HS068: What’s the Point of Having a Tech Strategy?

What does having a tech strategy actually do for an organization? In today’s episode, Greg and Johna highlight how a good tech strategy benefits a company: creates a foundation of first principles, reduces bias in vendor decisions, better allocates human resources, kills bad ideas, sunsets projects, and makes meetings a little more enjoyable and harmonious. Plus, Greg teaches us what “bike shedding” and “tar traps” are.

Episode Transcript

This episode was transcribed by AI and lightly formatted. We make these transcripts available to help with content accessibility and searchability but we can’t guarantee accuracy. There are likely to be errors and inaccuracies in the transcription.

Johna Till Johnson (00:00:00) – Hello, everybody. I’m Johna Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, here with my co-host Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers. And we are Heavy Strategy, the show that strives to give you the right questions but not the right answers. Today we’re going to talk about the whole concept of an IT strategy and a technology strategy. What the heck is the point? And Greg, I think this is something that you will do a fantastic job on because both you and I agree that the actual point of a technology strategy is negative, and maybe you want to jump in and explain your thinking around the why a technology strategy is, in a sense, a negative filter.

Greg Ferro (00:00:39) – Well, I think the first thing to point out here is that we’ve done two shows prior to this. On who should your technology strategy team include. Right. And there was another one, which is what should your technology strategy team focus on? And we’ve also done other shows a few months back where we talked about strategies like how to execute a strategy and things like that as well.

Greg Ferro (00:00:59) – So weirdly enough, in a show called Heavy Strategy or a podcast called Heavy Strategy, we’ve actually talked about this more than once or multiple shows that today, I think we just want to focus in on a particular niche of this. What’s the point? So if somebody comes up to you and says, what’s the point of a technology? Why am I bothering? Why are you bothering? Why are you spending time deploying a technology strategy? Because I’ve been in a situation where people say, we all know what we’re going to do, we’re just going to go and buy brand A, and we’re going to deploy it the way that they tell us to, and then it’s going to be done. Right. That just makes me so angry. Because and that’s.

Johna Till Johnson (00:01:36) – Why I said, this is totally this is absolutely, totally your show in this one. Because because this is just the kind of thing that just annoys the living daylights out of you. Yeah.

Greg Ferro (00:01:45) – So I think the thing, the first thing that I would say is the point of a technology strategy is to make decisions before you make final decisions, right? So if you put together a technology strategy, you’re making decisions around what technology, not necessarily the vendor.

Greg Ferro (00:02:02) – Maybe you do make a vendor decision, but you’re making the decision without the vendor being in the room, right. There’s no deadline. Here’s too many times we’ve done projects, and the project says we have to make a decision about what to buy in the first six weeks of the project. So all of a sudden you’re crunched up with this and you have to make a decision and you don’t have enough time to go off and do the research or to analyze the market completely. So probably the best value you could get out of having a technology strategy is making decisions before you make a decision. It’s like the pre decision decision making right. Which is very IBM way of thinking about things. Do you see what I’m trying to say there?

Johna Till Johnson (00:02:40) – I do and actually I’m thinking about a slide that we have that we created a long time ago that has the whole process of doing a technology strategy. And the output at the end is what consultants like to call in inimitable consultant: These value creation and one of the pieces of value creation is, is literally vendor and technology selection.

Johna Till Johnson (00:03:01) – Because I think the important thing is like this show where we talk about what the questions are, not the answers. With having a technology strategy, what it does is tell you what you should consider when assessing either a technology or a vendor or solution. So it doesn’t tell you which one to pick, but it tells you what things to look at when you’re doing the picking. And that’s the piece getting back to what you were saying, that’s the piece you’re not going to do if you have a couple of weeks to make a decision. No, I can go all the way back and say, all right, let’s retreat to first principles. What are the critical selection criteria that we should be considering? No, you’re going to be like.

Greg Ferro (00:03:35) – Time’s Up and says, no, we’ve got to make a decision in two weeks. We don’t have time to get back.

Johna Till Johnson (00:03:38) – Right? Like, what are the vendors? Let’s go, let’s go pick, pick, pick, go. Right.

Greg Ferro (00:03:42) – We just got to pick one so we don’t have time.

Greg Ferro (00:03:44) – And then of course you get, you know, three months down the line you’re going, oh, we bought the wrong thing or this isn’t exactly what we wanted or whatever. So I like to think of it as making the decisions before you make any decisions or preparing a list of questions. So thinking up all the questions that you need to ask about a solution by having a strategy that’s already asked identified what questions you want to be asked. I mean, I don’t think people give enough time because when you call in the sales teams, you know, whether they’re vendor or resellers, right? To say, we’ve got we’ve got a new project underway. We need you to start working with us on providing us with a solution for this. If you’re not going to ask the right questions, those people aren’t going to give you the right answers. I feel so cheesy saying that, but that is true.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:25) – I know, I know, and and while we’re talking about vendor and product selection, the other thing that I think is incredibly important about a strategy is it gets rid of the political nonsense that’s in typically in the room where somebody like Cisco and somebody else likes juniper HP and they just like them.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:43) – Maybe they made friends with a sales person. Maybe they just maybe their soul resonates to the architecture of the design. Maybe they just like the the steak dinner, I don’t know, the.

Greg Ferro (00:04:51) – Steak dinner, exact steaks.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:53) – Steak dinners, whatever it is. Essentially, if somebody’s walking into that room with a bias, whether it’s hidden or. Or overt. The strategy pulls that out and makes it impossible to implement the bias without an agreement on it. For example, if the bias is actually legit, like I like this vendor, I like this technology because it snaps into our ecosystem way better than any other one. That’s actually a legit reason. That’s fun. Go ahead and sign up.

Greg Ferro (00:05:21) – Only everybody’s. Have you got everybody agreeing with you?
Johna Till Johnson (00:05:24) – Yes, exactly.

Greg Ferro (00:05:24) – I don’t want to be standing in front of the all your preferred vendor and half the room saying, no, we hate this vendor because it’s not a good look for anybody. You’re wasting the vendor’s time. You’re wasting your own time pre decisions.

Greg Ferro (00:05:36) – So I like to think of this in consultant babble as a decision substrate. It’s like a pyramid of decisions right. You sort of make baseline decisions I’m going to buy a fiber channel SAN with fiber channel storage. Well if that’s your strategic decision around storage and you’re going to use, you know, off premise cloud backups with, you know, scanning for ransomware, well, that’s fine. Of course you are. Right. Or maybe this project doesn’t need to be scanned for ransomware for some reason. Right. Those those are the sorts of decisions, substrates that you have to have so that as you get into the project and the final decision points are coming and you’re negotiating over pricing, and the vendor starts piping up and says, oh, but for 10% more, you could have fries with that, right? And you can just sit there and go, no, that is not what we want or, you know, or right. Or if a new technology suddenly emerges out of left field when you’re in the in the process, you can say, you can say, oh, no, that does solve what we want.

Greg Ferro (00:06:32) – Let’s talk about it. Or you can go, no, that is definitely not along the lines. Or if you’re going to discard it because it’s too early, you can say our strategy, strategic decisions are based around stability for this particular use case, you know, whatever it might be. So the reason to have this technology strategy is to get a lot of decision making made up front.

Johna Till Johnson (00:06:51) – Right? It tells you it tells you what you don’t want. And that’s that’s a very it tells you what you do want, which is important, but it also tells you what you don’t want, what you can comfortably say no to it. And you don’t really need to justify saying no at that point. You can say no. Our strategy are, as we talked about, our technology. You know, our fundamental technology principle is whatever it is, this doesn’t align with whatever it is and you don’t have to defend it. You can just move on. So it cuts.

Greg Ferro (00:07:18) – So particularly around things like let me use a more specific or use case, which is you’ve got an obsolete technology in your system, right.

Greg Ferro (00:07:25) – Maybe you’ve got a, you know, particular set of network equipment or a particular server, you know, a server brand or something that you’ve been working on and you’re desperately wanting to obsolete that for whatever reason. Right. And that’s the strategy is to move away from that and migrate. You know, maybe you’re moving away from, blade servers to rackmount servers, like, to one. Are you, for example? Right. If you’ve made that decision ahead of time, you don’t have to have, you know, suddenly the vendor person salesperson pipes up and says, we want to sell you blade servers because, you know, most likely the vendors decided that this month is blade server month and they’re giving away.

Johna Till Johnson (00:07:59) – They get a bonus. Yeah, an extra.

Greg Ferro (00:08:00) – Bonus or double sales commissions if they sell some useless product that nobody cares about. I mean, that is usually why that product has a bonus. It’s useless. Nobody’s buying it. Right? And so you should always ask your salespeople, are you getting extra commissions or extra revenue? Ask them to their faces.

Greg Ferro (00:08:14) – Watch them panic when you say that, by the way. But you should always ask that in a, in a in that sort of sales meeting. So I think it’s really important to say for me, having all the strategy done up front, all the consultants, I was often brought in as a consultant to sit down and talk to people and set up and then advise on what to buy for a project. And if there was a strategy, you know, if there have been meetings conducted with dozens of people from departments and the CFO and, you know, all that sort of stuff, you could say, I know where I’m going. I’m much quicker to get to value. I’m able to come up with advice a lot quicker than I am. If I have to go around and spend days in meetings talking to people and trying to come up with some sort of faux, you know, strategy to to base the decision making.

Johna Till Johnson (00:08:55) – So two points on that, Greg. I think you touched on something incredibly important, which is, you know, we led with, hey, a strategy keeps you from making the wrong decision, but it also helps you make the right decision faster.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:07) – Yeah. And we all know that agility is a top goal. And one of the key pillars of agility is having to have these conversations and revisit, you know, as I say, relitigate all of this from first principles every single time. If you have a strategy.

Greg Ferro (00:09:19) – Don’t you know you don’t have to do that again. All that’s yeah.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:23) – All that other stuff. Yeah.

Greg Ferro (00:09:24) – You’ve got to have metaphors. If you’re a consultant, you can’t just call it what it is.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:28) – Well, relitigate is actually not a metaphor. It is exactly what happens. Everybody sits in a room and argues about stuff they should have decided years ago. But never mind that. The other thing, though, that I want to point out is that we present this. I’m looking at my slide right now and I’m on the left hand side. It says corporate strategy drives technology strategy, which generates strategic outputs which have value realization. Aside from being a bunch of consulting babble. The other thing is that implies that humans are perfect in their processes and that this is a clean process.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:58) – And we all know. In the real world. It’s messy. So one little tip I just want to toss out is if you are in the process of making a decision and you discover something that. You didn’t sit down and have that previous strategic conversation about what I found helpful personally, is sometimes you can make a very tactical, expedient decision. That is the wrong decision. Everybody agrees it’s the wrong decision for expedience, and everybody accepts the technical debt or whatever it’s bringing with it because it just has to get done. But what is super helpful in that conversation is to look around the room. Everybody eyeballs each other and says, we have now officially agreed that this thing that we’re about to do is something we never want to do again. It is officially off the list. We don’t want to do it, and we are doing it now for these reasons. And everybody nods. What’s interesting is you never make that same mistake again. The next decision that goes on those lines is like clockwork. It’s it’s very smooth because everybody understands.

Greg Ferro (00:10:58) – It’s linear, right?

Greg Ferro (00:11:21) – One other small thing that’s not obvious is I’ve also found a good underlying statement of strategy or collection of strategies. It stops bike shedding. So bike shedding for people who don’t know is it’s a famous story told by one of these high powered management consultants. And he said they went to everybody in the company and said, we’re building a five story building. We want to get your input into it. Right. And they went around and and basically nobody had any input because they had no idea what what to ask for. Right.

Greg Ferro (00:11:47) – They didn’t, you know, do you need a space that’s this big? Do you need a floor to be extra reinforced? Do you need extra toilets or whatever it is? And then they came out to the final part and they said, and we’re going to put a bike shed out the back and we just like to know which color you want it. And apparently and that would kick off meetings and email storms. And how big should you know how many bikes are there and, you know, blah, blah blah. And it’s called bike shedding, which basically means people can chip in on something that they understand, but people won’t chip in when they don’t understand, or if the task is so big or so specialized. Right? And bike sharing is a real problem in IT projects because people often have a pet technology or a pet thing, or they have a view on a particular thing. You know, I like this particular CPU because it’s good rather than that CPU. At the end of the day, nobody cares.

Greg Ferro (00:12:34) – It’s just a CPU, right? And it’s only going to be there for two years before it gets rotated out of the pool anyway. Stop fussing about the small things. Right. And and that’s something. So what the way I call that is it’s about cost of time in getting to the solution. So when you get into a project, how can you minimize the time spent in acquisition now in particular, enterprise IT vendors and in particular cloud off prem cloud vendors are really, really good at this. They get what I call tar trap solid sales motions. This is when the sales team engages with you and says, you know what, we’ve got one of everything for all problems. So we’re going to sit down with you and have an advisory program. We’re going to bring in teams, and what they’re actually doing is running you into a sales trap where they just slow you down, take up all of your available time to work, and suck up all of your attention so that you don’t go to their competitors.

Greg Ferro (00:13:26) – Have you seen this?

Johna Till Johnson (00:13:27) – I actually have not seen this, but then I don’t get involved at that level of operational focus. Yeah. So yes, I agree it happens. It certainly sounds like something that happens. And vendors love to be the center of attention and try to, you know, especially the evil, conniving ones. And I’m not going to name names here, but they like to become like a cult. And if you think about it, what is a cult? Do it. It disconnects you from everyone else, from any opposing view, and it becomes your world so that you slowly and that’s what you’re describing. You slowly begin operating within the cult mentality. But Cisco says AT&T says, you know, Amazon says and all of a sudden nothing exists outside their world.

Greg Ferro (00:14:10) – People’s intelligence drains out the bottom of their head and they go, oh, well, if they said it’s okay, then that must be the right thing to do. But in fact, what you become captive to is their sales motions, what they’re the the hottest product that they want to sell or the product that has the most commission, but particularly the tar trap is something to watch out for because, you might find a vendor has five different products in a space or three different products in a space, and they’re all directly comparable.

Greg Ferro (00:14:35) – And what you find yourself doing internally is arguing about which one of these products is, is the one that you want, but what you’re not doing is going out and looking at their competitors. So I’ve one of the things I saw happen very often is that inexperienced customers or inexperienced buyers, people who run projects. This is very true of project managers because they’re often ignorant about the tactics of purchasing, if you like, and I do sometimes regret the fact that the purchasing department is no longer a part of it in that sense, because they were usually very good at this, even if they were horrible at everything else, and so you, you know, if you’re sitting in a meeting with a single source vendor who’s saying where your trusted partner, we can advise you on what you want. That’s a sign that they’re running a tar trap play, and they’re trying to suck up all of your time. And you need to be aware of that. Your strategy will give you the ability to avoid that trap tactics by knowing what you want, right? By not letting your implementation be hijacked by outsiders with their own agenda or or potentially you getting distracted by some new shiny, you know, oh, should we put AI in this? No, no, that’s not in the strategy.

Greg Ferro (00:15:39) – Right? The classic one is AI, right? And AI is really insidious because everything is going to have AI added to it. You are not going to go out to buy an AI. You’re going to add it to something you’ve already got. Right.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:50) – And that’s a whole bigger conversation that we can have later. But I do want to switch gears a little bit because essentially, if you’re listening, you’ve learned that. You want a strategy because it it helps you not buy the wrong things, make decisions to buy the right things better, and avoid bike shedding and the tar trap. I love this bike shedding in the tar trap as problems, but I also want to switch gears and say it’s not just about how to buy stuff that’s a key piece, but it’s also how to organize and how to put in place your processes. So, for example, I sat down with a client not too long ago and we did a revisit of their strategy. Now, this was interesting because the client said we have no cloud strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:16:30) – Our entire strategy is on prem. But when we mapped out their organization, about 80% of their processing was happening in cloud. It just happened to be SaaS and they didn’t think of SaaS as cloud. So we got to the end of this. And I said, is your organization optimized for managing 80% of the workloads out there in SaaS cloud? How many people do you have that are focusing on gluing together workflow from cloud A to cloud B, which is exactly what they were doing. They were using DocuSign as a key piece of their workflow. They had to glue that into, into their CRM, which they were in the process of upgrading, etc, etc. and nobody they didn’t have anyone on team who specialized in doing any of that, because in their minds it was a blind spot. They didn’t do cloud, therefore they didn’t need anybody who specialized in workflow, implementation and cloud. That’s an example. I’m not talking about cloud as a strategy, but the point is, when you take your strategy and you say, here we are today, here’s where we want to be tomorrow.

Johna Till Johnson (00:17:29) – The next thing you do after you look at the technology you’re going to buy or not buy is look at your organization and say, do we have the people to do what we need to do, whether they’re internal or external, outsourced or in sourced? You just look at this and say, hey, do we have the right human resources to manage this? The strategy that we’re putting forward? And that’s a huge game.

Greg Ferro (00:17:50) – And that’s true. A lot of people forget, because that’s the one thing we’ve never talked about. If you suddenly said, well, we’re going to consider on, you know, off prem cloud for future solutions. Well, you need people with off prem cloud skills to understand like because the big thing about, public cloud or off prem cloud is that somebody has to track costs. The biggest mistake we’ve seen so many people make is they just wander off and go, oh, I don’t have to buy anything, so I can just use whatever I want. And that’s.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:16) – Exactly it.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:17) – And that’s one of the reasons I use cloud is this example is because in a sense, it feels like you’re not buying something, but of course you are.
Greg Ferro (00:18:22) – Here is that you’re still paying for the cost of purchasing, because what happens is it just happens to be paid after you’ve purchased, which is really dangerous. That’s like a crypto type thing, right? Because after you’re locked in, after you’ve actually deployed on it, you start paying for it. And then what you find now is most large companies have a cloud costs team. So the cost of your cost of purchasing in the public cloud or in off prem cloud is actually that headcount. And it’s usually substantial. It’s usually hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because there’s people out there with the tool gathering all the costs, assigning, you know, working out what’s being spent, all that sort of stuff. So there’s a cost of buying that very few people consider. And that is where technology strategies work just as well in off prem cloud, because it says our cost analysis works for these products in the off prem cloud.

Greg Ferro (00:19:10) – Therefore, you can only buy these products. So if you’re using, you know, a particular type of database, or if you’re using NAT gateways or if you’re using, you know, AWS DNS, for example, you know, route 53, don’t go off and suddenly do something different because your cost analysis breaks and then you cause problems. So your strategy, your your, your solution acquisition cost. And there’s always a cost of buying something.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:32) – Well, and Greg, I’m going to stop you because you’ve wandered back like you’ve got this gravitational pull to turn everything into a discussion of products and technologies. And I want to just highlight that that’s not wrong, because that’s a key piece of the strategy. But it’s also the case. I just want to highlight that you want to take your strategy and look at it and say, do I have the right people and are the right people in the right places? For example, to use your.

Greg Ferro (00:19:55) – Example, people have the right skills. Do I need more of them? Do I need do I send them out for training? Do I do.

Johna Till Johnson (00:20:01) – I do I enforce these? How strategic is it?, do I use consultants? Do I use a managed service? That’s a whole nother discussion that we can have. Because, you know, skills aren’t skills anymore in some sense. They’re they’re fungible. Yeah. That’s so that’s a that’s a second one. And then the third one is process optimization. And this is the thing where most people fall down terribly because you have a process that got worked out through good or bad over the years. This is how we do things. And ideally in technology, you’re constantly importing new technologies, new capabilities that are going to require changes in that process. And your ops people hate change. Why? Because change brings risk. Risk brings the possibility of failure. And for ops people, it’s better to keep doing the same thing again and again and again and again and have it perfect every time. Then increase the risk of of a failure just to get a new capability. So there’s normal human resistance to change. There’s logical resistance to change, and there’s also the need for change all coming together at the same point.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:10) – And your strategy will tell you how to balance all those conflicting forces, you know, at what point do you side decide it’s important enough that we’re actually going to require everybody to change, and we’re going to try to mitigate that risk and accept that the ops people are correct, that all change brings risk, but at the same time, tell them, I don’t care. You still have to make this change. Now let’s talk about how to mitigate the risk.

Greg Ferro (00:21:33) – But the strategy will give you a framework to discuss that if they’ve been involved in the consultation. So there’s no yeah yeah, yeah. There is one part of this which I also, is a strategy should also be useful to guide you to killing off projects that have run off the rails. We’ve all been in enterprises who have projects, and if all of a sudden they stop meeting the goals in the strategy, then everybody can agree that this project needs to be killed off. Right? Because one of the great things about it will I mean, that very sarcastically is.

Greg Ferro (00:22:00) – Yeah, right. Once you start a project, it can never die. It becomes a self-fulfilling. It’s a train that can never come off the tracks. And they should. We should have walked away from projects much earlier, well.

Johna Till Johnson (00:22:11) – And in fact, when we do strategic planning for our clients, well, what we do, we typically do a strategy and roadmap that, you know, I set it all together because that’s what we do. We say we’ll do a strategy and roadmap for you. And they’re like, okay, fine, we sit down, we take their thinking, document it, and then the roadmap. The cool thing about the roadmap is that we always include for every project, when you’re going to be sunsetting it, when you’re going to be end of life ING it, what are the you know, we may not necessarily know what year, but at least we can tell you what events will cause you to reconsider this project and decide to sunset it, and sometimes that’s really obvious because you’re coming in and you’re doing a bridge project.

Johna Till Johnson (00:22:50) – You’re doing one of those things that you absolutely know is not long term, but it solves the here and now. So it’s not Mr. Right. But it’s Mr. Right now. And and, you know, it needs to be sunset.

Greg Ferro (00:23:01) – I have to bee in my bonnet about the long term. I don’t think one of the things I’ve come around to now is I don’t think that you want to build things for the long term anymore, because technology continues to iterate. It’s much. One of the things that we did learn from off prem cloud is that if you don’t have a long term strategy, you just keep a very short term, tightly focused 1 to 2 year. You can actually get a lot more done. Does that make sense? So it does.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:27) – It does up to a point, you know, I disagree that you shouldn’t have a long term strategy, but I agree. I agree that.

Greg Ferro (00:23:34) – You should have a long term. But sometimes we focus on the long term over the short term.

Greg Ferro (00:23:39) – And what I think we should be doing is much more focused on the this this project has to produce an ROI in 24 months.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:46) – Or 12 months. 12 months is much more common. But yes.

Greg Ferro (00:23:49) – Whereas before it used to be we’re going to buy this for ten years, so we need to and then you buy this massive oversized, you know, with a bunch of technology that would be obsolete after five years. Well, that obsolescence cycle is now down to 18 months, you know. Exactly.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:04) – And you may, you may you gave us a great analogy when we talked about this before, which is the canal system in the UK was designed as a transportation system for the manufacturing plants, and the only reason it made any sense to build canals was because you knew those manufacturing plants would be there for 300 years. Yeah, but if you’re just going to sort of do a pop up, why would you build a canal to reach a pop up? And that’s kind of what this long term investment strategy is.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:31) – We’re going to build this enormous network of canals for a pop up like. That’s right. Yeah.

Greg Ferro (00:24:36) – Well, the canals were a little bit different and a lot like enterprise IT.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:39) – That’s what that was the example.

Greg Ferro (00:24:41) – Yes. Instead they dug one canal at a time and they dug a short version. And then once it was there you could extend on it and then you could extend on it. And then they realized you could connect them all up. And that had certain advantages, you know, whatever. And that’s a lot like enterprise it in that way. I also think that having a pre-defined strategy reduces communication between teams. And that’s valuable. If you’ve got a pre-defined strategy around a bunch of things, you don’t have to waste time in meetings discussing whether this is the right solution. That communication is much reduced because you’ve already had that communication in a non-confrontational, non time crunched non, you know, whatever you can say. Look we had all these strategy meetings a year ago. This complies with the strategy.

Greg Ferro (00:25:24) – Is there any deviation. You know there’s a lot it’s a lot quicker to iterate on to. This is the solution that we’re going to purchase.

Johna Till Johnson (00:25:31) – I agree and I think I couldn’t have said it better myself. Greg, I completely agree. I will also say something that’s a bit provocative here, which is as you were talking, I was thinking, well, it reduces non-essential communication. And then I thought, no, it reduces annoying, frustrating, stressful communication and opens up the space for non-essential communication because non-essential communication is often the glue that enables. Teams to work together. So in a sense, even if the net number of words to be quantitative doesn’t reduce, maybe more of the words are about the ball game on Friday or how your kids doing in school, which actually serves a real purpose because you have a connection with that person that you can then rely on later on. So I know I’m taking it to a bit of an extreme, but essentially you shouldn’t have to talk about stuff that you’ve already decided you shouldn’t have to relitigate.

Johna Till Johnson (00:26:24) – I love that word.

Greg Ferro (00:26:26) – Because having discussed it before and work through different issues, it does mean that when you get to the, you know, the next project, a lot of those discussions have already been held and you’re not starting from zero for every single as you move into the purchasing cycle, you’re not starting from zero every time. Now, all of this assumes that the strategies are communicated and upheld inside of the yeah it right.

Johna Till Johnson (00:26:48) – Your strategy yes. Is a living document. Yes.

Greg Ferro (00:26:52) – But it also assumes that people that the people in your team are competent at knowing the strategy, engaging with the strategy. And it also assumes that your management is ensuring that the strategy is being considered and followed. My working theory is that managers in IT teams are all incompetent. As a general rule. That is true. There are. There’s been some notable exceptions in the people that I work with, but you should assume that management is incompetent unless proven otherwise. And whereas engineers are generally, the reverse is my experience for reasonable purposes.

Johna Till Johnson (00:27:22) – I think that’s true up to a point. I want to add to that, I’m going to say, and furthermore, there is an assumption that I don’t think you can count on, that. There’s a level of emotional maturity across the board, both in management and in engineering. And in my experience, engineers tend to be emotionally very immature, largely because we spend most of our time in a world where there is a right answer. So if I just hammer, you know, hammer my point home louder and louder and louder and make it in several different ways, I will win because my my point is right. Or very rarely, Greg’s point or whoever. I’m Greg, you’re often right. I don’t mean to pick on you, but my my colleague’s point is right, at which point it’s perfectly acceptable to say, oh gosh, you’re right, I missed that. Let’s carry on. Which is not the way normal human reactions work at all. People hate outside of engineering. People hate being criticized, not just personally.

Johna Till Johnson (00:28:15) – But even if you have a marketing campaign, for example, and somebody says, I don’t like the color pink, that marketing person is not to pick on marketing people. They’re going to melt into a pile of glue because you criticize them. And yet, as an engineer, you’re simply stating a fact. I don’t like that color. Pink. What is that person getting old would be about? And you know, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it’s really real that engineers can get very old before they grow out of being about four years old emotionally because because their intellect hides it.

Greg Ferro (00:28:45) – So I think increasingly in the last ten years that’s been more addressed. People, you know, the business demanding that engineers speak business, which is of course, stupid because engineers, that’s different. Speaking what they were saying is you need to understand enough business to be able to communicate with us because managers are lazy and they don’t want to speak technology. Yeah.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:04) – But that’s but you’re, you’re you’re simplifying the problem into something.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:06) – Speaking. Communicating is one thing.

Greg Ferro (00:29:08) – I understand there’s a rule there.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:12) – But I didn’t I didn’t say anything about managers being hopeless. I’m talking about the distinction between emotional maturity and communications, which are two totally different things.

Greg Ferro (00:29:20) – Ten years ago, 20 years ago, we used to hire engineers for their technical aptitude, right? We weren’t encouraged to have any knowledge of the business because that wasn’t the goal.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:28) – But Greg, things change. Greg, you keep jumping to knowledge of the business and communication skills, which I agree are important. I’m simply making a different point, which is emotional maturity, which has nothing to do with business knowledge or technical knowledge or anything else, or whether you’re a manager or an engineer. I do agree that it’s changed.

Greg Ferro (00:29:47) – You know, in the last ten years there’s been a concerted effort amongst us. You know, engineers realized that there is value in speaking business because you get more pay rises.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:56) – You but you keep saying the same thing again and again. I do not think that there’s been a net increase in emotional maturity in engineering.

Johna Till Johnson (00:30:02) – I do think that there’s an increase in speaking business. So those two things are different. We can agree to disagree on that one, but I do think it’s something disagree.

Greg Ferro (00:30:10) – So I think my point here is that when managers aren’t using the strategy for their review and their approvals and for their engagement, because I often think that the best place for us for a technology strategy is actually getting the management to actually think about the technology instead of just, oh, that’s that’s the engineer’s job. Right.

Johna Till Johnson (00:30:29) – Well, and I would I would jump from that to something you said earlier that, that you said so quickly, I want to bring it back, which is, if you want to use the strategy to optimize your processes, you have to make sure the ops people are included. And that gets back to the conversation that we had some number of weeks ago, where we talked about who should be involved in the strategy and the the big picture answer is everyone at different levels. Obviously, you don’t want management in there with the nitty gritty, you know, deep.

Johna Till Johnson (00:30:58) – Arguments, but you do want everyone to sit there, hold the strategy in their minds and and think about how that would how that would apply to their universe. And you need them to weigh in with honest concerns like, this isn’t going to work for me, because I have to change this process in this way. And if I change this process in this way, I’m going to break this other thing. And so that’s part of what you’re saying, which is the managers need to be involved. They need to use the strategy as a lodestar and so does everybody else.

Greg Ferro (00:31:26) – And that’s and that’s the biggest part here is when an engineer, when the engineering teams or the technology teams fail to use the strategy, that’s bad. But the worst thing is when the executives and the managers don’t use it. You got to if you go through all the effort because it’s really for them, a much more valuable tool than it is for the engineers. Everything that we’ve talked about here applies to business leaders today, but it’s really the worst thing is if they don’t use it to understand how to speak technology or to understand the technology motion inside of their organizations that is where the most significant failure will happen.

Greg Ferro (00:32:00) – And ultimately, if your management team, you know, your IT managers, your executive management, whatever it is, haven’t taken the time to understand the technology at least a little bit, right? At least a little bit. Smartphones have done so much for it because the CEO now has to use a smartphone, and he understands how difficult it can be. Right. It gets some insights. And and that has done more for the value of it than anything anybody ever did. Training the CEO how to use I remember training CEOs on how to use Microsoft Word to back in the day, and they hated.

Johna Till Johnson (00:32:33) – And they were like, why do I have to learn this? It’s so much easier just dictating to my secretary.

Greg Ferro (00:32:38) – Yeah, oh, I’ll get my secretary to print out all my emails and I’ll just ride on them. That’s easier. Can you like that was a real thing. And ultimately, you know, changing those attitudes took decades. Because like I said, all managers are idiots in my opinion.

Johna Till Johnson (00:32:50) – Well, well. So coming back to this, I think you made an excellent, excellent point. And it’s probably a good one to close out on, which is, you know, the, the, the only thing a strategy is good for is the trash unless you’re using it. And so I said earlier that a strategy has to be a living document. But I want to correct that. To say a strategy has to be a living process. You need an ongoing process for revisiting it and not just pro forma. Check the box. Oh yeah. Everybody look at the you know, it’s the third. It’s the third Monday in the quarter. And everybody needs to go look at the strategy and sign off on it. It’s got to be it’s not a real strategy unless it’s eliciting passionate debate every time you revisit it. Because certain pieces of it are irrelevant. You become irrelevant with the passage of time in the development of new capabilities. So essentially boiling it all up, a strategy isn’t good for anything unless you follow it and revise it on a regular basis.

Johna Till Johnson (00:33:47) – And with that, I think we’re pretty well at the end. Greg, what do you think?

Greg Ferro (00:33:50) – I think so, I think we’ve managed I’ve managed to dis on the managers who pissed me off for the last 30 years. Enough today. It’s been a while since I got to.

Johna Till Johnson (00:33:58) – There’s all there’s always the next episode, Greg. And and for listeners, thank you for joining us today. If you’ve got feedback or follow up for us on this topic, send us a message at Packet Pushers Dot Net Slash FU. We’d love to hear from you. And as Greg always likes to point out, you do not need to leave your name and identifying information. We want your opinions. We’re not trying to spam you, also at Packet Pushers Dot Net, you will find the Network Break podcast, which helps you stay current on the latest tech and what it means. Very relevant for a lot of what we’ve talked about here, plus a whole bunch of other really cool podcasts that are coming out. So, you should take a look at what’s there while you’re there.

Johna Till Johnson (00:34:36) – If you want to talk to me, go ahead and reach me at Nemertes dot com. We have a little community form. You can fill out that community form, and we have a Slack community for Packet Pushers that we urge you to join and come up with us there, because there’s quite a lot of people on there, and it’s a very lively conversation and very technical, I should say. Thanks much.

Greg Ferro (00:34:56) – See you in a couple of weeks.