
team uncovered wasn't just a series of unfortunate events. It
was becoming more and more clear that this wasn't some
normal run of the mill IT issue. It was sabotage.
But there was more work to do, and the Dex
(09:54):
team knew just where to turn to for answers. Next week,
we'll dive deeper into the sabotage, who planted the rogue
script and why, But more importantly, how did Zintec turn
things around. Stay tuned for the next episode of Parallel
Leave No Trace.
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