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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;23;02
Speaker 1
So I'm here to talk about my big, hairy, audacious goal. You've heard the phrase Knock it out of the park. I'm here to talk about a story which is going to knock it out of a city, folks. So I did some research on what this big, hairy, audacious will be mean. I learned about it in my former employer that I worked at Cisco Systems.
00;00;23;05 - 00;00;48;19
Speaker 1
These were like big projects. So it was actually derived from a book. And the book is built to last successful habits of visionary companies. This is where you take people out of a slump and you go big, where you go for you heard that phrase, too. So I tell you a story. I got up, I came off a very large, successful implementation on Pega.
00;00;48;21 - 00;01;22;16
Speaker 1
I hadn't been the IT delivery director with CNO for about three years. This week is going to be my third anniversary, so I had a very large engagement on Pegasystems. And you know, things are good now, you know, high severity industry incidences. And I got a call from my boss. Yeah, I think I want you to work on this major transformation by it's going south and I heard some colorful words in that story and I'm thinking, okay.
00;01;22;21 - 00;01;44;03
Speaker 1
So I was not sure what's going on here. A couple of days later, I got a call from another person that I was one of my trusted advisers, and I heard the word dumpster fire and everything else and everything else. I just tuned out and I'm thinking, Yeah, I don't know about this. But anyway, I said, I've got two choices.
00;01;44;05 - 00;02;07;26
Speaker 1
Either I can run off and be scared or I'm going to figure this out. So what's this big, hairy, audacious goal? So first I had to figure out what is it that we are trying to do? What is this transformation? Why has it gone south or not gone? So we'll spend millions and millions of dollars and it's not there.
00;02;08;03 - 00;02;36;29
Speaker 1
Okay. So we talk about the situation. We talk about the strategy. We'll talk about some of the game changes that the team actually came up with which knocked it out of the city. So what's the why major transformation platform? So we ran three lines of business life annuities, millions of policies. This is like the heart in a heart bed of everything that CMO does.
00;02;37;00 - 00;03;04;02
Speaker 1
Policies get sold, they get service, address, changes, beneficiaries. Everything goes through here. It's like the hub. And I'm thinking, Yeah, if things don't go well, I'm in trouble. Anyway, so lots of conversations around, Hey, we want to do some hyper automation. You want to automate everything? Okay, wonderful. We want robotics. Got it? We want blockchain. I don't know about that.
00;03;04;02 - 00;03;26;08
Speaker 1
And how is that going to work? So we looked at all of these things, you know, cloud outsourcing. We knew some of it. But the but the story that stuck with was we have to modernize our legacy platform because we have all these feeds and money comes in and goes potentially it goes to, you know, compensation of people.
00;03;26;10 - 00;03;48;17
Speaker 1
It's always getting delayed. There is a problem to be solved. So we said, okay, the first thing we have to do is upgrade to the next gen platform and then we'll get other things in there like Will do. We're already doing some of it, but that's kind of what we wanted. The key things were here is where my focus was.
00;03;48;19 - 00;04;21;19
Speaker 1
Costs were like just running over. We had some cybersecurity vulnerabilities. You know, some of you are a cybersecurity simplification was important. Simplification was a really big deal. So let me give you some high level numbers. 2800 plus modules had to be retrofitted. There were 1400 custom programs. And I'm like, What the heck are these people do and why is it so complex?
00;04;21;19 - 00;04;52;20
Speaker 1
Right. So so this is this is a while. So if the the situation. So there were three pillars in that I focused on people, technology and the process. So people say I started talking to some of my business people. So this is like finance actually, you know, valuations. So there's like 14 of them had new business underwriting and everybody had one thing fear.
00;04;52;23 - 00;05;18;08
Speaker 1
If this doesn't go right, bad things are going to happen. You know, reporting to Wall Street, you know, money coming in. They were fearful. So what was the reason why it didn't go well is because this was two plus years running. You know, it was a not a great situation. And there were some conflicting opinions on priorities based on different areas.
00;05;18;08 - 00;05;42;14
Speaker 1
And I want this and somebody else wanted something else We had to navigate between a whole bunch of other programs. Why? Because we are the hub and everybody wants their own thing out of the hub. All right. So I looked at the technology, say not meeting ceilings. I have, you know, one of my colleagues here who, you know, is always barraging me on, hey, you have a B-1 today.
00;05;42;14 - 00;06;10;19
Speaker 1
You know, what's what's going on. So I have to solve that problem. I knew that one. We had 78 plus integrations that just went out to banks, to internal systems, to whatever. And these are these different feeds, and they have certain sleeves. You have to be big. All right. They're 170. Some express that we need to validate and imagine.
00;06;10;19 - 00;06;33;06
Speaker 1
You know, you have to prepare the data. This is test data management. You have to prepare the data. You know how you gain certain policies. The policies become new. They have statuses, they have premiums or whatever. It's pretty complex. And every time you try to compare the data, it takes days to figure this out. You need hundreds of people to figure this out.
00;06;33;09 - 00;06;58;22
Speaker 1
We can't build it. It has to be fast. We found that there was a non-priority environment, but people did different types of testing. They did some testing over here, some testing out of here. I'm like, Wait a minute, where's the end to end before you move into production? Yeah, we kind of don't do that as well as we would like to do it kind of sort of dinosaur, but it did.
00;06;58;22 - 00;07;19;06
Speaker 1
It did work and work, but it just wasn't, you know, you never got the warm and fuzzy that. Yes, this is solid. All right. The other part was the process. Okay. So it's been running for so long. What happens to the concurrent development? We have all of these big programs are running products going out the door, other projects dependent on you.
00;07;19;08 - 00;07;29;29
Speaker 1
We needed a system that allowed concurrent development. That's a big deal. How do you do that? Right. And this is legacy platforms.
00;07;30;02 - 00;08;08;26
Speaker 1
When I came in, we had 26% automation. We like thousands of test cases, thousands like 8000 plus 26% automation. Like Houston got a problem. You we got to solve this one. Oh, so what did we exactly do? I give people technology and process. So the biggest concern I had from one of the SVP that I spoke to is he said, when you guys did this the last day, which was probably a decade ago, we had six plus months of stabilization.
00;08;08;28 - 00;08;37;08
Speaker 1
I'm telling you, I cannot afford that budget. And there were people on the team that were tired. They were exhausted. They didn't want to be on the team, but at least didn't feel like they were in the right place on the team. They had to do something. All right. So if you ever read the book Extreme Ownership, I actually read that book twice.
00;08;37;10 - 00;08;56;06
Speaker 1
I had to I had to learn it. But one of the things I learned from that was prioritize and execute. You know, I had people on the team that gave me a whole bunch of things, but it was no specific did it's oh, it's too complex. Oh, you know, I can't put a project. Oh, I got to do this only later.
00;08;56;09 - 00;09;19;05
Speaker 1
I need you to focus on two things and then you kind of go from there. The main thing was to bring people to the goal. Those who didn't want to be on the team and said, okay, I am. Here you are. You know, you've probably been there for two years, three years trying to deal with this situation. You have two choices.
00;09;19;08 - 00;09;43;19
Speaker 1
Either you're in it or, you know. Big deal. I said, This is the Super Bowl for CMO. You have this golden opportunity to be on the Super Bowl team, Whatever it is you got here now, you got to knock it out of the city. And so talking to people, understanding their fear, what's what's motivating you? What's your fear?
00;09;43;19 - 00;10;07;21
Speaker 1
What's the issue? We went on hundreds of issues that we had learned to even keep up with that list. One of our former speakers here, my former boss, she came up with this concept of building highly. It's an industry standard. Maybe it was presented before, which is basically we want to create two lanes of a non profit environment.
00;10;07;23 - 00;10;39;05
Speaker 1
That's an amazing concept. How the heck do you do it? You create a clone of your best environment. But here's the problem. Those integrations I told you about, they don't exist. So I can create the clones, but I'm only going to get 20% of the integration. What about the rest? That's the problem, right? So we spent months and months negotiating with people on setting those up because it's among their priority.
00;10;39;05 - 00;11;11;01
Speaker 1
They have ten, 20 projects that are very that's where we were working on. We had to figure it out. Automation. We went from 26% automation to 86% automation. So all and the automation is not that simple type of, you know, bad things. You look up something, you know something. No, no, no, no. It's about a feedback comes in, it gets process, it does ETL, it goes through the different stages, it goes to all these different places.
00;11;11;01 - 00;11;36;25
Speaker 1
And then we brought in some people. I was talking to somebody who you talking about Python type development. I brought in an intern. We brought in some people that said, You've got 170 feeds that go up, do a comparison. So we had one of our architects talk about that. So imagine this. Somebody is going through the old system and doing the verification.
00;11;37;02 - 00;12;09;06
Speaker 1
Somebody is going through the new system and they're matching up. And then we just give our business partner deal the exceptions. You tell me what needs to be done. If we had not done that every cycle, we would have taken easily 30 plus beats. We did it in three and do it on the process side. The the mantra was very simple automate everything end to end wherever you can automate you figured it out.
00;12;09;06 - 00;12;35;17
Speaker 1
You if you're going to do the whole thing, you do a piece of it and you automate. We did something called DART deployments. I had to look this up because there's some suggestion people were talking about, and I said, What happens if we take the whole thing and you push it into like a release? Like how, you know, Google does it, like how, you know, Facebook, American does it, people do it.
00;12;35;20 - 00;12;57;05
Speaker 1
And if it doesn't work, they roll it back. You'd never find out when you're logged in. You just get redirected to something else and you never know what happened. Well, there was a problem with that concept, too. Why? Because I can't have two parallel production in one. Because the feeds are going on from both of those systems. Which one are they going to go from?
00;12;57;07 - 00;13;16;28
Speaker 1
The one that I'm talking about or the one that was there before we had a chat. But we ran through some examples that I was in. It came up with a doing a box model, which is where we had the business and the IT person working together and making quick decisions. You look at what's something is there from before.
00;13;17;00 - 00;13;31;22
Speaker 1
What is it now? Is there any deltas, any exceptions? Can you live with that exception or not? What needs to happen? Fix it more, but fast decisions. That's what we did.
00;13;31;24 - 00;14;03;00
Speaker 1
The big thing is I reflect on it, what the game changes. So focusing on the people first was a biggest reading from our standpoint. The biggest thing was having that mindset that, you know, this is not a good project, this is not affordable. Well, and these same people who came to the Super Bowl team, they became the biggest advocates to the motivation of these people changed.
00;14;03;02 - 00;14;25;09
Speaker 1
All we did was talk to people and say, What's your why? Why do you think this is going to fail or do we need to do to solve this? Give me some ideas. Let's go talk to people they knows about. They tend to just come out and speak to. These are all these experts who know how this business works, but you want to talk to them and understand their issues.
00;14;25;09 - 00;15;00;26
Speaker 1
And then they are like, what? Example? Back in the day in nineties and dating myself, I was working in a consulting role at Lilly. I, my, my, my, my pride factor was I shared the same floor with the C-level executives. I was in the Patent Trademark office. So there was a big, you know, picture outside one of the CFO, the CFO office, and it was this one big ship and a whole bunch of these boards and ships that were all in different directions.
00;15;00;26 - 00;15;32;16
Speaker 1
And I'm standing outside looking at it, and his admin comes in and says, Send you, do you know what this thing means? I know Diane Delany. She said, Lilly is a very large company, 38,000 plus employees. When you have all these different departments that are in different directions and you have believers in different directions, if you don't align them with the vision, they're all going to be in different directions and some of them are going to be competing with each other.
00;15;32;21 - 00;15;59;11
Speaker 1
So you will never achieve success like that's a pretty good life story to have. So I gave that example to the team. I said, You got to work with each other, figure this out because you have only one goal. One goal is to deliver this with success. That was our mission. Fortunately, we had people open up and they were able to speak up.
00;15;59;13 - 00;16;25;17
Speaker 1
The people who were the naysayers, the Debbie Downers got them out, gave them an opportunity, got some people who were brave enough to speak up and execute or tell us why it could not be done. The same people who said, you know, last time we had six months of issues can't have it now. We had to negotiate with it because you can never find it.
00;16;25;19 - 00;16;57;17
Speaker 1
And I'd never find the right time to deliver anything in production. But you know the story well, we cannot because blah, blah, blah. Well, we cannot because whatever. So how do you navigate this? So I created this concept called ambulance. And I'm sorry, guys, when you take out an ambulance and the ambulance is silent, what happens? You get out of the way, but you have only a window of opportunity to get out of the way because the cars have come back on the road.
00;16;57;20 - 00;17;20;15
Speaker 1
So he said, We have to give us a limited amount of time, but we have to make it work for you. So you let me go, but you have to give the space for it to do so. Owning it then cheerleader, the team, you know, the people who are on the Gore team. We met every single day. I know the coffee cup that the person has on the team every day.
00;17;20;18 - 00;17;38;05
Speaker 1
And if she does not have it, I would ask why is that? What's going on? Why are you not in the right frame of mind? You know, things happen, right? You have to be human. Some days you have a bad day. Sometimes you have a headache, whatever it is. But when you know the people you have interactions with, people you build relationships with people.
00;17;38;07 - 00;18;07;21
Speaker 1
And the focus is very simple. Are who I what do you think it stands for? And. Carolyn Yeah. And then relationships over issues. You work the relationships, everything falls into place. Going back to the people, then you get a flood of all these teams. I don't know, I'm supposed to run this big program and everybody has their party issues.
00;18;07;22 - 00;18;33;18
Speaker 1
I'm like, okay, call them all on the list. Today we talk about two or three of them and figure out a plan to execute on it. That's it. During three at a time and you work through the list. What we did was the DART deployments. The growth mindset was we actually simulated the solution going into production pieces the right time because we had only a window of opportunity.
00;18;33;20 - 00;19;15;17
Speaker 1
Guess what happened? Our program manager perfectly. February ten of this year, and we picked that in March of last year. One day was it do you know it was Super Bowl weekend? And I'm like, Why did you pick the Super Bowl weekend? I you know, that's weird. I said, okay. I said, there's only one cardinal rule people have what I have fun and we have to two pencils down by 4 p.m. Eastern time, 4 p.m. So I said, Your opportunity is 2 p.m. and everything happens.
00;19;15;17 - 00;19;39;03
Speaker 1
And before that, because we have only one window right now. Only one window. It's Friday afternoon going all the way. And these are mainframe systems. This is this is going to touch like a whole bunch of things. So your window of opportunity is only that weekend because we cannot have downtime. Why? Because people are selling policies. Some things are coming in, payments are going out, money is coming in.
00;19;39;03 - 00;20;06;10
Speaker 1
What is going on? What? What do you do? You have no option. So we went through that back deployments, multiple number of days, and we found out those little, little things that that happened in there. And we find a way to fix it because you will find things in an environment. Yeah. Now what idea what or somebody is going to affect finger something and it won't go right and then you restart that process.
00;20;06;12 - 00;20;27;19
Speaker 1
The clock is still ticking. We also have the opportunity been brought in a lot of communication. So brought in all these big leaders, you know, from our teams. And we said this is what we're doing. This is our entire plan. If it doesn't go well on this day, we're going to do it. They do they 20 options and it we had to negotiate that.
00;20;27;19 - 00;20;56;23
Speaker 1
That is not easy to do it. I remember a call to my boss at 10:00 at night on Saturday. I'm like, Yeah, I know you just joined the organization. When we have a problem, I have my business partner who wants to kill it. I don't know if you remember that Rooster Ball, but we had that conversation and and I said we had almost did my make believe person was saying, we're almost dead.
00;20;56;25 - 00;21;33;07
Speaker 1
I know we are 2 hours over our plan window, but trust me, if it doesn't work, is going to fail anyway, right? What's the difference? However? However, I'm almost there. I trust the team. Give them a chance to execute. And I said, Remember that to our 2:00 PM. And so now you be at Street View. But I told the team said, Guys, after 4:00 pm there's no phone call because people will not be in the right state of mind.
00;21;33;07 - 00;22;03;04
Speaker 1
They were having a couple of beers that will bring on tailgating. You're not going to get good answer, so forget it. But it worked. It worked. We went through that. And one of the things that we learned out of this is if you keep your goals too low and you just about meet it, then you're not achieving what you're able to do as the team who didn't want to be on this team, they came together.
00;22;03;06 - 00;22;27;22
Speaker 1
They want to their fears. This is just not an IT platform upgrade. This is where the team work together that touch every part of CMO. I had our CIO speak to one of our celebration events and I gave a list of 15 organizations that were there that were involved. And I said, Mike, I probably missed a few. I promise you that.
00;22;27;24 - 00;22;50;13
Speaker 1
But we ran through it together where the whole team came together and we had unfortunately one high severity incident and it was a tremendous success. So I'm here to talk about our big hairy Haiti or the physical. Think of it.