All right. So this is rance Turley, Turley and Turley shank innovations. And I have Matt Shank here with me, man. Yeah, it’s a pretty early in the morning, but in the rest for the wicked, Huh? All right. So we wanted to talk about the importance of standardization in IT Services Bartlesville. This is one of our key points in what it is we offer businesses and it’s, it’s easy to overlook the importance just because I know I’m guilty of it takes time to write documentation, which is pretty important when you work with multiple people doing the same thing. But uh, in any case, so from a business perspective, we’d like to talk about the importance of standardization. So one of the main things, Matt, you experienced this when you first started at ascension. I mean, it wasn’t the best, but yeah, it was easier to train new hires. I mean, I was the one that trained you.
Yeah. Um, I wouldn’t say I did the best of jobs, but you know, you got, I got, we got the point across. It’s a bit of a bumpy road, but at the same time it, it was familiar for you because you came from another large company that use the same reporting tool, which, so that, that kind of ties into processes and workflows because that standardization, it was a lot easier for you to become familiar with that because that the system we are using for ticketing was it, it was standardized. Granted there were little nuances in between the two, uh, organizations, but for the most part it was pretty straight forward just to get in there and get to work. I mean, you, as far as skillset goes, um, most people tend to hire somebody with a base line of skills that in that position that they’ve hired them for.
And it’s then teaching them the processes that are standardized within that organization. So from a business perspective, you train new hires, just it’s, it goes, it may makes the difference between spending half a year, six months or you know, even a whole year for training, uh, in a new position to maybe spending six weeks. You know, it’s, yeah, if you can, it’s also an a leading by example because you’re training them and you’re showing them the stuff that you do daily. If like for in our instance it, you came in doing what I was doing, so it was really easy to just kind of throw you in there and say, okay, well this is how we do what we do. And it kind of took off after that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, feel free to jump in with your experience on the getting trained and I know you did some training with other people and other organizations, so how did that, how helpful were the processes or the standardization of what you were trying to do?
Well, the standardization of just the ticketing system made things a lot easier. I wouldn’t say that ascension fact had their Stinger dictations down as well as other places I’ve been at. So,
um, and that’s in the kind of touch on that is one thing we’ve experienced as IT Services Bartlesville is that you, you know, that the different local ministries, we were in one and then, uh, they have national, which is in a different area entirely. They, if they have standardization, if they have processes, they don’t communicate that. And that’s one of the things that is like a, a cornerstone of standardization is having this set list of processes and standards that you can communicate no matter, no matter what part of the organization they are. It’s, it applies to just, I, you know, you have this ministry over here in the eastern United States and you have one over in the western United States greeting time difference. Yes. That makes it even more important for there to be some level of standardization. So I think that’s kind of telling why we picked this one as the first topic of discussion is because we don’t, we know the importance of it and we’re not getting that in what we’re in our current positions. But with the businesses that we’ve started, we, we understand that importance and we’re building it in from the ground up. Yeah. So we can avoid those pitfalls that we, uh, we’ve, I mean, honestly, we encounter them every single day. The importance of standard, oh, go ahead.
Well, I think that, you know, the first importance of that is just the fact that, you know, somebody with a basic skillset should be able to come in, look at documentation, read documentation and proof form
almost anything there is to perform in that role. So with things being standardized as far as just documentation and basic software goes, I mean, they should be able to look that up. That’s why it’s so important for us to write that stuff out, to have a ticketing system, to try to get everybody on the same, you know, version of their operating system.
yeah. And our, our experience from the business perspective is still in the IT Services Bartlesville. I mean, we are a part of a technology services deal for a large multinational or multi or just national company. And those, we experience some aspects of it with, like you’ve said, certain levels of, uh, operating system and a software, well, softwares kind of iffy because it’s just an amalgamation of different hospitals that just came together and said, okay, what’s it’s standardization has been an afterthought. And we see the, we see how that works out kind of in the medium run. I don’t think they’re in what would be considered the longer on yet. And it’s not something we want to experience. Yeah.
It makes it very difficult for, um, if there’s an issue to find out who can help with the issues, you know, kind of who owns the application because we may use one application where, you know, 50 miles away they’re using something completely different. So,
yeah. And that, that, that kind of
tours with the expectations of who we’re working with because they, they can ask two different people get two different answers, especially with this large of an organization. Yeah. So, well, let’s, let’s, uh, let’s, let’s make it positive now. Let’s talk about the Tsi Perspective on the importance of standardization. So I’ve got some notes here. One of the first things I want to talk about was documentation. And I’ve, that’s one of the things that we both sat down and talked about was how important it is to document everything we do. I even offered a suggestion of using this, uh, recording software. So if you’re doing work on the computer like, like you were doing, um, I haven’t, haven’t seen the videos yet, but you are, you have basically laid the foundation for training with our networking equipment. Yup. So kind of touch on that a little bit. Tell me, tell me what, um, how, where do you see this going as far as what you’ve done and how documenting this process is working into our overall business?
MMM, mmm.
Business. What am I looking for a strategy?
Well, the Nice thing about it is as we grow, um, you know, or even not, let’s cut out even the growing part that between you and me, um, as I on network gear or you work on server staff, we’re able to, um, watch these videos between each other and have that kind of foundation laid along with some written out documentation and screenshots, et cetera. Um, that helps both of us and move forward without, you know, at more of an excel pace instead of,
um, I mean we can
without the documentation and maybe, I mean, we ran into that just what a couple of weeks ago there was, the documentation wasn’t right at a client site and we spent more time digging up correct passwords are correct IP addresses or correct software, et Cetera, et Cetera, et cetera. Then it should have taken, we probably spent a good eight to 16 hours extra on just that stuff instead of just getting the equipment out that we needed to deploy. So, and that’s one of the first things were hitting with this client is just, um, making sure that all their documentations correct because, um, if anybody else ever needs to step in, we’re able to just hand them all of our data and say, look, here it is.
Yeah. And it’s, it’s most certainly a professional courtesy. I mean, there, I’ve heard of other come other service providers that don’t provide that documentation when there is a switch of service and it’s, it’s, it, it hinders the client more than anything. And we’re in a service based industry. That’s not something that we, it’s almost vindictive to not document and you know, we being the type of people, we are not okay with that. Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons we’re in the service based industry is because we have and our knowledge and our skill sets and we like to apply those to our clients in a way that they, they don’t have access to a lot of these people. A lot of the smaller businesses around here are typically, they either have like a one man it shop or they, they just use somebody who knows a little bit about setting an iPhone alarm or something.
They’re having them configure their network. So that’s just one of those things that you have to be mindful of because it’s not, it’s, you have to make yourself sit down and do it. It’s not that I’m, I’m guilty of this, have been guilty of this, not documenting the steps I take to remediate a problem that, I mean whenever I look up documentation for or resources and trying to fix something, it’s like spot checking the Internet. I mean you’re looking at, well I look at probably about 10 different sources of information and see if any of it even remotely fits. And you know, that takes time. Kind of like you said, the whole lack of documentation at this client has caused us a lot of, I don’t want to say wasted time, it’s ill, it’s time that could be better spent making sure that they’re getting the type of service we need.
But this, this kind of falls into this is why we do what we do. We want to take care of our clients. And that’s really what happened with this client. They, they, I mean, I’m sure they were appreciative, very appreciative of that effort to gather the documentation and make sure everything was right. And you know, we’re in the process right now of redoing that documentation. Yeah. And the part of that was also, excuse me, was the procedures for remediating problems. Because I know with, uh, like for example, setting up some emails, I think you had to, what did you pull the information from an existing set up? Or was it, did you actually get that information from the other it person?
Um, actually, um, it was station that was correct. So I have to look at that. Um, when it came to passwords, luckily on setting up the email, they had used Google chrome and saved the password. So I was able to see it that way. Um, and then it was kind of just trial and error. So until I could get the get outlook to, to connect with their email servers. So which shouldn’t have taken that long. It took probably 55 minutes longer than it should.
Yeah. And that’s that right there. I mean, we’re going to instill a culture of documenting things with them and they’re gonna. I mean, it’s just kind of how we’d, if we were to own a business outside of it services, then this is what we would expect for the it person to do is document everything. I want to be able to look and see what is, how things are configured and I may not understand it, but I know that having that information is extremely important. Especially when you have, you know, five, 10 15 vendors coming in that need access to your network or a server or workstations, any, anything like that. Well that’s also, you know,
he did jump off on a side note here. Just also the importance of having a ticketing system. So when we correctly resolve an issue and we update the ticket with the correct notes, then we’re able to look back at those notes if the problem is to arise again. And instead of me like at rants goes out and he’s trying to fix something I fix before but it’s on a different machine, it’s a lot easier for him to get on there and just type in a search and find that resolution than trying to figure it out on his own or trying to nail me down for five minutes trying to explain it. So,
yeah, most definitely in that kind of leads into the next point that, um, ease of support and monitoring because having a, it’s not like true documentation. Well it can be depending on how the notes are set up. But yeah, it’s, it’s definitely, I can’t imagine any MSPs out there that aren’t, that don’t have a ticketing system. If they don’t, then they’re probably in the wrong industry because that’s a huge part of just really keeping track of what you’re doing. If I could see like a small break fix, not really using the, using a ticketing system because other than for pure documentation, I mean it’s, it’s kind of like a cliff notes of a network set up or software setup or anything like that.
Yeah. But you still want those notes for that asset that you have. So you know what’s changed on it. Yes. That documentation
most certainly. Yeah. We see, we understand the importance of that ticketing system. It’s been beaten into our heads. I know that, um, we used one ticketing system. It was okay. It was actually what they used at your, uh, other business at the, your first organization before you came to the hospital. It was a BMC remedy and it just, it didn’t fit the needs that they had for their procedures and the workflows that they had in place. So we transitioned to service now and I, you heard myself and another mentioned yesterday that when we transition, there was a lot of work that had to be done to kind of cut down on the work that wasn’t being done because of that inadequate ticketing system. Yeah, yeah. That took, yeah, what did we say, six months? That was a, that was a heck of a time. But so, and uh, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about monitoring because we use a tool that lets us make comments on, it’s kind of like one step below.
Mm. Excuse me. Below, um, the ticketing system. We can put comments in on a machine and it’s, I mean, it’s just more documentation. It’s, we’re kind of, we probably need to set like a central point of where this documentation will live. Well, I guess you’ve done that with Dropbox and Dropbox is great because you can log in anywhere and boom, there’s everything you need access to. So it’s really simple. It’s, you know, the cloud, the cloud is there and looming and does what it does as far as making sure everybody has access to everything they need. So yeah. Um, monitor. So what’s your been, what has been your experience so far with the monitoring aspect of standardization?
Oh, I love it. Um, I’m sure there’s a lot more that we will learn to implement IT Services Bartlesville as we find out different clients meetings. But, um, just the whole, no one what’s going on with the machine. Um, no one, the asset now on the Ip addresses now one, um, who’s logged in, what patches are on the machines, what software’s installed on the machines, uh, being able to just remotely take over the machine and there’s that, there’s just tons of benefits to it. So
yeah, it’s kind of like, it’s that definitive tool that turns a shop from break fix into a different type of entity entirely. Because yes. Just like you, like you mentioned the reporting, we get reports every day. I’m sure anybody who uses this tool is familiar with that or any, there’s a number of them out there, but it makes management just, it actually makes it possible. I mean, outside of that it’s, I don’t even know if there’s anything that comes close to except for like running a server and constant powershell scripts that pull data every so often. But it’s, it’s an integral part of the documentation because we can, we can really see where everything is at a glance rather than kind of like having to spot check everything. So it’s, it’s a wonderful tool to have that just makes our jobs so much easier and that’s, that makes the customer the client’s happy. I mean that’s like I said this while we do this. Yeah, it is a big, it’s a loaded word, just like cloud services. I mean that’s, you can’t really, it’s hard to differentiate if outside, but if you’re within its, it’s very car compo, a compartmentalized and everything. Makes Sense. So,
well, I think there’s a lot of these businesses too that don’t, since I’ve never operated at, you know, a fortune 500 company level, they don’t have a lot of these tools available to them. And not that, not only that, they don’t even know these processes that can benefit their infrastructure so much.
Yeah. And they, in one thing we’ve kind of seen is it’s, people don’t really understand how it services can be leveraged to really help them do what they do. It’s like, it’s like an uphill battle. You have to get what you’re worth is kind of the, the um, buzzword or buzz phrase that you hear when it comes to MSP or anything. It really, if you’re starting a business as an it provider in any respect, it’s other than Isp, I think you’re kind of, nobody knows what it is that you, you do. So yeah, it’s an uphill battle to really carve out your, in your spot in that market or that niche and say, this is why you need me. And eventually it becomes self evident, you know, once, once if you’re lucky enough to get a client or two and then they start to see, oh wow, you know, I’m a business, I’m a office of 15 people, but I’m getting access to workflow automation and server backups and a web application monitoring and you know, things you don’t typically associate with things you would associate with like a fortune 500 company. But that’s kind of what we want to bring to a bunch of these businesses here. And I think there’s absolutely no reason that a small business wouldn’t look at that and say, I that, that should, that will work for me or I’d like to implement some of that.
Well, and I think what a lot don’t realize initially is how much money they’ll actually say in the long run. Like we were talking again on the clients and you know, they have roughly probably 15 machines, but that are assigned to 15 different people that realistically, there’s only about four people using machines at any given time. So by have 15 machines there. Yeah. So again, back to if we had a standardized, uh, machine oh s login, um, software and then, um, procedures that because all these people do the same job, um, we could put that on five machines, take out the other 10,
and
they would all have access and doesn’t matter what machine they sit out there always going to have all their, their software, their documents, their basically their abilities to perform their job on every one of those machines. So again, back to the standardization part. So
yeah. And on top of that, you know, were limit words, lowering their overhead.
Yeah. That’s what I mean by saving money. Yeah. They’re not having to keep up with 10 other machines there
and we ask questions that from an it perspective, like, I mean they, they probably weren’t even aware that they needed or that they could have pared down on those machines. Did, I mean, sure. I’m sure that they mentioned something about that to you and you said, oh yeah, this is possible. Did they know that something like that was that that was a possibility?
I am not for sure. I know I’m the one that brought it up first, that that goes back in to, you know, some of the other conversations we had about where we saw this kind of going into the future about adding different equipment and servers and stuff like that. So yeah, their, their eyes lit up and we got into that conference.
Excellent. We’re in the business of making people happy. It’s not typical with it, but that’s what we do
well, you know, and it’s not only that they can allocate that space that’s in there too. Maybe there’s something else, you know? Yeah. In Shane’s take up a lot of area.
Yeah. And they’re not, they’re not in a very large area to begin with. I mean, they have a good, it’s a decent size area, but it could be better served. Yeah. So, well, I’ve, I think we’ve touched on most of the, most of our points on the importance of standardization. You, can you think of anything else that you’d like to add?
No, I think that touches on everything. Documentation, documentation, documentation first. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Most,
certainly in the IT Services Bartlesville processes that you implement to basically create expectations that somebody can follow. And it’s, it’s benchmarking too. You can sit there and say, is this person following these processes? Okay. Do we want to spend time working with this person to make sure they’re following these processes? Yeah. So yeah, it’s standing at the importance of standardization applies to all aspects of business. And we’ve talked about a few here, but, well it’s, you know, you can search and find all different other types of resources on this topic. Um, we’re not experts on the matter, but we do have experience on our side. Yeah. So, well, I guess that concludes this podcast. I’m Matt. Thanks for calling in and it sounds like it’s raining outside, so maybe you can go there. Yeah, you could go streaking and have a, have a cheap shower. Alright man. Alright. Talk to you later.