December 5, 2023 • 21 mins
Do you want more control over your career? What about influencing people in a way that increases profits? If so, then these critical skills change everything:
1. Ability to organize people.
2. Maximize individual productivity.
3. Ability to solve critical problems.
The application of these skills transforms business relationships into profits. You'll see things others cannot. These make you a go-to leader.
In this episode, I share lessons learned in defect management for a Fortune 100 financial services firm. Practical skills that work in any size business.
How we eliminated every critical and high defect in an environment of 40,000 servers. An organization approach that made the most of 1,500 engineers' time.
Previous defect aging was 120 days to 640 days, with thousands of defects discovered each week. The environment was thought to be hopeless. Engineer morale was sinking.
Implementing these three skills helped these teams eliminate hundreds of thousands of defects. They had a greater velocity of resolution than ever seen by management.
Never before have they had such leaps in performance. The new natural state had zero critical or high defects over 30 days. Fully compliant servers were the new majority.
You'll learn how these three skills made all the difference. With careful listening, you'll be on the path to profit from these powerful leadership skills.
You're in the right place if, you want to become more indispensable. If you want to solve real problems in your business. Or if you want access to the best opportunities.
Smart business owners and executives use these methods, as well as many more by joining us at https://www.insidestrategicrelations.com/newsletter/
Write with your comments below. Top leaders use these insights to influence outcomes and create results. You can, too.
#LeadershipSkills #PersonalDevelopment #BusinessRelationships #IncreaseProfits #ProblemSolving
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/inside-strategic-relations--3010682/support.
1. Ability to organize people.
2. Maximize individual productivity.
3. Ability to solve critical problems.
The application of these skills transforms business relationships into profits. You'll see things others cannot. These make you a go-to leader.
In this episode, I share lessons learned in defect management for a Fortune 100 financial services firm. Practical skills that work in any size business.
How we eliminated every critical and high defect in an environment of 40,000 servers. An organization approach that made the most of 1,500 engineers' time.
Previous defect aging was 120 days to 640 days, with thousands of defects discovered each week. The environment was thought to be hopeless. Engineer morale was sinking.
Implementing these three skills helped these teams eliminate hundreds of thousands of defects. They had a greater velocity of resolution than ever seen by management.
Never before have they had such leaps in performance. The new natural state had zero critical or high defects over 30 days. Fully compliant servers were the new majority.
You'll learn how these three skills made all the difference. With careful listening, you'll be on the path to profit from these powerful leadership skills.
You're in the right place if, you want to become more indispensable. If you want to solve real problems in your business. Or if you want access to the best opportunities.
Smart business owners and executives use these methods, as well as many more by joining us at https://www.insidestrategicrelations.com/newsletter/
Write with your comments below. Top leaders use these insights to influence outcomes and create results. You can, too.
#LeadershipSkills #PersonalDevelopment #BusinessRelationships #IncreaseProfits #ProblemSolving
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/inside-strategic-relations--3010682/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Do you want to maximize influence overyourself and the people around you? Do
you want to have a clear pathof career acceleration where you constantly get offered
new opportunities, new growth and thebest positions available out there. Well,
you're in the right place. I'mjustin hit with inside Strategic relations. If
you're tired of being passed over forraises, promotions, and other new opportunities,
(00:23):
then listen carefully. There are threethings that you must do in order
to position yourself. In fact,these are skills that help you position yourself
in a leadership position. So ratherthan being an individual contributor, you get
to grow teams, lead teams,grow your opportunity. You'll stop getting passed
(00:43):
over because people recognize these skills asinfluential to their own success. And when
you implement them in the right way, you gain control, access power.
Now, what are these three things. I'm going to cover these three things,
and then you want to look atthese as skills and we're going to
talk about them individually. I'm justand hit with inside Strategic relations. Let's
(01:04):
start with number one, your abilityto organize people. It is so important
that you're able to organize individuals aroundsolutions, around specific results, around certain
outcomes. So I was working fora Fortune one hundred bank and we had
about forty thousand servers, and thegroup I was working with was responsible for
(01:27):
defect management. So there's hundreds ofthousands of defects. They're rated critical to
low, and these defects come fromoperating system failures, problems in the environment,
software code, application issues, awide range of things. There were
two about forty thousand servers, andthere are two groups of servers, so
(01:48):
there's Unix servers and Windows servers.Now, originally leadership wanted me to get
together all of these people. There'sabout twenty five in each group that were
leads, and each of those individualshad about fifteen to twenty people working for
them, and leadership wanted everybody onthe phone to go over this defect list
and to start rashing these out.And what I mean by rashing it rationing
(02:09):
out these defects for resolution. Andthat would have been hundreds of people on
a call. So when I talkabout the ability to organize people, it's
not about how many people you canget together, about how many followers you
have, about how many leads youhave. If you're a service business,
or how many friends you have.It's about being able to look at a
(02:30):
group of people and logically organize thesepeople to resolve the issue at hand.
So our goal was to eliminate allcritical defects in the environment. Our goal
was to reduce the amount of timeit took to solve these problems because they're
time critical. So for example,if today a bug came out, the
organization has to resolve that bug ina certain amount of days, otherwise it's
(02:52):
vulnerable to hackers. And so wealso want to organize people in a logical
way. If you threw all theUnix leads and all the Windows leads on
the phone at the same time andthey were talking about problems in their environment,
if you had an equal number ofpeople from both groups, then you
can guarantee that for every idea orevery discussion you have that at least half
(03:14):
the people on the call have nointerest in it. Because the Unix operating
system and the Windows operating systems aredifferent. The Unix operating system is a
different set of applications. The Windowsenvironment has different set of applications. A
lot of the Windows environment tended tobe more infrastructure related, and then the
Unix environment more application related, soit's even the application of the services were
(03:38):
not relevant to each other. Andso in a business environment, if you're
going to hold a meeting, youdon't want half the people on the call
to feel the meeting is useless.And so if we organize the meeting,
we would just you know, wewould rotate from topic to topic, and
so maybe people would stay interested inthe call, but we'd have hour long,
(03:58):
three hour long calls and it wouldjust be complete waste of time.
But if you organize the people andyou have one call for the Unix people
and one call for the Windows people, you now can focus at least from
a subject matter interest that everybody onthe call will receive the majority of their
time to be perceived as valuable.And so again the ability to organize people.
(04:20):
Not only did I split the groupsinto Unix versus Windows, I also
focused on the subject matter experts andthe leads for these groups. Because I
understood the organization of people, Icould better manipulate that organization to get better
results. So rather than having individualcontributors on the call, we had the
(04:41):
people who divide out the work withinthe Unix environment on the call, and
so that when I brought defects thatwere UNIX specific, they can now assign
them appropriately to the application. Now, the leadership of the organization wanted us
to get these calls together and thatwas going to be the only way we
interact. But I could easily seethat sometimes there was a specific application that
(05:04):
had problems and the other people onthe call had no problems in their environment
or their applications. So again,why do we want to have people on
a call who are not directly benefitingfrom the call. So instead of having
hundreds of people on the call,instead of even having twenty five people on
the call, sometimes I would haveindividual calls with a specific group who I
(05:26):
can tell by the defect reports arehaving a little bit of problems. Now
let's talk about the social engineering becausenumber two of the skill that you need
is the ability to maximize individual productivity. So I'm maximizing productivity by not wasting
people's time, but by meeting withpeople individually. We can talk specifically to
their problem without concern of embarrassment,without concern of peer pressure. We could
(05:48):
just bring in the subject matter expertsthat they need. And we're focusing on
maybe five or ten people on acall coming up with an issue. So
we used an issue management methodology wherewe come up with the issue, define
the root cause, develop corrective actions, and then it's focused. So there's
nobody else on that call except forthe people who want to be on the
call, who benefit from being onthe call, and then who's through the
(06:11):
productivity of that call have a directadvantage. However, there's a social engineering
element that I added. It wasbeyond what we're doing here now. I
did get criticized for having too manymeetings because me, as an individual,
had meetings every hour of the daywith different groups, and then there was
paperwork I had to do to figureout what we're going to focus on.
But again, the productivity talks foritself, and we'll talk about that shortly.
(06:33):
But I would take the success storiesfrom individual groups, and then I
also cultivated leaders among the entire population, and so we would have specialized tactical
groups that would go after kind ofthese universal defects that impacted both the UNIX
and the Windows environment. And wewould have the decision makers there and the
(06:55):
subject matter experts there in a smallwork group focusing on one problem, and
then I would take the success storiesfrom all these small meetings, and then
we'd have a larger meeting that hadjust the leads on it. Of course,
we'd have a genda written in advance, so the individuals could decide whether
or not they're going to be there, but we would then praise the successes
of individuals as they're performing things.And even more importantly, we started documenting
(07:20):
best practices, so individuals could pullfrom the library of best practices that were
developed by their peers and ultimately implementmany of these solutions so that they never
came up on a call talking aboutthe problems. Now, the complexity of
what I set up is a littlebit more than we can cover in a
podcast, and I can show youspecific application if you're in an environment where
(07:42):
you're resolving defects. But again,it didn't matter whether there are hundreds of
thousands of defects, or there areforty thousand servers, or there were a
hunt of fifty leads and thousands ofindividual contributors. We narrowed focus down to
those people who can maximize the benefit, and then we amplify and promoted the
benefit to supervisors. So here's thelast part of what I did, and
(08:05):
this is a problem solving skill,which is number three, the problem solving
skill. What we noticed is thatsome of these problems could be easily resolved
in a short time period. Sothe meantime between discovery of the problem and
the solution of the problem was shortfor some, but others it could take
months. Because we have applications.Is a very complex environment. And so
(08:30):
when leadership wanted to measure the meantimebetween failures, which is how often do
certain types of environments fail, andthen the time to resolution, which is
how quickly can we resolve the problemthat we do find, we had numbers
all over the place. So,for example, the Unix environment tended to
(08:50):
have a long period of discovery andsolving the problem, but they could roll
out the solution very quickly. There'sa lot of scripting and a lot of
server images and different things, wherethe Windows environment tend to have very short
troubleshooting because there were only a fewthings that would go wrong, and then
ultimately a very long implementation because thoseapplications had a greater impact to the larger
(09:15):
environment, and sometimes it was viceversa. And so by saying okay,
it takes a typical thirty days toresolve the problem. It ignores the fact
that in some environments you could haveninety days. And if those environments are
going to get punished for taking ninetydays when it's typical for their environment,
we're not moving forward with the resourceswe need. So the resources was the
(09:41):
problem. The business would say,Oh, well, those Unix machines are
taking too long to solve problems,and so we're going to just replace them
with Windows machines because Windows is solvingproblems so quickly. We had to not
only be able to present our reportsin a logical fashion, but we had
to present the data sets that gotus the resources to properly or appropriate to
solve the right problems so that wecould eliminate all the critical defects in the
(10:05):
environment. So I talked about bestpractices. I talked about highlighting successes so
people feel motivated to have wins.I talked about organizing people so we have
the right people on the calls.Now, what I added to this was
a senior executive meeting where we wentover success stories. So a couple leads
come in, talk about their successstories, talk about how they overcame things,
(10:28):
and then we help contextualize the metricsfor those individuals. Okay, this
is very important. We were helpingthe leadership understand that we have to measure
performance based on so I wasn't tellingthem that their measures were wrong. I
was saying, we have to measureperformance on categorization and application because of the
(10:50):
complexity was in the application, notin the operating system. Because once we
determined a best practice to solve adefect, that solution could be applied to
any server, doesn't matter the application, but the time to implement inside the
application depends on what that application isgoing through in its life cycle. Again,
very complex, but it sees threeskills of organizing people, having the
(11:15):
right people in the right place,having the right skills, and it's a
lot of cataloging, it's a lotof individual interviews, it's a lot of
or and by the way, Ihad a direct line reporting to these individuals,
primarily through a reporting system that automaticallyscanned every night to see if these
problems still existed. Okay, sowe're in an operational risk management position.
(11:37):
There's scanning software to see if theserisks still exist in the environment. And
so there's a lot of automated pressure. We had to organize people around that.
We had to increase individual productivity becauseevery day the big bosses were getting
a report that said, you stillhave these defects, and so how do
we prevent those distractions? So Idid run a lot of interference, and
(11:58):
again, organizing the executives into abriefing meeting where the leads came in and
talked about successes and talked about whatthese numbers mean helped a lot. Organizing
the individual groups so that they hadmaximum value in the calls helps a lot.
I think we got down to anhour meeting with each of the twenty
five leads by operating system, whichis two hours of meetings for me,
(12:18):
probably two hours of prep for eachmeeting, and then basically they left with
homework, assignments or success stories.And then we had one executive meeting twice
a month, which was about anhour each required about four hours of prep,
and then of course custom reporting.But again three we're solving problems and
(12:41):
executive sits down to a meeting andthey say, okay, I understand why
it takes so damn long to solvethis category of problem, and so what
we're going to do is one ofmy supervisors described as proactive preventative measures in
order to not have the problem existin the future. So we actually shift
the metrics from how often do thingsbreak or what's the time it takes to
(13:03):
fix something that breaks, to doesit stay fixed, which in hindsight is
very logical, but it was notthe initial drive from executives. Executives wanted
to have all the problems solved withno determination by priority. Where we ended
up with that when an auditor showsup, they will not find a critical
(13:26):
issue because all the critical and highissues were resolved, and then the other
issues were fixed in the configuration ofthe platform rather than the maintenance of the
platform. So as we rolled outnew servers, those new servers didn't have
any of the problems that we werefinding in previous servers, and that was
considered a success rather than how quicklycan we fix things that are broken?
(13:48):
And so again, when we're usingthese three skills and we're building the relationships
necessary to organize people and to helpindividuals be productive and to solve problems,
we now shift the thinking to thingsshouldn't break. The natural state of our
environment is not to have defects andso once we resolved the defects, we
(14:09):
eliminated the need for half of thesemeetings because there were no defects. Now,
there were no high or critical defects. There were still configuration defects and
such and such, And I didrun a model to identify which groups had
repeat defects, and we resolved thosegroups, which types of processes had repeat
defects. And that was of courseon my end. But when it came
(14:31):
to those engineers who were launching newsystems, who were configuring new environments,
who were also replacing environments over ayear or so, they were able to
make better server images, better configurationplans, and ultimately better implementation of their
work. Now, was that whatI was supposed to be solving for,
(14:52):
of course, not I was supposedto be monitoring a defect report and encouraging
these people to resolve the defects.Instead, I engineered an environment where defects
were not normal, and that normalwas a compliance system that fit both security
operating system and other types of policythat we had in the organization by design,
(15:15):
so it wasn't an afterthought. Itwas the first thing we did,
and then we went in and adaptedpolicy for best practices and then made sure
that our environment was cookie cutter.In fact, in some environments, here's
how we ended up resolving the defects. We would end up having some servers
with defects. They tended to beolder servers, and so instead of fixing
the defects, we just replaced theserver because we had a virtual environment,
(15:39):
so we didn't need a physical serveranymore. We could basically come in with
a virtual image that was the bestversion of that old server, and it
had better hardware, and it hadbetter disc access, and it had better
speed, and we would just decommissionthe old server. And so one of
the times the executive came by,I said, why you decommission so many
(16:00):
servers? And it turns out thatwe were decommissioning servers that had leases associated
with them, that had physical hardwarein the data center associated with it,
that had higher than average costs,And so they were upset why we were
decommissioning so many servers. But whenwe showed them the cost savings that were
far beyond the cost to repair,then they understood why some of those servers
(16:22):
were had the defect for one hundredand twenty days. We actually accepted the
risk, resolved what we knew bestpractices for accepted the risk, but in
parallel had a migration plan to getthose servers out of the network. So
in fact, we were eliminating defectsby eliminating defective environments. Again, that's
(16:42):
not what I was hired to do, but that is the beneficial result that
makes you indispensable. So if you'vegot a problem in your business and it
seems simple, there are ways oflooking at it, by organizing the right
people, by maximizing individual productivity,by solving the problems that need to get
solved, not the problems that theyidentified. But we're using again the issue
(17:06):
management methodology to develop a problem statement, identify root cause, and then identify
corrective actions so that we can saydo we even need to solve this problem?
You know, some of the executives, and this is critical to understand,
and I know you're facing this inyour environments, but some of the
executives wanted us to have like zeroday fixes or to have like ten day
(17:29):
fixes. When we told them thatwe weren't going to fix certain problems.
We're just going to replace the serversbecause the new version of that server doesn't
have any of these problems. Theythought we were spending money. We were,
in fact eliminating hundreds of hours ofwork by just kicking off a new
image, an image that had beentested, an image that had no defects,
(17:52):
an image that didn't require downtime inthe application, an image that we
could roll into a service pool ratherthan having to take something and shut it
down and bring it back up.When you implement these three methodologies, people
are going to look at you likeyou're crazy. Now, those in the
know, those who are being praisedfor their successes, those who are helping
you develop the implementation, they willknow that this is powerful. Executives may
(18:18):
not until you work out the communications. So ultimately, what we're doing here
is we're applying a methodology that ismaking you a powerful leader in your area.
It's not necessarily making it easy forothers to understand what you do.
So we have to and this isthe last point, we have to build
the association with the successes as youas the organizer. So these successes happen
(18:47):
when you're in charge. Therefore,we need to make you in charge of
more things. Now, I willadmit it's a lot of hard work on
my part, to organize meetings,to prep for the meetings, to write
custom reports, have to be familiarwith the technology to make it easier,
and so in this particular environment,I had to do a lot of things
that necessarily weren't necessarily in my workscope. But if I could pull up
(19:10):
a report, and I could letmy leaders in the field doing the work
pull up a report, and Imade it easy for them to find out
what needs to be done and forthem to have successes, they by de
facto turned to me for advice,turn to me for solutions. I then
can go to the other people inthe group, document their best practices,
(19:33):
and now share the best practices.Overall, we get better successes. People
who were interacting with me and thisenvironment got promoted. It built relationships for
me to find new opportunities. Itbuilt relationships with leadership for them to know
that I can get the work done. And ultimately it was three powerful skills
(19:55):
that every leader must master. It'sthe ability to organize people, the ability
to maximize individual productivity, especially thosewho are working with you, and then
solve meaningful problems. The problem solvingskills. I'm justin hit with inside strategic
relations If you want certain access andleverage in an organization, if you want
(20:15):
to be not only seen as theperson who can get things done, but
you can actually get things done,then you're in the right place. Come
join us at www dot inside strategicrelations dot com. We've got a newsletter
that shares these insights and tips.We've got a paid membership program where we
talk more in detail about your specificneeds and we apply the concept of strategic
(20:40):
relations We are transforming business relationships intoprofits. I know it's a difficult topic
to understand, but we break itdown into these bite sized chunks so that
you can implement. Start today,how are you organizing people? How are
you helping others be more productive?And then how are you solving real and
meaningful problems. Thanks for listening andI'll see you in the next podcast.
Do you want to maximize influence overyourself and the people around you? Do
you want to have a clear pathof career acceleration where you constantly get offered
new opportunities, new growth and thebest positions available out there. Well,
you're in the right place. I'mjustin hit with inside Strategic relations. If
you're tired of being passed over forraises, promotions, and other new opportunities,
(00:23):
then listen carefully. There are threethings that you must do in order
to position yourself. In fact,these are skills that help you position yourself
in a leadership position. So ratherthan being an individual contributor, you get
to grow teams, lead teams,grow your opportunity. You'll stop getting passed
(00:43):
over because people recognize these skills asinfluential to their own success. And when
you implement them in the right way, you gain control, access power.
Now, what are these three things. I'm going to cover these three things,
and then you want to look atthese as skills and we're going to
talk about them individually. I'm justand hit with inside Strategic relations. Let's
(01:04):
start with number one, your abilityto organize people. It is so important
that you're able to organize individuals aroundsolutions, around specific results, around certain
outcomes. So I was working fora Fortune one hundred bank and we had
about forty thousand servers, and thegroup I was working with was responsible for
(01:27):
defect management. So there's hundreds ofthousands of defects. They're rated critical to
low, and these defects come fromoperating system failures, problems in the environment,
software code, application issues, awide range of things. There were
two about forty thousand servers, andthere are two groups of servers, so
(01:48):
there's Unix servers and Windows servers.Now, originally leadership wanted me to get
together all of these people. There'sabout twenty five in each group that were
leads, and each of those individualshad about fifteen to twenty people working for
them, and leadership wanted everybody onthe phone to go over this defect list
and to start rashing these out.And what I mean by rashing it rationing
(02:09):
out these defects for resolution. Andthat would have been hundreds of people on
a call. So when I talkabout the ability to organize people, it's
not about how many people you canget together, about how many followers you
have, about how many leads youhave. If you're a service business,
or how many friends you have.It's about being able to look at a
(02:30):
group of people and logically organize thesepeople to resolve the issue at hand.
So our goal was to eliminate allcritical defects in the environment. Our goal
was to reduce the amount of timeit took to solve these problems because they're
time critical. So for example,if today a bug came out, the
organization has to resolve that bug ina certain amount of days, otherwise it's
(02:52):
vulnerable to hackers. And so wealso want to organize people in a logical
way. If you threw all theUnix leads and all the Windows leads on
the phone at the same time andthey were talking about problems in their environment,
if you had an equal number ofpeople from both groups, then you
can guarantee that for every idea orevery discussion you have that at least half
(03:14):
the people on the call have nointerest in it. Because the Unix operating
system and the Windows operating systems aredifferent. The Unix operating system is a
different set of applications. The Windowsenvironment has different set of applications. A
lot of the Windows environment tended tobe more infrastructure related, and then the
Unix environment more application related, soit's even the application of the services were
(03:38):
not relevant to each other. Andso in a business environment, if you're
going to hold a meeting, youdon't want half the people on the call
to feel the meeting is useless.And so if we organize the meeting,
we would just you know, wewould rotate from topic to topic, and
so maybe people would stay interested inthe call, but we'd have hour long,
(03:58):
three hour long calls and it wouldjust be complete waste of time.
But if you organize the people andyou have one call for the Unix people
and one call for the Windows people, you now can focus at least from
a subject matter interest that everybody onthe call will receive the majority of their
time to be perceived as valuable.And so again the ability to organize people.
(04:20):
Not only did I split the groupsinto Unix versus Windows, I also
focused on the subject matter experts andthe leads for these groups. Because I
understood the organization of people, Icould better manipulate that organization to get better
results. So rather than having individualcontributors on the call, we had the
(04:41):
people who divide out the work withinthe Unix environment on the call, and
so that when I brought defects thatwere UNIX specific, they can now assign
them appropriately to the application. Now, the leadership of the organization wanted us
to get these calls together and thatwas going to be the only way we
interact. But I could easily seethat sometimes there was a specific application that
(05:04):
had problems and the other people onthe call had no problems in their environment
or their applications. So again,why do we want to have people on
a call who are not directly benefitingfrom the call. So instead of having
hundreds of people on the call,instead of even having twenty five people on
the call, sometimes I would haveindividual calls with a specific group who I
(05:26):
can tell by the defect reports arehaving a little bit of problems. Now
let's talk about the social engineering becausenumber two of the skill that you need
is the ability to maximize individual productivity. So I'm maximizing productivity by not wasting
people's time, but by meeting withpeople individually. We can talk specifically to
their problem without concern of embarrassment,without concern of peer pressure. We could
(05:48):
just bring in the subject matter expertsthat they need. And we're focusing on
maybe five or ten people on acall coming up with an issue. So
we used an issue management methodology wherewe come up with the issue, define
the root cause, develop corrective actions, and then it's focused. So there's
nobody else on that call except forthe people who want to be on the
call, who benefit from being onthe call, and then who's through the
(06:11):
productivity of that call have a directadvantage. However, there's a social engineering
element that I added. It wasbeyond what we're doing here now. I
did get criticized for having too manymeetings because me, as an individual,
had meetings every hour of the daywith different groups, and then there was
paperwork I had to do to figureout what we're going to focus on.
But again, the productivity talks foritself, and we'll talk about that shortly.
(06:33):
But I would take the success storiesfrom individual groups, and then I
also cultivated leaders among the entire population, and so we would have specialized tactical
groups that would go after kind ofthese universal defects that impacted both the UNIX
and the Windows environment. And wewould have the decision makers there and the
(06:55):
subject matter experts there in a smallwork group focusing on one problem, and
then I would take the success storiesfrom all these small meetings, and then
we'd have a larger meeting that hadjust the leads on it. Of course,
we'd have a genda written in advance, so the individuals could decide whether
or not they're going to be there, but we would then praise the successes
of individuals as they're performing things.And even more importantly, we started documenting
(07:20):
best practices, so individuals could pullfrom the library of best practices that were
developed by their peers and ultimately implementmany of these solutions so that they never
came up on a call talking aboutthe problems. Now, the complexity of
what I set up is a littlebit more than we can cover in a
podcast, and I can show youspecific application if you're in an environment where
(07:42):
you're resolving defects. But again,it didn't matter whether there are hundreds of
thousands of defects, or there areforty thousand servers, or there were a
hunt of fifty leads and thousands ofindividual contributors. We narrowed focus down to
those people who can maximize the benefit, and then we amplify and promoted the
benefit to supervisors. So here's thelast part of what I did, and
(08:05):
this is a problem solving skill,which is number three, the problem solving
skill. What we noticed is thatsome of these problems could be easily resolved
in a short time period. Sothe meantime between discovery of the problem and
the solution of the problem was shortfor some, but others it could take
months. Because we have applications.Is a very complex environment. And so
(08:30):
when leadership wanted to measure the meantimebetween failures, which is how often do
certain types of environments fail, andthen the time to resolution, which is
how quickly can we resolve the problemthat we do find, we had numbers
all over the place. So,for example, the Unix environment tended to
(08:50):
have a long period of discovery andsolving the problem, but they could roll
out the solution very quickly. There'sa lot of scripting and a lot of
server images and different things, wherethe Windows environment tend to have very short
troubleshooting because there were only a fewthings that would go wrong, and then
ultimately a very long implementation because thoseapplications had a greater impact to the larger
(09:15):
environment, and sometimes it was viceversa. And so by saying okay,
it takes a typical thirty days toresolve the problem. It ignores the fact
that in some environments you could haveninety days. And if those environments are
going to get punished for taking ninetydays when it's typical for their environment,
we're not moving forward with the resourceswe need. So the resources was the
(09:41):
problem. The business would say,Oh, well, those Unix machines are
taking too long to solve problems,and so we're going to just replace them
with Windows machines because Windows is solvingproblems so quickly. We had to not
only be able to present our reportsin a logical fashion, but we had
to present the data sets that gotus the resources to properly or appropriate to
solve the right problems so that wecould eliminate all the critical defects in the
(10:05):
environment. So I talked about bestpractices. I talked about highlighting successes so
people feel motivated to have wins.I talked about organizing people so we have
the right people on the calls.Now, what I added to this was
a senior executive meeting where we wentover success stories. So a couple leads
come in, talk about their successstories, talk about how they overcame things,
(10:28):
and then we help contextualize the metricsfor those individuals. Okay, this
is very important. We were helpingthe leadership understand that we have to measure
performance based on so I wasn't tellingthem that their measures were wrong. I
was saying, we have to measureperformance on categorization and application because of the
(10:50):
complexity was in the application, notin the operating system. Because once we
determined a best practice to solve adefect, that solution could be applied to
any server, doesn't matter the application, but the time to implement inside the
application depends on what that application isgoing through in its life cycle. Again,
very complex, but it sees threeskills of organizing people, having the
(11:15):
right people in the right place,having the right skills, and it's a
lot of cataloging, it's a lotof individual interviews, it's a lot of
or and by the way, Ihad a direct line reporting to these individuals,
primarily through a reporting system that automaticallyscanned every night to see if these
problems still existed. Okay, sowe're in an operational risk management position.
(11:37):
There's scanning software to see if theserisks still exist in the environment. And
so there's a lot of automated pressure. We had to organize people around that.
We had to increase individual productivity becauseevery day the big bosses were getting
a report that said, you stillhave these defects, and so how do
we prevent those distractions? So Idid run a lot of interference, and
(11:58):
again, organizing the executives into abriefing meeting where the leads came in and
talked about successes and talked about whatthese numbers mean helped a lot. Organizing
the individual groups so that they hadmaximum value in the calls helps a lot.
I think we got down to anhour meeting with each of the twenty
five leads by operating system, whichis two hours of meetings for me,
(12:18):
probably two hours of prep for eachmeeting, and then basically they left with
homework, assignments or success stories.And then we had one executive meeting twice
a month, which was about anhour each required about four hours of prep,
and then of course custom reporting.But again three we're solving problems and
(12:41):
executive sits down to a meeting andthey say, okay, I understand why
it takes so damn long to solvethis category of problem, and so what
we're going to do is one ofmy supervisors described as proactive preventative measures in
order to not have the problem existin the future. So we actually shift
the metrics from how often do thingsbreak or what's the time it takes to
(13:03):
fix something that breaks, to doesit stay fixed, which in hindsight is
very logical, but it was notthe initial drive from executives. Executives wanted
to have all the problems solved withno determination by priority. Where we ended
up with that when an auditor showsup, they will not find a critical
(13:26):
issue because all the critical and highissues were resolved, and then the other
issues were fixed in the configuration ofthe platform rather than the maintenance of the
platform. So as we rolled outnew servers, those new servers didn't have
any of the problems that we werefinding in previous servers, and that was
considered a success rather than how quicklycan we fix things that are broken?
(13:48):
And so again, when we're usingthese three skills and we're building the relationships
necessary to organize people and to helpindividuals be productive and to solve problems,
we now shift the thinking to thingsshouldn't break. The natural state of our
environment is not to have defects andso once we resolved the defects, we
(14:09):
eliminated the need for half of thesemeetings because there were no defects. Now,
there were no high or critical defects. There were still configuration defects and
such and such, And I didrun a model to identify which groups had
repeat defects, and we resolved thosegroups, which types of processes had repeat
defects. And that was of courseon my end. But when it came
(14:31):
to those engineers who were launching newsystems, who were configuring new environments,
who were also replacing environments over ayear or so, they were able to
make better server images, better configurationplans, and ultimately better implementation of their
work. Now, was that whatI was supposed to be solving for,
(14:52):
of course, not I was supposedto be monitoring a defect report and encouraging
these people to resolve the defects.Instead, I engineered an environment where defects
were not normal, and that normalwas a compliance system that fit both security
operating system and other types of policythat we had in the organization by design,
(15:15):
so it wasn't an afterthought. Itwas the first thing we did,
and then we went in and adaptedpolicy for best practices and then made sure
that our environment was cookie cutter.In fact, in some environments, here's
how we ended up resolving the defects. We would end up having some servers
with defects. They tended to beolder servers, and so instead of fixing
the defects, we just replaced theserver because we had a virtual environment,
(15:39):
so we didn't need a physical serveranymore. We could basically come in with
a virtual image that was the bestversion of that old server, and it
had better hardware, and it hadbetter disc access, and it had better
speed, and we would just decommissionthe old server. And so one of
the times the executive came by,I said, why you decommission so many
(16:00):
servers? And it turns out thatwe were decommissioning servers that had leases associated
with them, that had physical hardwarein the data center associated with it,
that had higher than average costs,And so they were upset why we were
decommissioning so many servers. But whenwe showed them the cost savings that were
far beyond the cost to repair,then they understood why some of those servers
(16:22):
were had the defect for one hundredand twenty days. We actually accepted the
risk, resolved what we knew bestpractices for accepted the risk, but in
parallel had a migration plan to getthose servers out of the network. So
in fact, we were eliminating defectsby eliminating defective environments. Again, that's
(16:42):
not what I was hired to do, but that is the beneficial result that
makes you indispensable. So if you'vegot a problem in your business and it
seems simple, there are ways oflooking at it, by organizing the right
people, by maximizing individual productivity,by solving the problems that need to get
solved, not the problems that theyidentified. But we're using again the issue
(17:06):
management methodology to develop a problem statement, identify root cause, and then identify
corrective actions so that we can saydo we even need to solve this problem?
You know, some of the executives, and this is critical to understand,
and I know you're facing this inyour environments, but some of the
executives wanted us to have like zeroday fixes or to have like ten day
(17:29):
fixes. When we told them thatwe weren't going to fix certain problems.
We're just going to replace the serversbecause the new version of that server doesn't
have any of these problems. Theythought we were spending money. We were,
in fact eliminating hundreds of hours ofwork by just kicking off a new
image, an image that had beentested, an image that had no defects,
(17:52):
an image that didn't require downtime inthe application, an image that we
could roll into a service pool ratherthan having to take something and shut it
down and bring it back up.When you implement these three methodologies, people
are going to look at you likeyou're crazy. Now, those in the
know, those who are being praisedfor their successes, those who are helping
you develop the implementation, they willknow that this is powerful. Executives may
(18:18):
not until you work out the communications. So ultimately, what we're doing here
is we're applying a methodology that ismaking you a powerful leader in your area.
It's not necessarily making it easy forothers to understand what you do.
So we have to and this isthe last point, we have to build
the association with the successes as youas the organizer. So these successes happen
(18:47):
when you're in charge. Therefore,we need to make you in charge of
more things. Now, I willadmit it's a lot of hard work on
my part, to organize meetings,to prep for the meetings, to write
custom reports, have to be familiarwith the technology to make it easier,
and so in this particular environment,I had to do a lot of things
that necessarily weren't necessarily in my workscope. But if I could pull up
(19:10):
a report, and I could letmy leaders in the field doing the work
pull up a report, and Imade it easy for them to find out
what needs to be done and forthem to have successes, they by de
facto turned to me for advice,turn to me for solutions. I then
can go to the other people inthe group, document their best practices,
(19:33):
and now share the best practices.Overall, we get better successes. People
who were interacting with me and thisenvironment got promoted. It built relationships for
me to find new opportunities. Itbuilt relationships with leadership for them to know
that I can get the work done. And ultimately it was three powerful skills
(19:55):
that every leader must master. It'sthe ability to organize people, the ability
to maximize individual productivity, especially thosewho are working with you, and then
solve meaningful problems. The problem solvingskills. I'm justin hit with inside strategic
relations If you want certain access andleverage in an organization, if you want
(20:15):
to be not only seen as theperson who can get things done, but
you can actually get things done,then you're in the right place. Come
join us at www dot inside strategicrelations dot com. We've got a newsletter
that shares these insights and tips.We've got a paid membership program where we
talk more in detail about your specificneeds and we apply the concept of strategic
(20:40):
relations We are transforming business relationships intoprofits. I know it's a difficult topic
to understand, but we break itdown into these bite sized chunks so that
you can implement. Start today,how are you organizing people? How are
you helping others be more productive?And then how are you solving real and
meaningful problems. Thanks for listening andI'll see you in the next podcast.
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