Get ready for a rewind of our March 21st episode
where we kick things off with the latest drama
between Trump and Musk. After that, we dove deep
into the complexities of process debt, questioning
if the systems we rely on at work are fundamentally
broken. A couple months have passed and the fast
friends have quickly become enemies. And at this
point, it looks like Musk is the one that is
being chewed up more. Hey, what's up, Toby? We
are to episode 24 of the process debt. podcast.
I don't even know where to go. I mean, we were
I mean, we got well, 24, you know, Elon is is
running amok in the government. Oh, wait, I thought
he was fixing things. I don't know. I'm not sure.
I didn't understand is is when you hire your
your politicians that you just bought and paid
for to promote your product and your stock goes
down. What's that tell you? I don't understand
what that message is for the market. I don't
know, man. But my pay grade, maybe. He's doing
a bang -up job, though, of really showing how
value is created or not to all of his Tesla shareholders.
Yeah, it's very interesting. Very interesting
stuff. We should probably spend a couple to talk
about Doze, because I think the short -term the
the busyness There's a lot of value for a lot
of people. Yeah And you know the impact The long
-term impact like how does that how does that
play? But let's not talk about that today. We
should we should we're such a tease, man You're
throwing I am for our listeners in Romania. I
know shout out. They're gonna Now I know Next
session. Okay. I know they're not gonna listen
to us. We're not gonna have anybody in you know
In Romania, no more Romanian listeners. It's
terrible. I do appreciate the folks in Grayson
though. That's sticking out with us. There you
go All right, so you had an idea. Yeah. My topic
was people have racy's right? So responsible
accountable on Consulted and informed they have
them but they don't always know what it means.
No, no your acronym. Yeah, it is a familiar acronym
and I Don't I've seen that people bristle against
it. I probably, maybe that's because I bristle
against it. Yeah. You put it, you give out what
you want back and yeah. It's like, I don't want
to be responsible or accountable. But the thought
here is like on the software side, which is where
I believe most process debt lives. Yeah. Not
because the systems are bad, but because the
people don't understand what those. what those
systems are for like do are we stuck with crappy
systems yeah because we don't have a baseline
for what those systems are supposed to do yeah
and i guess a question you you know this is not
your first rodeo well i've been a circus clown
for years what's the what's the worst system
that you've stepped into I'll tell you, it's
also probably one of the most popular. It's SAP.
I've been involved with a number of, a dozen
plus ERP systems. There's a whole variety, right?
SAP and Oracle are probably the two most common
kind of broad base use cases. But the difficulty
with these very complex systems is that the configuration
requirements are so high. Yeah. And to do meaningful
configuration assumes you understand how your
process works. Yeah. And oh, yes. Right. And
so that you and I have chatted offline at times
about just. they have a core piece of software
and it's like financial software and then they
keep adding other crap onto it and they acquire
other companies to keep showing growth. And the
difficulty is that a client gets a singular idea
in their mind that the three -letter acronym
SAP solves everything. This magical panacea and
life will be grand and greener and they're not
gonna do anything. Is it like Henry Ford's? Model
T, where you can get it in any color, as long
as it's black. Well, therein lies the irony,
right? I would say well over half the big ERP
systems. One of the early conversations is always,
you know, it's costly to update when you do more
configurations. There's all this additional testing
and, you know, the more you integrate it and
really try to make it a lifeblood system in your
business, every step along the way, just there's
more care and maintenance. Yeah, every you know
again over half say we're just gonna keep it
vanilla Reality is Reality is and maybe the title
of this podcast is nobody likes vanilla, but
You know the reality is that a vanilla based
system It lacks any of the nuance that so many
of our businesses require Yeah, you know a service
business and a product business can use the same
software, but they have to have certain considerations
But what about you? What's the what's the you
know? It's it's interesting like I think in my
career I've actually never worked to the company
that had SAP. Well, you're not good. I know I'm
getting better as they would say in Monty Python
I've I've worked with a lot of really good software
that has just been hacked So this is just not
usable. And so I think the Atlassian Suite oftentimes
can lend itself to, you know, someone had a bright
idea to add a custom field and, you know, someone
else had a bright idea to add a custom field
and a thousand fields later, you're stuck with
which, which, what's the due date? I'm scrolling.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting because
I think most people don't realize that to add
to anything, like any single software, adding
is so easy and oftentimes it's so wrong and you
can almost never take it away. No. Like if you
look at our wrists, we have all these bones on
our wrists. What are they for? We're not really
sure. That's right. But they were added. They're
really hard to take away. I'm not experimenting
with that. I'll take your word for that. But
you're right. It does seem like it's easier to
add layers. And typically when process changes,
we do our best to offer some measure of change
control, but then we tweak what's in place. And
there's a whole host of really good arguments
for doing that. To do a wholesale tearout. have
a process is expensive and can put your businesses
at risk. Talk to me about, there's probably some
elements, maybe it's not an ugly acronym like
RACI, but there's some elements that when you
bring this up and thinking about how SOC plays
a role in organizational process, what are some
of those elements that come to mind? Yeah, I
think there's workflow, right? So you've got
Jira Service Management, you've got Zendesk,
you've got reporting, which, and I delineate
between reporting and analysis. Whereas reporting
is something that's delivered on a regular basis
from a system, it doesn't change. Whereas analysis
is single, one time, and can't be reproduced.
However, within business, that is a nuanced thing
that most people don't understand. In that like,
an executive asked for something, and they get
delivered something that's subpar or semi -made
up. But now the executive says, we want you to
reproduce this. And so it gets reproduced, right?
That's right. And then I think there's a prediction
component or prediction slash roadmap. Like how
do we do things? And then planning. And then
the other the last thing that kind of gets lost
is status updates like I've been thinking a lot
about like how many tools we use and how we use
them and It's crazy. Like we literally don't
realize that probably in a given day. We probably
touch 30 to 40 different tools Like like what's
email for yeah Like it's not it like and what
where this stuff breaks down oftentimes is you
see you see You see Excel being your reporting
slash analytics slash workflow slash everything
tool because it's flexible. Yeah. And then you
have email being the planning notification. And
yet the email, I don't think email was ever meant
for that. No. In that way, we're kind of like
cavemen, right? We've got a stick and a rock
and we use them to hunt and we use it for a pillow
and It's our toy and entertainment. It's just,
we don't have other alternatives. You're right.
I personally use email as really kind of my hub
of communications and tracking. It does have
some of those fundamental things like reminders,
but in any given day I may use email and provide
updates inside of a shared piece of software.
and use Slack and text and then all the variety
of mean platforms that we use now. Well, and
one of the things to think about as you're thinking
about process debt is we are oftentimes being
sucked into these like time suck warps, meaning
if you go into your email. Are you focused? Oh
no, it's just a distracting area of landmines.
Oh, and then you just got a text on your phone.
Why am I playing Angry Birds now? Like, you know
what I mean? Like, there's this really weird
thing where it's like, where does the work live?
Like, where's my process? Where's my workflow?
And the thing is, is like, we just don't talk
about it. And so we all assume that we're right.
and we're all doing it differently, you know,
and our core tenets of like, is it discoverable
and is it transferable? Right. We actually don't
know, but we believe it is. And that therein
lies the problem. Yeah. Yeah. For a country of
less religious folks, we have a high degree of
faith that things will magically happen. Oh,
yeah. You know. And when it comes to process,
we take the handoff from person upstream and
then we give it to the next person downstream
and we walk away and said we did our job, but
that's not a finished thing. We've gotten so
expert, especially in larger organizations that
we rarely see a transaction tip to tail. Yeah,
for sure. I don't know that we've talked on this,
but I've been... recently doing some work around
real estate renovation for a client. Yeah. And
this is an opportunity to really see in a very
physical way what happens when those handoffs
break. Yep. You know, what happens if you don't
get your permits or inspections or what happens
if the cement guy shows up and nobody's there
to see him and get stuff poured? Like so many
places stuff breaks. But I think in our digital
corporate world. There's not that same sense
of urgency. We don't have the weather beating
on us to keep us focused and on the timeline
and so things kind of drift, you know Yeah, well
and the other thing is like the just definition
of done oftentimes is unclean like You know where
and I think you know, one of the things that
we've talked about is like, what are you doing?
Are you just drafting something up then just
do a crappy video? Like that's and and then we'll
figure out if it will figure out if it's important.
Yeah later Yeah. Well, I think, you know, on
this on this notion of is there a racy for software,
where should the technology be the the system
of record? Oh, yeah, for sure. That's that kind
of accountable piece. Where is it consulted?
And so oftentimes we took put process into technology.
But then when we build out the access model,
we strip out people that need to consult the
very data we capture. And so now we've. We've
artificially separated them and made their lives
harder. But then the informed piece too, back
to reporting and analytics, they are not the
same. Oh, it's interesting. I think it would
be very, not that you could do this, but if every
single report, you just simply had a stamp of
this is a one -time analysis. or this is repeatable.
And what you would find, I think what you would
find is you would find that most processes are
driven from a report down versus a process up.
You're talking hierarchically in the organization.
Something's missing in a report and therefore
we need to add this thing to the report. And
so then we manufacture that into our process.
And the process is really good until they ignore
the report. But the report lives on for decades.
But that process either stops, there's entropy,
or you get a who's on first type thing where
it's like, I don't know who's doing the report.
It just magically shows up in the spreadsheet.
And they realize that that data is stale from,
you know, 94 or something like that. Chris, that
we're coming up on the end of time. And so one
of my favorite memes going around right now is
a guy's girlfriend is losing her mind. And he
comes to him and says, hey, I can't keep up with
all the laundry. You know, the house is a mess.
He's like, oh, wait, wait, come here. Let me
show you. He walks her into the laundry room
and he says, I just dumped my dirty laundry in
this basket. And a day later, it shows up in
my dresser and it's clean and folded. And you
can see you're like starting to boil. And he's
like, come into the kitchen. I leave my crap
all over. But when I walk away, it gets cleaned
up and it's back in the cupboards. And I think
that people kind of expect process to work like
that, you know? If I ignore it long enough, somebody
else will, magically, the fairies will come in
and they'll fix it. You know, they'll put things
back in the proper places. So, yes. And the closer
you get to the root of whatever it is, it's just
nuanced. So nuanced. And like it takes so much
like I like it takes so much of that slow thinking
of like, why do we want this? How do we use this?
Right. Which is why like any time. Anytime someone
asked me about a report I'm like or creating
specifically a new report like I had someone
asked me today I was like they were like hey,
I need to create this report and I was like do
it as simple and as easy as you can and If it
gets used they will tell you if you want more
information Yeah, and then you will find that
the information that you're providing is not
that good and so you're gonna have to clean it
up But the reality is is they're probably not
gonna want to clean it up And so it's significantly
easier to ask for more and more reports and more
metrics that you don't have to think about. And
so in some ways it becomes this easy out for
management. There's nothing more frustrating,
and I like data, but there's nothing more frustrating
than just grinding and being asked to deliver
data, delivering data and have it be dismissed.
because the data doesn't match the confirmation
bias that they want, so. Yeah, that must be wrong
because that's not what I thought. There you
go. Hey, you know what? I think on our 24th session,
we may have just created the longest piece. Oh,
love it. Yeah, this podcast also not brought
to you by the assholes at Fabletics. That's correct.
We do not like them. They're not our favorite.
All right, dude, we will catch you next week,
man. It's a deal. All right, thanks.