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The purpose of the IT Leaders Council is to bring together IT Directors and Managers for leadership training, educational content from guest speakers, and peer discussions in a vendor-free, collaborative environment. IT Leaders Councils are currently offered in Indianapolis, IN and Columbus, OH, with more cities coming soon!
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;20;25
Speaker 1
Nice to meet you. I see some familiar faces, but not that many, I have to say. So let me introduce myself. Patty Kolodziejczyk took very nicely done. My name made a name was Lange. So that was a try to get him to take my last name, but really, I didn't work. I am relatively new to the Indianapolis area.
00;00;20;25 - 00;00;41;17
Speaker 1
I moved here about three and a half years ago. Nothing like moving in. Six months later, a pandemic hit, so coming out of that now, relocated from Connecticut in the Hartford area. For those of you are not familiar with CNO Financial, we are a midsize insurance carrier right here in Carmel serving middle America. And I came from Connecticut.
00;00;41;17 - 00;01;07;19
Speaker 1
And prior to coming here, I was with travelers in the Hartford. So I've been around the block with insurance. Right. This may be the racing capital of the world, but Hartford, Connecticut, is known as the insurance capital and was really exciting. So that's a little bit about me. I moved here, as I said, with my husband and two high school age kids, but one of the things I really want to also tell you about myself is I didn't start my career.
00;01;07;19 - 00;01;29;00
Speaker 1
In fact, when I was younger, I never even expected to be in management or leadership. I would just go for engineering. I was hands on developer, architect, tech lead. That's what I was planning to do with my career, and I'd say about ten years into it, I got to a place where it wasn't really hard. Building technology solutions just started becoming easy.
00;01;29;00 - 00;01;53;06
Speaker 1
It was the hard part. I think everyone in this room, if you've been a leader, knows the hard part is people, processes, leadership, governance. And I decided I wanted to shift and do the hard stuff that the would tell my team that I think that's a harder step back. So I switched to about 15 years ago my roughly now into a leadership role and I got really excited going there and helping teams achieve more than they thought they could see.
00;01;53;07 - 00;02;14;26
Speaker 1
This works. Yes. Okay. When when Doug reached out to me and asked if I would present, I said, what would this group want to hear about? So I feel really fortunate that I'm helping to kick off 2023. This is the first session in 2023, and what's relevant to leaders in the first part of the year goals, objectives. Right?
00;02;14;26 - 00;02;36;18
Speaker 1
So I think a lot of you, much like myself, are probably thinking about what are we going to accomplish this year in 2023 is pretty different. I in October I was at the Gartner Symposium Convention. I don't know if any of you have been to that, but it was over 8000 folks attended CEOs and senior leaders, and I was really surprised.
00;02;36;18 - 00;02;59;12
Speaker 1
It was really a different home, a different theme than I had heard in the past. We still have the normal you need artificial intelligence and forward looking in strategy roadmaps. But almost every presentation and every networking discussion talked about these three things persistent high inflation reality for us in 2023. Scarce, expensive talent. We see a lot of attrition.
00;02;59;12 - 00;03;21;23
Speaker 1
I know about you and even when we don't see the attrition, just hiring those open roles that we do have are costly. It takes a while a global supply chain challenges where we're moving our data centers and we're doing other things with our bank, our fields and so forth, and we're really feeling the pain. So 23 feels to me quite a bit different than the past few years.
00;03;21;26 - 00;03;36;23
Speaker 1
And that means our goals have to be a little different. We've got to set some lofty expectations. We've got to move the ball. We as leaders need to get our teams excited about being in the role as they're in because it's hard when we have to replace them. So that's why I want to talk to you a little bit about today.
00;03;36;23 - 00;04;02;14
Speaker 1
I'm a storyteller, so we tell you some of the principles I've kind of developed over my career, and then I'm going to tell you stories about each one. That's how I started. And so how many of you have you heard? Are you smart goals? Right? Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound? This isn't that lofty goals. I like lofty goals, right?
00;04;02;21 - 00;04;36;22
Speaker 1
I think that it gets people excited about accomplish things. It drives an innovative way of thinking. It'll help folks maximize their potential. And a recent leadership by two surveyed said, I think they surveyed about 400 companies and the folks said that only 15% of people felt like that their goals and objectives would help them do great things. And even less 13% of people said they strongly agree that the goals and objectives were going to maximize their personal potential.
00;04;36;24 - 00;04;54;11
Speaker 1
I don't know about you. I don't get jazz to go to work. I'm going to be mediocre today. I'm wicked excited and I don't want a team that's excited about coming to work to be mediocre either. So I think part of what our job as leaders is to help set that vision of lofty goals, to get people excited about coming to work.
00;04;54;13 - 00;05;15;14
Speaker 1
We want our folks to stay with our companies, all the great people we want them, and they want to be at a place where they feel good about being there. And so lofty goals are part of how we get there. So let me tell you a story. Let me set the stage for you. I'm a large company. We are fairly far along in our Agile transformation journey.
00;05;15;14 - 00;05;35;12
Speaker 1
But let me be honest, we saw a lot of waterfall in our environment and we have a release process. I mean, I'm in charge of release management at the time. And so when we develop our code and our approach, our application teams and our delivery teams are working on Agile delivery, they'll spend three months on API. Very common right at the end of their three month API.
00;05;35;12 - 00;06;03;25
Speaker 1
They're ready to do all that fast, nimble work and put it into our production environment for our customers and our process said, Now let's go to systems testing for two things that led to user acceptance testing for six weeks and now it's six months later before I released it. Didn't feel really good, does it? So we spent three months developing software and the teams feel like they're done and then our rest of our processes is another three months before we get the business value.
00;06;03;28 - 00;06;21;14
Speaker 1
So this wasn't going to work. Right now, nobody's happy about that. So what we said, what are we going do for goals and objectives? I'm talking my leadership team and you know how many people have said my goal is to reduce it by 10% or 20%? Right? Those are really good goals. That's what people say and that's what people do.
00;06;21;16 - 00;06;44;17
Speaker 1
And that's not thought of as an easy objective. But 10%, I can make a lick of difference. Ooh, I'm going to production in five and a half months or five months, but I finish the software development in three. Right? So of the team that we're talking about, what do we want? What is the objective? Say? How about 50%?
00;06;44;19 - 00;07;12;22
Speaker 1
Why not? All right, let's set a lofty goal. And before this goal, the things that people were talking about were so small in nature, right? Maybe we can do things to automate more or we can have a better test data management platform. Right. And of course, that's not cheap. Right. Let's introduce something there. And all these experts set up this application where it's building out more automation.
00;07;12;25 - 00;07;35;24
Speaker 1
But we changed the conversation dramatically when we said it's 50%. We had to think differently, right? Because that's a whole different league of accomplishment. And we were in a meeting and we're brainstorming. And of course I was like, How are we going to do this? And some of those. Patty, don't you realize that we would have to like not even do one of those whole things because we want to cut that in half?
00;07;35;24 - 00;08;06;04
Speaker 1
We'd have to stop doing one of those. Oh my God, we're going to stop doing one of those, right? That's what we decided. We said for Agile teams, they're already doing this testing in there. It's not the waterfall way where we'll pass it forward to the next user group. And so that's what we did. So we we end up having one test environment and we optimize the things we were doing right and we didn't repeat the things that the Agile teams have already tested.
00;08;06;06 - 00;08;29;21
Speaker 1
We had one test environment and we really we reduced our duration of our release process by 50%. And you know what else? It didn't cost anything. Didn't cost money to, to hire folks to do a bunch of additional automation that we to close gaps. It didn't mean we bought a new platform and implemented it. It meant that we did change management, we did process engineering.
00;08;29;23 - 00;08;46;20
Speaker 1
Right. And so I can't even tell you how proud the team was at the end. And while we were doing some of the hard change management and getting there, we kept saying, you know, you're going to do today, you're going to do you're going to do it by 50%. And folks were get excited and that's how we got there.
00;08;46;20 - 00;09;09;28
Speaker 1
So now how do we do the hard step folks who are really good about themselves? They didn't come to work to be mediocre. So that's one of my stories about how we transform the release process with a lofty goal. And if we hadn't set that one goal, it would have been like a 10% reduction, right? So that's my first guiding principle of my next one is focused on outcomes.
00;09;09;28 - 00;09;28;01
Speaker 1
So now I have some senior folks here and I see them smirking already going, okay, if she talks about outcomes one more time, I'm going to kill myself. Now. I do. I do all the time. I'll be randomly in a meeting saying and we'll see how come and what are we after, Right? We want to make sure we don't lose sight of what we're a team at home.
00;09;28;08 - 00;09;51;04
Speaker 1
All right. You hear the age old ad, age old adage outcomes over output. I think when you think about it, a lot of times we'll have objectives. And I have a really good intention and they'll we'll know what they're about and then we break it down and we'll build roadmaps. Okay. And the roadmaps are the activities needed to achieve that outcome or that vision.
00;09;51;06 - 00;10;15;26
Speaker 1
But we often then start focusing on the roadmaps. You start forgetting about the outcomes. Let me give you a, for example, of what not to do, right. I'm going to Sunset Application X so I can drive down costs fewer things to manage, right? And then you're marching towards sunsetting that application. How many times have you said I've sunset that application?
00;10;15;26 - 00;10;34;10
Speaker 1
Only to find out is on a shared server and you're not actually getting that same the last time you've been there too. Does it stink? Right? And you're so proud of yourself. I get to I know another one where we implement a bunch of automation and I said, okay, we're going to implement this automation where we're moving human tasks.
00;10;34;13 - 00;10;55;01
Speaker 1
It's going to drive down our cost with our sourcing partners. We got it all done. We went to go save that money. And what happens? Oh, my contract says I pay by the server, not by the activity or the work unit. I didn't get the outcome right. So you need to keep that check in balance and keep yourself honest around what's the outcome you're trying to achieve at all times.
00;10;55;01 - 00;11;20;02
Speaker 1
And not just focusing on those activities and it should be part of your everyday conversations. So let me tell you another story, similar situation where we've got a lot of activities going on. We've moved the ball as an organization. We've really got fewer platforms. That's what everybody wants, right? I'm going to rationalize my application portfolio. I'm going to have a few key applications.
00;11;20;04 - 00;11;40;29
Speaker 1
But what folks don't always remember is your level of concurrent development on those few strategic platforms goes up, right? So you have a lot of activities, a lot of teams all coding against the same code base and the same application. And now when we have release points, we got to bring it all together. Okay. So at the time I'm accountable for a dev ops team.
00;11;40;29 - 00;12;04;12
Speaker 1
We do all of the code management, we do the deployments and the releases and again, two weeks just to merge code. I'm embarrassed saying that out loud, frankly. Right. Two weeks. So you think about it, if I have a production date and I'm putting out four different teams work in that release, that's eight weeks, two months, super embarrassing.
00;12;04;15 - 00;12;22;27
Speaker 1
So we said we knew where we had to move the ball and the team, you know, we said, we're going to look at our process and as you can see, we mapped out how we can create the new code base branch. We'll use the automated code tool to to do our merges and they can merge a lot of those things, conflicts automated without and then we've got it.
00;12;23;02 - 00;12;47;27
Speaker 1
Do humans doing manual code conflict resolution for the remainder of them? So I said we've got to fix this, right? We're the transformation team. We make things better, we're fast, we're going to do this. And my team said, okay, so what we can do is we can upgrade the server that has been done and we're going to make this this automated thing run really fast.
00;12;47;29 - 00;13;09;06
Speaker 1
And I think of myself, okay, so if it goes 30% faster, that's great, right? Yes, we were off that and that was then, you know, how am I to reword what's going to take a day off, Right. Take four days off of my month long activity. They said, what would you go to a different tool that does that faster, too.
00;13;09;08 - 00;13;32;22
Speaker 1
But nobody was talking about this, right? This is the biggest part. It took the most time. It took developers away from writing code because they're doing code conflict. So we needed So I'm a domino mind my objectives here. We need a lofty goal and one that was going to drive the right outcomes. Those were great ideas, those roadmaps that that folks were suggesting, but they weren't hitting the outcome.
00;13;32;22 - 00;13;59;26
Speaker 1
We needed. So we made another lofty goal. Why not write We're that team? And so we said we're going to reduce the manual code conflict resolution time by 90% because that's the bulk of it. That's how we're going to move the needle. And so, again, it drove creative thinking, doing things differently and so forth and whatever here. Continuous integration, right?
00;13;59;28 - 00;14;23;27
Speaker 1
So it was it was hard because we weren't the team of developers. We were the team that was a kernel for all the code managed with women code and having to influence and say, I know code merges right now are hard for you and therefore you avoid them, which makes more complex, which makes it harder to resolve, which tells you away from your development to do your code conflict resolution.
00;14;24;00 - 00;14;41;07
Speaker 1
We're going to have you integrate all the time by integrating all the time. There were very few conflicts, even with, say, four teams working at the same. Kobe's at the same time because they made the changes. I liked it, right? And so we did a pilot because everyone thought that's not going to work. It's another one of these crazy ideas.
00;14;41;07 - 00;15;03;18
Speaker 1
It's never going to work. But we did. We started with small teams and we hit it right because it could handle when you were merging the code frequently there weren't conflicts and we did win. Were juiced it by 90%. But the reason where I'm going with this story is the fact that everyone kept thinking about activities they could understand and things like what?
00;15;03;18 - 00;15;44;20
Speaker 1
Fix our tool. But that really wasn't going to achieve the outcome we wanted, which was the level of speed. So that's another story we've got for you. There. About my third guiding principle is making sure that the goals really are connecting to a purpose so people really understand your team understands why they're doing things, and it's influencing their day to day decision making and their behaviors is so that when you show up at work, it's something you could wrap your head around and that you're going ahead and doing these things and living every day.
00;15;44;22 - 00;16;08;24
Speaker 1
And so one of the things that I find a lot of times is while an organization can create goals and objectives that feel like good ones, and when in your setting, you're drawing at the beginning of the year, if you think about when your team shows up for work every day, does it drive the different behaviors? Does it change the way they do things or think about things?
00;16;08;27 - 00;16;37;03
Speaker 1
And I think that's how you really make a big difference. So let me tell you another story. And did you know if you had an application that's supposed to be up 24 by seven and it was down for half a business day, you still that 83% availability that day, If that happened three times in the same week, three days at nearby business days, you you you're down for half the day.
00;16;37;06 - 00;17;07;04
Speaker 1
You have still a 93% availability. And if that application is part of a well-performing portfolio, about 500 applications, your average availability for your portfolio is 99.99%. Yet we are awesome, aren't we? I don't know about where you work, but if I my system was down half the business day for making same businesses nobody celebrating this actually happened to me.
00;17;07;07 - 00;17;33;13
Speaker 1
It was pretty horrible. I had accountability for our non-production environments at the time and their availability. I call it Project Atlas. So we had a project, a big project was a CEO's pet project. It's trying to go to production and the environments keep going down for testing and that and I'm having to explain why the development teams meeting their objectives and working on this.
00;17;33;13 - 00;18;14;26
Speaker 1
Our dates and I got sideswiped. I'm walking the floor. We were off 99.9% availability. Our screens are green, are status updates agreed and literally our team is going to be the reason why this major multimillion dollar program. So I can go live. It was a really tough holiday season that year. I think I read over a thousand tickets myself personally just to make sure I was comfortable, all the information, but it said we had to figure out how to have different balls, not ones that say our portfolio is going to be 99.99% available because that wasn't going to meet the business need.
00;18;14;28 - 00;18;32;14
Speaker 1
So I said to the team, What are we going to do right? What should our goal be? How can we set a vision for the new year that's going to make sure folks are waking up and doing the right thing, driving the right behaviors every day when they show up for work. And it's a team. I've worked with them and they kind of know my style around.
00;18;32;20 - 00;19;04;12
Speaker 1
I'll come base lofty goals and they said, Patty, how about if we try to ensure any outage that impacts Project Atlas is resolved within 2 hours? I'm going I read the data. That's never going to happen. I'm trying to think about I'm not saying and I'm like, there's no way I've sat on the triage calls that is so far and I like Lofty my that is still so far, but they said they could do it right.
00;19;04;14 - 00;19;31;26
Speaker 1
So we signed up for so we said we were going to resolve any outage infecting Project Atlas within 2 hours. And I saw a completely different behavioral pattern on triage cause folks are going, we're 30 minutes in. Who does that? It looks like there was a clock right Every week at the staff meeting. We're talking about it. We're talking about how many instance there were right.
00;19;31;29 - 00;19;52;04
Speaker 1
And you might say, well, gee, if you solve a lot and it's so problematic. But the team knew they had to deeply understand what was going on, to be able to respond. Within 2 hours, they were reading the tickets. They were looking for the patterns, they were looking at the history. They were getting ready. They started thinking much more preventative to make sure it didn't happen because they knew those were lofty goals.
00;19;52;07 - 00;20;13;22
Speaker 1
Within three months we had accomplished that. Every month it was going better. I couldn't believe it. I actually was like, Let me see the data. I wasn't even sure. Right? But they did. They exceeded my expectations, which frankly are pretty high. And they did because they felt like they the goal resonated with them. The goal drove a behavior in everyday activities.
00;20;13;24 - 00;20;28;01
Speaker 1
Gentleman in the back, I forget where you were talked about what you do with the offshore teams, a recognition. You know what I did with it because the offshore team signed up for this to I had four of them thank you notes on my way back from India. When I went back a year later, it was so phone tacked up.
00;20;28;04 - 00;20;51;13
Speaker 1
I knew they killed themselves trying to hit this ball right. They were excited about it. They were super hard and a simple thank you note made a giant difference. So that was one of the stories there where it just made a difference with respect to making sure the goals were worded in such a way. It could drive behaviors, people could connect with it, and they saw a value.
00;20;51;15 - 00;21;13;04
Speaker 1
So I just want to share with you a little bit. We've got 20, 23 goals, objectives starting now. We've got a talent and a workforce that has options and we want to make sure they're at a place where they feel passionate about what they're accomplishing. They feel good, they're happy to be here, and we're accomplishing great things. It's a year with a lot of financial pressures.
00;21;13;04 - 00;21;30;14
Speaker 1
For many of us, we have to move the ball in bigger, better ways and we've got to make sure we get those outcomes. So I hope this motivate you a little bit. And some of the stories of my career and go forth, set some lofty goals. But you said outcomes and impact didn't purpose.
00;21;30;16 - 00;21;33;21
Unknown
Here and I.