410- Not Everything Needs a Ticket w/Tim Armstrong

Mike Kelley: 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.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. Good morning, Tim Armstrong. I'm the manager of it here at Pro Con and lovely Hooksett, 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 ninety days now and it's been quite a ride so far. We come from a, fifteen to twenty years of it background from tinkering with the family VCR as a wee lad to now managing an IT department.

Mike Kelley: Cool. And, you had some experience, where was the, prior location at you because you were there for like seven years. Tell me a little about that experience.

Tim Armstrong: 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.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. The, LinkedIn stalking I did, I believe I saw that you went from that it, project management into it project or not project, but IT manager. Correct. So how, what did you do that helped you transform from running the projects to running the department and having somebody, I assume, help you continue to run the projects?

Tim Armstrong: 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 the biggest factor to help get from there to here. 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 eighteen months. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go through the team development stages, storming, norming, the whole nine, right. 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 and repeating some of those, positively contributing factors really helped get us from where we started three months ago to how operationally savvy we are now.

Mike Kelley: Karen, you talk about some of that makes me think of the Phoenix Project. Oh, yeah.

Tim Armstrong: Absolutely.

Mike Kelley: And the project management and the aspects of how wide of a, conversation or a topic that is, and how many different variables, 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?

Tim Armstrong: Whatever worked 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 past the agile approach is the, the best approach. So fitting in the pieces where they work. Some things must be sequentially. I 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.

Mike Kelley: 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 that.

Tim Armstrong: 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 the whole crux of it. We've recently deployed one here at Procon 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 overcommitted. 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 twenty twenty six looks like when 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 twenty bananas of work per two week sprint. We know that these projects are going to take, one hundred 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 stand ups. 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.

Mike Kelley: So okay, now back towards that, bringing a value I t 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 thoughts about that communication about how to manage up on those strategies.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah, we actually probably shouldn't have used bananas. I'm not a big banana guy. I would much rather oranges or Milky Ways.

Mike Kelley: But with the four month old, you're going to have to mash up some bananas.

Tim Armstrong: 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, it's something that will align with organizational strategy.

Mike Kelley: being three months in, how did you build that trust? I mean, there's a certain amount of it that they're just giving you because they hired you. Right. But but there's always still, it kind of depends on your predecessor and those that tread before you because you're under their shadow for a while until you show them a new sun, so to speak.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. 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.

Mike Kelley: 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 one hundred percent coverage for everybody in your organization, or was it the data centers protected and you happen to be within the the data center realm? So you had power, you had lights up because I've seen organizations do both.

Tim Armstrong: 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 our ups's are in good shape. We have the necessary redundancies. In theory, nothing should happen. We do have a, failover, internet should 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.

Mike Kelley: So yeah. Good job. Yeah. any other things for the ninety day horizon. What's it been like in that ninety days?

Tim Armstrong: 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 job site two weeks ago and I got to see them just doing demolition and what that entails, which I think, excavator break the whole building down, smoosh it up, put it in a dumpster, and you're done. Of course, that's not that easy. And it it's 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 like modeling programs we use, it's incredible. And then seeing the final product was at a site yesterday, seeing what the final product looks like after a year and a half of hard work. That's been the most interesting part of the past approximately ninety days, but definitely, something that's going to be built on.

Mike Kelley: 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.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. I can call out two different examples. And the first being our, BIM folks, our 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. and 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, follow a plan and spray out the layout versus just having a robot do it that could do it with near perfection.

Mike Kelley: that is something that I hadn't heard of, but makes complete sense. I mean, it's.

Tim Armstrong: Like a spray paint.

Mike Kelley: Roomba. Yeah. It's leaving the mess instead of picking it up, but.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. Right.

Mike Kelley: 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 ESI that individual contributor into the leadership role?

Tim Armstrong: Ooh that's a good one. I like that question, though, because There are certain aspects of my previous role that I miss and Right off the bat, 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, our leader of our department, she meant truly mentored me through my leadership career. She's the reason I lead the department, the way I lead the department. She's the reason why I do a lot of 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 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 product. 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. Eighteen 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.

Mike Kelley: 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 is 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.

Tim Armstrong: Sure. So we're a department of four. Okay. 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 design build company, right? So everything happens in-house. All the collaboration must happen in sync, in unison together. 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 the business. Certainly better than I could. Certainly better than most good. Having that resource is critical.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, it sounds like the 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 solution. so for on your team, including you.

Tim Armstrong: Correct.

Mike Kelley: Okay. And then the other ones, how many knowledge workers?

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. we have, one hundred and seventy five 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, 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.

Mike Kelley: Are you guys subcontracting out the rest of that work, the construction, those kinds of pieces? Or is that stuff that you have? Because I assume that there's a large chunk of that staff that is not using the computer every day. They've got the tool belts and they're running the cables, they're doing those pieces of it.

Tim Armstrong: But yeah, I mean, there'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 so they can access their email and payroll. And it's proven interesting to manage, a remote workforce, even if that workforce is still within an hour and a half of headquarters.

Mike Kelley: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. We've got the truck drivers. So and they all get a device. And of course, there's all of the sensors and everything on the tractors themselves. But they're not getting like corporate email and they don't have the true account that way. However, they, I'd love.

Tim Armstrong: To.

Mike Kelley: Pick your brain about those devices. 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 that you wish the industry or that the industry would retire forever. What's something that we can get rid of?

Tim Armstrong: 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 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 hyper converged versus, whatever X, Y, Z. But I'll never claim to have enough to fully integrate that top to bottom.

Mike Kelley: So especially management and above.

Tim Armstrong: Exactly. So being able to be a resource for those doing that and 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.

Mike Kelley: 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 the answers immediately. it's exactly 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 infrastructure. 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 to, 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 I guarantee that that conversation has probably already had.

Tim Armstrong: I feel like you can 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 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 the policies and texts behind using AI is something that I was tasked 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.

Mike Kelley: 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 its enterprise?

Tim Armstrong: I'd like to put my blinders on and say one hundred percent of it is enterprise, right? But we need to accept the reality of the situation where that's likely not the case. we have, of course, leveraged copilot, and we, of course, leverage ChatGPT. We're primarily a Microsoft House. So leveraging copilot is kind of its 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 CEO 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.

Mike Kelley: Okay. anything else you want to bring up on the topic or questions or thoughts on AI?

Tim Armstrong: 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 eighteen months looks like in the world of it. And I'll give myself my own 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 New 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 in eighteen months from now, we're going to be seeing a different landscape, more of the oh, no, what have we done? Right? More of the we did not put the appropriate guardrails into place.

Mike Kelley: 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 brought up Claude AI and, the singularity. So we talked about the Terminator effect, the singularity. And, I've started to hear the singularity referred to in a different way than like the Terminator effect or the matrix thing, where the computers decide that the best thing for humanity is to control it versus, to continue to augment it. Minute. but now I'm hearing singularity of more towards augmentation and changing that way. any personal thoughts or feelings towards said singularity?

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. If, AI told me what to do every day, it certainly would make my life a whole lot easier. But 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, vibe coding and all that. And recently I 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 need to put the humanity back in technology, leveraging AI, leveraging 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.

Mike Kelley: 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.

Tim Armstrong: Right.

Mike Kelley: yeah, our little Roomba going around leaving a trail of paint on the, how many, technologies like that does Procon have? Are they playing with any of that stuff? Or because I assume that that was at the conference, not something that Procon has.

Tim Armstrong: 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 are. 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.

Mike Kelley: 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.

Tim Armstrong: But there's like a.

Mike Kelley: Cost.

Tim Armstrong: 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 the process. It saves a ton of money and ultimately makes people happy.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And it gets your customer what they want.

Tim Armstrong: Exactly.

Mike Kelley: Interesting and fun to play with.

Tim Armstrong: 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.

Mike Kelley: what do you think it gets wrong? And, that's an obvious thing that that we get wrong. that for some reason lots of us haven't learned.

Tim Armstrong: 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.

Mike Kelley: Okay. So it's not necessarily that tickets are bad, it's that the prioritization of making the consumer provide the documentation prior to work happening.

Tim Armstrong: And that's how you move away from being a cost center and into a strategic part of the organization.

Mike Kelley: But how do you balance that against your sprints and your twenty bananas for the week?

Tim Armstrong: 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. That's part of building velocity and that's part of understanding. John may only be responsible for ten 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 a senior systems administrator and Jack may only be able to take twenty, 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 ten 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.

Mike Kelley: 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?

Tim Armstrong: 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 incredibly successful thus far. As part of my thirty days, my first thirty days at Procon, 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. 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 a platform for those to share their, 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.

Mike Kelley: Nice. random. what was your first computer?

Tim Armstrong: my first computer was an already outdated compact that came in the. Do you remember the boxes that were in the cow print?

Mike Kelley: Oh.

Tim Armstrong: Yeah. Like the commercial. I I'm going way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be dating myself. But I guess we're dating myself now.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, a little bit. At least you didn't have to deal with Betamax and Yeah, probably slightly.

Tim Armstrong: Before my time.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Probably didn't remember when we went from the four channels to a cable.

Tim Armstrong: No. Yeah, that would be slightly before my time for sure. I remember hearing all about it. if I gotta 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.

Mike Kelley: 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? that was something else that we talked about. So, let's switch into that for a minute. Let's talk about mentorship.

Tim Armstrong: Right?

Mike Kelley: So tell me a little about that mentorship. And what would you want to tell that aspiring person who's listening to us and has not yet an IT manager, let alone a director or a chief information.

Tim Armstrong: 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 needing, then you've already positioned yourself not only as somebody who is forward thinking, but you're positioning yourself as a leader and understanding how leaders think, how our technology leaders think. If you're able to say, hey, I know VMware is coming end of life or I know VMware's got bought out, Brought 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 we're taking apart a computer building one. Don't forget those things, but also keep the humanity in it as well.

Mike Kelley: how many of those mentors or those leaders that you listen to, or learn from had nothing to do with it?

Tim Armstrong: Oh, 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 I was in my previous organization. I would say she would not be the best technical example, even though, she truly is and doesn't give herself enough credit.

Mike Kelley: 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 one mouth in proportion.

Tim Armstrong: Exactly. And she was one where and this is something I carry through, but she's the one that kind of helped me keep the humanity in things. And she's the one that always defined project management as much so, if not more of an art as it is a science, 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 have or you don't. And she helped instill that in me, and that's something I certainly carry with.

Mike Kelley: 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 with 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.

Tim Armstrong: Absolutely appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. and all of you listening, please leave a comment, put some stars or a like or a thumbs up or whatever at your, podcast collection aggregator and let us know how we're doing. And by all means, come by the, youvebeenheard.com and check us out. we're at it community for I t know vendors and just nerds and geeks helping nerds and geeks out. So have a wonderful day. Thanks, everyone.