Episode 20: Delivering Service with Susannah Morton
In this episode, we sit down with Pat's old co-worker Susannah Morton, Senior Manager of Service Delivery at Rentokil North America. We chatted about what Service Delivery is, the communication between the business and IT teams, change management, and changing people's habits. Communication between teams is key and service delivery is here to help! Join us!
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Pat: 0:18
Everybody. Welcome back to this week's edition of, so you want to be in it, if you've been here before, you know, the deal, what we're about who we are and what we're doing, if you're a first-timer welcome, it's good to have you. We're a podcast aimed at those starting their journeys out in the vast world of it. We talk about navigating the world of it as a beginner, right? From breaking in to climbing a ladder to management, office politics, getting to the next rung and everything in between. We talk about it all. So as usual, I'm your host, pat, you can find me on Twitter at pat Allen, 180 2, and you can find the show on Twitter @sywbiit the acronym for, so you want to be in it. So, Dean is here with me as always, Dean. Yeah. There's he's on Twitter @DeanMacUK. So go hang out with him and a chat with us on Twitter. And we have another guest this week. I am excited about this one. She is a longtime friend for former coworker of mine at Rentokil. Mrs. Susannah Morton. Hi, Susannah. How are you doing?
Dean: 1:30
Hey Susannah, wow. How are you
Susannah: 1:32
Great. How are you guys?
Dean: 1:33
Excellent. Thank you for joining today.
Pat: 1:36
Yeah. So
Susannah: 1:37
Yes. Pleasure.
Pat: 1:38
it's always a pleasure to talk to Susanna from my personal experience is talking to her almost daily to it's about six months. Since the last time we talked Susanna. So it's been awhile.
Susannah: 1:48
Yes
Pat: 1:49
It's been a hot minute.
Susannah: 1:50
when you left us for greener pastures.
Pat: 1:53
I'm sure. I'm sure I missed by some more than others, but, that's
Dean: 1:57
Is that the uncut part?
Pat: 1:58
Yeah exactly. Susanna why don'y you tell the fine folks out there, who you are and what you're doing now for Rentokil.
Susannah: 2:06
Sure. I am the senior manager of it service delivery and it communications for Rentokil North America. So I help our lines of business connect with our technical teams, like our operational teams we have lots of of different meetings. We take escalations, we meet with them on a recurring basis just to make sure we're providing the best kind of service that we can because they're our internal customers. So, and I also help kind of standardizing the communications that we send out to our various end users. Oh, my gosh. I think we're at like 226 services that we that we run all the lines of business. So try to help our service owners communicate most effectively with their end users.
Pat: 2:58
look at that. So you're in the comms game. Susannah is basically.
Susannah: 3:01
I am. I am. I tried.
Pat: 3:04
It's a good It's a good business to be, and I'm not going to lie. It's yeah, it's a good one. So I figured this week, it's a little less technical on the bits and bytes, zeros and ones that Dean and I usually plow through on this show. And we wanted to open folks eyes to some of the other facets of it. Cause Susannah, and don't take this wrong way. You're not necessarily technical. You just work with technical
Susannah: 3:29
not technical note.
Pat: 3:32
X and Y. So, there's always going to be that buffer between the business and technical teams and somebody to make sense of it and to put a comm out and to, make, a talk to b. So Susannah is that person. So we figured this week's a little bit of a curve ball, change up whatever you want to call it to open, and expose, focuses eyes to other facets of it. it's not just, people, pushing buttons and zeros and ones and making, packets go from a to B there's other, there's other people involved in the backend. And a lot of that, a lot of the time they don't get the recognition they deserve because they're not, at the front of the line, helping the end user. So we want to, bring folks into that and give some shout out to the folks behind the curtain sort of thing.
Dean: 4:11
that's really cool. So, what does your like job look like on a day-to-day basis? Could you walk us through.
Susannah: 4:17
Sure. Well, it's a mix of a few different things. I feel like myself and my team we juggle a little bit because we interface some of the leadership teams. They know that we're an escalation pathway. So if they have something that has come up that stopping their teams from working. You know, if they've gone the pathways escalating a ticket, but maybe there's a misunderstanding about how high of a priority it is. We can really help move that along, make sure the right people are engaged to help get a more critical issue towards resolution. So, that's one of the things and those of course up anytime. It's not just in the mornings or things like that
Dean: 4:53
so does that involve setting up meetings and working with technical folks and non technical folks, and then coming up with a conclusion of best rd, is that kind of that of the
Susannah: 5:05
deal there?Es. We kind of different tiers that happens in when it's a major incident or the most critical type of incident. We have a very structured process that we go through, pulling people together on a crash call, gathering the information that we need. Making sure that the right people are present and then that technical team goes off and does the work that they need to do to restore service, investigate, whatever they need to do there. And then we check in with them periodically so we can help make sure that we're giving them the support. They need to meet periodically to send out communications to the relevant parties, help them maybe gather additional information or feedback from those end users who are affected. Let's say they've put in a. we need to help get confirmation that the fix actually worked and people can get back in and work again, like expect to be so yeah, some of that like liaison ship something we help with that's on the highest priority where there's that bigger you know, more structured approach to it. We adopt that even on some of the lower levels with that as well. Even though there isn't quite as much, you know, built around. But with that major incident process, I mean, there's a lot of rigor that goes into it. Like along with, okay. After the fact we have a post-mortem right. We're debriefing, we're making sure we've identified the actions that need to take place and who's going to do them. And when, so that we can avoid it happening again. Doesn't always work out that you can completely avoid something, but at least you can decrease the impact to your end users by those actions you can take. we help wiwith that. Yea that's one iece.
Dean: 6:40
That's enough. Keep you busy.
Susannah: 6:44
yes. Yeah. So one of the other things that, that, myself and my team do. I was mentioning, we interfaced with the leadership team. So our organization has a lot of different lines of business and then some kind of functional teams like our finance team, our customer call center team and HR. So we kind of have a mix of these groups, these user groups that may use different applications and services. They can be impacted when something happens. We on a periodic basis, we'll provide service reviews, we call them. So it's essentially the leaders of that line of business. They come to the meeting and we talk to them about things that they've told us are kind of high priority for them. We get them FaceTime with their application managers. We talk about those major incidents or things that really have impacted their people. We go through some metrics, like ticket data. We use service now. so it makes it really easier to pull those things out and maybe give them advice, you know, talk about trends, things like that, and kind of remind them about the ways to best engage with us. So it's a very collaborative, like partner focused interactivity that we have with. because we have not between all of our lines of business and those functional teams it adds up to be about nine different. So, if you think of that over the course of a quarter, we've got quite a rotation going on about, you know, three, three a month so it's constantly kind of churning through those. So, but it's really good. We've helped remove a lot of. Where it was like, oh, we have all these problems. And then we actually sit down and we say, let's go through this in a structured way. Let's talk through this let's problem solve figure that out. We move it through and categorically, like we, we moved to a much better state. We're always moving towards kind of a better relationship with them. So
Dean: 8:43
That's
Susannah: 8:44
the focus.
Pat: 8:46
Susanna is the centerpiece of all the stuff and all the things
Susannah: 8:50
Now I wouldn't say that I am just one. I am just one of many, very capable people
Pat: 8:57
look at that. That's the politically correct way to say right now. whoOOOOK.Eah, that's Right? No, I, so to sort of back up, Rentokil North America is a large, pest control company And very, they have other assets of it too. So yeah, Susannah said why the businesses? So they do pest control. They do, like sanitation, they do office, plants And that sort of thing with their Ambius, division. And, just recently Susanna, I heard on the waiver wire maybe a month or two ago that you guys bought out Terminex, correct? So you guys are confining, conjoining with Terminex, which is a huge deal. So, so just a little background story there for folks that don't know, it was typically in the race for pest control dominance. the term out there. Normally, it's normally Rentokil, Orkin and Terminix were the big three. And then, yeah, there was some other players in there that sort of settled, but the big three were those three and they switched spots depending on what month of the year you'd come and check in on the who's doing good and who's leading the race sort of thing. So now with Rentokil buying out Terminex and the conjoining there, that is another asset, or I should say aspect of a major merger. And, when I was there, we had 400 plus sites imagine what those sites are going to look like now with Terminex coming into the fold. So, and I don't want you to go too crazy, cause I don't know what you can talk or can't talk about, but what does that look like of, bringing that load onto the, and I know you and I have been in the fire before, Susannah, of the already tremendous load that's already there and it's still, you still have to keep Rentokil's wheels churning, but now you're bringing in a company the size of Terminex, which is pretty large. And how do you make everybody fat and happy sort of thing.
Susannah: 10:48
Yeah, no. Great question. And I know there's lots of discussions going on with that. The they're still competitor, right? Has to go through all the checks and balances, make sure
Pat: 10:59
legal channel. Yeah.
Susannah: 11:00
and all of that stuff. So we have a little bit of time, I think, to start to get our heads around it. But yeah, I think one of the good things that we have going for us, because I don't know what it will look like, but it will double size and we already have over 10,000 colleagues just in America. Not
Pat: 11:19
to North America, right?
Susannah: 11:21
think we're close. 50,000 worldwide or 42,000 or something.
Pat: 11:27
I know it's up there. Yeah, it was up there.
Susannah: 11:29
yeah, this is going to be huge. So, so I think one of the I can say is the structure that the teams have put into place from an acquisition and migration perspective. Over the last couple of years, like really putting like repeatable processes in place of how we move new acquisitions into the company and how we plan for that. It's not just shove it in there and figure it out later. Like maybe kind of was done a little bit more in the past when we weren't resourced properly. We're in front of that, now. So we won't be shooting ourselves in the foot, maybe as much despite, you know, I mean, this is going to be huge for sure. So yeah, it'll shape up. It'll shape up. It'll be interesting.
Pat: 12:12
so that brings me to another question then. So, so take Terminex out of it, right? Take the size of Terminex and take the Terminex name out of it. So when Susannah and I were at Rentokil, we, they bought roughly 10 to 12 companies. So smaller mom and pop shops, and they were pretty aggressive on the, the art of the deal, if you will. And I think that was a term from one of the CEOs that said, he loves a good deal. Shout out to them. But yeah, they bought, 10 to 12, sometimes 15 companies a year. And so I'm curious on that Susanna, like when do you and your team get involved in that? Is that from Hey, we bought mom and pop pest control down in Florida. Now they're sort of under the umbrella. Does, do you do deal with them? Like, from day one sort of thing, or is there like a grace period where okay. You have to give them 90 days. Sort of, let that shake out, let the sand settle a little bit and then sort of introduce them briefly because a lot of these were mom and pops that don't necessarily have the processes that big conglomerate Rentokil has. So that is sort of a culture shock to some people that they've done this way for mom and pop pest control for the 10 years they've been there. And now all of a sudden they're not used to playing in the big pool and now they're like, oh, this kind of sucks. What does that look like as far as how, do you do you meet resistance with that? Trying to get people, in to shape for the lack of better term?
Susannah: 13:31
well, I mean, this may be surprising to you but people are not with change, especially when they.
Dean: 13:38
shocker.
Susannah: 13:39
the
Pat: 13:40
oh, they hate it. Hate it.
Susannah: 13:42
And, that is such a huge part of the migration. The acquisition and migration strategy is really trying to help people. Integrate. So it's not just the technical pieces. There's been a huge push in the company overall, not just it wise to really bring people into the fold. I know our HR and our colleague engagement teams and our colleague engagement team is just new to the organization just within the last couple of years because of feedback that, people gave us like, hi, I'm from an acquisition. And it was really painful. So they took it to heart, like to really put together programs with that. So that's part one, right? Help people be open to change, help people be feeling a little bit better about all right. So my day-to-day job not only is changing, but all the ways that I do that, like I, I've got to use a Chromebook now, and I'm not really comfortable with that, but kind of helping them into that in multiple. So the emotional way, and then the educational side of it. But to answer your question, we do not engage my team. Doesn't engage with them day one. The migration and integration teams they work through, I've mentioned the process that they go through there. There's a great number of steps to help make sure technically we're moving them through that There's a review piece of Technology, do you guys that? We can quickly move to can we move your cell phones over and you still do your work? Or do you have a as 400, you know, system that you're working off of, that all of, your customers are on that we need to make a bigger plan to move that customer base over. So some of the things can move faster than others. But typically the pace that it's been is it takes a good deal of time before we're actually interacting with them. Yeah. And a lot of times they're pest companies. So they're kind of folded into those reviews that we have, like the leadership teams, aren't always just immediately going to becoming right. Because. They integrate in there as well. Their mom and pop operators might not necessarily, they may be going off to retirement land, right? Like they've passed the buck with that as well. Some of the larger acquisitions that's different of course, but with the smaller ones, they're kind of pulled into the, to the folds of operations there. So in those cases, we don't actually interact with them directly. Probably at all. One that we did, if I can elaborate just a little more.
Pat: 16:08
go for it.
Susannah: 16:08
So when we acquired the lakes management company, right? So solitude lakes, management, and kind of. Subsidiaries and related companies with that. That was a way that we did actually get a closer relationship going with because it was all new. It wasn't like, oh, we just have this acquisition that like fits in. 'cause it's an Indiana somewhere. It was a completely new line of business and they had their own set of technical challenges and they needed support and they needed a little bit more maybe than just that smaller pest acquisition. Like it was kind of a bigger, newer, broader need that was there. So
Pat: 16:51
Yeah.
Susannah: 16:51
yeah, we do have some situations like that, but they're more few and far between.
Pat: 16:56
yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so I, I was always curious about what happens with the folks and the acquisitions that happen and then how open they are, if that's the right term, how, how open they are to adopting bigger, say conglomerate, that has a negative connotation to it. But you're part of a bigger umbrella. And now they're sort of shell-shocked if you will, because like you said, people just, they hate change in general. It was, it's interesting to me when that when your team actually steps in and says, okay, you've been a part of the business long enough. Now you can my way or the highway, you know, that's sort of sort
Susannah: 17:33
I mean, on some of that stuff. a little less. I feel like there's this lag between, you know, when we have an acquisition and us, maybe interfacing with them more of what we do in the kind of change management realm is when we have needed to pull what our operation looks like or an application into the 21st century. Hi, you've been running on a extremely old server and we need to move you into our like enterprise data center
Pat: 18:06
400. It's not going to cut it.
Susannah: 18:07
this you're going to need to log in to that application in a new way. So that kind of education, that's more of the change management type stuff that, that my team really works through in trying to connect with them and help them be educated. And of course we work with the subject matter experts, the service owners of that particular application or service. They have their key people in the business, which we always try to emphasize, like, you have to have your advocates in the business as well, because I can send an email from it 22 times, but until they have their business leader saying, Hey guys, this is really important.
Pat: 18:45
Poking the
Susannah: 18:46
Is so key to helping people move through, change it can't just come from it or from secure. You've goity to have that partnership with key leaders and folks in the business that the business people trust for them to adopt that and move it along in a positive way.
Dean: 19:02
huge.
Pat: 19:04
makes sense.
Susannah: 19:05
There's always going to be
Pat: 19:06
Oh, there always
Susannah: 19:07
cut iss down on Yeah.
Pat: 19:09
ever smooth. No, you gotta get somebody with a title behind their name to say, all right, look, this is the cutoff date. It's like it or not. This is what we're doing. sort of thing.
Susannah: 19:17
And that's part of it. And also the likelihood that they trust them, right? Not only is it their boss or their boss's boss. But they have a rapport with them. They are working with them. They're someone in the business, a peer or a peer leader. Like, who am I? Right, like I'm some chick in IT who writes And though it might look fine and they get it and they can comprehend it. It means a lot less in that where it's like great thanks. It's the next notice. So,
Pat: 19:46
right? CorrectCorrect. No, I agree., it's an interesting facet of, you know, cause Dean and I come from a technical perspective of, you know, we're pushing buttons all day long and you know, I've said multiplmultiple times, like why don'tpeople get it? I'm like They're not paid to get it, stop slow down. You know, it's one of those things like you just, you know, but now it makes sense that there has to be some sort of medium or some sort of buffer there to okay, break down technical term a into customer term a so they understand Hey, we're doing upgrades on Sunday morning, you know, your VPN will be not available. Lo and behold, you send out emails all that week and Sunday at you know, right when, just 10 minutes after you start. So somebody brings a ticket. Oh, my VPN is down. I need immediately.
Susannah: 20:34
yeah.
Pat: 20:35
Oh, they're killing Like
Susannah: 20:38
I wrote it in English Spanish.
Pat: 20:43
I even use punctuation. This
Susannah: 20:45
French Canadian. What do you want from me?
Pat: 20:48
that's true. It is. true. No. So, yeah. So from Dean and I's perspective, and I'm speaking for myself, but I'm sure Dean has been through this before. It's you want to race, race, and get this done. And you have, you know, people to impress and check mark list to to get done. And you gotta do this And like you're there, or someone in your position is there to say, all right, hold on, slow down, We gotta, plan this. we gotta write it out. Cause I can't tell you how many times Susannah, when I ffirst started at Rentokil within thefirst six months and I would do a change and like we'd all meet on a Tuesday or whatever the change day was like, I would not have enough information in my change. And then you would be like, I need more information. I'm like, what do you mean? I just want to push buttons. It's Jesus, you know, it's one of those things. So no, but I think that is a good checks and balances to say, okay, look good. Cause sometimes I think tech people live in a vacuum and it's their tech things go on in their head and nothing else really matters, you know, that sort of thing. But then it's, you know, departments like yours and people like yours in positions to say, okay, look, no, there's a business here to serve. That's sort of who, you know, pays your paycheck sort of thing. So you have to keep them happy. So I feel like,
Susannah: 21:59
What's in it for them, es it them or it's go, it's definitely going to go over their heads.
Pat: 22:06
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Dean and I can sit m, you know, what we're going to do and this and that. and people look at you like you have seven heads. I doyou like you you have sevenrtant to understand why we're doing it and then have people sort of on board and the business on board, ultimately it's about moving the business forward, I think. And it, it takes multiple people and teams and time and effort to, sort of get there.
Susannah: 22:27
It does. And you're still not going to get everyone. I mean, it's just a matter of fact, people learn in very different ways. We have this thing of okay, well, we'll send out an email. Well, like you're only going to hit, you know, a certain percentage of your population, especially depending on what they do every day. So we have technicians that are out in the field and they're on, you know, a mobile phone. So if I'm putting a bunch of graphics and stuff in there, and they're trying to read it on, a four-inch screen, like you're totally missing your audience. and for other people, when. Reading instructions or like putting something in bulleted form, they might do better if you record a three-minute video, actually walk them through it. So those are things that we have to consider as well, depending on how complex the message is, how new it might be to them. It's just, you know, we have to move out of those traditional oh yeah, cut an email. It's definitely not going to hit everyone. Even if send it eight times.
Pat: 23:26
No, video's a huge t iing. So YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google and that's all video, So, it makes sense. People, learn better from video, I think, or at least they absorb information better in video form. I know I do. It's just the way it is. But yeah, I think that's a think that's a big, piece of it and I think the larger the company you have, the more there is a need for it. And I'm sort of confused. Cause I don't really know like where that cutoff Is okay. Is there a magic number? Okay, you hit 5,000 employees, you have to have a service delivery department. Like what does that, I guess it's the nature of the business and how open. The communication between the business and it departments are, if that warrants one, like, what do you see there? And I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer. I'm just spit balling at this point.
Susannah: 24:16
Yeah. I think I can help fill that in a little bit. So. So. one of the things about Rentokil as a larger organization, not just North America is we run with the ITIL foundation, so, and that actually service delivery and continual service improvement. Is a key piece of that. So if you think of everyone talks about life cycles, software life cycle, so think of a customer experience, life cycle is you know, you come in, it's something that we're providing support. We provide structure and process. We have incidents, we have problems. We have change. And then there's always like wanting to make sure that's consistently improving that we're engaging with our customers. It's kind of this, like we're gardening in a way. Like we want to make sure that we're consistently improving. Fertilizing right. Ensuring that like the things that we're doing are making it better and helping the relationship and the partnership grow and all the while we still have all the things that we need to do, we need to patch servers. We need to do our upgrades to software. We need to, you know, do our disaster recovery. Like all of those things in the background that still need to happen. But we also need to be able to keep the lights on and help people when they have a question about how to do their job, or if their network connectivity has gone down, how do I work Around that? And can you help? It's like the real life piece with all the maintenance and all the other pieces too. So it all kind of goes into that life cycles swirl in a way, but I'm really more on the side of the bigger picture, right? Of like they are our customer and what can we do to make sure that we're on top of all of those pieces that help a partnership be as strong as it can be
Dean: 26:01
So are these internal customers or external customers? I'm a little lost on that sort of part,
Susannah: 26:05
Internal. Yeah. So as it, all of these particular lines of business that are within the north American region, they are our customers, but they may be like distinct groups, because they have their. Operational teams and they have their own processes that are even separate from each other in some cases. So yes, definitely internal
Dean: 26:26
what would be your biggest or today's biggest challenge with your particular role right now?
Susannah: 26:32
Biggest challenge. Until more recently, I think it was having enough people to go the continual service route. So we can take escalations, but that's very reactive, right? We want to get to a place where we can be proactive and get in front of things like notice trends, help coach our customers on things that like education or things that they can do better, kind of making things easier on themselves. Self-help kind of stuff, but we haven't been resourced really to be able to get in front of things. So it's been very reactive. Not really the way you want to be in a in a customer. I mean, we're all customer service. Even though they're internal customers.
Dean: 27:20
but how would you get in front of Or be proactive in a situation like an acquisition, how would you know what they would need? Oh, you see in trends in what, multiple acquisitions that they're going through. And is it similar kind of material you're sourcing or what is that look like?
Susannah: 27:36
Yeah, there's a great partnership between, our acquisition team and kind of our hardware and our other senior leaders in it in particular. So when it comes to, hardware and being able to be prepared for those things, be able to get people set up on. Those processes are in place with enough advanced notice that when we do need to move a bit faster, we can mobilize, I'm probably not the best person to answer all of the acquisition questions but I do see how these teams interface with each other. And because of the requirements gathering that the acquisition prep teams do. We don't, we have less surprises. I mean, there will always be something, but there's less surprises because they're asking questions upfront.
Pat: 28:21
Yeah. And the one thing I did like at Rentokil when I was there and you guys were sort of trending towards was more of a self service model. And I know Susannah that you had a big part in that and you and Lynn and Aaron and all those guys, and gals, shout out to Lynn, Erin Lynn. is a big craft beer person like me. So we hit it off quite well. So, yeah. Love Lynn. So, so yeah, so the one thing I was sort of drawn to what is your self service help yourself model sort of of thing that these folks can do right? They can open a ticket in the portal themselves. They we have knowledge bases, right? So KBs to follow and knowledge bases are actually pretty decent from a level, zero and knowledge base, which is, you know, the user facing one almost like a help article all the way up to a level three, which is, you know, Dean and I, and top of the chain. And this is your process on how to do this, if this is broken sort of thing. So I'm curious on that Has there, are you guys sort of still driving that factor home of like more self-awareness like chatbots and, you know, things of that nature to sort of get, I should say not less tickets cause you want to help people, but less trying to herd cats sort of thing. And if somebody has a problem, like they're not going right to the top instead of. There's a chain there that you have to follow. And I think you guys were doing a nice job of trying to put more tools into the hands of users and trying to get them to do it that way.
Susannah: 29:46
Yes, definitely. Yes, that is still a huge initiative. I mean, it's like literally every day we press that people should have as much information as possible in their own hands. We know there will always be a subset of the population that feels much more comfortable with actually calling in and walking through. Something with a live human, I don't think we'll ever move away from that. But yes, absolutely. I mean, huge drive for that. And as far as kind of, I think some of what you're talking about, like with chat and different ways of accessing like that omnichannel kind of approach, from a technology side, like chatbots, I'm not sure that we're there yet, but we want to get there all the work that the teams are doing for. Knowledge management and, building that up to be more robust will help set us up in a spot that we can do that. And we did that big push. I guess that last year, two years ago, I don't know all the time is running together, but.
Pat: 30:44
Which losing time,
Susannah: 30:45
We did a push for, kind of that, that landing page where people could go to put in a ticket or read those knowledge articles or order, a new monitor if they needed one or replace a laptop or, something. So. So we are always looking for opportunities where we can make that better, more user-friendly, capture those things, to move things through workflows and things like that because we have great tools to do it. We just need to know it's going to be most effective. So, so with, more people kind of added to the teams and very strategic areas to be able to pick those things out and look at data and see those areas that people are most in need. That's a way we can kind of move that forward and keep that growing in the most effective way. I mean, we,I mean, we, you canething a million times, but if it's not something that people are actually, willing to help themselves with, or, move through themselves. It's way less effective. So there's some look at that too. Thankfully like these tools that we have, they can see what pages people are hitting and, people can click the, this was helpful, not everyone does it,
Dean: 31:55
Yeah, I've got to ask what's the response rate on these new tools and what's this helpful were people like engaged in those things is that you getting some traction.
Susannah: 32:04
Yeah. It's well, in a way with one of these pieces, we kind of forced them to, so they used to be able to submit tickets by calling. By putting it in through the service portal, which was right. You type your own ticket essentially. Or they could send an email and the email would auto create a ticket. We were finding that the email tickets. Most often we're so vague that we spent a tremendous amount of time trying to reach the people back to get clarity on what the problem was. So we decided, and this was the campaign part of the campaign that I was talking about. We were saying, okay guys, in October, we're going to do away with that email method. And here's why, and we talked to all the leaders about it and we did the countdown and we made it competitive of here's. how many people are using more of the service portal, right? Like we tried to make. Really like kind of inclusive, involved thing. And then eventually we pulled the plug and said, you can't submit it by email anymore. So we kind of force them in that case. But
Dean: 33:10
was that received with the population or your customer base?
Susannah: 33:14
it's the =same thing with change, right? Some people are Well, I emailed the ticket and it's yeah, that went away four months ago. You got to bounce back, that said you can't do it this way anymore. So some people.
Dean: 33:29
are they accepting or non accepting of that? What are they, or was it a lot of frustration and anger?
Susannah: 33:37
A bit, I think for some, so it's kind of a funny thing, because, we expect, because we lived in that, we're like, oh, we know that? email tickets went away, but Like maybe someone didn't have. An issue that they, needed to escalate to us since before the email option went away. So even if they saw that email and they heard from their leaders, like they don't have email anymore, it doesn't register because it's not relevant to them at the time. And so for those pieces, like we try to put it out on the internet and we try to put it in places that we know they can see it before they actually, so if they go, oh shoot, I do have an issue today. Where do I go to do that? So it's kind of nice and clear for them. You're aren't going to catch everyone, but we try to hit those other engagement points with them we in advance. It's tough. There's 10,000 people.
Dean: 34:27
Yeah. You're not to please everybody. That's definitely parent. Yeah. just have to please the right people suppose your position. Has there ever beeneen a case where. You've made a change and then you have to go back due to maybe a leader or someone in your organization, not liking the change or not being the right fit for the business or anything like that.
Susannah: 34:51
Yeah. I mean, probably not related to like specific initiatives that I have led, but I've been involved in some like technology transitions where we realized we, we may be talking about rolling this out to 5,000 people. We're going to need to break that up into some smaller pieces and help pace that out. And get some buy-in. So certainly we've had cases like that before. I think over time, I mean, particularly the last couple of years, unless it was something that was like, oh, holy Christ. We got to move fast on this. Like getting people ready to work from home two years ago. Some of that stuff, it's going to be messy. So you offset it with the executives and it talking to the executives of each of our, each of the lines of business that we support, And we know it won't be perfect, but there's a little bit of grace in a situation like that. But certainly, I mean, we've had changes that have gone wrong and we've had to roll them back. I mean, it's just like any other technology shop. Like you can test and test. And prepare and it might not always a hundred percent go the way you want it to. So what we try
Pat: 35:59
don't get me
Susannah: 36:00
and honest about it, and then people respect it a little bit more than they're a little less critical, right?
Dean: 36:06
absolutely. Yeah. As long as you give them the transparency. Yeah, definitely. do
Pat: 36:11
I think that goes a long way. the
Dean: 36:12
Yeah, sure.
Pat: 36:14
So having people try change. So Susannah you get involved, I want to sort of rewind a little bit, but you get involved in a lot of change management process as well and communications and things of that nature. And I know that, so, and everybody's changed management. Different. Some people have a call, some people don't, some people get it approved by like a board and you just basically make your changes and you know, by the grace of God, it gets approved you know you carry out your time sort of thing. And so everyone's a little different and I know it sort of falls into that ITIL framework and everybody tries to funnel their stuff through that. And what not. I feel like change is a double-edged sword in that aspect of yeah. You have to document it. Yeah. You change, you can't just fly by the seat of your pants and other people have to know what's going on when you're trying to make change. But then the other part of it is the red tape it's got to go through and you know, all the questions and all this stuff, but it's all for good. It's just Some people can think it's. A lot of unnecessary paperwork and I've been a part of some places that, that the paperwork is just for the sake of doing paperwork and it's not aimed at Rentokil by any means they had, they actually had a decent chain structure, so I'm feeling like you're part of the change. I think change is getting to be a bigger part of organizations. Even the smaller ones are starting to lend their ear to change do it that way in that structured manner. So you have something to look back on and say, okay, this is how we did it. Last time. These were our pluses. These were our minuses work, or we do better things of that nature. So you talk about the change process a little bit there and sort of what your role is in that a to Z process, if you will.
Susannah: 37:52
We actually, since you, departed the organization, there's actually been some, some improvements to the change management
Dean: 38:00
see that part. You're holding the team back.
Pat: 38:03
That's it took was for me to leave. What
Susannah: 38:08
No.
Dean: 38:10
Lovely.
Pat: 38:11
the hell? Just, if you didn't want me to just give me the papers it's Okay.
Susannah: 38:16
I'm willing to say that they were unrelated events.
Pat: 38:20
Okay.
Susannah: 38:21
So, so one of the things is that, we brought a little bit more structured than really the global, like the group team had. We knew we needed, some additional structure for the north American group because we have so many applications and services. So having that standardization where we can run things through the change advisory board. Which now the way that those meetings go on a weekly basis, we meet to review changes that have come through. They've been planned, there's an implementation and a rollback plan for each. Communication plan. We talked through what other services it might impact, especially when it's on the infrastructure side. We know that there could be multiple services that are hosted on one server that we're doing some kind of like patching or fix or move or migration, whatever. So it's really that awareness piece, but I think one of the. One of the opportunities we found in rolling out a little bit more robust of a process is that it helped people realize that preparation that they were doing for the implementation plans and the buy-in that they got by bringing all that due diligence and bringing it to the board To say, Hey, let's look through this. They were fully supported after the fact, because again, not everything always goes a hundred percent to plan, no matter how well you plan it, right there can be a snap. But in the cases where it came through change advisory board properly. And something went wrong. For whatever reason, they were fully supported by the leadership team. They went, yes. It went through the process. We have your back, it's okay. However, if you don't follow that process and we're not aware, we can't help have that kind of upfront awareness and review with it, then it's a lot, it's a lot tougher. It's I mean, prepared for that, when something does go wrong and. What happened.
Pat: 40:18
Who pushed the button.
Susannah: 40:19
So it gives that kind of additional assurance that we have your back kind of thing that, that kind of dynamic, I should say for people who are doing the work, pushing the button, it's not just like you're out on an island. Good luck, right.
Pat: 40:34
Get out there and be somebody. All right.
Susannah: 40:37
But it's, it definitely is a part of that, ITIL foundation structure, very much a part of an accountability approach. Awareness and accountability is really big understanding who's doing what, when they're doing it. Why and what else is affected my part in the change advisory board. I mean, Helping review them. I can't say if a test plan is good enough. And did you consider XYZ super technical thing like that is not, I am there at all. Hey, after all the things that you're saying are happening, if you're going to have an outage, do we need to let end users of this service know about that? Is that something that we have an agreement with them that even if it's in the middle of the night, but we're going to do, we're going to do some kind of maintenance on something. Do they want to know, because a lot of times our line of business leaders, they want to know, and it's good because then they're like, oh, you're really supporting us. Like you're doing work to take care of us. So it's not a bad thing to say. We have maintenance to do. Like it's a fact of life when anyone's using any kind of technology at all, like you got to accept your updates. So.
Dean: 41:52
that's fair. That's super fair. Yeah. It's off of permission and not for
Pat: 41:56
Yeah, you can argue
Susannah: 41:57
Oh,
Dean: 41:57
Different way I live, but yeah, I like it.
Pat: 41:59
that's it now. So what I left right to kill, they were in that weird. nobody does any changes until after midnight phase. And I was like,
Susannah: 42:09
Yeah,
Dean: 42:10
places?
Susannah: 42:12
I.
Pat: 42:13
oh my God, that was rough. I'm like, what are you doing? I'm like, I. need my beauty sleep. This is insane.
Dean: 42:17
I've worked at places where change is going to be done until two o'clock in the morning. like working on telecommunication systems. That's rough. You go to the pimps and drug dealers. You can't cut off. So
Susannah: 42:30
Yeah.
Dean: 42:31
until two, you got to give them a little space and then yeah. But yeah, that's really rough, but 12 is, it started at 12 for us and then it moved to two. So I wonder if that might, when the more services and stuff or go in your systems and your impact them later and change out.
Pat: 42:49
In the business's defense, like there was a stretch there where people were just pushing buttons and it was wild west and management was like, hold on, timeout, nobody touch another bleep button. Like it was insane. That was just like, Ooh, that's a little, yeah, it's a little too close for comfort. But then the rest of us kind of, kind of shot the rest of us in the foot, trying to, you know, try to do a small change. And people were like, Nope, midnight. I'm like, oh man, you're killing me.
Dean: 43:17
How strict is it though? Like in the respect, like if you're doing a change on, let's say a server, for instance, and that server has redundancy, are, can you do that, do you have, are you accepting of doing that change at midnight? Or can you do that change at light at lower traffic hours? Like what does that kind of look like? Is there like, do you guys like exercise that and see if you have that in your infrastructure? Or is it. There's a no go. I just want to do it. at midnight and that's final kind of deal.
Susannah: 43:50
There's definitely flexibility depending on the situation. Definitely the way that, that these changes are brought, if documented and brought in front of the border, they're very specific questions, that are asked, like what else is there? Is there an outage impact? There's all these like drop downs and things that ultimately lead us to the flags that go, Ooh,
Dean: 44:14
oh, so it's just like a series of questions your answer. Okay. that so it keeps you consistent all the time.
Susannah: 44:21
Yep new. Well, and then we go into the weekly meeting, the change advisory board meeting, and we have the opportunity to look through it again. I mean, we can look at it in advance of course, but, we get into the meeting and we can ask the change owner and the person who is going to actually do the change. If they could be two different people. Questions about it to clarify and, work through that before it's ultimately approved to move forward. So that, that additional discussion and the rigor that goes into that, that your shirt consists, right. That that all of those pieces are in place and have been considered and are clear and help move it forward. So it isn't, it doesn't have to be as. As a overly locked down as it had at one time.
Pat: 45:10
That was rough. That was rough city, man.
Susannah: 45:13
Oh man. It was burning people out really badly. Cause they're like, so I have to do that. But like I also have my day job. So, So, I'm just going to work nights doing changes now and not coming in the day. Yeah, it was too. That's not sustainable. Thankfully it was a short, just a short term thing. So
Pat: 45:38
good.
Dean: 45:39
so how'd you guys how'd they get around that? They just have an uncle guy doing the changes at night or
Susannah: 45:45
it was also a case by case basis. In some cases we didn't have multiple people that could always do the same things. Kind of SMEs on certain areas, services, servers, things like that. So, those were taken. Case-by-case basis schedule was worked out. And if it meant that, for the change that they did, that? They then, didn't come in the next day. Then that would be part of the discussion and the planning within that team. So.
Dean: 46:13
where I miss those days, day off.
Pat: 46:15
That's funny now I, so, so the one thing that I had, I don't want to say issue, but it was a little, it was a little eyeopening when I was at Rentokil And I'm not about to throw anybody under the bus or anything, but it was a legit question. So especially like in the network side, like a lot of things run through. People and like a lot of applications and a lot of just basically everything is network is the plumbing. So what we would get was, you know, from a developer, from somebody in another department and say, okay, I need this. And it's Like, all right. And then people were begging for an implementation plan. And I'm like, I'm just the guy the buttons. I don't know, what the end goal is or where the starter, where the end, you know, the start or the end is I'm to the guy in the middle opening a port, or I am adding a route or whatever you need. So there was a lot of like here, he, even over the fence and have the network guy catch it. Cause he's the guidance. He's the guy pushing the buttons at night and it's and then like we would get heck because we didn't have a plan filled out and I'm like, I don't know what the plan is. Somebody, I felt like, a giant middleman in that aspect. So is there a lot still to that? Or whoever's requesting the change? Do they have to have an implementation plan before the, before it's at cab or and then hand it off to the person doing the job?
Susannah: 47:34
there shouldn't be.
Pat: 47:35
that was the big part I had and I was like, eh, so stop
Susannah: 47:40
I know. And it was super uncomfortable for so many people on the infrastructure team, right. Your team and hosting team sometimes too. So one of the things that has changed with the change management approach is that until there's been collaboration and that implementation plan is documented. It doesn't even come to cab. We don't, it's just not even on the agenda. Like those ducks have to be put in a row before it even comes into that meeting for discussion or review. So, yes, because it was bringing a lot of pain and it was like teams, like not a good team dynamic when someone's
Pat: 48:21
There.
Susannah: 48:22
so.
Pat: 48:23
Yeah. Yeah. You're sorta like, holding the bag. I was just like what am I doing here? And then, you know, certain people would yell and I had this, I'm like, I don't have anything. I'm just pushing the buttons. It's program that he wants, you know, it's one of those things. So it was a, it was an awkward dynamic there you know, do one of these, you know, try to point in the right direction And get the people in the right room. And it's I have a day job. I got other things
Susannah: 48:45
Yeah. Well, and I think depending on personalities and frequency that people might be a change owner. Like it's probably that some teams maybe have progressed a little bit faster than others on it. So. it's just like anything else, like some of it just takes practice. Some of it takes a comfort level that, okay, we're all on the same team. Let's work together. You can have a conversation before you get into a big meeting together to plan it out. So Yeah. we're trying as much as comes through there, it's again, like never going to be super perfect, but we just keep trying to move it in the right direction. So.
Pat: 49:24
That's all you can do. D do you have anything else? We're kinda getting up on the hour and I know we try to keep it to an hour.
Dean: 49:29
no nothing else from me. And that was really informative. Really super.
Susannah: 49:34
I was very concerned that I would bore the pants off. You
Dean: 49:38
No, it really is a, no, it was really a lot insight
Pat: 49:42
lot of insight I like it now, Susannah. and I go way back because we've worked together, you know, almost daily there for a while. She's gonna you and I were putting our heads together with people changing jobs and directions and who we report
Dean: 49:55
so she's ever told you no,
Pat: 49:57
She's told me no more than more times than I care to admit or count. So
Dean: 50:01
Okay. Okay.
Susannah: 50:03
this is this even English?
Pat: 50:05
Now what he's doing, he's been here five years. Well, it's not pretty.
Susannah: 50:10
I don't remember that happening,
Pat: 50:12
Some people are worse than others. That's all I'll say.
Susannah: 50:15
Hey, we all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Pat: 50:19
right. We appreciate everybody joining this week to chat with us about some softer side of it in that in this realm of, service delivery and how it all works together on the back end of making it teams well-rounded and not just a bunch of zeros and ones and bits and bytes and then magic leap comes out as a product or an app. So, thanks, Susanna. This has been really cool. Appreciate you joining us and hanging out and talking.
Dean: 50:45
thank you so much. Yeah. So insights for, and definitely display use the sophistication side of it.
Pat: 50:51
That's
Susannah: 50:52
Oh boy.
Dean: 50:53
so. Anyway,
Susannah: 50:54
thanks having
Pat: 50:55
See, you brought a little class to this podcast, so we appreciate
Dean: 50:58
I think so.
Pat: 50:59
let's Folks, we want to let you know that we have been nominated as a finalist for the Cisco it blog awards. So our podcast has been making its way to the right ears, to the right people. So I think voting is a, I think it ends February 18th. I think I saw today somewhere. So, if you'd like the podcast, which I hope you do your list. Go out there and vote for us. The the form or the link will be in the show notes, if you want to go out and vote for us. And there's some other really great content creators on there as well. So, we're in some really good company. So, yeah, Cisco champions runs a it blog awards that they opened it up and we have been named a finalist, so that's just to be named the finalist is cool with us. So we're just talking into a mic and helping as many people as we can. that's there and then also make sure you visit our website. So you want to be in it that com you can subscribe to the show, from various platforms from there iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, Stitcher there's a plane RSS feed up there as well. So. Anywhere you want to listen to us or whatever form we have you covered there from the website. And you can listen to shows right from the website as well. They're all up there with the show notes and all that kind of stuff. So, go check that out as always throw us a rating on iTunes that helps play with our algorithm and gets us to the top of the list and more eyes and more listens. So that's always good there too, or simply tell a friend, right? So we all like the word of mouth that I think that works better or some days now in this technology driven era, some of the some of the technology does so simply tell a friend that's cool to be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, right? facebook.com/ don't you gonna be in it. The discord server is out there for you guys to come and chat with us as well. So that's sywbiit.com/discord. So you can do that. That gives you the invite, right to the chat platform at. And then obviously the survey that's still out there, so surveys can be out there for a couple more weeks. We have, we've gotten some really good feedback on how we're doing and what we could work on, improve things of that nature. So we want to be part of that. Just a couple questions. I think there's 10 or 12 questions on there. It's all the information is private. We don't sell or anything. We just aggregated to just kind of get a little closer and tweak the show to some your likings and see how we can do better. So that's sywbiit.com/survey so you can do that. That's a Google form. So go check that out and I think that's it. Dean, we'll see you next week. Susanna again. Thank you very much. This has been awesome. And that's it. That's all I got. See you guys next
Dean: 53:24
thank you. Yeah. See you soon. Thank you. Susanna. And yeah. Thanks again for joining us folks.
Pat: 53:31
C you folks next week. Bye.