Category: Podcasts

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia, you are now tuned in to the Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Hey, hi, and welcome everybody to the Highlight Cast. My name’s Adam McNair, we have with us today Kevin Long and Kevin Milner. Hey guys, how are you? Good, so if, uh, now, first off, if you haven’t listened to our first episode that we did on DevSecOps, I would recommend that you pause here and go back and listen, uh, DevSecOps walkthrough, really what I would say is a walkthrough for a layperson, um, somebody that, you know, I’ve, like, like myself, I’ve, I’ve done some things in software and so forth in the past, but, uh, Definitely not a hands on, uh, technical architect or anything like that at this point. So I thought it was a very good conversation and we certainly hadn’t covered everything. So we had talked about the benefits to organizations of DevOps. We had talked about how we had seen some of our customers. Adopting DevSecOps because it is a transformational activity. It’s not like you just make a decision that you’re going to do it. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’re a DevSecOps organization, right? So we talked about that. And, um, Today, I think that the things we wanted to talk about were, uh, the toolbox that you need to implement DevSecOps and how to build a team, uh, to deliver in that way in, you know, in the, in the federal marketplace. So we talked about that. It’s, it’s a, it’s a tool heavy. Activity or you lean on tools to be able to automate things and so forth. So I think it begs the question, um, so what are the tools that you guys, you know, typically kind of are, are the major core go to go to tools? 

Kevin Milner: I would, I would say that like a lot of the tools that you’re going to lean on for DevSecOps are going to be, uh, you know, If you look at it holistically from, from the start of the pipeline on, you’ve got, you know, first you’re linting tools that make sure that the code is, is, is like, you know, properly formatted and stuff.

Then you go and you do your, Your unit tests, but then you also do you want to have a suite on your toolbox of like, um, security tests and code validators like sonar source and stuff like that so that you can really make sure that that’s part of your pipeline. And then, uh, other tools you might. You might use our, um, you know, diagnostic tools are really handy to have if you’re, if you’re looking at net security, you might use like Wireshark.

Um, my preference is to try to go for free and open source tools as much as possible, at least in this sort of space. Um, Just, just because generally they’re, they’re better vetted and people, you know, uh, are able to, um, you know, if you, if you have code that like everybody in the world can look at, then you can be, you can be pretty sure that if there were some problems with it, somebody would have pointed it out, uh, 

Kevin Long: When I think about the tools also, though, I think about it is sort of like turning software again into a factory and things that automate different processes, right? So, Kevin living in this every day has has has gone gone to the to the deep, some of the deep facts, which I love. But then there’s also been like the base automation tools out there that you get like, you know, Jenkins and SonarCube and, and then you end up and Maven and, and, and Gradle and tools like that are Ansible and, um, Chef, Puppet, uh, all of those really that allow you to, to push your code down the, it’s like making, making it a conveyor belt, you know, that which moves it, moves it. Moves it along through the process. 

Adam McNair: Now, where are we from the standpoint of interoperability? Are we, do they all kind of work with each other? So that if I want a automated unit test tool, will all of them work with the, you know, whatever the precursor tool would have been? Or is it some are better than others?

Or how, how does that, How good is your DevOps engineer? 

Kevin Milner: Generally, uh, generally the way it is, is set up, you have tools, you know, you’ve you’ve heard the phrase the proper tool for the proper job. So, so some tools are better at sort of generic analysis. But then other tools are specifically made for like the language and environment you’re working in. For instance, you can’t really easily use, um, say like Maven to compile NET code. It’s possible, um, and it comes out really messy. But, uh, you know, you can do that. But the better, the better. The better choice would probably be to find a specific tool for that particular implementation. Um, you know, in some cases it’s useful to have a tool that can reach out and talk to a Windows machine or a Linux machine or a Mac OS machine. But in other cases you’re going to really need to focus on what your specific application is in order to make sure that the tool properly works. 

Adam McNair: Okay, so it kind of goes into the category of the MacGyver type aspect of there are some things that will do what they are intended for all the time and then you can take something that’s not ideal and Maybe you can patch it around and rig it so that it will do something, but it is probably not ideal for the task. Yeah, 

Kevin Milner: and it’s sort of, there’s, there’s sort of two philosophies, I’d say, in computer science, or at least in, in this sort of thing, there’s either the idea that you have a whole bunch of little tools that does one thing really quickly. Uh, and, you know, you know, every time you type. Mv space file name space destination. It’s going to move the file. It’s not going to, you know, reset security, stuff like that. Uh, and interesting analog to this might be in chip design. Originally, the, the PC chips, uh, the IBM compatible chips for processors were designed using a complex instruction set. You have a rich, robust set of functions that don’t do each, each one does a specific thing and you have this, you know, really complex way of using it. Then, you know, you might, you might think of that as like trigonometry. Uh, you know, you’ve got all this, these complex equations to do things, but they only do the limited things that, that, that they do. Then the other option would be what Apple chose, um, which is the reduced instruction set code, which is. You have, you know, uh, basic, simple tasks that you do, and then you build up the more complex tasks from the simple set of tasks. So, uh, so you end up with like a much simpler, Design set a simpler tools that you have to be more creative to use, uh, to do what you want. So it’s sort of a, you know, a philosophy of do I want stuff that does, you know, these complex, actions, but, but that’s it? Or do I want to build up the complex actions from simpler sets of steps, which would be like, you know, arithmetic in a math example I was using earlier. 

Adam McNair: So one could also crosswalk it, like I think of, so when you look at a LEGO set, there are some of the LEGO sets these days that have customized pieces that It’s the top of the cantina in Tatooine or whatever and that’s but that’s really all That’s all it’s going to be because it was custom designed for specifically that purpose Whereas theoretically if you just had a large enough collection of one by one bricks, you could build anything you wanted 

Kevin Milner: Yeah, exactly 

Adam McNair: Got you.

Kevin Milner: It would be more effort, but right you you know, you have that one tool that you know I mean that one One by one brick, you know, it’s properties. You know exactly how it’s going to work all the time

Adam McNair: now. So really often in DevOps or DevSecOps, how frequently have you guys seen that you walk in and get to pick your own tool set versus that there’s an existing tool set or some kind of give and take? Where they’re wedded to some things, but they let you pick other things. 

Kevin Milner: Um, it, it happens both times, uh, obviously when you have like a, uh, um, a Greenfield project where you’re, you’re going in and starting from scratch, that’s obviously you have a much better chance of choosing your own tools. With Kessel Run, for instance, um, Nope, 

Adam McNair: had a little breeze on Kevin’s end. 

Kevin Milner: Oh, okay. Sorry. Um, at Kessel Run, you know, we had an existing environment that we were expected to integrate with. Uh, it was already a macOS environment. Everybody’s developing principally in Java, excuse me, JavaScript. Uh, so, so that sort of, you know, Dictated what tools we could look at when we went to say, okay, well, we need a specific tool to perform linting. Um, you know, the linter needs to know what javascript looks like as opposed to cobalt or something

Adam McNair: Okay and As a DevSecOps engineer, now, like I think back to when I’ve had development teams and you kind of either had a Java developer or you had a NET developer and occasionally you would have some real rock star expert Something that would work on both usually in an environment where they had both applications for some odd reason, and they needed somebody that was conversant in both. But typically I always saw you either had a dot net or Java team. That’s kind of how it. In the DevSecOps space, do you view yourself as a proficient user of a certain set of tools? Or is it more the theory of it, and you can sit down and use any tool once, whether it’s documentation or a little bit of just understanding of, you know, you’re watching YouTube on it, however.

Kevin Milner: Yeah, they call those full stack engineers, and that’s what everybody wants. Thanks. Now they want, they want full stack engineers, not, not a front end guy or a back end guy. They want somebody with full stack plus DevOps plus, you know, electrical engineering, uh, all that kind of stuff. Um, but in terms of, uh, Myself, I try to view myself more as a generalist that, um, you know, adapts sort of the basic theory to whatever the application is at the time. So, I mean, I’ve done DevOps for, for a software migration. A data migration platform, uh, and I’ve done, I’ve done a form of DevOps for the tool chain team. So, um, you know, at Kessel Run. So it, it really is a base theory that ideally you could apply to any sort of, 

Kevin Long: Programming is a mindset. The rest is syntax.

Kevin Milner: Yeah. Or, or my other, my other favorite phrase, you can, you can write Cobalt in any language. You can program in Cobalt in any language. I 

Kevin Long: mean, that said, I mean, everyone is going to have a strength in a different part of it. Right. And, and that’s really where you get the nuance around it. And so, uh, well, you’ll have someone that’s amazing at JavaScript, you know, they’re, they’re not going to be confused If they need to open up Eclipse and start writing a bit of Java, right, or they’ll understand a bit about, uh, you know, I don’t know, EKS maybe, or something like that. But when you get into something like EKS, then you’ll probably have someone that’s come into DevOps through the standard sysadmin infrastructure build out. And they wouldn’t necessarily be confused by, you know, some Java or some JavaScript, but it’s certainly not their strength. And so Kevin’s absolutely right. Everyone is is searching for the full stack everything. Nobody’s a full stack everything. There are people that understand the principles of it and are able to get smart on just about anything from what I’ve seen. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot about the mindset, willingness and because DevOps and DevSecOps is so new, it’s people that love the readme files. That, that do well with it? I think yeah. 

Kevin Milner: If you like to read documentation, this is, this is the position for you. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. ’cause the tool that’s amazing today is gonna be obsolete in, in, in a year. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. 

Kevin Long: And, 

Adam McNair: and I, I, I saw that. So when, when web apps started to become a thing. I feel like every little tool that existed that either allowed you to cache data so that you could have a disconnected user, or it allowed you to dynamically pull information from some place and display it on part of the screen, which all sounds pretty simple now, but there was a time where That wasn’t very simple, and you’d get this little plug in thing, and you’re right. It came from a random developer organization, it had a README file, and it was really about who could understand conceptually what it was trying to do and how you configured it. And half the time you’d have to look at what, what variables can I configure in the thing, and that would tell you what it was looking for. Um, so that, that makes sense, you know? And I think A lot of the, the emphasis, you know, like you say, on, on full stack engineering, I think it’s pretty common for staffing lists initially to be built with kind of some guesswork in mind. And if you go with somebody that can do everything, It’s, your staffing plan’s probably, probably accurate, you know, because if you went down the path of how many people do I need that know this or that or this other thing, you can be wrong, because I’ve had that happen to me before. I’ve, I’ve won programs and showed up and they said, And by the way, who’s going to manage the servers? Well, what servers? Well, there’s this one bullet in the Statement of Work that said, you know, and, and other systems support, but that means we have a data center and we need the servers maintained. Oh, and so you can get things wrong, whereas if you have people that are experts that know how to do everything, you have that comfort factor that if something goes sideways, if something new happens, if you want to do something new, that You put four or five of those people together and they’re probably going to be able to figure out what comes at them. Um, the question I guess I’d ask around that is, that’s mindset difference. That’s a different approach from instead of give me three of these people and four of those people and I need this many of that people and all these different work streams and swim lanes of people and different kinds of engineers go into, uh, Heavy full stack organization. What else when you go to DevSecOps, just as the typical, you know, I work in Agency X and I have this application that, you know, I’ve been responsible for managing as my team did, you know, a couple waterfall deliveries a year. What are some of the major changes that happen when you do that?

Kevin Milner: Well, um, you know, some of the major changes, I guess, If you, if you focus too heavily on generalists, then you lose out on some of the, the, the specialist skills and, or it costs you more, uh, it’s one of those, you know, powers of three type things like price, quality, and, and speed, you can have two, but not the other. So I look at it sort of in that sense that. You can get a lot done if you have some general, general skilled people, but then if you get into something like, you know, needing to, to efficiently move gigabytes of data from one place to another, you’re going to need a file system guy for that, because, because your generalist just isn’t going to know the, the, the details of how to really make it efficient. So, you know, I, you could even, even say that, you know, Even if you have like a large team of, of generalist engineers, you probably are going to want to have at least one or two specialists for your, for your field, uh, for the, the, the space that you’re in just Just to make sure that you get all the details covered. Was that an answer to your question? Yeah. Here’s another, 

Adam McNair: yeah. Here’s another question along that line. So let’s say I’ve got an organization, um, that we’ve still got legacy stuff, right? Mm-Hmm. . I’ve got, I’ve got a, a, a legacy system that is. feed some other systems. Can I go to a DevSecOps environment if I have some kind of old, creaky application? 

Kevin Milner: You Can. You can, you can do anything you want. Um, but you know, the effort involved might, might make it, uh, impractical to do so. I mean, if you’ve got a situation where you’ve got like this really old code that communicates with a a server somewhere over open text. Um, you can’t, you can’t really put that in a, in a DevSec environment, uh, you know, without, without some changes, making sure that you follow proper encrypting protocols and things like that. So, so again, it comes down to a balance between, um, uh, you know, practicality and, and, um, You know, benefit of, of doing so. Um, a lot of times people, especially like, you know, in the higher levels like to see the checkbox clicked. Okay. We’ve got, you know, this, this sort of, uh, compliance. With with this best practice, but if if it if it took you a long time to get there and and too much effort, then 

Kevin Long: yeah, but if they really want to cut over, I mean, let’s let’s walk down somewhat of the happy path because sure.

I mean, there are definitely old systems out there that it’s probably better to rewrite a lot of it. Yeah, but, but if you have some part of like a legacy system that that could be extracted, like, you know, like some sort of data sharing where it could be turned into a service, right, a web service out there, right? And with that, then you really could decide to start doing some, some DevOps stuff with that really to spin that up. Some of the major things that you’re going to have to change. Um, Yeah. Are you have to change the way your teams are put together. You’re not going to have a testing team, a development team, a production team and an infrastructure team.

Speaker 3: Yeah, 

Kevin Long: you put them all together and they’re all working for that. And so there’s a lot of times when you’re cutting over from old old in quotes to new in quotes. With that, there’s a lot of change management on the on the organizational and political side. Yeah. To get that put together, right? So where everybody is working together to push off is one of the core elements of, of DevOps is that you have everybody working together, right? You have development ended in years of security, all, all, all, all pushing, pushing it from the, from the same team. But then you also have all those tools that Kevin talked about in the beginning. It is a non non negligible amount of startup to, to put together a pipeline, uh, to have people that have done it before. If they’ve never done it before, to go through it, get to the read, get through the readmes, learn how to be able to, you know, connect your Git repositories through, through, uh, Jenkins to have thresholds put on a Sonar cube, uh, for, for code coverage as it’s running through your, your, your, uh, Selenium tests, right?

And things like that. So it, to, to spin it up, I mean, it is, it’s awesome. It will. Overtime save you time and it will allow you to deliver more value to your customer faster over time. But it is, it is an investment to, to, to cut that over for sure. To, you know, even on full and open, uh, uh, free open source software, you know, it’s not free engineering to, to put together and build, uh, a resilient pipeline. It is not, uh, without political capital to rearrange your software development and infrastructure shop, um, uh, to, to do all of those things. But where you have, where you have, uh, a legacy system that can, that can have incremental things, you know, sort of strangled off of it. Uh, uh, there’s whole design patterns around ways you can pick and choose small elements off of, uh, off of, uh, sort of larger monoliths to, uh, to, uh, make them more loosely coupled, which work really well in, in, in a DevSecOps environment. To make that shift. 

Adam McNair: So you’ve got two, two big categories of call it effort. You call it challenge might be some combination of both, but you’ve got a significant level of effort project to be done just to stand up the tool chain, the pipeline so that, you know, if you take it back to kind of a real world example of if you’ve, if you’ve had six people, You know, chess pieces and you decide that you’re going to make a factory that does this. You have to build the assembly line that makes those things. So you’ve got a significant undertaking to do that, which means you likely can’t use the same. People that you have doing your existing O and M because they are likely to either not have necessarily the skills or they are likely to not have the time. I mean, I guess it comes back to depending on how much, you know, what’s the stability of the system that they’re on and I guess I’ve been involved in, in software O& M projects where everybody seemed fine and it was kind of orderly and there was a backlog of, of enhancements is really what they were prioritizing around. So I guess if, if you were in that environment, that could certainly work. 

Kevin Long: If it’s not a bubble gum and bailing wire kind of place, uh, the existing team could almost certainly do it. And honestly, if you were to talk to them. I bet, I bet you 80 percent of the folks on the ground there would be excited about it because they’ve been reading about it, looking at it, and probably interviewing for jobs at places that do it. That makes sense. 

Adam McNair: Yes, I guess it’s also possible, you know, I think one of the things that, um, that we’ve done, you know, Kevin and I, For years is to bid jobs in places where they wanted to modernize software. So it’s possible that I’ve seen an overabundance of O and M organizations of the bubble gum bailing wire type where things are broken. Things are not backed up. You know, you’ve got. Developers that say, like, you know, I haven’t taken a day of vacation in four years because this thing goes down at least twice a week because as soon 

Kevin Long: as it sees I put in PTO, it starts to smoke. 

Adam McNair: Right? Right. So, so if you have a reasonably executing environment. Yeah, you could probably do it with your team. Uh, so that makes sense. Then from a, an organizational kind of thought process standpoint, you know, typically you have this, this Burndown list of user requirements where they’ve got some enhancements they’ve requested and so forth does DevOps dramatically impact that side of it. I mean, because you’re still you’re still getting your requirements from from the user base. Um, and I guess you’re not necessarily burning through them dramatically faster than you were before. It might just be a more efficient implementation. How do you see that work? 

Kevin Long: So let me give the management side on this first and then we’ll get to the tech side. What you see with the DevOps from a management side is you don’t see human error in deployments happen as much anymore. That’s really what you see. So the quality of what moves from dev to test to staging to prod is far more consistent because there’s literally no fat finger involved to fat fingers. Right. And so pipeline done right. You’ll catch those errors earlier on. That’s what I like about it. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. Yeah. So, and also from, uh, you know, from the state, one of the ways that it can really impact is. Is you can set up a system if you have good management of your pipeline and your repository and stuff you can and you set it up with branches feature branches and stuff you can have it so people are working on parallel things without affecting each other so you might have one person working on you know the UI and another person working on the rest server in the background and anything that the UI person does. Isn’t going to affect that. And so you can build the product so that, okay, we can put in the new UI. Can’t call any of the new stuff in the backend yet, but it’s there for when we want to. And, you know, say the backend hits a major problem and they get delayed by a sprint. Well, you know, your UI guy can then go work on the next sprint worth of stuff while, while the backend guys fix it. And if you’re. If the pipeline is correct, then there’s no cross contamination of the branches. You don’t, you don’t end up with shipping, you know, a product that has the new UI, but has a UI that has this broken feature from, from the back end in it also. So it, it lets you be more granular about. Um, you know, requested new features or fixes or whatever, make it into a given, uh, distribution.

Adam McNair: And so you can definitely have what I’m hearing is more efficient use of resources, more efficient use of time. And it takes out some of the critical path areas, because I’ve definitely seen that before, too, where you have a development team. And, I mean, it happens on any team, but Out of 20 people, there’s a few of them doing nothing because it’s not time for them yet. And so because of that, um, You know, that’s, that’s the, a frustrating thing as a, as a, a being involved either as a user or as a customer where you’re there and you’re like, you’re both telling me that we’re, we can’t get this done until a certain date. And I see that we’ve got people that when you look at the, you know, the overall resource allocation, they’re not actively doing anything right. Exactly. Um, or they’re doing some task that’s way, way lower priority. But you say, why can’t they delay that? Like, well, but they can’t do that yet anyway, because they have to wait for these other things to be done. So, so that makes a lot of sense. Um, from a, a team construct idea, how different is it? Like, uh, are, are you used to as a developer? Are you used to not having any of the infrastructure security types talk to you when they do? Is that beneficial or does this get down to just it’s personality driven or how does that normally work? 

Kevin Milner: I mean, it’s, it’s a little of all of the above. Uh, all I can really speak from is, is, is through my work history, but I’ve worked in places where, um, You know, the release engineering would refuse to update the actual build environment that the code was built in, so we were still using Visual Studio 98. This is 2007 2008, somewhere around there, and 98. Only the most current. Yeah. Um, well, but, but the problem was the, the, the code we were working on in this case was medical device drivers. Um, it, it required windows, I mean, uh, Visual Studio 98, but the the main application, uh, that would take the data from the drivers was written in, uh, starting at a certain version number was written in dot net Visual Studio, and so the problem with that was, as a driver developer, I had to release two different applications Driver versions, uh, one for the, you know, pre version 4. 5 of the software that would work with visual studio drivers and one with the next version. So, so the inability to get, to get, um, release engineering to take that supported version. And update it to use this new development tool because it was completely incompatible, uh, meant that, that, yeah, it was a lot of extra work for us. Whereas had we had more of a team focus on agile DevOps and again, this was, This was early mid 2000s. So, you know, uh, things were different then. But, um, it made it so that there was a lot more work for, for my team, the, the, the driver team and, and, A lot more testing that had to be done for for the the QA part of that because they had to test both versions of the driver and stuff like that. So it would have been really effective if we had had managerial buy in in that case to be able to make changes. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, I mean, I can tell you from way back in the day when I was a developer, you know, back in the State Department, nothing made me happier than when security got involved. Earlier on, because I’ll tell you, nothing breaks software like applying Stig’s that you didn’t develop against.

Kevin Milner: Yep. 

Kevin Long: And literally, you just, I mean, you develop everything and then it’s like, Oh no, well, you can’t use this feature because.

Kevin Milner: We need encryption at rest.

Kevin Long: Well, I mean, or, I mean, or just, oh, you thought you were going to use this port. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, sorry. Right. Uh, just so much stuff. So getting, uh, the, the sec in DevSecOps, where you’re looping the security folks in earlier on is so much better.

Kevin Milner: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and that’s, I think what we talked about. In the last, in the last, uh, podcast was that, um, you have to, you have to build security and from the beginning, uh, it, it’s not something that you can reliably, uh, shoehorn in afterwards. 

Kevin Long: And it’s not something regular developers think of.

Kevin Milner: Yeah, yeah, it’s certainly not, not something I, I can consider when I’m, I’m hammering out code. Yeah. 

Adam McNair: Well, it’s something, you know, it comes back to a general idea that, that we talk about a lot, which is, it’s much more common for organizational challenges to be problems than it is technology. You know, and I, I think back to programs I’ve been involved in where really for just sometimes personality reasons, but a lot of times the alignment of priorities in one group versus the other. You know, the, the security office’s priorities were driven by somebody that had nothing to do with this app you were doing. And so you were over there kind of begging them to do security scans so you could move on with your deployment and it was officially not from a priority standpoint. It was not what they shouldn’t do be doing at that point. But in a big enough organization, sometimes Well, it’s never actually going to be your priority. This system does not have a high enough impact for you ever to prioritize this. And that’s where like, you know, sometimes there’s a contractor, almost the personal relationship of, you’d have to go over and be like, please, please. Yeah. Would you guys please just like, look at this real quick. I mean, we’re all going to get in trouble and it was, it would have to take some kind of human appeal. So I, I wonder. In the federal space, where there’s kind of the added complexity, you’ve got contractors in the mix and not only do you have the federal organization and there may be one or more organizations there with, with different charters or alignment or whatever, but you’ve also got potentially multiple contractors where because of scope and who’s allowed to do what and who’s supposed to do what and who’s being paid to do what, um, you know, I mean, you don’t, you don’t go to your house painter and ask them to.

You know, put a new microwave in because you, the appliance guy is late. Like, and that, that, that’s the kind of thing that, that happens on government contracts all the time is just because you’re there working on something. You’re like, that’s not my scope. I, I, I’m not supposed to work on that. So I wonder if we have seen organizations. Undertake change, try to transform the way the organization is set up and then go to DevOps or they go to DevOps and it helps them push the culture and organizational change in in the places where we are are working. You know, Kevin, I know we’ve talked about, about your project and, uh, Kevin Long, you know, there’s some that you’re setting up now for DHS. Do those feel like the organization was really on board with the concept of working together and the contract is just a mechanism to accomplish that? 

Kevin Long: That’s a great question. So, our DHS work is not what I think is standard because I, I, I, Absolutely think that, that, uh, they made the decision that this is the way it’s going to happen and, and be damned if you’re going to get in our way of it, right? That this is, this is what it’s going to be, um, that they are, I mean, and DHS and a lot of their subcomponents are, are newer, uh, in terms of how they’re organized. And so being newer, they’re not. Has saddled with, you know, 25 year old DOD legacy applications that, that if it goes down, awful things in the world happen, right? Um, or that they were able to, to decide much like Kevin was talking about much more earlier on much more greenfield, we’re going to stand up this. We want to do it this way. This is the right way to do it. And so they didn’t have as much legacy overhead, I think, to deal with. Um, I think that. A lot of, of, uh, of other places I’ve worked, it is really folks, uh, coming around saying, no, this really needs to happen. And then having to push the organization forward with it, uh, because, you know, everybody talks, people see the benefits or hear the benefits and, you know, it’s, And, you know, act IAC and government industry, uh, groups where it’s like, Hey, you know, this is how we’re doing it. And you have CMMI talk about even have PMI, uh, the project management folks coming in, getting in on, on Agile and DevOps being the natural, uh, natural progression on from that natural next step that they want the benefits. And then you have to say, okay, you don’t just get the benefits without the work without these fundamental changes to how you operate and are organized. And, um, uh, so I actually expected, uh, some of the Organizational pushback, uh, at our DHS stuff that we really haven’t gotten. It’s more like, no, this is how we’re going to do it. We, we believe it more so than at some of my other contracts where we’ve like helped literally design, you know, uh, agile and DevOps work and literally have to say, all right, when. Our customer doesn’t provide a product owner to sit in the meetings. You know, at this point, this is when we’re allowed to punch out and say, okay, you don’t get to do agile DevOps anymore. Now you have to do waterfall and your world’s going to slow down. 

Speaker 3: Yeah. Right. 

Kevin Long: Where I. We literally, you know, debated for two weeks about how much intransigence from our customers we could take before we had to, to, to bust back to the old way just to get something done. Um, so it’s, it’s very exciting on, to have. Customers in both sort of both mindsets. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. Uh, Kessel Run, it’s almost, you know, sort of the, they were created as, as an agile shop for that purpose. That’s, that’s what they made for. Um, and since this DOD security right there from the beginning is, is. an integral part of it. So we were fortunate there in that they let us, they let my cyber security engineer essentially architect, uh, the entire approval process for the Kessel Run and potentially the Air Force and the DoD. So there’s been lots of interest from, from even higher up than the detachment for these, uh, this process that he developed. Uh, so we were really lucky with Kessel Run that they let us, you know, Make contributions towards the security posture of the development process.

Adam McNair: And I think that, you know, sometimes the comfort factor of how fast something is going has to be, has to be there quick. Is aligned with risky a lot of times, and it’s almost like if you got something done too quickly, if something got too easy, if a process got automated, are you sure that it’s, you know, still compliant with whatever? And realistically, it generally can be. So, like, we’ve talked a lot about. Some of the experiences we’ve had in organizations where this is kind of the way they do business in a very, like, it’s a cultural aspect of the organization at this point. Do you think we’re going to see a point? Because I would, I would translate this kind of to agile. But a little bit different, you know, the agile mindset, I think most federal agencies at this point would say that if they’re going to do development or in a lot of levels, just program management in general, that the agile terminology has really permeated, permeated the whole everything that you’re doing DevOps. Is some theory, practice, all of that, but it is, it carries around this kind of technical assembly line behind use and it has a lot of boundary. Kind of, you know, unifying a team all into one, you know, Agile doesn’t say you have to do that, like everybody can be in whatever team they want to be in and you just, you know, whatever. So, do you think most organizations, all organizations, like is the whole federal government headed for DevOps or 

Kevin Milner: Pockets or what do you think we’re going to see? I would say some form of it. We’re likely to see in the next 10 years, generally any, any software development shop perform like a, uh, a lot of, uh, at least mimicking, uh, DevOps. Uh, you know, I hate to use the term cargo cult programmer, but, uh, you know, there, there’s a lot of that sort of mentality. Yeah. Cargo cult. Is after World War two, they had a bunch of, uh, uh, you know, they had an army air bases out in, um, you know, the Pacific islands and some of the Islanders got so used to having troops stationed there. Um, they, after the, after the war was over and the planes left, they would, um, they would build mock ups of airplanes, hoping to lure back the soldiers with their bars of chocolate. And so. That’s called, that was called a cargo colt. Uh, then they came up with the term cargo cold programming, which is where you sort of, you know, imitate what you see online and hope that that, that works. And that’s not the ideal situation. So, so you might see a lot of people that are At least trying in name to, to adapt, uh, agile methodology and dev ops, but if they don’t actually believe in it and, you know, really sort of live by it. 

Kevin Long: So I think what we’re going to see a lot of with the bigger agencies now, there, there are a lot of smaller agencies out there that, that honestly, looking at the layout of, Of upfront cost to put DevOps in place is going to be problematic, um, until you get someone like GSA, like 18F did with, with a lot of their sort of their, uh, stuff, maybe someone like GSA might start selling the service, but I think things like platform one out of DOD. Uh, or are going to start having, uh, DevOps service that they can sell to the, to the different components within themselves, within themselves. And so, uh, I think that, that we are, we really are going to see it, uh, because it, it is, uh, It reduces risk. It includes security earlier on as a core component of software development. It reduces human error, and it speeds time to release as things go. And Where the larger sort of Uber agencies can, you know, as they’re creating platform as a service and things like that, DevOps as a service, I think is going to end up becoming more and more of a thing, you know, go buy yourself tool chain as a service.

Adam McNair: Yeah, and I think one other thing that I would say will probably help it is. As opposed to 20 years ago, there it is so much more common to see agencies working together, to see shared services come out, to have to see as a service offerings, um, and also for federal employees to move from agency to agency and come out into the industry and then go back into government. And I think, uh, You know, there’s been a lot of times where I was involved in programs where there was a lot of stasis and everybody that was working on the program, contractors and federal had all been there for 25 years. And when you have that, there’s not really a good opportunity and that the perception of risk from something different, if you’ve never seen it in person. I can absolutely understanding them say, like to Milner, to your point, when something infinitely bad could happen, whether that’s weapon related, whether that’s no, no, you know, no, no checks get out to, to, to Americans, the food stamp program stops working, like whatever that would be, I can completely understand if you’ve, if you’ve never seen it work before, you’re like, well, cool. Somebody else can try it first, and even if they have tried it first, every agency’s requirements and architecture are unique enough that you can still say, well, it might have worked for them, but it doesn’t feel like it feels like it’s risky here. Whereas I think if you have enough people that have moved around to enough organizations, um, and you have forums like Act IAC, where you can, uh, go You know, we were just talking today. We’re going to be one of the sponsors of the ELC conference in Hershey in November and several of us will be there. You can go there and talk to a dozen different agencies and a dozen different contractors that are have implemented it all in one day. And do much easier research than you ever could have just kind of, you know, sitting in your, in your one agency as a, as a federal employee or as a contractor, uh, without exposure to it. But so I, I do think, you know, it’s certainly something. Our staff, when you, as we hire employees, everybody wants to work on this kind of stuff. I think being in, in, in leading edge technology environments is exciting for everybody. And I think, uh, for people that are, that are federal employees that want to be able to more efficiently get, Change and value generated for their mission. It’s exciting for them too. So, um, yeah, so it certainly sounds like it’s, uh, it’s going to continue. Well, uh, with that, uh, we’re up on time here.

Thank you for listening to the highlight cast. Uh, thanks Kevin. Thanks Kevin. And, uh, to keep up to date with the news and activities, follow us on LinkedIn. You can visit our website, highlighttech. com and you can tune in to our next episode. Thanks, everybody.

Kevin Long: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia, you are now tuned in to the Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Hello, welcome everybody to another Highlight Cast, uh, joined as usual by Kevin Long. Hey, Kevin. Adam, how’s it going? Good. Also joined with two guests this week with Ashley Nichols, who leads the corporate strategy and development here at Highlight. Hey, Ashley. Hello. And also, uh, Emily Scantlebury, who runs our BD operations, um, and supports, uh, Capture. Uh, Emily, how are you? 

Emilie Scantlebury: Hey, Adam. Hey, group. Doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Great. 

Adam McNair: Great to see you. So. Our topic for today that we wanted to talk about, so we actually went to a real live conference, uh, which is, to my knowledge, I think it’s the first one that we’ve been to since, uh, March of 2020, is my, it’s my recollection. Um, because I know we talked about in one of the previous episodes, I think, uh, Kevin and I had taken our last couple corporate out of town trips really, as far as travel, but so this was a To the HEMS 2021 conference in Las Vegas, uh, HEMS 2020 was canceled, I guess. I think, you know, maybe some of the 21. But so the first question, how did the conference operate as far as, you know, kind of things are, you know, certainly different. I know, I think HEMS happened right on the, the, the cusp of, you know, masks on, masks off. Um, you know, that actually anything. Any kind of reactions from just what it’s like going back to a conference after all this is gone on for two years now?

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, it was definitely kind of weird, but you know, I think like HIMSS required everybody participating to be vaccinated, right? And you had to either show your card or use one of the new, uh, Um, Vax passport, uh, apps like a clear has one, for example, that’s free. Um, that stores your info. But I think that the fact that it was spread out over like three hotel and casinos, you know, kind of, it burst that bubble a little bit because you had to go through so many. folks. Um, I think that’s not usually the case when they have an Orlando at the convention center. I think that this year was kind of like, um, it was kind of like the Olympics, right? Where we kept calling the Olympics, the 2020 Olympics. There was a lot of signage that still was like from 2020 hymns. Like they pushed a lot of it forward. They held it. In Vegas in August, because I think they just wanted to get it done so they can get back on track for for 2022. It’s gonna be in the spring again back in Orlando. Um, but it was good. And people in Vegas, surprisingly, were very mass compliant. We didn’t see any dust ups or anything, as you might see, and sin city, or you might expect, but I felt like people were good and places were really. Pretty strict about having people mask and reminding them to remask and things like that. So, um, all in all, not bad. 

Adam McNair: Gotcha. And from, uh, him standpoint, so is it normally in Orlando? Is that the, their typical location? 

Ashley Nichols: I’m not sure it’s like always in Orlando, but it is definitely a heavy favorite for that. And that is where it will be again, March. Um, and it is then in the convention center. I think it’s been in New Orleans before too. Um, but I think Las Vegas was one of the first places really open to getting conferences going again. Um, and maybe it was able to accommodate their schedule. Nobody chooses to go to Vegas in August, really.

Adam McNair: Yeah, I did notice that. I know I, we had talked a little bit about. What events we think we might be going to and I know Emily and I had talked about one that is in Detroit in December, so yeah, that and Vegas in August are probably, I’m guessing somebody got a break on the conference costs to be able to make that happen. Vegas was crazy heatwave then too, right? Uh, 

Emilie Scantlebury: yeah. It was a hundred and five hundred and two, but it’s, you know, it’s a desert, a hundred and two, a hundred and five. So during the day, it’s, 

Kevin Long: so you only burst into flames after five minutes out in the, in the air instead of, 

Ashley Nichols: well, yeah. The even funnier thing is there was like, well, it’s a dry heat, but, uh, every, all the locals were complaining that it was unseasonably humid there while we were there. And we’re talking like 35%. So for us, that’s like nothing, but for a place that’s used to like zero humidity. They were so sweaty and uncomfortable. Like I felt bad. I was like, Oh wow, really? Okay. 

Emilie Scantlebury: But, you know, I was just going to say to Ashley’s point, it was, um, it was of course our first conference back and it was really intrigued to see how some of the logistics were going to run, like the check in process, because we did have to show that proof of vaccination. You had to make sure everybody was wearing a mask. the entire time and it was very smooth. So credit to the show organizers, you know, HIMSS is such a big presence across multiple industries or, you know, a number of people there. Um, and I was really pleasantly surprised at how smooth it was operating.

Adam McNair: Yeah, which does leave me, Emily, I was going to ask, what So for anybody that hasn’t been before, so HIMSS is kind of the premier health IT conference, but it’s, it’s commercially in government, but what, how would you summarize kind of the overall scope of the of the conference? 

Emilie Scantlebury: Great question, yeah, so it’s pretty, it’s pretty large. It’s Spans big pharma, um, individuals who run networks of hospitals, Uh, federal government, federal health I T. Um, and so the scope of the conference touches, you know, touches across that space, whether that’s looking at trends in the commercial space. Um, and I think that’s the one thing that’s really important in terms of really, um, you know, as we look at the, you know, in the health care space, looking at trends of emerging health care techniques, emerging health care, new tools and technologies like physical hardware, physical software, things of that nature, all the way to like, talking about covert response on the government side and how the government is allocating funds to, you know, to, to help. I’m going to be talking about how we’re going to respond to pandemics in the future. Um, so, you know, it was very vast, a number of breakout sessions, all happening concurrently. It’s really interesting. to be able to see all those different kind of flavors in the health IT space kind of come together and and find the commonalities across industries.

Adam McNair: Well, very cool. Yeah, it’s a conference. I’ve not been to before. I’ve typically as far as conferences. I think I err on the side. IAC or FC, a kind of government industry organization conferences, as opposed to, um, kind of focused line of business, uh, conferences, but I know a lot of people that have gone, I know the LinkedIn streams as everybody was out there, you know, a lot of, it felt like, you know, hundreds of posts a day from, uh, from people that were out there. So as far as. Major areas of discussion. Um, so Ashley, do you have like thoughts as to what really stuck out to you as far as major kind of conversation or themes to the, to the, 

Ashley Nichols: yeah, I’d say, you know, Emily and I stuck a lot to the ones that were based around, you know, Federal health care, right? So they had federal, they had a federal health care pavilion. Um, and so folks who were sort of focused on that, um, and then the conference, the mini breakout rooms around that had a lot of things focused, um, on issues within sort of federal health care. So you had VA, DHA, sorry, DHA, um, HHS folks, a lot were the speakers there, or people who support them from, from GovCon. So I think a lot of our stuff was focused there. Obviously, there was a ton of talk about COVID and the ways that it has changed health care, the ways that it has changed technology to provide health care, um, and, and some innovations around there that I think Emily will talk about one that we found super intriguing. In, in a minute. Um, there was a lot of talk about sort of usability and viability in this intersection of creating tools that are functional for the industry, but also more user friendly and intuitive there, you know, and, and that’s on a broader scale, that’s not just federally focused, but, um, as va and DOD often remind us they’re, you know, the biggest healthcare provider in the country with the services they provide for veterans. So, um. They have to be very customer focused in a lot of ways too. And a lot of systems are focused very much on provider needs and not necessarily user needs, but even on the provider side, not necessarily really understanding what it is the nurses in these hospitals are doing or the providers are actually doing and how they need to use the system. So, um, I saw, you know, a number of things about modernization and design. You know, in discussion around the I. T. And what else, Emily? We heard a 

Emilie Scantlebury: lot about some emerging tech and, um, you know, biometrics information, how biomet the rise of biometrics is not only helping secure a lot of the new softwares and, um, user interfaces out there, but it’s also helping improve the usability for those users. So, um, kind of looking forward into the future, how biometrics might change, um, the way in which we’re developing software, uh, and the way in which we’re kind of as end users, even in our civilian lives, um, using that software. We saw that a lot. 

Ashley Nichols: I think, and there was a lot about, obviously data, um, electronic health records, uh, records portability. Which is equally as applicable within, you know, sort of the federal spaces as it is with, uh, commercial spaces, um, and then security around that data. This is my, my new favorite buzzword that I’m here to learn more about this homomorphic encryption, which is really about securing large amounts of, of data in the cloud. That’s really specific to. Uh, not specific, but very applicable, obviously, to the health care industry, but it also allows you to run a lot of processes on that data or maybe extract useful information from that data without decrypting it. So you never use the security features while still being able to run process on it. That’s the big thing there. And interestingly. We recently did a survey at ACT IAC of government IT leaders and people supporting IT leaders to figure out which emerging technologies were going to be, uh, super important to them over the next five years. And this homomorphic encryption was at the top of that list as well. So I went from, you know, not knowing about it three months ago to now repeatedly hearing it, hearing about it and seeing it, you know. As you know, really kind of an emerging technology focus for for some of our government customers, 

Adam McNair: you know, and I think protecting it that kind of information. Um, and I think back, I was involved at 1 point in, uh, training for HIPAA implementation at the point where HIPAA kind of started and that was pretty cloud. So, at that point, it was, you know, Kind of simple. You just said, look, either this system holds PII or it doesn’t, and if it does, we just note that, and you have to get an extra level of approval if you’re going to have any data exchange with that system. But they were physical systems, and you could say, well, we know where it’s stored, because like, you could point to the box and say what’s right there. And, uh, as as that becomes cloud driven, you know, there’s so many things that that cloud has revolutionized so many things and data exchange is so much different and processing and everything else. But that kind of security is is so much more complicated. You know, we see that with with C. U. I. Uh, we see that with, with PII, um, once, once you get information and it’s kind of just everywhere and then replicates the places and all of that, there’s a lot of complexity that comes into that.

Ashley Nichols: And I think that this aims to, um, remove the necessity for that replication, right, which is that you’d have like one version that’s complete with PII, then you’d have one that was stripped out or slightly different. For another system to use and another system to use, if you don’t ever have to unencrypt the data to run the business processes that you need to from a central location, then you can, I guess, have a more singular data source or data lake of all that information and run multiple processes out of it.

Kevin Long: And it’ll be so much faster not having to unencrypt the data to do the work on it and then just have the response. The data that is worked on with the encrypted data. Also be remaining encrypted. So that work product of that remains encrypted and it’s all there. And it’s so much more than just encrypted in transit, encrypted at rest. Now it’s. 

Ashley Nichols: Yeah. So I would expect to see more of this in, in things. Wouldn’t be surprised if we saw something, if this would pop up, say at the Act IAC, you know, conference coming up in the fall, that kind of stuff. I think we’re going to see a little bit more, um, about that. I, I mean, I’m, I’m super interested in, especially as we start talking about, you know, larger data management issues and. And, you know, the theory, the concept of creating data lakes and all of that stuff, uh, I think we’re going to see a lot more of it. 

Adam McNair: So an interesting topic, um, you know, we talk about AI a lot and I think a lot of these topics, you know, I’ve seen before, whether it be the, um, The Gartner Magic Quadrant, they also have a hype cycle of where things are. If nobody’s ever looked at that before, their hype cycle is where something is from the standpoint of being talked about to actually being understood, to being In production to where it really is kind of a tested technology, and I think a I was there a while ago. Like I, you know, at the point where people were talking about cloud, they didn’t really know what it was. They just they heard that it was good. And so they wanted some. Um, and I think a I was there a couple of years ago. We had conversations as we would be solutioning deals or we’re talking about programs. Where AI was on the roadmap, but it didn’t necessarily have a definition to it. Um, I have seen, you know, and I think this ties into PII. I will say one of the things that that we’ve done internally is we now use an AI driven tool that that monitors our enterprise for PII. So even after you’ve had a policy established that says, Hey, don’t, don’t send this in an unencrypted manner, don’t email this out, et cetera. I mean, you can tell everybody what to do, but you know, when, when you, anytime you see the grass worn because people don’t want to walk the sidewalk, you know that people are going to do what they’re going to do at some levels. So we’ve, we’ve implemented AI tools so that we’re constantly looking for things people might be doing that are. Or a risk from A-A-P-I-I or C. So I do think there’s an intersection of AI with that. But I’m curious, did you guys have, I, I know that there were, there was AI on the agenda. I’m, I’m wondering what kinds of, you know, how much of it, what was talked about and, and what areas you, you know, you, you heard people discussing AI at himss?

Emilie Scantlebury: Yeah, so we, we heard a lot of ai and that’s to be expected. I feel, you know, AI has. been to your point, Adam talked about for a couple of years now. And I think as an industry at large, even outside the federal sector, it’s something that we are all learning on what that actually looks like from an implementation, um, and execution standpoint. Uh, the large kind of message that I heard, especially on the first day during one of the CIO panels was how our understanding of AI, um, is the of changing a bit, especially with the rise of global pandemics, the rise of natural disasters. Um, you know, when, when these events occur, it’s feeding these algorithms that have been driving AI for that AI bot for years. It’s kind of skewing their data, and it’s changing the way that that the AI is thinking, changing the way that they’re ingesting and behaving as a result of that data ingestion. So, um, it’s kind of begging the question of what new role does human data cleansing play inside of AI and, and the expansion of that, I think. You know, a big takeaway that I really heard frequently was it’s going to be a bigger footprint than what we had initially anticipated as an industry where we thought, you know, hey, we can build these algorithms. We can create these massive data lakes, um, feed it into the AI and kind of let it do its thing. You know, it’s going to require much more of a human footprint. So it was interesting to really listen in, uh, because of course COVID was a big theme on, on how that, how that’s kind of skewing, um, some of that.

Adam McNair: Yeah, I, I think it’s, that’s where for me, the conversations about how much can be automated, tuning AI and having human engagement, it usually is not just one or the other. Uh, there’s usually some sort of, you need to have kind of a well defined charter for what you’re trying to accomplish and then you can decide how much of it is technology and how much of it is people, uh, which I think ties into something else that when I’ve supported health IT, it’s mostly been health and human services. hrsa, NIH, uh, those kinds of organizations, uh, a a little bit, very little on the, like the DHA or or VA side. I’ve been, you know, at, so back when I was, you know, CACI, years back, uh, they had quite a bit of VA work and so I would talk to those teams. But as far as direct support, it was always the, kinda the HHS side of the world. Um. And there were different parts of the government, at least from my experience, where some agencies, when they were tackling a technology problem, it was a technology lead supported by the kind of medical health science community, and then in others, it was the reverse. It was the mission science. Your customer was a doctor. Your customer was a research scientist, and, um, And technology was very much just an enabler. Uh, I’m interested, you know, whoever wants to, to, to jump in first, perspective of the technology and, and health balance. And was this an IT conference with, with medical aspects? Was it a health conference with IT or is it more integrated than that? Neither of you have thoughts around that angle?

Emilie Scantlebury: I think, you know, it, the message was it’s truly a mix, um, where we are in a boom right now of information technology expansion from physical tools that are getting better every year to AI to software that’s getting stronger and it’s getting integrated more and more into our lives. daily. Um, I think the big message that we heard was it’s not a bandaid where we have challenges as an industry to better serve your end users, whether those are doctors or that’s a network of hospitals, or that’s understanding and visualizing data trends to better prepare for the next pandemic. A software only takes you so far. Um, you know, it really is driven by people and whether or not, um, your organizations, whether that’s DHA or highlight, um, whether your organization is equipped from a process standpoint and from a people standpoint to really implement and leverage and, and, um, capitalize on, on that new information technology. So it was definitely a mix of both. We heard some really cool new it trends, but we also heard some of the. Challenges like this AI piece where, hey, there needs to be more people push, more human push, more, um, you know, support human support behind it. So both would be my takeaway. Ashley, did you have any thoughts?

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, I agree. I think, I mean, there were some, I mean, like I said, there were literally like hundreds of sessions. And so some of them are very much focused on a type of technology or a type of thinking or innovating within the federal IT workspace. Some of them are really specific. So like, you know, a lot of things around again, like I said, the EHR came up a ton, even just by casual mentioned in everything. And then, but then there were also a lot of ones about how providers are leveraging existing technology to provide services in a new way. There was, you know, there was a lot of focus on some mental, not a lot of focus, but I saw several around. Leveraging social media and technology platforms for providing, uh, mental healthcare in a pandemic and even post pandemic thing, right? You have a lot of people who are anxious and stressed and they’re seeking out these services and, um, you know, trying to find a more effective way to reach out to this constituency. Um, there was one about someone was using TikTok, um, to, to put out information about like, Pandemic mental health care, you know what I mean? Like taking care of yourself in this or whatever, but so, so it was like the hardcore technology. And then I am a provider of health services to people. And this is how I use technology and leverage some of these tools and things that are out there. Um, but always, and then, but especially during this time, and then in a lot of cases, how it’s somewhat permanently shifted the way they will continue to provide some services, um, pandemic not withstanding.

Adam McNair: You know, I think as I’ve been to some conferences, you know, like this, or just met with customers about, you know, mission, I think that’s one of the areas that I, that when we, when we engage on programs, I think it’s one of the reasons why we’re always excited to work on, you know, what we kind of call mission area. Technology solutions. It’s because kind of being able to add in some understanding of what the actual work domain is. Um, you know, I think about having worked on consular systems for State Department and you have conversations about, well, Out of 270 locations, you know, some of them have bandwidth like you’d be sitting across the street, and some of them are low grade dial up connectivity that, and of course I’m sure some of that has changed now, but when I was working on it, you know, low grade dial up that’s not always available all the time. Um, you know, I think I’ve, I’ve been involved in things like that. I’ve, I’ve had conversations with, um, you know, when you look at first responder, whether that be, you know, DHS, um, they’re showing up on site that how they don’t know when they’re going to have access to power. They don’t know when they’re going to have access to Wi Fi. Um, also some of the, the law enforcement was like, have you ever tried to wear a tactical helmet? And, and tactical glove and type on a, on a tablet, um, and just some, some things like that, that are real life use cases that they sound like, oh, okay, well, we’ll just go ahead and note that down. But it kind of informs everything that you’re doing. I mean, it, it, the entire approach has to be shaped around, and The specifics of how it’s going to be used. Um, you know, one of the kind of integrated technology and health topics that I’ve heard, you know, around federal programs for a long time is the concept of telemedicine. I know. Just so many things, whether it’s disaster recovery, and they go, like, we can’t get a bunch of doctors there, but if we could get an x ray machine there, we could have somebody read an x ray and, you know, almost anywhere. And a lot of commercial health care providers have done that. I mean, I don’t know if you guys have done this, but, um, You know, our company healthcare has a telemedicine feature and, uh, during COVID at some point where, you know, one of us needed something at home from a healthcare standpoint, we’re like, Oh, well, I guess we don’t want to go to the doctor. We did the telehealth thing. And they’re like, yeah, that’s probably this. And we’ll, um, you know, get your prescription or something. So you don’t have to actually go to the doctor, which at least for us was never a big deal before. In the, in the height of the COVID standpoint, where you’re like, I don’t think we want to go sit in a doctor’s office right now. Um, so I I’ve seen that on the commercial side, how much telemedicine type of, of conversation was there at, at HIMSS? 

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, Emily, go ahead and tell them about the, that army program that we saw. That was so cool. 

Emilie Scantlebury: Yeah, I would love to. This was one of my favorite sessions that we were able to sit in. And this was hosted at the federal health. pavilion. Um, so it was really interesting to learn about. It was a program called net sen, N E T C N N. Um, and it was provided by DHA, but funded by parts of HHS. And essentially. To like explain like I’m five, it’s a sort of like FaceTime for doctors where, um, you know, these rural communities that may only have one or two doctors, one or two surgeons, um, in their networks of hospitals that are, you know, in a radius of 100, 150 miles, whatever it may be, who were completely overwhelmed by, you know, COVID. Patients needing care immediately, um, and needing some pretty intense care were able to work with DHA at no cost to the hospital, um, and essentially, like, order doctor support. They were able to completely brief on their patients. It’s all through just a 4G network. They didn’t even need high connectivity, which is a big problem, um, for rural communities of course. So low connectivity, we’re able to just hop on, you know, talk through, chat through what’s happening with their patients and, and get that, um, support on demand. Um, it really helped impact these, um, smaller hospitals and the number of patients that they were able to treat, um, especially as they were, you know, especially as they were becoming overwhelmed with COVID patients. So it was really cool to hear how telemedicine, which has started, you know, only a couple of years ago, was able to impact, um, something that none of us could have seen, which is that response to COVID. So, yeah. I really like that session. Um, 

Ashley Nichols: it was interesting that they said that they worked with a couple of, uh, specific partners. I think Deloitte was one of them and another company, and these were the physician providers, right? And they provided these essentially on call physicians, um, that, you know, could be used for just these understaffed facilities, which obviously would have applicability as we continue to face doctor shortages across the country, especially in rural areas, um, you know, could change. You know, the paradigm shift there about the quality of care that it will provide. You know, one of, someone else’s first question was, um, do you see this, you know, being com, you know, a commercial offering? And he’s like, well, no, we’re, we’re DHA, we’re DHA, so whatever. But I wanted to say, I bet your boots, those companies that are providing these doctors for you already have a commercial offering to do the same thing, you know, to contract out with some of these clinics and hospitals. Um, so. But yeah, it was definitely one of the cooler ones and just to see how that program came together inside the federal government, you know, facilitated by DHA, funded by HHS, you know, made available just to the, to the, to the areas in need across the country. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, that’s very interesting. And I, it was, it was a while ago, but at one point I was involved in a HRSA program that out of their rural health organization that did focus groups around the country. So HRSA was funding. focus groups that were in person focus groups around the country to understand gaps in health coverage because, you know, data is one thing and you can go and say, hey, I only have one data per X number of people in this county or, you know, those kinds of stats. But when you actually sit down with them and say, you know, why don’t you, you know, If you haven’t had a checkup, why didn’t you go get one? And they say, well, actually, it’s because the one doctor that we do have is all the way on the other side of the county. So it really isn’t an even distribution where they’re in the middle. So it’s a two hour drive for me to go get there. And they’re only open during hours where I’d have to take an entire day off of work. And I only get so much time off, or I’m paid hourly, etc. So I think it’s, It’s really neat to see out times like that where the federal government is able to understand requirements of, because this country is really diverse. I mean, when we work on on systems for the government, one of the things that I always think is so interesting is their requirements are unique. It’s so many times because. Sometimes it’s geographic distribution, global distribution, the encryption and security requirements are different, which could be interesting. And I, I’ve seen working on disconnected user scenarios where they said, look, we don’t know how often these people are going to be able to be attached and. That’s kind of easy to do now, but it didn’t used to be. And so I think a lot of those kind of technology use cases, uh, the federal government at times is a forcing function to say that they have a requirement that they’re willing to pay to have fulfilled because it may not be commercially viable for. A commercial company to decide they want to offer uniform coverage across the country, but when the government prioritizes it and is willing to, you know, put funding behind it, it’s, it’s interesting to see, um, to see what, what they can come up with. So very neat kind of scenario, encouraging when you can hear something like that, where the government’s able to provide something that’s, that’s helpful across the country. Um, So as far as the conference, I know you said that there were tons of sessions and Um, were there specific speakers or anything that really stuck out to you as far as, Hey, this was great. It was, it was enlightening. Or, um, you know, there was some aspect of it. It was, it was compelling that it still sticks in your head, you know, several weeks after the conference. Now,

Ashley Nichols: actually, one of the last sessions that we went to. Was the CXO, uh, conversation. And it was the former CIO from VA, uh, James Freer. Um, and then Don Rucker, who’s the former, um, ONC national coordinator for IT. And I had to actually look up, um, ONC, but it’s in big HHS. It’s the office of the national coordinator, but I guess they have different coordinators, national coordinators around health. He, you know, so basically he was like the CIO. They’re, uh, sort of advising the technical direction for HHS and, you know, they talked a lot about sort of the, the modernization and the things that they were trying to do in the agencies when they were there, you know, VA was specially has, we all know how the visibility that VA has been under. the last several years. Um, and technology plays a not inconsequential part in helping create some of the improvements around services for the veterans. Um, but it was how much they didn’t just talk about technology so much as they talked about like organizational change and culture and creating the organizations to provide these services. Um, so that the would better align with the mission that they were there to provide. Um, so, and then, you know, and, and then one of them, actually, I think it was Freer from VA recommended this book, can’t remember what it’s called, but it was written by this woman from Gartner. And basically it was like the Machiavellian approach to being a CIO. Um, and, but the whole point was, is that people consider a CIO in a lot of ways, a very passive person or, um, you know, uh, not. Not a difference maker within the organization. And it really advocated for how that is not true and how to be sort of the lion in the CIO organization. And looking into that book a little bit after he recommended, he said it was like the best thing for for a CIO to ever read. It made me sort of understand where he was coming from much more and sort of, um, you know, really trying to be a force for change through the it to meet the mission requirements within there. But a lot of it too was about, um, creating the right team and creating the right culture and. Um, reinforcing, um, the notion of what mission they were there to serve was. So, it, it was just as much about, I think, organization and people as it was technology, to Emily’s point earlier. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting conversation to have. And I, I think any, whether it’s health IT or any, any space where you’ve got technology leadership outside of the program organization, Um, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen CIO and CTO organizations that were very much just recommendation driven. Um, and they would try to suggest a target architecture, but the people that had programmatic funds could still spend them as they wanted. Uh, sometimes they were inserted into the procurement workflow, and then sometimes they drove everything. Uh, I mean, I’ve, I’ve been a part of, Having an agency decide that they were going to consolidate all IT spending under CIO, and now they spend the money, so it doesn’t matter that you said you really liked, you know, low code platform, whatever. If that’s not on the baseline, you’re not going to use it. And, um, You know, so I, I think there’s like anything else, every agency is different. There’s no right answer for the way that should always be. And, uh, I think when you get down to the people in the role, there are probably personality fits that are team builders and, and facilitators and would, uh, really thrive in an organization where even though they don’t control any of the funding, they would, they would be kind of organizationally change focused and move forward, and then there’s others that would probably be, you know, uh, from a. A program management kind of standpoint would be more effective just owning all the money and saying, look, you give me your requirements. I’ll build all your systems. And then you let me know if you need it. Need something worked on. Um, I think 

Ashley Nichols: the thing about, um, the VA guy. is that he presumably was there during, you know, the last five, seven years where there’s been that huge focus on, uh, veterans not being able to get appointments, no availability, their VA centers, and then sort of no visibility on how to help these folks, people waiting six months for appointments. And those are the kinds of problems that in large part have been solved by technology, right? Unifying scheduling capabilities. So you can create visibility into if this person can’t be seen here, where can they be seen? And, and how to flex those resources. And so, uh, you know, I think, you know, obviously from a sort of how they provide healthcare is one thing that changes, but I think there was a lot of technology changes that went in to VA is more high visibility challenges, um, in the last couple of years. And so hearing, you know, him talk a little bit about his philosophy as a CIO, knowing that. That’s when he was there. It was pretty interesting. Oh, yeah. The wolf in CIO’s clothing is what the book is called. Emily just reminded me. I did download it on the audio book. I haven’t finished it yet.

Emilie Scantlebury: Very cool cover as well. It’s enticing.

Adam McNair: So there’s one other thing I have to ask about. So as you guys were, you know, returning from the conference. I got a video texted to me of a robot. What was the deal with the robot at the con? Because here’s the thing. Every now and then I’ve been to conferences where they try to have something cool that kind of draws you in or whatever. I’ve not been to CES. I’ve never made that leap to say like, oh, I should go see that. But, you know, little stuff like, oh, look, here we have a drone or here we have whatever. There was a robot. What was the deal with the robot?

Emilie Scantlebury: Um, we’re best friends now. We’re pen pals. No, I’m kidding. 

Ashley Nichols: The video is posted on our LinkedIn. For those of you who are interested in seeing what it is, I honestly cannot tell you what company that robot was repping. Like we immediately saw it and I was like, Emily, 

Emilie Scantlebury: you have to talk to it. It was tunnel vision. We, we locked eyes. And, you know, robot eyes to human eyes. And I was like, I have to shake this robot’s hand. Walked up and we had a conversation. It, it can, it listens. It didn’t hear me one time ’cause it, you know, we’re in the conference floor. And so it said, oh, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. And it turned its head where the speaker was to like, come in and lean in and listen to me. Um, it was. like having a conversation pretty much with a person. It was honestly wild. I have seen, when I went to Afsia Rocky Mountain, which was two years ago now, I had seen the robot dogs before, but this was my first seeing like a more of a person. If you will, 

Ashley Nichols: he was so small. I just wanted to call him a robot child. Um, but it was, of course, Emily was like, I have to meet this robot. And I of course was like, well, then I have to film this. And she said, can I shake your hand? And he said, not too tight. Yep.

Adam McNair: Wow. It was an impressively fluid interaction from the video that I saw. I mean, the thing initially when we showed it, it looked a lot like, if anybody has seen like the old, like 1970s Buck Rogers TV show, there’s a little robot named Twiggy. It looked a lot like that. Yeah. Except, I think that thing just had a speaker in it that some, that a human spoke through as opposed to, this was a little kind of, I don’t know, how big is it, like, was it like kid sized? Is that approximately how big a thing was? 

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, it’s probably four feet tall. Yeah, I’d say four and a half feet tall. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, it could move around, it could roll around, like it definitely adjusted itself to like pivoted to face us as Emily was talking to him. And interestingly, as we walked away, like we were probably 50 feet, 100 feet away, and he was still watching Emily. Like, like trained on Emily, I guess, until someone else comes to interact with it. It’s just trained on that subject. Um, but yeah, it was, it was a trip and it was, it was a, it was a fun thing. And uh, again, it’s on our LinkedIn. Everyone check it out. 

Emilie Scantlebury: Yeah. Shameless plug. Go check out our LinkedIn. You’ll see Shameless plug. Yeah. The best video from him. So it, it was really cool. It was, 

Ashley Nichols: you’ll, you’ll notice at the end. Um, Emily’s eyes are kind of like saucers, uh, based on the interaction itself. You know, a little bit of like amazement, maybe a little bit of fear. I’m not sure, but it was definitely, it was definitely, uh, funny for sure. 

Emilie Scantlebury: Yes, it was a mix of emotions. And if you all could see my eyes right now, they’d be the same.

Every time I think about the robot, just.

Adam McNair: Very cool. Well, thank you guys. I mean, I think it’s, it’s super helpful to hear kind of the experience of going to a conference like that. And, um, especially these multi day conferences. I think now that coven is is is a thing. Uh, the decision process is even more complicated. If you’re going to go to 1 of these conferences, because you don’t know exactly what to expect. You know, is it still going to be a feel like it is a reasonably beneficial interaction going to this conference or are you just there and it’s segmented and it doesn’t feel like it was helpful because it was so compartmentalized or whatever. Um, but it does. It sounds like there was a lot of good content. Uh, the question I guess I’d have to as we as we wrap up here is so hymns is coming up again. In the spring, is that the next, the next iteration? Yeah. Yeah. So do you guys officially recommend it? Like, is this, is this, you feel like this was a good use of, you know, three days? 

Ashley Nichols: I think that for this one, it was a good learning experience for us about how to most effectively participate in HEMS going forward. I think that we, Yeah. I think from a participation standpoint, the networking opportunities are good, visibility into what different agencies are doing is good. Um, even if it’s stuff that we don’t specifically do, having an understanding of where that segment of government health is going and looking to, um, is always good from a situational awareness standpoint. So I think it just informed us on how to. Make the most of future hymns engagement. 

Emilie Scantlebury: I was going to agree with Ashley. You know, definitely for anybody going into hymns, if you have never been, it is probably the largest show I personally have been to in my career. Yeah. Um, and as such, it’s not something that you can go into kind of. And float around, you know, really look at that schedule. Really make your plan. Ashley and I had pre picked a couple of our sessions, and I think that’s why we were able to take some of those takeaways out. We did hear from others like, I don’t even know where to start. So they provide a lot of good materials leading up to the conference. So definitely closely review those as you guys are preparing. So yeah, I think it would go again for sure. 

Adam McNair: Great. Yeah. I, I do think that when they have some kind of either a domain or a Some kind of a focus, it makes it easier. I’ve, I’ve gone a couple of times. I don’t know if Fosse is still a thing, but Fosse used to be like just the, the giant federal contractor event. And I went once or twice and I was like, you know, if you happen to sell, you know, a better kind of, of waterproof boot or a, Helicopter maintenance app or whatever. I can understand going and trying to roll out your product or get people’s attention, but as a general kind of service solution contractor, other than just stopping by to see people or network a little bit or whatever, uh, it was a bit overwhelming and kind of just, you know, not sure what to do. focused enough where I really felt like I got tremendous value from it, but, um, him sounds, sounds solid. So I, I mean, it feels, it sounds like we’re probably going to have, have more people going in the future, uh, than less. And, um, uh, seems like as they move it around, um, you know, as you mentioned, uh, one consolidated location is always nice for a conference that you don’t have to be, uh, you know, strung around or taking shuttle buses or, or whatever. Well, great. Well, thank you. I hope everybody, um, Has has enjoyed the kind of general conversation around the, the hymns 2021, uh, we’ll probably do this as we, as we go to major conferences, uh, act I acts, uh, imagination, I believe is what they, what they refer to now is a, um, is a. Big industry, government industry conference, um, and we’ll probably talk about that as we have some of these other ones that are, that are booked. We will certainly, uh, uh, speak about those. Actually just mentioned, uh, That she and I attended a conference a couple of years ago in, uh, in San Francisco. That was Sim Tech. It was a semantic modeling technology conference that because we had, we’re doing a, a pilot program at our company, uh, we got invited to come to. And that was probably also an example of something that was. Really, really focused around the technology area that when, when people were interested in that technology, that was definitely a place to, uh, a place to be. But I don’t know that we, um, I don’t know how deeply we fit into the, that, that overall community. Was that, is that your recollection? Actually, 

Ashley Nichols: it was. Well, we were there, though, with like a partner company. It’s your point about why you go there because you have something to rule out or show and they, Yeah. They did right. They had a low code solution. They were, you know, based out of the Netherlands. Um, and so they really belong there and us being sort of their federal partner. We tagged along and did some boothing to talk to some federal customers and that kind of stuff. 

Adam McNair: Absolutely. Yeah, that was, so that was SimTech back, um, a few years back. Uh, so, and just as some notes for other things that we will be attending. So you could probably also look for, um, an episode as a recap. We’re going to be going to DOTUS, uh, later this winter. Uh, there’s an AWS. Uh, conference coming up and there’s also tentatively, I believe, a, uh, uh, a software factory conference. That’s the one that’s supposed to be in Detroit in December that, uh, I think we, we may be going to. Um, I know I’m really excited about, about the weather for that, but, um, we will let you know which ones we’re going to be, uh, attending. Uh, you can also, uh, keep up on our, uh, Our activities like that, the, the news link on our website, highlight tech. com or our LinkedIn feed is always a really good source, uh, highlight technologies, the, the LinkedIn feed for where we are and who’s doing what inside of the company. So our next episode, we are going to go back into our, uh, deeper dive of DevSecOps with some of the technology notes and, uh, Explaining some of the intricacies of what certainly sounds really, really intricate, but seems like it operates like a well oiled machine when the right people are doing it. So, uh, we will get back to that, but, um, that will conclude today. So thank you to, to Kevin, to Ashley, to Emily. Uh, thanks everybody very much for listening and we will talk to you on the next Highlight Cast. 

The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect Highlight Technologies and or any agency of the U. S. government.

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Welcome to another episode of The Highlight Cast. I’m here, Adam McNair from Highlight, joined by Kevin Long. Hey, Kevin. Hey Adam, how’s it going? Good to see you again. Good, good to see you. Also joined by Kevin Milner, who is our northeast Kevin. It’s good to see you, man. How are you? 

Kevin Milner: I’m good. Thanks for asking. How are you? 

Adam McNair: Good. Um, alright, so what we were going to talk about today, we’ve talked about in a recent episode, we talked about a code challenge that we had done, and as we, uh, We look at the work that we do, those kinds of code challenges seem to fit into the DevOps or DevSecOps work domain. So we wanted to talk a little bit more about that. Because the last episode where we talked about code challenges, you could theoretically do a code challenge without code. 

Kevin Long: I Mean, we literally just did a style of code challenge for tool chain and a style of code challenge for knock, 

Adam McNair: right? Yeah. So we’ve, we’ve done infrastructure. We’ve done kind of COTS tool integration. We’ve done different kinds of code challenges. So it doesn’t necessarily need to be DevSecOps. And, um, We wanted to take the opportunity to delve a little bit more into that. I will lead off by giving you my deep expertise in DevSecOps. I know it’s development and security and operations integrated together. And, uh, I, I’m trying to remember the first time I ran across it. I, I think it might’ve been in DHS several years ago. It might’ve been at, uh, PBGC. I don’t recall exactly, but I know the idea that you could use tools to, you know, streamline the development code to delivery process and the way that I, I took it. Initially was if you if you started thinking about the way we used to build software or it was this waterfall type thing where you each step that you took in the process kind of took a long time and was super deliberate and, um. A lot of documents and a lot of signatures. Yeah. And, um, you know, I, I think that when, when Agile showed up, at least for me, from a non, you know, I am not a hardcore software developer. My lay person’s feeling about it was that you were kind of just speeding all those cycles up. And there might be some steps in the process where if for some software, where you really need a zillion page document and sign offs and everything. But a lot of things don’t require that and, and agile sped those cycles up, but also the idea, you know, the, the kind of catchphrase I used to hear was, you know, fail faster, you’ll find out if you’re going to have something don’t build. A million lines of code and then find out that one of them doesn’t work, right? Like 10 and see if 

Kevin Long: those 10 work because or, or worse, find out that it took you so long to write that code that it operates perfectly, but isn’t needed anymore. No longer needs the needs. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. And I will tell you, I, I had a project at departmental labor one time that it. It, uh, by the time we got ready to release, uh, like a year long software development cycle, uh, the system it was supposed to integrate with had been upgraded because that wasn’t under our contract. And so it didn’t work. And there wasn’t a mechanism in place to tell us, hey, uh, we’re going to turn system X off and launch a new upgraded version. All the back end is changing. We didn’t know. And it was a big problem. So, so those kinds of things, you know, okay, we’re going to, we’re going to do things faster. It’s just better real time visibility where it’s, I mean, nobody wants to do anything that you don’t really get a product out of for six months or a year, if you can avoid it. Um, it’s just a very long time to recover if you find out something is wrong and GSA, General Services Administration, what they call DevSecOps is safer software sooner. And so that’s kind of a positive angle on Fail faster, I think, so I, you know, kudos to them for coming up with something that doesn’t use failure in your, uh, in your value statement. Um, and I think GSA, they had an organization there for a while that, um, was really, I think, at the forefront of DevOps and DevSecOps, and, uh, 18F was an organization that was trying to jumpstart innovation and technology into the federal government. Because in the government, a lot of times, I think what happens is somebody asks the question, okay, well, this sounds like a really neat, cool, innovative thing. Where has it been done before? Which is not just a bureaucratic question. It’s a very valid one because the federal government has unique requirements from 

Kevin Long: the state. It’s just a different beast. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. I mean, I remember at one point when I was working on passport systems and I was talking to one of my customers and they said, you know, the thing is, There’s no COTS solution for issuing a passport. You’re like, oh yeah, that’s a fair point. It’s like, we have to have something that prints this highly specialized secure book and all of this stuff. You don’t find, uh, uh, an application where we can go borrow that from. 

Kevin Long: Right. 

Adam McNair: Okay. If 

Kevin Long: it was easy to find, it’d be easy to forge. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah. So that, you know, to me, DevOps or DevSecOps, it’s like, okay, we either development operations of software development, the security process and operations are integrated or mushed together in one word. And so it’s, it’s all one thing. You guys do this for a living. What do you, how would you describe it to a person such as, such as me that, uh, that doesn’t do it every day?

Kevin Milner: Well, what I would say is, is first of all, um, We when you think sort of you talked about the history of DevOps a little bit, and you know, they went from the waterfall to to the agile methodology and the idea of failing fast, what they noticed was that they were, you know, they would people would build a pipeline to take software from from code into a product. And then you would have your security people come in and say, well, can you also run these tests? Or can you also make sure that, you know, the container we’re releasing has the these particular versions of software on it? And so people would add in, you know, these, these Tests as they came up. And essentially, um, it was an afterthought. You’re, you’re tacking on security as an afterthought, uh, to the process. And that’s never particularly effective. So, so you could almost think of DevSecOps as DevOps 2. 0. Uh, it’s, it’s not so much different as, as improved with security built in from the beginning instead of, uh, Instead of added later on, 

Adam McNair: and so I’m guessing that when you do that, then are you avoiding the situation where you’ve written code? And then when it gets kind of further along in the process, it’s being security scanned. And they’re saying no, that’s incorrect, which means you have to go back and rework it. But it also means you could have other people doing kind of the same thing, making the same mistake. Right. So if you had some sort of the security litmus test in the middle of that, it kind of systemically stops it. Is that kind of the idea? 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. For instance, you might have a well meaning developer, you know, put a debug statement into the log file that says, you know, I tried this password. It didn’t work. Or I tried this password. It didn’t work, but then you’ve got your password in the log file. And so that’s a pretty secure, uh, pretty big security flaw right there. So, um, so the idea is, well, okay, let’s include tests to make sure that. That security, the passwords don’t go into log files and, you know, obviously that’s a mistake someone else might make later on down the road. So it’s a, it’s a chance to, to sort of make sure that doesn’t happen before you even get deeper into the testing phase.

Adam McNair: So here’s a question from a dumb person. How do you actually do that? So you want to make sure that there aren’t passwords in there. So what, what’s, is it a security tool? That’s just automatically out there. Sniff it. How does that, how does that happen? 

Kevin Milner: I mean, they, they have security tools that do that. Uh, Sono type. Um, so in our queue, uh, is one of those that has a suite of tests sort of to make sure that the security is stable, but it can also be done manually. You could write a unit test that that deliberately calls that API function and then after it’s called. scan the log file that was generated with, with, you know, a, uh, you know, just a simple text scanner to look for the password that you, you know, that you put it in the test.

Kevin Long: Yes. A lot like, uh, DevOps is based on tools that automate the integration and deployment of code. DevSecOps has tools that integrate into that whole tool chain that will do security checking on it. Like Kevin said, SonarQube will do a lot of static code scanning. There’s whatever Twistlock is called now, now that Palo Alto bought it. Um, You know, does container scanning and it does it’s things that that that integrate security pieces through the deployment and and development pieces of of of your software so that, you know, you don’t have a well meaning developer that that has this great idea, but only works if passwords are passed in plain text over. Non HTTPS and things like that, and then everything falls apart, right? Or security decisions that security decisions are made early and tested throughout each incremental deployment.

Adam McNair: So then one could think of the, that’s the security piece of the development and the ops piece on the development side. The, the idea of. Doing some coding and then doing some testing and looking at, you know, performance metrics and some of those kinds of things. So there are tools that are automating that, too, essentially. Is that right?

Kevin Long: Yeah, absolutely. It is part of this, uh, DevSecOps CI CD pipeline will include things like SonarQube and tools that do static and dynamic code scanning. Um, will also include things like unit tests. Built in also for, you know, that you would have in, in standard DevOps, right? If you’re doing TDD or TDD, uh, development where having the developers pay attention to all of the things that need to be tested throughout the life cycle of the, uh, of the development.

Kevin Milner: And then you might also have other, other things like, um, you know, tools that test to see if certain edge cases are, are covered in, in your, in your software. For instance, you might have a, a situation where somebody on submitting a form, uh, can actually include an SQL injection into, into the, the payload of the, the form. And you have to make sure that. You know, that’s sanitized and doesn’t let someone get control of your database just by, you 

Kevin Long: know, or drop your, drop your master database or little johnny drop tables. Yep. Little Johnny tables is what we call them.

Adam McNair: And I, so then on the upside, you know, I, I, I would think of that. Is that kind of similar to when you think of like the install shield, you know, wizard type thing that, you know, when you, when you buy professional COTS software, there’s usually a click here to install as opposed to, you know, I have done in the past where we were trying to deploy something and you had, Documentation about where all these files were supposed to go, and what was supposed to be where, and what was supposed to be configured in what way, and then once it went in, what was supposed to be changed on the server to allow it to work, and, you know, like, all this stuff, right? And it used to be I mostly did just relatively simple web systems, but it still might be a day or so, and depending on how good your documentation was, when somebody would forget to tell you that, oh, by the way, you have to either open this port, or it needs to have an empty folder or directory called such and such to drop log files in, and then if it isn’t there, the thing doesn’t work. thing will die or, you know, whatever. It was this big, long list of things you had to do. And so I’m assuming it kind of converts the custom software deployment aspect to more of a, here’s the install shield that has been told, go do all these things. Is that kind of the way that works? 

Kevin Milner: Yeah, with, uh, I’m sorry, Kevin, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but with, uh, especially if you have a system. Like, uh, infrastructure is code that allows you to be able to build, you know, the platform you’re deploying on the install shield would, would be more relevant for somebody installing the software locally on their, their workstation. But, um, one of the things you can do. with infrastructure as code is have it set up so that you build exactly the infrastructure, you know, the virtual machines have exactly the software that you know that you want them to have. They have the exact version, the exact ports open, all of that stuff. And it can be automated and therefore, um, you know, replicated quickly in a consistent and reproducible manner.

Adam McNair: Gotcha. So that makes a lot of sense. So that’s. You know, so we’ve automated essentially a lot of the manual steps throughout the process. And then there’s also a, um, um, kind of a mindset difference that, cause this takes the whole organization. Like you can’t just decide that your development contractor is going to do this. There’s a lot of. Overarching architecture and decisions and everything else that has to be made, um, when organizations start to go that direction, what kind of categories of benefits are they seeing? I mean, certainly it sounds like it could be faster or there could be less errors or there could be more secure. But what, like, what typically if somebody was going to say, Hey, we’re currently doing this, you know, we’re normal agile organization. And then we do whatever we do. Uh, what, what gets better?

Kevin Long: You’re finding security issues earlier in the development curve, where it’s much cheaper to fix. And if, and if you need to rearchitect something at that point, it’s with, with a million little deployments, instead of one monolithic thing going out, it is much. Cheaper to to take security into account as you’re going through without a doubt as as a manager. I know. I know. That’s the benefit that I see. 

Kevin Milner: I would say one of the main. Sort of, uh, I don’t want to say promises, but one of the, the early goals that you can present to, to your C level people, like your CTO and stuff is the ability to, um, consistently reproduce the environment. So one of the, One of the encounter problems you encounter as a developer is, is the works on my machine issue, um, you know, and that’s, there’s, there’s not a product manager in the world that will accept that as a, as an excuse, but, you know, I wrote this code. It works on my machine. Um, 

Kevin Long: all it has to do is run locally as admin and it’s fine. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. So if you can say, Look, we’ll never have a works on my machine problem again, because the machine is always exactly what we expect it to be. Um, I think that would be a good starting place. You know, the deployment will always look like what we know it’ll look like and sort of sort of use that as your your motivator to start. Getting into the push to production phase of it, and then as they start to see the benefits of that, then you can include other things like code coverage. You know, I can guarantee that That in these known conditions, the program will operate in this way. I can prove it. I can show it to you or, um, you know, various things like that, that you can begin to, to add new features that bring new, uh, profit, not profitability, but, uh, benefit to, to the organization.

Adam McNair: And so that, you know, those things that I, I hear, so, you know, You don’t have to have rework as much, so if you’re finding things earlier, you’re not having to do as much rework maybe. You’re doing it, you know, you’re getting things done faster. That always equates to having it be done cheaper. That always equates to having it Deliver some value to the users faster, which is depending on the organization and what it is can be a really big deal. The other thing that it may be as it strikes me as I think about some of the other regular software projects I’ve been involved with over the years. When you’re going from a build 1. 0 to build 2. 0. The training curve and the usability curve for your users, where they, because you’ve lumped so much into that big deployment, right? And so you went from 1. 0 and you’re like, okay, now we also are going to add all these things in. We decided we’re going to reorganize these other things. We’re going to change the UI because we didn’t really look how it like how it looked that much. We’re going to add this search thing, but we’re going to have it work differently because we felt that there were some issues with it before. So And it’s almost like you have to relearn the application from one version to the next. I, I, I’ve been involved in a couple of those like that where, uh, you know, we had some big training room and you walk in and all these users are in there and the questions of like, where did my button go? And where did my this go? I mean, I, I would, I’d correlate it to the difference between like, if you look at the major versions of any of the Microsoft Office tools, if you find somebody that, that was using like 97 or 2003, And then they go into the current 365 version. It takes a couple of weeks, if not longer, to just get back to where the things that I use, like, I’m sure I can pull this. What the heck is this ribbon and where is my menu? Exactly, like, where’d the menu, you know, where did all that go? And yeah, versus, you know, like we’ve been on Microsoft Teams for a long time now. And every now and then there just happens to be a little tweak. 

Kevin Long: They just move things. 

Adam McNair: And you’re like, but it doesn’t completely destroy your ability to use the app. It’s just a momentary, like, wait a second. Didn’t there used to be. So where did this button go? Where did this button go? Now, the user communication would be, would be handy. Um, so, so certainly telling them what, what happened would be, would be outstanding, but from the idea of, you know, You think so many of our, our cloud based, you know, software as a service apps now, I’ve almost gotten used to, I think, going in and seeing like, oh, I guess that moved, it kind of gets you in a, in a slightly less kind of static role as a software user, where you’re not so accustomed, like, it’s not chiseled in stone, you accept the idea that this is not a typewriter, and for the last 117 years, all these keys have been the same place. It’s. It’s like, I’m going to look consistently somewhat aware of the fact that this is not a, a iron machine that has gears in it. It, things could move around and change. And so I think maybe as time goes on, users will get a little bit more used to, Oh, it moved from over here, not over there. You’re not going to be getting a bunch of help desk calls of like, where did the save function go? It’s probably still somewhere intuitive. It’s probably a major function. It just not, might not be the first, you know, floppy disk icon in, in the top left corner. Look around a little and you’ll probably find it. Um, so that might be a impact that I would think, you know, just from what I’ve seen of the way in organizations use, use proprietary software, certainly in the government.

Kevin Milner: Yeah, um, Adam, if I could address something that I sort of occurred to me as you were talking about that from from a developer’s perspective, uh, not necessarily, you know, the end user of the software, but from the developer’s perspective of someone working on an application, um, one of the one of the sort of moves that they’ve been going to for the last two years. 10 years or so has been micro micro services. Thank you. My brain just completely froze on me. Um, so as a developer, you’re, you’re frequently having to use external resources. Like, you know, I might need to reach out to the printer if you’ve got a situation. Like we had recently, where we had to have like a proprietary printer, um, that we needed to use, or, you know, we need to get information from this specific government website and bring that in and then format the data and present it. Um, one of the advantages of using microservices is that you can. You can do incremental changes to the various interfaces that those applications have so that the developer isn’t having to relearn like an entire monolithic, you know, front, uh, front end to communicate with back into communicate with, you can instead say, okay, well, I know, you know, the, the, uh, The print server has changed its format. So right now I can just worry about how to interact with the print server, then we can go and upgrade the criminal database server or whatever and and do incremental changes that way so that you can test them, make sure they’re good. Developers can get, you know, easy. Learning curve on it before having to move to, to, you know, having to learn everything just to make that one little change.

Adam McNair: So I guess that’s a concept that as a non developer doesn’t come along all that much, but I guess to your point is potentially daunting. So if you’re looking at software and it is written as these giant services, if you’re a new developer walking into that, before you’re an effective developer, you basically happen to just sit and learn the code base for some amount of time? 

Kevin Milner: Yes. Yes. The more complex the code base, the more time you have to spend learning it. Um, because, you know, most, most software that you encounter, at least from the code thing, is, is an evolved product over many years by many different people. So, um, You know, there’s, there’s obviously going to be different styles of coding, even code formatting if, if you want to, if you want to start a war, go on to Reddit and say, you know, open bracket on the same line is better than open bracket on a new line and then there’ll be hundreds of people to tell you why you’re wrong or right. Um, but yeah, so this, this makes it so that there’s a lot less of a learning curve. Um, if you have. If you have, you know, simple web interface, you can, you can even play around with a tool like curl on the command line to test it out before you go in to your, you know, uh, code base and try to try to make changes there. So definitely that has an advantage. 

Adam McNair: I think, you know, thinking back and with things I’ve been involved in, I, I know there was, uh, A team I used to work with and the lead developer, a fellow named Carl, was known as the guy that was kind of the godfather of all of their code. And I asked somebody at some point, like, well, could you do this differently or that way? He said, at this point, he’s had his hand in the thought process and the architecture of so many things that there is. The right way and the wrong way. And then there’s the way that he has done it, which is probably, you know, perfect in some places and might not be another, but you’re so far down that road that you’re like, everything is done this way. And so this services framework is what it is. And this is what we’re going to operate from because you just can’t, you know, you’ve, you’ve kind of, you know, you’ve already built the house, so to speak. You can’t. You know, could we knock half of it off? Yeah, but that’s not really how you do things. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, and if you’re exposing services like that, that are enormous to other applications, just like you were having earlier, where the application you’re integrating with changed when you’re. When you’re building, if you build giant services like that, you expose them out there. I mean, the backwards compatibility issues for, uh, for making, making the service do what it’s supposed to do going forward is, is, uh, it is a real hassle. Now, keeping them compact and finite like that instead of monolithic really makes, makes maintainability much, much better.

Kevin Milner: Yeah. And, and, uh, you can. You can do, this is the point I was trying to, I was struggling to recall later. You can, um, as part of the DevSecOps process, you can actually test at the same time you’re doing your other code tests, uh, you can test for syntactic style and various, uh, things in variable names, make sure that, you know, you have consistent variable names, make sure the code’s readable, formatted nicely. That’s really important in that it lets you have a more homogenous. Code base that, you know, looks the same, uh, and that makes it more readable. So you’re not having to translate everything as you go through, you know, Oh, well, this is, this is the code that Kevin wrote. You know, why would he have done it that way? Yeah. It, all the code looks like standard code for, for your organization. So that’s a, a really, another huge benefit of, of that. DevSecOps pipeline. 

Adam McNair: So does, does this help solve in some way, at least part of the problem where, I’ve walked into a lot of transitions where somebody would say, you got to try to make sure that you keep so and so because they are the, the lead developer on this system and there’s no chance that anybody else can ever maintain that thing. Which may or may not be 100 percent true, but I think what probably would be 100 percent true is, if anybody else is going to, going to handle this, they’re never going to be able to understand it the way that that person understood it. And they’re going to be largely ineffective for months as they try to figure out what this is. Uh, because I’ve had conversations in a transition before where they said if you can’t get This person to maintain this system, you are probably better off to start now rebuilding it because you’re going to have something at least serviceable in a couple of months, whereas you’re just going to. If you don’t, three months from now, you’re going to say, I still can’t figure this out. Does it help avoid that kind of, um, either through kind of immaturity of developer or I’ve certainly seen some developers before where I believed they did it because it was job security for the rest of their career that, you know, they had, they had built this Rube Goldberg type thing that nobody else was going to be able to handle. Does it help kind of protect against that? 

Kevin Milner: Yeah, what you’re talking about is, is called in the biz, the bus metric. Um, if you, if you’ve been hit by a bus, what is the number of days downtime before, before the code can be worked on it? So, so, um, You know, if I, if I wrote all the code and I’m the only one that understands it, if I get hit by a bus, you’re going to have to bring somebody on that can then, you know, pick up and learn everything. So ideally, everybody would have a really low bus metric and you would. You would do that through cross training, paired programming, so you have more than, than, you know, one creator of the software and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, that definitely is, is, is something that you want to reduce as much as possible.

Adam McNair: And so this might be a, how, how integrated into the DevOps mindset is paired programming? Is that a big, a big part of DevOps or is that just a development kind of theoretical type of thing? Activity that that can be used with anything.

Kevin Milner: That’s a good 

Adam McNair: question. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah, I would say it was probably be more on the developer side. Um, you know, you’re going to run into it a little bit when you’re merging the code, I guess. But, um, yeah, that wouldn’t be a DevOps policy. That would be that would fall more under the, like, development side of things. 

Kevin Long: It’s a convergence of popular, uh, popular development methodologies. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because you could absolutely do, um, pair programming in Waterfall. Absolutely. Um, but, yeah, we’re seeing more and more, you know, extreme programming where pair programming is, is a core, core component of it, or just pair programming in general, uh, coming together as independently as DevSecOps is getting more and more popular. I wonder if they’ll merge. So let me, let me, 

Kevin Milner: uh, let me give you sort of. Just to clarify what, like, paired programming is, the idea is that you have two developers, let’s say, and they’re working on a new feature for this application. So you have one developer, maybe they’ll write a unit test and say, when, you know, when this button is pushed and this field is populated, I want to see this result. So they’ll write this unit test, then, you know, their, their co worker that they’re sitting next to or in a, in a virtual meeting with or whatever, we’ll then write code to make that test fail. Um, so then once it fails, then your other guy can go in and say, ha, now I’ll write the code to make it, I’ll fix the code to make it pass. And then, you know, the other guy’s like, well done, now, you know, here’s a unit test for you. And, and you do that and, and that not only has the benefit of letting everybody sort of get their hands dirty with a particular function of the code of the, of the application, but it also makes it a little more fun to program. It’s, it’s more like a game. So, you know, happy coders are. Are better coders, I think, and if you can keep people entertained while they’re while they’re working, even if even if it’s like a financial application, you know, calculating compound interest, it’s more fun if, you know. You are challenging your friend.

Adam McNair: So I will tell you, I, to just strongly agree with that statement, I mean, there’s a lot of things that we do with that idea, that people that are happy with what they’re doing do do better work. Um, the, you know, the whole idea, I I sat through a, kind of a seminar one time on gamification of, of work. And, Whether it be on a service desk where you are giving some incentive that whoever can close the tickets out, you know, they get something and you make the reward suit, you know, frequent enough that it’s not an annual award. Because then by 4 days, you kind of burn it or whatever. I’m behind it. It’s over something small. That’s on a, a daily basis. That makes it fun and it gives you something to focus on other than just, oh, all of these people’s, you know, the accounts didn’t work. I gotta go in and fix ’em. The, those kind of gamification aspects, something where paired programming where you, you know, you and somebody else are going back and forth. I, I think there’s a lot of that. That makes sense. And you know, I think also the, one of the real benefits of, of a lot of the, the automation that we see is. People just can’t operate where they, they’re just sitting somewhere for eight hours a day just waiting for something to happen. I’ve had, you know, watch desk programs or, um, you know, network monitoring programs where you’re just having somebody sit there waiting for something to happen and then expecting them. And a lot of those programs aren’t even eight hour shifts. I’ve had ones that were 12 hour shifts. You’re expecting somebody that’s been sitting there on hour number 11 to be just lightning quick and completely, you know, clear. Oh, this is exactly what we do in this situation. And you can drill and train and do all of that stuff. But, um, I think it makes a lot of sense what you’re saying. And the, the, the, the development methodologies that. Make the coders enjoy it more, and theoretically, I guess, probably also, are there tedious aspects of the work that DevOps or DevSecOps is removing? Are there some of these roles, like if you were going to have to do all this testing and the code quality and all those things, was there a point, I guess, where that was somebody’s job to sit there and read all the code with, uh, Kind of code style guide for lack of a better term.

Kevin Milner: Yeah, I mean Those have largely been replaced with yeah, you used to have to check code manually, you know, just hey Can you look at this now? The the code reviews are a little bit faster You just sort of make sure that there’s nothing really strange going on and Then if your tests fail Then you can go in and look at it. But, uh, various methodologies such as dependency injection, uh, where you, where you have pretend resources that you give the program for it to interact with, so you know how it’s going to respond, uh, you know, um, things like that. That that helps reduce that so you can automate your your testing and and as we mentioned, the code style, um, things like that. So, yeah, I mean, my goal is as a DevOps engineers to not have to do anything to get to a point where where I just sort of sit there and say, yep, it’s working. Um, obviously, I don’t want to tell my employers that. But, uh, um, but yeah, I mean, the goal is to, to automate everything that you can, so that not only is it more enjoyable to do, but you also want to make sure that there aren’t any tedious mistakes, um, you know, uh, You can solve that with checklists, but nobody wants to go through a checklist and say, uh, does this have a semicolon? Okay. Does this have, uh, you know, does this return a null value anytime? Stuff like that. You don’t want to have to do that. If, if, if you can automate the process itself, then you can spend more time doing things like adding cool features. Uh, instead of having to like make sure that every weird use case that you can’t envision, but your customer will immediately find, um, you can make sure that doesn’t happen. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, there’s nothing more demoralizing as a developer than having to go back into what was cool once, but now is done in your brain and rebuild it. Build it from the middle out because a security finding came in and said, no, no, good idea. Nice try. Not here. You can’t. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. Right. First 80 percent of programming is great. The remaining 20 percent is tedious and not much fun. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. Getting that, getting that in your mindset while it’s still cool and exciting. And it’s another problem to solve while you’re still problem solving all of that. Like the initial stuff is, yeah. Makes it so, so much, so much better than, than squashing giant bugs at the end.

Adam McNair: Yeah. Well I will tell you, um, and this, this goes towards a lot of things that I have done, uh, whether it be software or when I worked, uh, you know, the infrastructure design or you know, whatever. I’m really, really good for your first 80%. Like that’s, that’s a wall you want me on. That last 20, I’m with you. Like the, the, Oh, I, I actually have to go up and line up all of the individual requirements and make sure that we completed all of them. I don’t, I don’t know if you want me to do that. I’m going to zone out in the middle of it. I’m going to miss one. I just know, I just know I am. Um, so, so DevOps, there’s a lot, certainly it sounds like there’s, there’s, there’s a lot to it. Cause it is, it is both an integration of tools and it, it requires a lot from the whole organization and you need your development and your whole technical team needs to be proficient in a whole set of tools and. Are there, are we really at a point now where there are, like you mentioned a couple of tools as we were talking, are you seeing a pretty standard set of tools at this point? Or are there, is it the app store and you just try one? How does that work? How does that work? 

Kevin Long: I would love to hear Milner’s take on this. 

Kevin Milner: It’s a little bit of both. Uh, there’s, there’s tools to do everything. Um, 

Kevin Long: and new tools every day. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah. New tools every day, being able to, uh, to, to learn how to use them and make them work with existing tools is, it’s another point entirely. But, um, it’s like any technology, really, if you look at JavaScript, there’s, There’s 8, 000 different JavaScript libraries. There’s Node, there’s Angular, you know, all of these things. So, um, you know, there’s, everybody wants to create their own flavor. And, and I think after a while, natural selection or artificial selection sort of whittles away, you know, the, the, the puppets and the, I know there’s going to be some haters that are like, No, not puppet. Um, and leaves you with chef, you know, uh, so, so it’s sort of a marketplace of ideas where, where you, you see when somebody identifies a problem, there’s lots of solutions to it. Over time, it, the, the better solutions usually tend to, to remain. Uh, the most robust, 

Adam McNair: so do we, does it look like it’s headed a direction where the, you know, Microsoft DevOps in a box thing shows up and it’s all of these integrated, already integrated tools, or does it seem like there’s enough out there that it’s just too diverse and you’re not going to see one product end to end that does everything?

Kevin Milner: Oh, it’s, it’s just like any. Program. Really? I mean, is there a Microsoft program that does everything? You know, um, 

Kevin Long: if you ask Adam that his answer is PowerPoint. 

Adam McNair: That’s correct. That’s that. If you look at the Venn diagram of things that can be done, uh, The part that can be done in PowerPoint is is overlaps many, many things, 

Kevin Milner: but you see my point. There’s, there’s, uh, you know, there’s, there’s not like, uh, you know, every organization is going to be slightly different. It’s going to have slightly different needs. Your, your D. O. D. Organizations are going to have. A much higher focus on security, uh, making sure that libraries that are used are not, not, you know, kind of dodgy, that sort of thing. Whereas as somebody that works at, you know, drizzly, the, the booze delivery service is going to, uh, You know, they’re going to be a little bit more concerned about making sure the maps are accurate or it’s right. So, um, you know, like, uh, it’s, it’s going to be very organization dependent. There’s large blocks of stuff. For instance, Jenkins is really good at coordinating all of this, all of the points between, uh, committing code to, to your repository. And. pushing a product out somewhere. But, you know, as far as monitoring, you’re going to need a different Probably a different tool for that. Yeah. And things like that. So there’s, I wouldn’t look at it so much as a, as a universal tool, as, as there’s a well rounded toolbox that you have available to you.

And I mean, 

Adam McNair: yeah, yeah. And I used to see some of that. So I probably could draw a correlation with the infrastructure side of things that. You know, there were, there would be a a service desk tool where you handled your, your incident management. There would be a tool for scanning the actual infrastructure to make sure that the point to point connections were up. There would be a tool for monitoring the end points to make sure that the end points were active. There would be a tool for capacity that was monitoring how much availability there was. And there’d be, you know, one for patching that would push patches out and you had all these different, different items. And so there started to be some consolidation where there were some tools that kind of did everything. But what I found was it really, truly, like you say, it depended on your requirements and what the priorities and areas of emphasis were. Because a tool that started as a service desk tool, Even if they bought or added on or started making something that would do patching it never did patching as well as your patching tool. And so when we used to use some of the earlier Microsoft tools there, there were there were ones that were. really enterprise monitoring and they started to build patching into it. And I, I worked with some wizards that they could deploy stuff all over the globe, kind of figuring out how to hijack some monitoring processes that the thing would do. Then other people said, well, why aren’t we just using these other patch management tools that are so much more robust and you have versioning of your patches and all of that. And so it probably at the same level, like when we look at recruiting systems, if you’re not a recruiting system company, you might have added recruiting into your HR system or your finance system. I’ve seen ones where they’ve added them into like your asset management system and that kind of suite. There’s just nuances that, depending on the organization, can be a huge deal. Um, so that, that makes a lot of, a lot of sense. Go ahead, Milner. 

Kevin Milner: Yeah, it’s, it’s sort of, Like all things, it’s a balancing act, um, and this sort of ties back into the microservices we were talking about earlier. You can, you can view the microservices, uh, concept as sort of the idea of a bunch of tools in the toolbox. And so, you know, yes, you can break them down and have like a bunch of little tools that do exactly one thing. And that’s super efficient, super, super good from that standpoint. But then you have the complexity of having to orchestrate all of those tools, whereas, you know, something that’s a little more. Integrated is a little easier to manage, but then you start having to have specific experts on that tool. Yeah. So then, so then your, your, your bus metric goes up. So it’s, it’s sort of a, a delicate balance. Um, I think that the, the project managers and other stakeholders need to be cognizant of. You can, you can go too far in either direction. You can have one tool to rule them all or, uh, you know, have a million tools to do little things, but you have to worry about orchestrating it. 

Adam McNair: It makes a tremendous amount of sense. Um, and I will tell you, I, I feel like as we’ve, you know, kind of been exploring DevOps here a little bit, it might make sense for us to do a part two on this and, you know, talk more about some of these. Development aspects because I think it’s certainly deep 

Kevin Long: in the weeds on this 

Adam McNair: stuff Yeah, it’s certainly been interesting to me and I I don’t I don’t know if anybody else is um has been around software as much and probably you know not not found an easy way to understand some of the You know, more complex aspects of it, but it certainly, I think, has been, um, has been interesting and enlightening in a lot of ways. So with that, I think we will go ahead and wrap up for today. Um, and. We will get back on a another highlight cast here sometime in the future and talk a little bit more about development and maybe some of the specific tools that we’ve, uh, that we’ve been using and, um, and so forth. Um, like to, uh, thank Kevin and Kevin for guys for taking your time to, uh, to, to, to work with us here today. Absolutely. Um, I appreciate all of that. So, uh, for more information about highlight, you can visit our website, highlight tech. com. Uh, there’s news. Uh, you can also follow us on LinkedIn where we have an active presence and, uh, thank you all very much. Appreciate your time. 

The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect highlight technologies and or any agency of the U S government.

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to the Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Hey everybody, to another episode of the Highlight Cast. I’m Adam McNair and joined as usual by Kevin Long. Hey Kevin. 

Kevin Long: Hey Adam, how’s it going? 

Adam McNair: Good. Uh, we also have Victoria Robinson, our Marketing Manager here. Hey Victoria. And we are also joined by Roman Zhelenko , who is one of the directors here at, uh, at Highlight and, uh, focused on software and service delivery. Roman, how are you? I’m doing very well. Thank you very much. Good. Um, We have talked and mentioned, I think, in past episodes about the fact that we have been involved in some technical code challenges and we talked about it from the standpoint of just situational awareness, talking about things we were doing, because they certainly were a big part of our consciousness, you know, for several months there about things we were getting ready to do or things we were going to do or actively doing, but we didn’t go into great depth on them, And we wanted to talk today about code challenges. Now, for context, for folks, the government has done pilot type procurements in the past. There are a few different kinds of procurements I think you see. You see the typical, write down what you would do based on some written requirements, and we will evaluate that, and we’ll come back to you, and maybe formally ask some questions, but that’s about the extent of it. Then you see the some combination of that with an oral presentation, which again is kind of talking about what you would do, but not actually doing what what you would be delivering in for the actual program. And then I have seen a few over the years. Pilots where they want to see you build a working prototype I think it was much more common in the metal bending and signals type part of programs if you were going to buy a new boat or Something like that. You might want to actually see one of them. Um, 

Kevin Long: probably some other times. Find cots and for to show that it works, you know, a commercial off the shelf software that already exists, right? Doesn’t work for here. 

Adam McNair: Right. So I’ve been involved in some things like that. And then, you know, years ago I was in a, uh, what is this? They didn’t call it a code challenge at the time, but I think it’s a code challenge. We were working on a name checking algorithm. And we had to build one and so that that felt that way, but it was also a large written component to that. And so yeah, that was a demo. I think they called that because and technically, I guess maybe that’s a good dividing line is that really was a demo of something that we had already built. We built it. However, we wanted to on our own time with no visibility for them and showed up with, uh, a black box that we fed their data into and then gave them the extract out of that. But we didn’t do any coding. We frankly weren’t allowed to do any coding in the room. So that’s a good point. Now in the last, I want to say 12 to 18 months. 18 to 24 probably, because we’ve worked on this for a year. That’s a good point. Yeah, I guess what you have to remember, we also have all been in our homes, so you probably don’t know how long we’ve been working on any of these things. So let’s call it for the last two years. I think we started to hear about. Tech challenges and having them be more prevalent in the customer set that we support. And during that time, we want a procurement where we had to go in and talk them through a scenario, but was not a true tech challenge. Uh, we were on a team, we were on a couple of teams as a subcontractor for, for some tech challenges. And then we. Really ramped up for like, because Kevin said about a year, uh, to, to prepare for this 

Kevin Long: to prime our first one. So, but now, now the big difference between the demo and detect challenge is as Adam was intimating was the demo. We knew they said, Hey, we need to name check algorithm system, right? And we built it on the tech challenges. We don’t know what they’re going to ask. They just say, this is the type of stuff that we do put together a team. We’re not going to tell you until it starts, then you’re going to do it. Right. And so, and there’s a couple of different flavors of tech challenges too, that we can, we can talk through. Uh, as well with that. I mean, summer or the, the, the homework style where they last multiple days and then there’s some where it lasts a much shorter period, like usually less than a day and they actually watch you do it. And so yeah. So it’s literally bring the people, do the work that we want to pay people to do to see it. We want to see that you can actually do it, not just. Right about it or talk about it like we do with the first two different types of procurements 

Adam McNair: and I would say my personal opinion is that I think it makes a lot of sense to do it that way. I will also say that nothing is ever perfect and that doing a. kind of artificial challenge type is not a direct 100 representation of how it would be. I mean, no more than when you ask somebody to do a 3D rendering of what your new landscape would look like, it’s not necessarily going to look exactly like that. Or if when somebody is interviewing for a job. Sometimes they are exactly how they are when you start working with them, but very commonly they’re not. Whether it be that they were trying to really put it a best foot forward or they were just nervous or any number of things. So I don’t think anything is foolproof. I think it’s It’s an avenue to buy something.

Kevin Long: It’s like the SATs and the GREs for getting into college or grad school. I mean, they’re supposed to say how good you’re going to do at something, but I mean, largely it tests how good you are at doing it, what they ask you to do. I mean, I, I went to grad school never once. Did I have to do, uh, a, a is to be as C is to blank. In grade school, but I studied that guy out of it for the GRE. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and I, I think in, you know, it does, it does. I like the fact that there is a, an attempt to think about how you would get a view into how a team would perform more so than just writing it. I think that that has merit to it. So what kinds of opportunities, what kinds of programs are you guys seeing the government use tech challenges for?

Roman Zhelenko: So most of the work that we’ve seen is, you know, software development, tool development, automation. They really want to see how we’re able to process requirements without a product owner. I mean, At this point on our previous coding challenge, I think Kevin was a product donor. I was a product donor. Everybody was wearing so many different hats, but we were still able to, you know, optimal requirements deliver a tool within the set time frame. So, so, so 

Kevin Long: Agile software development, CI, CD, um, Right. I mean, because that that’s really where it is, because there’s not time to do waterfall or anything like that. Right. God help us. If we did, 

Adam McNair: and there is a procurement that I know we’re looking at, um, that looks like they’re going to have a tech challenge for an infrastructure program. What will be interesting, because we haven’t done this yet, and I think we could probably circle around and do part two of this once we see what that looks like, but I’ve, I’ve been in an oral presentation before where they gave you a scenario and they said, if you were running the primary data center here on the East Coast and the replication on the West Coast, and at the same time there was a fire on the East Coast, data center, there’s a snowstorm and an outage on the West Coast and the person is supposed to get there to work on the hardware can’t get there. What things would you do? And they’re listening for thought process troubleshooting and all that, but there was no replica environment that we were doing anything in, right? I think it’s possible for the infrastructure when they may, may have some sort of mocked up environment. I 

Kevin Long: mean, or here’s a bunch of log data. Something’s gone wrong. Here’s your log data. 

Roman Zhelenko: Right. 

Kevin Long: Fix it. 

Roman Zhelenko: Absolutely. So, I guess on that point, since everything is now on webcam, when you’re doing that question and answer type of situation, you can’t see their response, so you don’t even know if you’re going down the right track. 

Kevin Long: That’s a great point, Roman, that, um. The last couple of years, these, these, these all used to be in the same room where they would watch you guys watch us do these different things. And now, yeah, it absolutely is all over over webcam so that they can record everything too. So, yeah, 

Roman Zhelenko: and you don’t see their expression. You’re just looking into the void, 

Adam McNair: which is tough because I know I remember Kevin and I, when we did our, uh, one of our, uh, DevOps ones, uh, several years ago, uh, we were, we were presenting and then as soon as the real presentation part started, they turned their cameras off. So you’re like, really? We can’t have any nonverbal feedback if this is maybe okay. Um, but I will also say there’s been so many times that I’ve gone to a normal presentation and People will have latched on to whoever the positive affirmation, nodding, smiling person is and they will say, I think we did really, really well and notice the seven other 

Kevin Long: people 

Adam McNair: that are like, what the heck are these people saying? Exactly. Because the person that’s staring at you, like, you dumb, you don’t look back at them because you just know it’s going to throw you off. 

Victoria Robinson: Thing about them turning off their webcams though is you just look at your team members and you’re like we’re prepared for this and we already know what we’re going to do and I have all these familiar faces here and the stress level goes down. I would say at least 5 percent but I wouldn’t say much more. Yeah, I mean, but by the same 

Kevin Long: token, I mean, uh, we’ve done oral presentations where we’ve gone in and we’ve looked at stuff. And as soon as we started talking, People pulled out their cell phones and started writing emails and the only thing that they would say was, yeah, well, that’s just that there’s nothing unique or special about what you’ve just said. And then go back to writing an email. Um, and at that point, I’d love to just talk into the void. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, if you could, if you could turn that video stream off, it would be helpful. Yeah, and also sometimes these rooms are really awkward. I mean, over the years, in oral presentations, I have had, well, Kevin and I did one, one time in a conference room that was shaped like a T. Right? And so it was almost like being back in the wings of a stage area. And so from where I was sitting, like I’d have to peek around the corner to make eye contact with anybody. And what we had planned on was some, okay, well, I’m going to comment on something to amplify that or whatever, when we get to it, but then you get in the room, you’re like, I can’t do that because I’m like sitting in a closet off to the side of where they can see him. And, uh, I also did a presentation one time where when the quality manager got up to go. present his part of it. He kicked the plug out of the wall and unplugged the, uh, projector and whatever other assorted hardware was plugged into that. Uh, and I will say, I don’t know if the laptop didn’t have battery, whatever, but everything shut down completely hard and had to be totally rebooted. And the government just said, you have to continue. So 

Roman Zhelenko: you you’re on the clock. But now we have a bigger problem. We have lawnmowers outside. We have dogs barking. We have all sorts of issues that can go wrong. Oh yeah. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. I also think maybe that the, our experience collectively working. Remotely and doing all of all of this remotely probably helped at some level in comfort factor for for doing this. I think if we’d all been in the same room for the last 12 months preparing for this and then then on go day, everybody has to log in and be separate. I think that probably would have thrown things off. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, but we, we digress and I actually really want to talk about this code challenge that we finally have found our way to the other side of because it was, uh, it was challenging in every sense of the word, I think. And so that means that I think that the government is likely going to get a good sense of, of, of what each vendor can do. 

Adam McNair: Yes, so talk me through the process. So the, is it. Just show up and decode challenge. Did we submit stuff? And like, what was the process? 

Kevin Long: Absolutely. So, uh, for, for the, for this one. So the first one we did, it was as, as a sub, you know, it was just have people show up and help and, and, you know, they handled all of the hard stuff for this one. It was interesting in that, um, oftentimes there is a written component for this, uh, for them. But in this case, the only thing we had to write down at all was a pricing volume. And then two Excel sheets that said who was going to be on your teams for each, for each piece that like there was, there was not a cover sheet to be found. There was not an executive summary. I mean, there was like, there was documentation that we had to do As part of the coding, but we didn’t write a proposal at all, but it was step 1 oral presentation. Exactly. Like you had described Adam, you know, where the government comes in, asks you questions about approach and how you do things like that. And essentially, anybody that was allowed to bid was allowed to do that. And so we practiced for months and months on that. We were assuming it would be a small team. You know, you normally see what, between five and ten people allowed to talk in orals? 

Adam McNair: Yeah. 

Kevin Long: To show up. And so, you know, we prepared for five. We were allowed more than that. So we, we, uh, padded our depth. With that, and, uh, it was, uh, an hour long, unknown questions, we have to answer them, uh, where they gave incredibly broad topics that, that you, that they could ask about, you know, like literally design was a topic they could talk about. Talk to me about code quality. Right? I mean, software development. So, you know, just enormous topics that, that. We’re very hard to 

Roman Zhelenko: scale down. And we were also provided a whiteboard. So as we’re talking about these enormous topics, we’re able to draw about the topics. Yes, 

Kevin Long: and Roman was one of the, uh, uh, our, our additions after we, uh, were allowed to have more than five people. And, uh, he was not only, not only was he one of our, uh, illustrators, which I think is really important. Um, when you’re on video and. And talking that instead of just seeing everybody’s face, you give them something else to focus on as well. Um, you know, it’s also our time keepers that we could actually get through all of our questions. Cause they, they, they give you nothing. It’s like, they give you a block of time and they say, we will ask you this many questions. It is up to you to manage your time to get through everything. And so Roman was, uh, was the guy that made sure that we didn’t, uh, didn’t run out of, uh, run out of time to, so, yeah. And so it was incredibly broad topics that we rehearsed for months on. Um, and then from that they do a down select to decide who talks well enough about the processes that they are looking at design software development. Right? Um, to to actually want to see how they then. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk, 

Adam McNair: right? And I guess imagine this from a down select standpoint, this is not a trivial amount of time from the government to sit through these. So, the code challenge itself, how far after, so we go to Orals, then how far after that does the actual code challenge part start? 

Kevin Long: Took about a month for them to get through the down select. Tttttttttttttttt But that said, they sat, like, they sat through a lot of orals. 

Adam McNair: Okay. And then what did the, what did the actual challenge itself look like? Was this days, weeks? Right. So there are, 

Kevin Long: yes, is the answer. Um, uh, what it looked like was, uh, it was a two, two fold code challenge, honestly, where it was 10 days, um, including weekends. So like 10, 10 calendar days where they give you a problem and say you have 10 days and then after that you have to stop developing, right? Done. You know, and you give us access to your code repository and we will check to make sure that you’ve And then we will schedule you to do to present what you’ve done, and then we will give you the second type of code challenge. We are going to give you a change to your code. And we are going to watch you make that code change. So, it wasn’t just the short, we want to watch the team go and do something. It wasn’t just the long, it was all of it. 

Adam McNair: Now, maybe it is because I’ve been around and involved in so much waterfall development over the years, which if anybody hasn’t done software, what I would say is that waterfall, you’re going to usually look at a couple of new releases of code a year. Theoretically, whereas the agile, we’re going to build a little and test a little and deploy a little all the way to DevOps, where it kind of almost happens in in real time at some level, um, that sounds like that could be really, really challenging. Is it from just a pure time? I mean, I know we had prepared and you guys knew what you were doing, but. Just to deliver something that works in 10 days with no real safety net behind it, and I’m assuming that these are probably not short days for two weeks, right? Oh, 

Kevin Long: no, no. I mean, uh, if in, in, let’s put quotes around this, in real life, that was 60 days worth of work in the challenge that they wanted to see. Easily. Do you agree guys? 

Roman Zhelenko: And I would, and I would say that the days were actually much longer because we had three different time zones. So when the East coast stopped, the West coast started rolling. So I think at any given point in time, we had meetings going on three, 4 a. m. So certain points, I had them start muting notifications on my phone so I could get some sleep.

Kevin Long: Sleep is for the weak, Roman. 

Roman Zhelenko: Ready for the next coding challenge. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. Right. So what, what were the. The hardest parts of this, like what, if you were going to tell somebody that was going to go do a code challenge, 

Kevin Long: I totally want to hear what both Victoria and Roman have to say about this, because Victoria is the marketing manager is also a human centered design person and she was on the code challenge. Also. So I’m going to sit back. I want to hear this. This is exciting. 

Roman Zhelenko: Sure, so I’ll go it’s I think it’s building a relationship this quickly. I mean, usually a team of developers of testers of business analyst, it takes weeks and several different, you know, uh, sprints before you start trusting each other on understanding. This is what he’s good at. This is what I’m good at. But here we had it in days, if not hours that you have to understand what your teammate could do, who you want to peer program with and what you can deliver. So I, I was so impressed that that was done in like day two and everybody was already like oh, yep I know what I’m doing.

I know what he’s doing. I’m ready. So 

Victoria Robinson: yeah, I think just to piggyback off that It’s you have a lot of people with a lot of different approaches to things Coming at a problem and trying to determine What the actual pain points for a user would be from like a human centered design and like a user experience perspective, you’re looking at this problem. And you’re trying to determine what are the pain points without talking to any users or talking to a product donor. You decide on someone within the team to be the product donor and hope that there’s some kind of understanding with. Throughout the group to be like this is what the problem we’re trying to attack is and this is how we’re going to approach it. Because as the days go on and as the hours add up You’re you start looking at things differently and trying to see Stay on track and make sure that you’re still attacking the problem at the end of the day, can get kind of fuzzy as the days keep building. Mm-Hmm, . 

Roman Zhelenko: Oh, I agree. Uh, just one, one more thing. I mean, whenever we had to pivot, we pivoted fast. If there was a process flow that didn’t work, it was changed immediately. It was approved, escalated through our project manager, who was also our business analyst, who was also the stakeholder. So we got it, you know, ready and out to the developers, you know. Same hour. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. I mean, and it’s also really from my point of view, because I’m a, I’m all managery. Uh, I think one of the biggest challenges of something like this is when you are given 60 days of work and 10 days to do it, uh, truly defining what is the, what is the, The MVP, the minimal minimum viable product to be able to release and what elements provide the most value so that you can get the most important things done first and so that you have, you know, when you have 5 different parts of something that you need to do to make sure that you’re covering all of the bases so that when you’re get when you get to the demo. You have something to show for all of it, and everybody, I mean, particularly developers, designers, uh, BAs that we bring into this type of thing, they are all type A, go get, want to be awesome, perfect, whiz bang stuff that I found myself yelling, not MVP, not MVP, again and again and again. Just like rev to put it on the list. We’ll get to it if we can. Right. Um, and so it is prioritization of, of things is super important. 

Roman Zhelenko: I actually, I agree a lot with Kevin. This team was so passionate about this product that they wanted to keep going. They wanted to like, oh, we can make. Even, you know, this we’re ready for iteration two, et cetera. And every morning I hear Kevin, this is an MVP, put it in the backlog. So it was, it was impressive to see people like, Oh yeah, no, we got, we can do this. Like put it in the backlog. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. So some things I’m hearing. And, and I think we are talking through this as a certainly it’s a fun kind of after action chat after we’ve done something that is difficult and impressive. I think it’s always always fun to do that. I think it’s also here for other employees inside of our company that if they are going to one of these days. decide that they want to be involved in one of these tech challenges, or we ask them to be involved in one of the tech challenges, because there’s always a little bit of both in that category. Um, what to expect. And then also, I think from a, a teaming partner perspective, uh, we are, certainly have some of these that we prime and we are sub sometimes, but we’re available, whether it be companies that we currently work with, that we, that, that are partners of ours, that we mentor, um, or, or other companies that we haven’t worked with. We’re available to support opportunities, I think, so we’re, we’re open to be, you know, having conversations about sharing some of these thoughts and, and potentially engaging with, uh, with other companies on some of their pursuits for tech challenges. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. 

Adam McNair: Now some of the things that I’m hearing that were important to being successful.

So from a kind of program philosophy standpoint, I’m hearing that you got to remember that this is a code challenge at the end of the day. And that I, I feel like has real underpinnings in the overall procurement process. Anytime, because that’s something that you see in just a regular proposal. Hey, why don’t we tell them all about this?

They didn’t say that’s how they’re going to evaluate it. 

Kevin Long: Yep. 

Adam McNair: That might be nice. If it fits, that’s okay. But they have not asked for that. So I think in that vein, I think that is important. I think that that makes sense. That’s kind of one lesson is really remember that this is a code challenge from a contest procurement type perspective. And. To keep everybody’s focus around, we can’t build everything, we can come up with a viable product, but it really needs to have, we need to have agreed upon what that’s going to be, and then, and then drive to that, and then if, if for some reason we had extra time, which I’m guessing nobody does, then you could do other things. Um, another thing that I, I heard that. Is not an easy recommendation for somebody to carry out, but I think is an important thing to think about is it sounds like you have to have really, really good people to do this technically proficient, good communicators, good at focusing on it. An objective and being a team player and figuring out how to get it done and driven to work their butts off over a 10 day sprint, including weekends to get something like this done. Is that is that definitely in the top? A couple of, couple of things. Roman. 

Roman Zhelenko: Oh, definitely. Well, I mean, for everybody we had, it was a full stack development team, just because we didn’t know what language we’re going to be using. So for some people, it was their primary development language for others, it was, you know, two or three. And with everybody balancing a work schedule, sometimes the developers would have to jump into the server side of things. So having that broad range of skill sets made this flow really smoothly. Ish. 

Speaker 5: Well, 

Adam McNair: I will tell you, you know, over the years, there have been a few people that I have, um, that I have worked with that any, anytime you were at a given, you know, customer environment or job or, you know, whatever, when there was going to be, you know, Something that was a difficult issue that arose when they say, Hey, you need to get so and so on the phone, your tech challenge team has to almost completely and exclusively be built up of people of that kind of ilk that in their, in their respective areas, the people who are Really adept at solving difficult challenges. Cause you know, when you’re going to install something that is fresh out of the box in a brand new environment, most of the time it goes okay. It’s when. You realize that you didn’t know that they had legacy data handling in the back end, and you thought everything was in this, well you thought everything was consistent with the actual documentation they gave you, and you found out that something had been changed and undocumented, and now what do we do? The person that you call for that, you need a lot of those kinds of people on a team like this. Yeah, people that love problem solving, absolutely. And then one of the thing I wanted to pull out from what I was hearing you all talk about is. How valuable and how important do you think it is to try to have a multi time zone team?

Roman Zhelenko: That’s a great question. I think it’s super important. I mean, because people, burnout is again, a worry, you know, after five days, if your main developer is just losing steam, that’s tough. But if you have that multi time zone team, people can, you know, make sure they focus on, you know, Their other job as well as the next team starts ramping up, making sure, and then you’re utilizing the full day for the most part. I mean, a little bit longer, not so much the full day, but you know, California, California where Victoria is from, you were on much later. So 

Victoria Robinson: yeah, it was kind of nice because the person I was working pairs with was on East Coast time. And when they couldn’t work, I was working. And when I couldn’t work, they were working. And it kind of just helped move us along even further than you would have thought. And I know on the development side, we had a couple pairs that were like that. And it just really helped propel us forward. And there was enough crossover that you can touch base and make sure that you’re still meeting the goals and objectives. And it 

Kevin Long: let us do it. Let us have Two scrum meetings a day with, uh, uh, two day and then one day releases. 

Roman Zhelenko: As you said, 60 days worth of work in a much shorter timeframe. 

Adam McNair: So I do think that’s something that is, is possible. That is a big contributor to efficiency. I know there are, there are different kinds of.

Workstreams that I have seen before where they will offshore different components of it to allow them to 

Kevin Long: Follow the sundown. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, exactly And uh, I think it’s it’s sounding like that might be the kind of thing now again I think that is a subset of That’s tucked underneath of number one. You got to get great people.

So if you’re, is it fair to say that if you’re, I 

Kevin Long: do just really want to say we didn’t offshore anything. It was east coast, uh, uh, uh, the, and the time zones between that and Pacific. So 

Adam McNair: central 

Kevin Long: mountain west, 

Adam McNair: all, all completely us, uh, us based activity. Um, But to the extent that you have to find people that can do this and then as you have your list of people, if you do have the ability to do so, thinking about time zone distribution so that you can.

As you say, have, have two full scrums a day and get more productive hours. Uh, that does sound like something that, that works well. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, that was, uh, a, a happy coincidence that we did that. We, we were working, we cast our net nationwide, right? I mean, I’d have taken someone in Hawaii if they were. If they were the right person, um, and it just so happened that we, we, I mean, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

And in this case, we were just lucky that we had people, you know, in California and and Oklahoma and on the East coast and and. You know, places in between that that really let us, uh, essentially through 18 of the 24 hours of the day be moving the program forward, which was, 

Adam McNair: yeah, and I’ll tell you, replicating luck is a real viable business strategy.

I think he is. So we may not have had that as a, as a major strategy coming into it, but once we’ve identified that it’s something that works, uh, adding it to the Always, you know, sometimes that, that, that works just fine. That, let me ask you guys another question. So, and we’ve talked about the fact, you know, Kevin, you’re here on the East Coast, Roman, you’re here on the East Coast, Victoria, you’re on the West Coast.

Were there any things that you all did within your control as far as environment? And when I say that I’m not talking about like the development environment. I mean the gear that you were using, your actual camera, mic, laptop, desktop, whatever. Were there any things that you guys did or Problems you had to overcome during the presentation process, Roman.

Roman Zhelenko: So, uh, I guess for me it’s making sure the microphone’s clear and making sure your webcam’s set up. It’s much easier to work with these people when, you know, you’re not coming in fuzzy. You’re not coming in metallic. They can see you clearly. There’s no, there’s no gap in transmission. There’s no lag time.

So it just makes it so much more fluid. Comfortable chairs. Yeah. Oh, that’s fair too. 

Kevin Long: Anything that makes it for a really long day with a really distributed team. And I totally agree with Roman. Like, you know, uh, I don’t work for Microsoft, but I’ll tell you here. I’m going to shill Teams for them. Um, Microsoft Teams was really great.

I mean, it’s not, it’s not perfect when you have, Uh, because I mean, because it wasn’t just highlight, it was highlight and subcontractor teams, right? We had, uh, folks from a bunch of different companies all working together, getting them all onto teams. There’s things we need to fix on that to be able to allow full communication on that, but being able to have I mean, we had meetings running 24 hours a day where people could just drop into it, be on the webcam, and talk with folks.

They would have, you know, code up on sharing the screen. I mean, heck, we had, you know, folks talking, you know, uh, uh, through different Mandalorian episodes while people were coding as well, right? I mean, just anything that helps them, people keep their brain sharp and pass the time as they’re As they’re blowing through code, it was, is, is really great.

So, uh, a strong collaboration tool set is. 

Adam McNair: So I, I, I think that that’s something that people might want to take note of. I think that probably goes for teleworking in general, remotely working in general, but certainly for something that is compressed like that, where you can’t necessarily always get up and walk around.

You, you, you. It is a little bit higher stress and higher stakes and everything else than just your average, you know, work day. The investment from a company into a better webcam, a better microphone setup, better headphones than ship with your average laptop, a better chair, you know, any of those things.

Um, I think that makes, that makes a lot of sense. I did want to go back down. to ask you something about what you commented on. So did you have almost, just think of it like a, like a virtual break room or virtual conference room? So you’re saying that people were having kind of almost interpersonal conversations.

Oh, absolutely. And, and 

Kevin Long: so are those rooms you just had open? Yeah, it was, I, I scheduled, um, In teams, a general room that that ran all 10 days. I scheduled the front end room back end room. Um, uh, you know, a leadership room that people could just drop into. I next time. I really want people to be able to I need to figure out how.

Despite who they work for and what infrastructure they’re on for them to be able to spin up instantaneous breakout rooms, which we were not able to do easily. But, yeah, it was just people. I mean, absolutely. I mean, I, I, I dropped into, uh, into rooms. I mean, I spent, you know, put in my earbuds on my iPhone on on on teams and just chill out, you know, as I’m.

Getting ready to go to sleep, right, and as, 

Roman Zhelenko: you know, talk Mandalorian or whatever. I mean, who needs audiobooks when you have Teams channels? At this point, we had about, we had nine, nine different Teams channels, and at this point. 

Victoria Robinson: And the nice thing was that if you were sitting in a room and you’re like, oh, so and so needs to be in this, discussion right now, all you need to do in Teams is invite that person from another room to come in, or even if they weren’t in a room currently, all you had to do was add them as a participant and be like, hey, we need you in this room now.

Like, we’re about to have a really important breakthrough and we need you in this room to, you know, either verify that we’re on the right track or tell us that we’re insane. 

Roman Zhelenko: And everybody had it synced up to their phone to make sure that if they got that message, they were able to get in immediately. So it was nice.

Adam McNair: Yeah. And that, I will voice over that, that also we have seen teams change and improve a lot over the course of the time that we have been using it. So, um, I think it’s also Impressive to note that you guys were able to use it in, in those ways where some of that functionality probably did not exist in teams when you started working on preparation for this.

Kevin Long: Oh, that’s 100 percent true. 

Adam McNair: Uh, one other question I wanted to ask you about preparation in general. There were a ton of standing preparation meetings for this team. Uh, you guys were prepping a couple times a week, right? 

Kevin Long: So, yeah, we have to put that into a couple of different buckets. So we were prepping for Orals to get downselected a lot, multiple times a week, right?

I mean, it was, I mean, uh, how long was the Orals presentation? I don’t know. 50 minutes. 

Speaker 5: Yeah. 

Kevin Long: Really? It was only, no, no, no, no. The first one, it was only an hour? Uh huh. Wow. Okay. Boy. Yeah. So, it felt, felt a lot longer than that. Sometimes they feel a lot longer. Right? 

Adam McNair: Yeah. 

Victoria Robinson: All the questions that they ask you, I feel like, usually could, one question could be answered in an hour.

So. Yeah. It’s hard to figure out what 

Kevin Long: describe your design philosophy. Oh my God. Right? Yeah. Um, but, uh, so yeah, so we would prep, um, and do full hour meetings where we had, you know, or oral coaches, right. That would prepare a series of just killer questions. And we would run through Practice, practice, practice.

So for, for an hour presentation, you have to have an hour and 45 minutes because people show up between five minutes early and 10 minutes late and you need everybody there. Then you need 50 minutes to do it and then you need to have a debrief. And so we did that a couple times a week for a while. Then, I mean, it pushed to the right a little bit, so we took some time off to not burn out entirely.

Then we looped back in, and I’ll tell ya, I mean, orals is hard. Um, and it is a, it is a different skill. And when you want, when the customer wants to hear technical people talk, it is, it is a non trivial thing to get brilliant technical people comfortable speaking on camera, which is, or in front of other people.

Or, I mean, some, some folks just, I mean, Roman is an anomaly. He, uh, he’s just, he’s technical and loves talking with people. Um, but it is, uh, you know, it’s a lot of work to get someone comfortable with all of that and the types of questions and to cope with the, to get comfortable with the uncertainty of, of what questions could be asked.

Right? 

Adam McNair: Yeah, and I, I would draw a parallel there. In the same way that when you have a talented technical team that they want to build all the features and do all the things and show how much they could deliver, I think you have the same challenge when you have really, really sharp people in an oral situation where either with one person or if you have a couple people with overlapping skills, because I’ve been in that scenario before where they will ask the question, You know, how would you verify that the coop site is operational?

And if you want, if you had time to step back from it, you could probably say, look, there’s probably a two minute answer to this that is sufficient, but you say a little bit and then everybody wants to weigh in because they, they really want to get into, cause they know that you should check the generator too.

And everybody wants to get in on, uh, you know, because they just, they really want to prove that they know it. And in a time constrained environment, that’s not 

Roman Zhelenko: great. Roman, you had a question. I was actually going to say, uh, that was actually one of our biggest, I wouldn’t say issue. It’s just limiting the amount of stuff we say.

How deep of a dive do you want to go? You want to know everything about the server environment and all the possible issues, or do we have certain points that we want to hit? So, yeah, we went from like seven minutes in answer to, we were consistently hitting the exact like four minutes every time. I was proud as the timekeeper.

So, 

Kevin Long: right. I mean, it’s sort of like the presidential debate thing. They ask a question and it could come out of left field. And can you answer the question exactly? Or can you answer the question that you want to answer in four minutes? Right. And working that out and having, uh, uh, essentially Good answers that cover the waterfront and working that out to be able to plug that in and then have somebody.

I mean, I don’t know if it’s a standard term. I call it the quarterback that is, uh, that that gets the question, make sure that the team understands it gives the team time to think on what the right answer is, and then points at the person and says, you know, Joe, I think, I think you probably have a really good take on this.

Let’s hear that. And I bet, I bet Charles has a good one. And then I bet Jane does too. So why don’t we go in that order? 

Roman Zhelenko: Right. Yeah. To be able to, to put it through. No idea who our quarterback was, but I get it. You got to give them props because he was also the person that was, you know, watching to make sure we’re staying on topic.

You know, you, since you can see your team, you can see if somebody is doing a hand motion of some sort to like wrap it up or you’re going too deep. So, and in the beginning we might’ve used it, but by the end. It was no need. I don’t think there was. I think it was just yeah, I 

Adam McNair: do think that’s also a very good point that somebody that can hopefully not have the pressure of answering the question, but that can be there to analyze what they’re asking.

And then help reframe and, like you say, give everybody a couple of heartbeats to think about what the answer likely is before you just toss it to them. And, uh, one of the, one of the techniques, I forget who I have stolen it from over the years, but if you don’t know the answer, stare at the ground. Don’t look at me.

Because I, if, if, if I’m going to have to find people to call on, You know, you can talk about, well, by role, it should be this person or that person, but if for whatever reason, they’re blanked on it, the worst thing, you really don’t want to call on them and then have them just meander and stumble for, for five minutes.

But those kinds of things, the wrapping up, um, and I will say, maybe that’s something that, that is, Almost easier in the everybody can see everybody of the team’s environment because I’ve definitely gone to Orals before where you’ve got somebody that decided they wanted to go give the uh, you know, a Shakespearean soliloquy and they’re just up there and you’re like, I don’t know how to get this person to stop talking and have it not be so obvious that I from behind them or something have, you know, have to step up, put your hands on their shoulders and 

Kevin Long: say, That’s enough Bob.

Adam McNair: Thanks. Yeah, you need the old timey vaudeville hook to pull them off the stage. Right. Um, and whereas you, when everybody’s facing each other, I hadn’t thought about that, but it could be, you know, very, hey, if I put my hand up sideways or whatever, it means you got to, you got to wrap it up kind of 

Kevin Long: thing.

And so there was that preparation and we did a ton of that and, and we made the down select. So it worked. Thumbs up. We had really great Uh, Oral’s Oral’s coach, uh, prep on that and a really great team that worked really hard. So with that, then also there was for the code challenge, uh, making sure that you have, uh, the right people identified and, uh, an environment.

Ready to start writing code. Right? So not every company necessarily sits around having, you know, an Azure or AWS environment with a full CI CD pipeline that is built to match the needs of the customer. Right? And they don’t make it a secret. You know what? The tech stack is that they are, they have, I mean, you just have to be willing to read the hundred pages of, of, of, of description of what it is, uh, to then be able to have that set up so that at the, at the start of the code challenge, you’re writing code, not creating an environment for them to 

Adam McNair: operate 

Kevin Long: in.

Adam McNair: Yeah, I think that’s a very good point also. And I, so I’d say as we were kind of collecting lessons learned and suggestions, having an environment to develop in that replicates the challenge environment and being ready. Makes a lot of sense. Um, as a wrap up, I think it’s been fun for me to see how far we have come from the first time that we did one of these where we were supporting somebody else to, you know, we are running them now.

I think it’s safe to say that we feel our chances are better at winning a procurement competition now if they do a tech challenge than if they don’t. So, I always felt that way about an oral presentation. I would rather go to orals than not. Right? I, I feel that this is, you know, a step beyond that. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it is, it is hard, and it is new, and it is different, and if you’re good at it, it is a differentiator.

Adam McNair: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, so the question is, the next time we do one of these, which is probably coming up, Rather than later. So everybody’s back on board. You guys are excited for it. Is that, uh, 

Roman Zhelenko: Oh, I mean, I would say definitely excited as long as there’s no obscure hardware that we have to go hunt down and drive, is that right? They’re quarterback. 

Kevin Long: That’s half the fun, right? It’s, it’s the, uh, it’s the unknown, right? That that’s, that’s, uh, and highly, it’s really good at. Problem solving, so give us a hard problem that other people can’t solve and that’s just, that’s just gravy for us to be able to show at the end. 

Adam McNair: So, absolutely. I will say this is as kind of a summary of it is I know other people in industry that have done some of these tech challenges. And the unvarnished internal conversations that we’ve had and in the conversations with I’ve had with friends when they’ve done them, they, they typically spoke about them as things that were were really unpleasant, that were hard, but not not difficult in the same way that, you know, you guys have talked about the fact that it was difficult, but difficult, like this isn’t a thing that I wish we would ever do again. And, uh, at least one of them Was, and I won’t make light of this, because I do feel, feel bad when something like this happens. They did a tech challenge and their code would not compile. Yep. At the point where the government, because I think what they basically delivered was a, a GitHub instance of, here’s all our code, hit this button, and they hit that button and nothing happened. And they just got an email from the government that said, we hit the button and nothing happens. Thank you for your interest in doing business with the Department of such and such. Okay. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, you have not been selected. Your code did not work. Yep. Yeah. 

Adam McNair: And, uh, and so to the extent that, you know, I think you guys should all feel very, very good about the way that you were able to pull that off. And, um, and that being said, uh, again, we will continue to talk about this. I think when we do the next tech challenge, we will have another, uh, Not another conversation on the podcast about it. You can look for probably blog posts from us in the future. If you look at our website, uh, highlights tech. com, uh, with two T’s highlight tech. com, we put blog articles up. We put, uh, content on our LinkedIn about these kinds of topics, uh, because at the end of the day, I think there are. There are lessons learned that we take forward. There are lessons learned that we can bring forward when we’re on somebody’s team. So if we can help you with procurement, you can certainly feel free to reach out. But I think in general, the better we all get at getting the right answer for the government, the better all of these systems and programs will operate. And I think as, as it, In a, in a joint way, we have as our mission trying to operate a business and all of the values that we have behind that, but we also all care about the ability of the government to operate the country and operate programs that are important and necessary. So, to the extent, you know, when we’re involved in organizations like Act IAC and ASEA and. We’re involved with the the new advisory board for CMMC for the cyber model that that’s all effort to just try to Help industry and government work better together. So that is some of the spirit in which we we send this out and also for the small businesses to have them not engage on one of these and 

Kevin Long: And not know what they’re getting into.

Adam McNair: Not know what you’re getting into, uh, because it is, it is definitely not a trivial, uh, trivial level, level of effort. Um, so, thank you for listening to the Highlight cast. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Roman. Thank you, Victoria. Uh, we appreciate your time and we will talk to you on the next episode. 

The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect Highlight Technologies and or any agency of the U. S. government.

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Highlight Cast. I am Adam McNair from Highlight, joined by Kevin Long and Victoria Robinson. Hi, Kevin. Hey, Adam. How’s it going? Good, good. How are you? You know, doing great things. How about you, Victoria? Yeah, how’s the West Coast? 

Victoria Robinson: I’m doing well. It’s nice and sunny today. It was gloomy yesterday, 

Adam McNair: . Yeah, you guys got your one gloomy day out of the way for the year. 

Victoria Robinson: Got our one cold gloomy day out of the way. 

Adam McNair: It’s good to know that you got that behind you. Well, glad to get back to have another episode here. And I know the topic that we wanted to talk about is, uh, we are right at a little after a year as to the pandemic. And. Victoria, so it seems like, have you seen a lot online? I guess, is this what a lot of companies are doing now? There’s kind of like a year retrospective. Is that, was that your, your thought process? 

Victoria Robinson: Yeah, there’s been a lot of chatter around LinkedIn and just every social media platform I’ve been on about people reflecting and looking back on what’s changed and what’s happened in the last year, whether it be organizational changes based on COVID or, you know, the masks. It’s changed to work from home, so I thought it would be a fun chat for everyone to come on and just talk about what, what’s happened in the last year at Ad Highlight. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I agree. I think it makes, it’s a good thing to talk about. It’s an interesting 13 months here. And certainly things are very, very different. I mean, I think we have adjusted to how we run the business and how we work and everything now, but it’s really different from where we were. 

Kevin Long: Never saw a business change so fast, like worldwide, put a cleat in the ground and Turn left. I mean, it was crazy. The speed and difference. 

Adam McNair: A absolutely. I mean, the things that we used to have conversations about, like conference rooms being overbooked or commute time to be able to get into, uh, the office or, or go to go to somebody else’s office. The amount of time and apps that I had for parking in DC right. The amount of time that I spent booking, travel, and de conflicting my schedule, not just work, but personal, because, you know, oh, by the way, on Thursday, I have to go to St. Louis, or Boston, or whatever, and then you had to move stuff around. It just doesn’t, it just doesn’t exist. 

Kevin Long: Nope. Well, not as much. We still have some on site commute questions that we’re, challenged with, but I’ll tell ya. Far less than I’ve ever seen before, even in, you know, classified programs, sitting around saying, what can we do just straight unclassified with people working from home on contractor issued laptops? I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. I never thought I would see some, I never thought I’d see the intelligence agencies, uh, uh, opening up. Figure out how much work they do that is unclassified and able to do that. It’s 

Adam McNair: yeah, I know. I watched my father over his career. He worked at GSA for a big part of it and they were some of the kind of front runners in government of both alternate work schedule where you’d work 9 days and get a day off. They also push forward a lot on teleworking. Um, they. They went to soft phones integrated into laptops. Oh wow. So as he was, his last several years that he was there, he was constantly teleworking. And I had never had a telework job at all, anywhere. Ever. And ever. I mean, the extent of my teleworking was, you know, if somebody was here to work on, you know, the air conditioner, you’d work from home for a day. When you’re working proposals and things like that, you worked from home in the evenings and weekends after you’d already been in the office all day. And when you went on vacation, you worked from there because you weren’t at home. But that was really the extent of teleworking. Um, So, you know, I think Victoria put some thoughts together here, here for us that, that I think is a good layout of, of what has happened with kind of the experience over the last 13 months. Um, Kevin, when you, when you first heard that there was, you know, a virus spreading, what, at what point did that kind of enter your consciousness? 

Kevin Long: Well, so honestly, March 10th, because I was on travel scheduled from DC to Boston for a conference, Boston to St. Louis to meet with with customers and then flying back on Friday, the 13th, when you called and said, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re shutting down work from home. Let let us know what you need. Um, so that’s what entered my consciousness, but I mean. Honestly, when it was very low key before that, because, you know, it’s state department, you know, I watched SARS. I watched bird flu. I watched Ebola, you know, also all of the news. It’s all going to happen. Oh, no, it doesn’t never mind.

Adam McNair: Right? So I was much in the same boat. I, I had a, a conference that I went to in New Orleans in early March. And I remember my wife mentioning to me, what about this pandemic thing? And I said, I looked on the map, you know, Johns Hopkins has a map and they don’t have it there. It’s fine. And that was obviously not correct. No. And at the point where I, I got back home, you know, I told my wife that they clearly didn’t have it there because They don’t have a lot of doorknobs in New Orleans. The weather’s warm enough that just the, the doors to everything is open, are open. And, and so it was my, uh, theory that, that that would, you know, keep you safe. Cause that was back when the guidance was that it was on surfaces. Yup. For eight days, eight days on surfaces. And, um, and then. I remember sitting in the office, and we were talking about whether we would telework or not, and there were various people that had some reluctance to shutting down the facility, and I’d had a conversation with my wife about, you know, the idea of shutting the office down or not, and, you know, one of her points was, she said, look, we, you’ve got people with, with kids, and When they shut the schools down, you’re gonna have people that have no ability to have any kind of child care, and this is going to be stressful enough.

And, you know, that’s, you always have to remember that, that people have, A real life that they have to have to worry about. And so as we talked about it, we came to a consensus that, um, that week, that Friday in that March 10th kind of timeframe, that we were going to go ahead and set the office to be, um, you know, remote only. And I want to say it was probably a day later that Fairfax County announced that all the schools were officially closed. And, um, and, and so it. I didn’t think it was going to be a year. I certainly didn’t think that. Now, Victoria, you were, I guess you were still back here on the east coast at that point, right? So how did that whole awareness process happen to you? 

Victoria Robinson: Yeah, it was a weird experience. So I remember hearing about COVID 19 starting to spread overseas at a conference in January. We were in Vegas for a big conference and at the time we were like, oh, this is just like a thing that’s going to stay over there and it won’t spread too much and it’ll be fine. And then by the time we got back and by the time a couple of weeks passed and it just started spreading everywhere and it hit the United States and we were like, oh wow, this is starting to affect everyone. And I remember, um, At my previous role, we were considered essential and we could be on site. So we were on site and people were bringing their kids into work and just having them sit in our lobby and play and like do some schoolwork. So it kind of went from a. This is, uh, this is spreading to, this is going to affect us in the office. So we had kids coming in, we had dogs in the office, you know, we had every work from home fear of, Oh no, people will have to bring their lives in. People were bringing their lives in with them to the office. About six weeks of essential where we would be cleaning the office twice a day or, um, we’d be wearing masks 24 seven while we were in the office. And then we had kids wandering around. So it was quite the experience. I think once kids started coming into the office, I was like, wow, this is really starting to become way more serious. And we might be seeing this for a couple more weeks and then about, I think, six weeks. We finally went from, went back to, to work from home and that was a weird transition also. We were only in work from home for about two months and then we went back to the office again. So. I definitely had an interesting experience of it going, Oh, this is only going to be for a short time. And then we went to home and we were like, Oh, this is really going to keep happening. And then we went to it, Oh, this is going to last for a while. And we have to figure out how we’re going to adapt. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. Yeah. I still remember I, I felt very similar to you because, you know, it was work from home. And so, you know, I was coming back from travel, so, you know, I had my, my, my laptop. Uh, with me. And so that’s fine. And so my house is under perpetual construction. And so I, you know, I was like, that’s fine. I’ll sit on the sofa. I can, I can just work there. And I remember it was like, probably like three or four months in. I was like, you know, I think I’m going to ask it for it. Keyboard and mouse so that I’m not just typing on the laptop itself anymore when it was, it was that switch to be like, you know, I think we’re in this for a little while. So, so I, I’m, I’m not doing makeshift anymore. I’m now, I’m now setting up for the, for, for the, the real deal. And, you know, got, got new desk brought in my, my monitor from the office, got the docking station keyboard mouse set up. So it was like, So I’ve got the office now here with all the technology and everything. I mean, heck, we’re instead of sitting across a table like recording this like we used to now, we’re sitting across the internet like we do, you know, eight hours a day. Anyway, it’s, it’s, it took a long time for me to make that switch and just see, think that it was going to last as long as it has. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. I started laptop, the kitchen table. And that’s going to be two weeks. And, um, my, my, my wife said, you should really like set an office up. I said, it’s going to be two weeks. Fine. I’ll do this for two weeks. Not a big deal. And she said, I don’t think it’s going to be just two weeks. And so I think like in the middle of the second week where we clearly were not going to come back anytime soon. And I had been, cause I get at the end of the day and just kind of exhausted. She said, well, that’s because you’re sitting on a wooden counter height. Chair, right. For, for, for, for, for nine or 10 hours. There’s a reason people have desks. And, um, so I, I, I moved down to a, a room in the basement and I set up there. And it was very much, that was a room that she had used for crafts and stuff. And so I started out with a very kind of low key setup. I just have a table down there that I have my laptop on. And then I, I had IT drop ship me a couple of monitors so that I could, you know, you know, okay, monitors, mouse, okay.

And because also in the middle of all this, it was really, really busy. We were doing all the, um, you know, the ramp up to support the pandemic that we, we do for SBA. And, um, that continued for a while. And then after a couple of, probably, I think it was probably two months, um, at some point there, you know, my wife said, this is going to be a while. Why don’t you set up, you know, we have a room upstairs. Why don’t you set that up as a real office? And, um. And, and I did that, and I, like, I have a window now, which is nice, um, because, like, working in the basement was not a lot of fun, and, um, got a desk chair, got one of those, and so, it’s, the big thing that I think I had to do to adjust, I had a lot of Wi Fi issues in the house, and I had a lot of sound echoey. Issues in the house. So I had to, um, I upgraded my wireless network as part of supporting all of that. And I had to go with a kind of a real microphone in the earphone setup because if not, it was either external noise or there’d be echoes or you’re straining to hear or whatever. Um, so I think that was. Kind of my adjustment. 

Kevin Long: It took, it took no time. Uh, like I was still sitting on our sofa, typing on our lap on my laptop when my wife was like, you’re now using enough internet that are you, you need to look at a new router modem system. She’s not super technical, so she didn’t use those words, but the gist was was upgrade the infrastructure in the house. So you don’t ruin my work to Kevin. And so we did that. And it’s a it’s amazing. But what new new Wi Fi hardware will do for you. 

Victoria Robinson: I have the luck of. I was in a one bedroom apartment before I moved out to the West coast. And I luckily don’t have anyone else on conference calls, but I ended up upgrading to a bed, a two bedroom apartment, just for the fact that I knew that this was going to keep going for one and two, that I was going to be remote. And I was like, I’m going to invest in a nicer desk. And I have a nice office chair. I started the pandemic with probably a 40 desk. I got off. Facebook marketplace that I was like, oh, I’ll sit here and do two hours of work, maybe, you know, here or there on the weekends, it’ll be fine. The, you know, flimsy little chair. And I learned very quickly that that was a very bad investment. Um, yep. And I know there’s lots of people battling out there with their, uh, significant others going, Hey, can I have the, the bedroom so I can have my conference call without, you know, hearing you in the background And, right. 

Kevin Long: That’s a hundred percent true.

Adam McNair: Well, I think that my desk is the table we were gonna throw away because it had a printer on it in one of the offices that I have shut down over the years. I’m not sure if it was a highlight facility or if it was one of the previous facilities I was responsible for, but I remember this table was going in a dumpster and I remember saying like, that’s not a bad table and it’s real lightweight, so that’s the desk that I use. Um, but I, I, I, I get what you’re, you know, where you’re, you’re coming from, from the, the, you get by with all kinds of stuff when you, when teleworking is like a day here or there, but, um, so schedule wise, what like Victoria from, from where you used to be. You’ve done both that, but now you’ve also gone to the West Coast, which is not a specific COVID impact, but were it not for a pandemic that shifted everything remote here, you know, we’d never really had anybody nationwide on the West Coast that was really truly integrated with the headquarter operation. How has your schedule changed? 

Victoria Robinson: Well, it’s funny because During the pandemic, I’m sure lots of people have pandemic hobbies. My pandemic activity was running before, and then I moved in October. I used to run before work and then start my work day and get through the day. And that was my like sanity check through the day. And then I moved and now I’ve trained. I’ve like. Flipped my work schedule. So now it’s, I usually get on between six 30 and seven, maybe some other early God, awful hour. And then, you know, now my day has completely flipped where I get off around, you know, four o’clock and now I have all these, Hours left over in the day. So it was a weird transition at first for sure. But now it’s kind of this nice, what do I do with the rest of my day? 

Adam McNair: Now, Kevin, just based on commute alone, yours has to be unbelievably different. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, I mean, honestly, I don’t wake up at four in the morning anymore. It is really what it is. Um, but, uh, yeah. So, yeah, so that’s very interesting. I mean, my, my commute has gone like when I would go down to client site, uh, at Union Station. I mean, it would take me 3 hours to get there. Right? I mean, anytime you do that much, it’s, uh, you’re doing conference calls and different things like that to try and stay busy. But I’ll tell you, I mean, it’s, it’s hit my audio book listening pretty hard. Um, so, you know, I don’t get nearly as much of that anymore. Thanks so much. Um, but yeah, I mean, I now literally I commute 15, 20 steps, uh, like, yeah, the fact that I have to go downstairs to get the coffee is the real is the real killer, uh, for it. But it’s, um, in terms of schedule, you know, work, work often tends to expand to fill all available time. And so, you know, you still have your, you still have your 8am meetings and stuff, but what, what it really has done is. You know, you, you work at 8 a. m., you work till you’re done, and now, now I’m just not as tired on the weekends. Yeah, it’s, I mean, so, so it’s, it’s kind of, kind of amazing. Uh, in fact, though, I have an 8 a. m. meeting coming up on, on Friday that I have to meet headquarters for, and so I’m dusting off, you know, I was, wasn’t sure if it was going to be for posterity or not. I still have my time to get up series of alarms on my iPhone for. For the 4 o’clock hour that I’m going to dust off on Thursday to turn on to to get into headquarters for our for 8 o’clock presentation. So 

Adam McNair: my schedule I, the commute to the office and I was always fortunate that it was not a. Real big deal for me to get to the office. It’s really close to my house, but the things that I’ve seen that are major, major schedule, different differences are number one, it’s very easy to commit to and book about 10 hours a day. Of just easy, pure meeting time because you’re like, Oh, sure. Wow. I’m gonna be sitting there. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, I’ll be there. And you sign up for that. The things that from a schedule standpoint, I’ve had to start really thinking about and changing are number one. You don’t, you don’t just have impromptu conversations for the most part. And so I’ve had to, I’ve had to kind of create governance around, well, Victoria and I need to talk about marketing activities once a week. It has to be scheduled. There’s a possibility that if we were in the headquarters and she was in the office next to mine, that she just would have come over every two days and there was no need for a scheduled weekly. Activity can’t do that now. Um, so I intentional now Yeah, it has to be, it has to be very intentional. So, so that’s a thing. And then the other one is, I, I’ve always known, and I, I, I, I kind of learned this many, several years ago where, um, I sat through three or four different back to back meetings with, um, one of the business group managers back at CACI . And I watched him go from one meeting where it was just conversation about something to another one where it was this big problem, multi million dollar, bottom line impact, stockholder, bad stuff, to somebody coming in wanting to bid a new deal. And he did a very good job. Of trying to insulate his mind and switch go compartmentalize and go from one topic to the next, but you could tell that it was very difficult that that that third capture conversation they had was not as optimistic as what he would normally be. And something that I used to do in my schedule was I would block different emotional types of activities into different parts of the day. You know, it’s like, hey, if we’re going to talk about deals and set a capture thing, I’m going to try to put that in the, in the beginning of the morning, because That’s at a point where we can talk about it and we can be optimistic and we are fresh and all of that.

Things haven’t 

Kevin Long: had time to go wrong 

Adam McNair: yet. Yeah, essentially. 

Victoria Robinson: Mine’s still sharp, ready to go, yeah. 

Adam McNair: And if you know you’re going to have this, here’s a program and we are losing money on it and we thought these things were going to happen and this is the problem and we can’t get this fixed and here, you know. I’m going to push that, you know, into a different block, maybe a little bit later in the day, and I would, I would try to group things up that way, and I would also try to get out, I’d go take a walk in Fairfax City in the middle of some stretch of that, and go like, okay, I need to like really shift what I’m thinking about, give some thought to this before I walk into it, and the 8am, 9am, 10am, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4 o’clock scheduled Is a problem to have that kind of space to think about things, but it also precludes you from getting any of the stuff that was actually written about and said, okay, you need to do these things. I’ve had to get really intentional about like, I have every day at like, 330 or something like that. I have something on my calendar where. I have to wrap up when people have reached out and sent me a message. I need to respond to it. And if I’m constantly in meetings, I either don’t do that, I don’t want to be the person that as you’re talking to me, I’m staring at my keyboard and you just hear me typing, and then it’s like, what?

I don’t want to do that. Um, so I’ve had to be a lot more intentional just about blocking out time to do things, which I don’t feel like was really a big issue. With when I was in the office, 

Kevin Long: I don’t know if it’s a new update or not, but Cortana has started looking at my outlook schedule and sending started sending the email saying, Kevin, you should really consider having some focus time in your calendar. Would you like me to book that for you? No kidding. 

Victoria Robinson: I have the same. Absolutely. In the last, like, two weeks, there’s something that Microsoft Office does that Outlook will send you if you’re collaborating or focusing or, like, on calls and it’ll tell you, hey, you’ve been on too many calls. Are you sure you’re getting enough, um, like, work 

Kevin Long: done? Yeah. Are you sure you don’t need time to actually do work? Yeah. And so I’ve honestly, I’ve only had enough time free in the schedule to use it a couple of times, but, but absolutely, you know, I mean, there was one day, I mean, totally not realistic, but, but it blocked off like two and a half hours of my day is focused time. And I said, sure, let’s try that. And it was great. So it, I mean, it showed time is busy. And so I got like actual hour and a half, like carved out of it because of that. And so. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what kind of, uh, what kind of dark magic Microsoft is running with that to tell, but it was, uh, yeah, it was, it was interesting that they, you know, are looking at that and recognizing the. The required intentionality around that. 

Adam McNair: Now, I guess I should start paying attention to this Cortana emails. I see some of them come in. I’m like, I don’t know what at the 

Victoria Robinson: end of the tunnel, that, that it’ll block off schedule. Yeah, 

Kevin Long: that sounds like that could be good. I mean, I was I was like, man, Microsoft is sending me more spam. And I was like, all ready to get angry at the spam that I read. It was like.

Victoria Robinson: That’s not a bad idea. Yeah. It’s like, uh, it’s like your personal assistant evaluating your schedule for you, but without, you know, the admin cost or anything, it’s just a magic voice. It’s like an Alexa for work. 

Kevin Long: It’s now telling me that my meetings are too long. And are you sure you don’t 45 minutes? But, uh, And I’ve done that a few times too. It’s like, you know, I could probably do that in 45 minutes. And, and no one wants to book you on the quarter hour. So that actually gives you 15 minutes of recovery time. So that’s great. 

Adam McNair: And I think if from a tool standpoint, you know, we teams has been, I think really, really. Just so much better than Skype. So much better. Yeah. Cause I think I actually look at them as almost just separate categories of product, you know, Skype was not much more than a video telephone and. It had a little bit of functionality beyond that, but our ability to do so many things, we’re creating process automated workflows in teams, I mean, we just, it has been phenomenal, uh, for our ability to continue to work. Yeah. Um, And it also has made me really, really appreciate the ability to digitally sign. Like we, we use DocuSign for a lot of things and we have for a long time. And so many little micro decisions that have been made over the years where, you know, three years ago, it was like, why are we still signing paper? Can’t we? Do something different and that was just out of the pure kind of philosophical like this should be easier. We shouldn’t have to store. And, um, you know, I think one of the things that we did a couple of years ago is, uh, we went through and digitized all of the HR files. And, and migrated to an online HR system, uh, because up until a couple years ago, we still had everything in paper. One of the compelling reasons for that is we had storage requirements and we said, look, if we’re going to move to a new office, let’s not move boxes of paper. We ought to scan all this stuff and then put it in a system and get a real system. And that was one of the drivers there. Um, are there other tools that you guys are using, you know, more differently now that we’re remote?

Kevin Long: So, I’m going to let Victoria talk about it because she and and another partner of ours introduced me to something called envision. 

Victoria Robinson: Oh, yes. Envision is an is an amazing tool. But before I jump into another thing that I’ve used completely differently than I did before was Trello, especially for marketing. Um, especially because you can tag people in it, you can make sure that people are assigned to tasks without having, you know, a video or a meeting about it. You just check in, see, oh, there’s my name. And then you just run with it. But to Kevin’s point, envision is basically sitting in a room with a whiteboard without anyone having to request control. Um, But all digital. So essentially you can leave posted notes for people. You can move around things as you see fit. You can type little messages to each other, highlight things. It’s great for design flows because you can change the orientation of everything while other people are watching you do it. It’s a complete game changer, especially for work from home kind of tool. So definitely check it out. I’ll have to look at that. Yeah, when we 

Adam McNair: do proposal solution development. Oh, you will love it. That’s the one thing that I’ve seen is, is difficult. Um, if you end up, I mean, screen sharing PowerPoint and, and drawing, and it’s not ideal.

Kevin Long: No, it’s, I mean, even to the point where you can make things clickable, I mean, to Go from one part of your whiteboard to another. So like, for example, let’s say you’re designing column low to mid fidelity wireframes and you literally want to be able to go from one part to another, you know, a screen to a screen. It’s just in there, and it has tools to export to other other collaboration tools. It’s I mean, I don’t know how to use it. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m not smart like that yet, but I have watched it used and I know I want more of it. 

Victoria Robinson: Yeah, you can follow people as they’re working in the space. You can do like, um, Kevin was saying you can make it clickable. So if you’re trying to do a mock up and try to get gained understanding between, you know, some development people and for, you know, The design team, people can go through and go, Oh, that’s what you meant when you were talking about this process. So if the questions of, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and we can’t talk about it in person, it kind of meets that gap.

Kevin Long: Or if you’re designing like a giant solution diagram, that is a combination of, uh, like of, of other diagrams that you can blow up to it. You can make it so you can click from each different piece part into the, into the exploded version of the diagram. Yeah, it’s. Yeah, Victoria, you’re going to have to show Adam in a legit way. It’s I think in fact, I think the entire any proposal solution architect folks should take a look at that because that I’m excited because that’s a brand new. A tool for me that I’ve seen, you know, late pandemic for for this. So, 

Adam McNair: but a lot of that, so those tools, I think they tie into a couple of things. And one is managing remote teams and. I think from my perspective, the, that intentionality to make sure that everybody’s talking and really focusing on a, a place of record where you keep information and, and requiring better notes and people to keep their information up to date. And frankly, I don’t think that’s. new because of this. I think there’s a lot of organizations that when they run tightly around sprints and, and, and user stories and those kinds of things, they are very much accustomed to that. I would just say that we were not that tightly organized prior to the pandemic. You know, it was, it didn’t have to be, we could all walk into a room. 

Kevin Long: Right. Yeah, we have, we bought these giant, beautiful whiteboards, like, like entire rooms long to be able to just hash it out. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. So I, I, I think that has, um, has certainly changed, but again, I think it’s been beneficial for how we operate. And I think it’s more intentional and more detailed. Um, I think more so, you know, when I look at real challenges that, that I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of them have been tactical things. Like it’s been really hard for us to get laptops. Um, now that everybody in the world is working from home. 

Kevin Long: Oh my gosh. And that started early too. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, we, we, we went from. Our supplier, when you just ordered one, they’d say, okay, well, you know, in 48 hours, we’ll just drop some off at your location with our configuration that we order. Um, we’re generally now about six months out. And so we keep a significantly larger stock than we used to and have to be, you know, more intentional about knowing what we, um, knowing what we’re, we’re, we’re going to need, you know, going forward. I think a lot of our. A lot of our other challenges had had more to do with scale of growing than necessarily doing things virtually. Um, but I, I think they all kind of, we had to work around the inability of having a bunch of people in a room and just stopping in, we kind of set our old office up. There were certain contracts and finance were. Some of them were in a bullpen area and had the ability that was intentional so that they could just like, you know, turn around in their chair and ask a question and it was very efficient and we’ve had to replicate that electronically. Um, Victoria, from your, you know, perspective, as you, you know, are, are, you know, Interacting with everybody as far as being able to communicate and advance the culture of the company. And then I mean, do you feel like we’ve been able to do that and still be kind of what we what it felt like to be a highlight prior to being here only digitally?

Victoria Robinson: I mean, I think a lot of people are talking about trying to establish and maintain culture while we’re virtual. I think it’s been a big topic. We’ve done a really good job of trying to transition that to virtual. I mean, teams is a great resource for that. We have, you know, our communities of interest and, uh, special interest areas where people can just like chat in channels on just like normal outside of work topics, or even trying to, you know, progress your career that way too, um, and learn about different things you might not be learning about where we used to be able to walk into a room and I think another, um, Thing people are kind of leaning on is trying to figure out what’s going on in industry and what the culture is from a lot more leaning towards LinkedIn and websites and things like that. There’s a lot more focus on that, especially when you’re evaluating a company for, you know, as a candidate or something like that, or even looking at. At resources like what we’re doing right now, talking on a podcast. It’s like, what are people talking about? What are they doing? What are they being intentional about? And I think Highlight’s done a really good job of trying to maintain that even in the virtual 

Adam McNair: world. So it does make a lot of sense. Yeah. I did the, the LinkedIn pages is ever more important when you can’t walk into the office and meet people and those kinds of things that makes a lot of sense. Um, so yeah, a couple of other things I think as we wrap up here, you know, as far as what we’ve Achieved during the pandemic. And Kevin, as you look back on the year, you know, uh, achievement wise, what are, what are the things that you think have been in the achievements that stick out the most? I don’t know if I would say that they’re the, the biggest or the most important or whatever, but what, what, what accomplishments from the company do you think have been memorable for you?

Kevin Long: Yeah. Well, so honestly, I, I, I sat on the outside of. And so of the biggest change, so I’m going to let you guys talk about SBA and whatnot, because I’m sure that that’s the biggest or one of the biggest. But for me, what I’ve seen, honestly, successfully moving us and our customers and our Contract staff from 5 days a week, 830 to 530 on site by, you know, all the time to what can you do from home to how do you get them set up with Citrix to how do you get 600 Mac books shipped to, you know, Topeka and 27 other locations around the country for our customers to get that set up. I think that was awesome. And then also, I mean, learning how to work and leveraging remote staff all around the country in a more unified way where we are looking at. If I was doing a code challenge or something like that, I. I know that I would have leaned on the D. C. area folks almost exclusively because that’s where I am. Right? Right. And now, when I’m looking at major bids or hard things to do, I’m, You know, I mean, I’m grabbing Victoria from California and talking with folks out in St. Louis and I able to do that and people in Boston and all over just bringing everyone together. And so, um, I think that that’s probably the biggest achievement in terms of opening the aperture of who’s available to do what to help our customers. Yeah, 

Adam McNair: I, I, I agree. I think that’s a really big deal. I think the ability to expand how we operated and really change that a lot. Because I, I do think, you know, when you, when you want everybody to show up to an office in Fairfax, Virginia, you are really limiting the number of people that you have access to. And it’s not just them showing up today. It’s also, how long are they going to want to show up there? I’ve talked to at least a couple people that, you know, their, their life plans take them to some place else other than Fairfax, Virginia, and they were going to have to have that. Can I work remotely? And do you think this will work? And, Working remotely wasn’t so much about them before the pandemic. It was a lot about the way we operated and it was difficult. You know, we’ve had people before that tried to move and he’d forget to dial the phone up so that they could dial into it and you didn’t have the tools. Really? We weren’t, we weren’t adept at using the tools to really incorporate them in the best way. And, and I think being able to switch and have everybody be, be remote has been, um, that’s a big accomplishment. Amen. I think another one is the ability to secure all of this, um, you know, the, we went through the CMMC process and, and went down the certification path for that because it’s going to be a, an evolving requirement basically for, for DOD, but. We had a decent foundation, uh, the ISO 27, 000 things that we’ve done around our IT and securing it was important that the fact that we’ve been able to do all of this and keep it secure and keep all the the connections and the data where it’s supposed to be and have data controls on it and flag things that are CUI. I mean, we turned that on early on. We said, Hey, look, if we’re going to be doing this, we got to make sure that, you know, the HR and finance department. Make a mistake and start sending social security numbers on encrypted over email. And so we started to put controls on our I. T. systems that never happened.

We were in the office because but the process was H. R. would walk down to the finance and with them written on a Post it. When they were done, they feed it into the shredder. What, that’s, that, that’s gone now. Can’t do that. Um, that’s, that’s a big one. And then I think the, the, the, and Kevin, you alluded to the SBA growth, and some of the other growth in the company. I mean we’re, Uh, we’re a full on large business now. We’re in a 200 million plus a year type company. And, and that’s a, that’s a big accomplishment, but, um, I think almost more than just the, this scale and size of, of growing is, I think we did the best job that we could. And I’d, I’d give this, I don’t know, I don’t, I, you can never give yourself an A, but I, I think we did a pretty, pretty darn good job. Yeah. Of Looking for an understanding of balance between we’re a growing company and all this is exciting. We have a new project. We have to ramp up and you know, the country needs support and all of that with the fact that you couldn’t, you couldn’t buy bread for a month and a half. And people’s kids are out of school, and if you needed to go get an ID to be able to get on site, it might take you six weeks to be able to do that, or you might not be able to, or, um, you know, all those things that you They’re intertwined with how you’re working. You know, as we were talking earlier today about how, how our personal job experiences were impacted by it, everybody’s was. And I think, I think we did a, as good a job as we could have, um, or close to it for trying to make sure that we were understanding and, and, and looked for ways to be flexible and looked for ways to, um, to acknowledge that. It wasn’t just normal and that was okay and we would try to do what we could to accommodate around that. I think that’s really important and I think there’s enough stress that this has caused, um, You know, it’s just, there’s, there’s little hard things, you know, you’re trying to take your kid to Girl Scouts, and it’s a remote session, or you’re going to do it in a park, and people wearing masks, they have to stay away from each other, or whatever it is, and, um, you know, so I, I think a lot of that, That’s probably what I’d point to as the biggest accomplishment. It’s a very, um, you know, more of a qualitative than quantitative metric. But I feel pretty good about it in retrospect. One of the things you also mentioned is something that we’re going to talk about in an upcoming episode. In the middle of all of this, we’ve started to do tech challenges. As you were talking about tapping into resources, you know, Just because COVID is hopefully we’re, we’re rounding some kind of a, of a, of a corner. Well, my desk’s not made out of wood. I don’t think so. This table that I took out of that dumpster, I think it might be just, um, plastic, but I’m not sure. Or I would, but I, I think that that we’re going to continue to operate primarily this way. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. 

Adam McNair: Um, going forward, you know, and we made that decision, you know, when, when Victoria said, hey, I can come over, but I’m going to be in California. Is that okay? As soon as you say, yeah, I guess so. Well, then you’re not going back to the way you were. Um, we’ve got a lot of really talented people here. You know, that have joined the team that are not going to work out of, out of, out of our office. And, uh, I think, like you’re saying, Kevin, you’ve tapped into people all across the country to support some of these tech challenges.

So, if anybody hasn’t seen them, the tech challenges, instead of the standard request for proposal out of the government, where they come out and say, hey, just write to me about how you’re going to do this. They have you do whatever that is. So if that’s building software, you have to go build software and it’s, it’s really not easy. I’d only been involved in one of them over the, over my career and it was really shocking at the time. It was about a decade ago and they said, okay, we want you to come in and actually show us a working prototype of a name check solution. 

Kevin Long: We are going to want us and we’re going to give you names you don’t know about to feed through them.

Adam McNair: Yeah, and I remember having they want us to have a prototype. Really? That’s an that’s an evaluation thing. And perhaps it’s my. My scarring over how that went. Uh, never 

Victoria Robinson: forget once you’ve done one. 

Adam McNair: I sat in that room and watched some really, really smart technical people after about eight minutes ago. Oh no. Like, well, these next two days are not going to be great. So, having started from there, Kevin has been leading our team to do some tech challenges, and we’ve been a part of a couple of them now as a sub, and we’re running one now as a prime, and have had some success. Think good thoughts, everybody. That’s right. That’s something we’re going to talk about on the next Highlight Cast, just that. Some of his tech challenge team, uh, about what, what that’s been like. Uh, Victoria has also been part of that. So she’ll be able to provide some thoughts. Uh, so that, that’ll be coming up. Been an, it’s been an interesting 13 months. Um, but I think we’re still getting by. And I, I think like we talked about, there’s a lot of positive things that have come from that, that we’re going to carry forward. 

So, thanks for listening to the Highlight Cast, uh, to keep up to date with our news and activities here at Highlight. You can follow us on LinkedIn. You can also visit our website, HighlightTech. com that has two T’s in it. Highlight. And you can tune into the next episode where we talk about, uh, tech challenges and then our team approach. So thank you very much. And Kevin, thank you. Victoria, thank you.

Adam McNair: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Highlight Cast. Uh, this is Adam McNair. I’m, uh, glad to be here today and joined again by Kevin Long. Hi, Kevin. Hey, Adam. How’s it going? Good. Uh, Victoria Robinson is also here who leads our marketing activities. Hi. Hi Victoria. 

Victoria Robinson: Hi everybody. 

Adam McNair: And our very special guest this week who we are very excited about is, uh, Fiona , who is our HR manager here at Highlight.

Hey, Fiona, how are you? 

Fiona Sityar: Hey, everyone. I’m doing well. 

Adam McNair: That’s awesome. So, Fiona’s joining us today. We’re specifically going to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And it’s a major program that we have here at Highlight. And there are, as a government contractor, there are parts of it that are actually mandated.

By the government, you need to have some affirmative action, um, uh, equal opportunity types of, of, of goals. Um, but we’ve, we’ve gone beyond that. There’s some things that come from department of labor, different contracts have some different things, but, um, we have a specific program around that, that, um, Uh, the Fiona leads and I will say that, you know, the topic of, of diversity and then going to diversity and inclusion and then diversity equity inclusion.

And I was part of that conversation of, you know, do we have, uh, a plan that does 1 or multiple or all of that? Um, and I learned some things during that process. I mean, I think the equity was a topic that I, I wasn’t really familiar with. Fiona, would you mind just giving us kind of the, your, your, your thoughts on that?

Definition of the differences, the diversity, the equity, and the inclusion. 

Fiona Sityar: Yeah, sure. So, I once heard an analogy that describes it really, really well. Um, diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And equity is making sure that everyone can get to the party, um, on time and enjoy the party together.

Sure. So, um, it’s a really pared down way to describe it, but I thought that that was kind of the best way, um, to put it in layman’s terms and make it really easy. Everyone loves a good party. 

Adam McNair: Absolutely. That, I think that’s a really good way to put that, you know, and I, I, equity was one of the things that I hadn’t thought about. Wasn’t really a topic I was familiar with in the past. You know, we had a manager’s meeting. I don’t know, it was a couple of months ago. Um, and we were talking about the practical impacts of this, because I, I think programs like this are theory and philosophical in, in overall kind of construct, but they, they impact your business very directly based on who you hire and what your workforce looks like and some of the examples that That we came up in the managers meeting or things like, you know, if you’ve got five people all doing the exact same job and you pick one person who’s not going to make as much money as the other four, that has a fairness aspect to it. It also has operational impact. I mean, I’ve had teams before where. Everybody knows what everybody else makes and a couple of people really resent what a couple of people on the team and it all has to do with something they had nothing to do with based on how much somebody did or did not get paid. And so it kind of stacks the deck against the morale of of a team.

And, and that’s not to say that’s more or less important than the, just the fairness aspect, but it’s a real one, because, you know, I think sometimes when you talk about kind of a philosophy angle on something like this, and it has some moral underpinnings, Okay. Well, how does that apply in the real world? It causes real world problems for everybody on, on programs when that happens. Um, so I guess the question, you know, I, I know we’ve, we’ve had some, some regulatory requirements to have some things we wanted to do it from a, um, kind of an ethics perspective, but for, you know, what, what for you was the, the, you think was the real reason for going from, um, What we’ve been doing before to having a formal named diversity, equity, and inclusion program.

Fiona Sityar: Yeah. Um, so DEI, um, short for diversity, equity, inclusion has obviously been a hot topic recently. And I think employees are starting to expect more from their employer and rightfully so. Uh, the way I’ve had it described to me before is that, um, Once employer is kind of an extension of oneself in a way. So why wouldn’t you want your employer to also reflect those same ideals? Um, ultimately we want to be an employer of choice that people are drawn to. It’s the law of attraction, right? You attract what you put out, translate that into corporate terms, and you hope to build a company culture that employees believe in and support. So. We want our employees to stay here not only for the financial transaction, perform their role, get a paycheck, um, but because they want to continue working with the peers they have here under the shared common values we’ve cultivated and stay in the environment that we’ve fostered. 

Adam McNair: So, so I think that makes a lot of sense. I think one of the, the, the, the ideas that that raises for me is that, you know, that idea that, okay, you just go to work to get paid, right? There are a lot of programs that that we support that really require a lot more commitment than that from from us as a company and from our employees. And I think maybe that’s 1 of the areas why this is kind of so important.

To the employee, but also to the company, Kevin, as I think about some of the programs that, that you’ve managed, you know, over the years, um,

what, what’s been your experience trying to, to find people for some of these difficult to fill positions? I mean, it’s not like they’re sitting there wishing we would call them. I mean, it feels like it’s, It’s a bit of a sales activity to get them interested in the role. 

Kevin Long: Absolutely. I mean, I have developed a, uh, I mean, even partners, when we start talking about, you know, recruiting and staffing things, uh, really good, you know, pitch on. Why highlight is awesome, right? And what you get out of it, what we do and why someone should consider coming to work with us. I mean, it’s exactly like Fiona said. I mean, it’s not it’s not just a paycheck anymore with that with what we do. I mean, why? We sell brains, right? And, and brains to, to, you know, function at the highest level, they need to be inspired and they need to be growing and they need to be learning and they need to be doing all of these things. And, you know, they need to feel like they belong and even more so with, especially with like harder to fill positions. It’s, I mean, a lot of. A lot of places where we work, um, uh, it’s, I mean, the idiom I use, it’s like, I mean, it attracts people that have drunk the Kool Aid, right? Like, you know, I worked at, at State Department for, you know, a decade.

Uh, you know, anyone that’s listened to this is probably tired of hearing about that, but I totally drank the Kool Aid at State Department, right? Like when, when State Department does a, Does their job, right? The world is a more democratic, safer, equitable place. How awesome is that? Right? And so with, with highlight and with programs like this, you know, you get to help inspire people with the ideas on, on what we’re doing, right? It’s when, when we’re here, it’s like, you come to highlight, not just because, you know, you’re going to get your paycheck, but we’re going to help you. Grow your career. We’re going to have a place that has ideals that, that hopefully match your own. If not, then great. Then there’s other companies out there for you. But, you know, I love having a program like this that allows us to be very upfront about who we are and what we do and, you know, and really attract people that, that share all of those values and people that, that want to find difficult, that are in difficult positions. Civil are often all, all interested in that. So I use it all the time. 

Adam McNair: And I think also, you know, as you’re talking, I think that as recruiting has almost exclusively shifted to internet based You know, research and people are able to much more easily do kind of kind of reference checks on employers. I mean, there are, you go see the website, but there is glass door. There is, there is linked in there’s, there’s reviews inside of indeed all these different places. It’s not just a. One way street of us sitting there kind of shopping for resources and whoever we find we go get it Yeah, it it’s a it’s a much more bi directional process at this point where where people look that are Sometimes they’re not even looking for jobs. They’re a commodity and and You really have to have a good You know, overall story for them. If they’re going to be interested in coming to work someplace. And the other thing is you talk about the missions of the customers that we support the company that we’re trying to be. If you want innovative thought, if you want people that have new ideas, you need to have everybody that doesn’t come from exactly the same background. And, you know, I, I think we’ve all probably seen either inside of a customer organization where everybody’s been there for 20 years, or even I see sometimes it’s small businesses, you’ll see most of their management team and most of the people inside of the company, they’ve all come from one large business and, There’s there are some positive things to that, you know, unified culture and shared experience and all that, but you’re not going to get my opinion.

You’re not going to get as diverse and innovative a set of ideas. So I think there’s there’s a lot of benefit across the company and the kind of work that we do and the capabilities we have for having. A diverse workforce and, and the morale aspects of having people that feel included and have equitable access to, you know, the corporation and the benefits of the corporation and their career and so forth, you get better work from everybody. And that benefits all of us. So I know Fiona, you’ve taken some specific actions and we’ve got a formal plan around this. So what are the same some of the Key or compelling to you aspects or actions like what, what’s the D. E. I. Program actually do? Like, what are some things that you can sit back and say, Hey, these are the ways we try to advance this, this program and concept in the company.

Fiona Sityar: Sure. So highlights culture as in culture. Credibly fluid and our initiatives ebb and flow based on direct employee feedback. So the feedback that we get from our focus group, from the surveys that we run, I know we just ran a best places to work survey. So I’m hoping to get those results here shortly. Um, fingers crossed.

So different things like that allow us. To assess what employees are needing and kind of pivot what we’re doing based on that. Um, and obviously it’s truly voluntary, the information that we collect, but it’s truly valuable as well. Um, it focuses us, it directs us moving forward, and It drives the conversation and keeps the momentum going.

Adam McNair: That makes sense. I, I, the other question that I have, and, and I, I don’t know if this is a, is, you know, an easy question or not, but I’m curious, how much of what we do do you feel like is mandated by the government? Versus how much have you tried to go above and beyond for value, whether that be value to the employee, value to the customer, value to the company, you know, whatever. As far as just minimum compliance where we wouldn’t be in trouble, how, how far are you trying to have us operate at or above that level? 

Fiona Sityar: Uh, compliance is my favorite topic. I live in brief list.

As Adam mentioned earlier, we’ve got the formal affirmative action plan and that is definitely mandated by the government and that’s kind of the baseline of what we need to go off of on But I think that highlight does so much more than that. I know I mentioned our focus group earlier on where we have representatives from a number of teams come together to discuss different topics. Um, uh, we also. In addition to that, we’ve just recently launched our highlight inclusion ally program. Um, it’s basically an eight part mini episode series that helps with furthering employee education on basic DEI topics. So defining diversity and inclusion, exploring what it means to be an inclusive leader and what we can do as individuals to help foster an inclusive and diverse work environment. So the episodes are bite sized. Only a few minutes long, which I think is the best way to sustain someone’s attention span. Um, and the series really intends to be a resource and build upon existing knowledge employees may already know. And it also allows them to be recognized for their continual learning and distinguishes them at highlight. And then lastly, there’s a small aspect. I like to think of personal pride that comes with knowing that you’re doing your part to make highlight a better place to work. And that’s what it really boils down to. We want a place to feel empowered and know that they can make applicable changes to highlight that will impact them and highlight as a whole. So 

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you’ve done a lot of work in a lot of those areas and I think things like that and it’s important and you know, I’ve, I have worked places where they, they, they felt like they were operating off of that baseline of the things you have to do to be compliant. And I’ve had. All kinds of different versions of, they weren’t called that necessarily at the start of my career, but some kind of inclusion diversity type training annually was folded in with the overall HR training, and it evolved over time, but it was a lot of it was usually just focused on as a manager, here are some things not, you know, not to do. And. I, I felt like when I was taking manager training, a lot of it was bordering on, let’s try to make sure that we don’t get sued as a company or, or if we get sued as a company, we can, we can claim that Adam was given training. And so it really isn’t our fault. It’s his. 

Kevin Long: Here is what the lawyers told us we had to do.

Adam McNair: Absolutely. You know, and, and I, I think, I think when, first off, I think when training is offered and it feels that way, nobody engages with it in a meaningful way. And I think one of the differences between what Fiona is doing here at Highlight and what I’ve seen other places is the spirit and intent of that comes out.

So people actually feel like it’s a real thing and not just something that we sent you to it. Quote, unquote review, which, which what we really mean is we need to show that you clicked this and opened it and closed it. And we don’t care if you read it, but it covers our legal liability. The 

Kevin Long: liability is now shifted to you. Congratulations. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, absolutely. Um, the other, the other part of it that I, I do think is, is important is I think the idea of, of allowing. Creating something to communicate to all employees from an education standpoint, because I would, I would guess that some turnover and some morale problems and some issues on programs arise when there’s probably, there’s something that probably should have been addressed from the perspective of DEI, but maybe the employee didn’t realize it. And they just thought I don’t like this program, this program, this. It seems like it’s frustrating here. There are things I don’t like about this, and so I’m going to leave because I still something doesn’t feel right. 

Kevin Long: And so I can find some place that feels better, 

Adam McNair: right? And knowing that there are some things that because like nobody’s perfect, it’s possible that the program set up the manager, any number of things that they may not have known. It wasn’t intentional, but there’s also a lot of times where some sometimes there are contract differences and I’ve had programs before where two people were in different labor categories and they felt like they were doing the same job and they find out one of them makes more than the other or one of them has slightly different responsibility than the other. I’ve had people that, you know, one person’s hourly and one person is salaried, and they have kind of the same job, but there’s some fundamental differences to it that may not be apparent to them, and they feel like it’s this fairness thing. So the idea of, of, hey, we’re allowing this dialogue, talk to us about it, and we will engage on it, I think sometimes there might be some things going on that maybe somebody needed to be trained on or wasn’t aware of or wasn’t thinking through that lens, but sometimes there’s just. You know, well, why do I get to, to, you know, why, why can’t I work from home? I mean, this is obviously we don’t talk about this much anymore because we all do, but I’ve had situations before where they said, you know, what, why is it that, that, that they are allowed to work from home and I’m not. Because the work that they’re doing is on a network that can be accessed remotely, and the work you’re doing is on a network that can’t be accessed remotely, and that’s just a technical challenge, and if I had the opportunity to, I would change that, but unfortunately I can’t. Then all of a sudden they don’t come to work every day. And feel like something unfair is going on, they, they ask, they ask the question and they knew it was okay to ask it and it wasn’t just a, well, they’re complaining, you know, I think there’s a very old school thing that used to happen with the, you know, just show up and do your job and stop complaining about it. Um, and I think this is a really good step in, in the different direction. Um, I am curious to, to know, and this is from all of you, places that you’ve worked in the past. Um, like Victoria, at what, what extent, you know, places you’ve been before, did they have defined DEI programs? Were there, was it talked about? How did that, how did that look? 

Victoria Robinson: It’s interesting that you ask that because this was actually one of the big reasons that I decided to come to Highlight a couple months ago was that we had a more holistic approach to our employees in general. We have our DEI, we have career and leadership development programs. There’s, you know, we’re trying to invest back into our employees rather than just have a training simulation that you go through. Previous places of work. One was so small that people didn’t even think about diversity inclusion. We had interesting. Um, let’s say water cooler conversations about it. I wouldn’t say that they are very H. R. approved water cooler conversations. And then my pre my other previous employer. We did. I don’t think anyone ever talked about it, and it was a larger organization. You’re just like, in this day and age, you’re just kind of surprised when it doesn’t come up at all or that it’s not being talked about. Even at a, it’s mentioned somewhere on the employee internet kind of thing, and it was very enticing to me that we were talking about it. And then also that we have this. kind of work in progress mindset that we’re always going to adapt as employees need, are providing us feedback and also as times change, which in the last two years have changed tremendously, that we know that we need to continue to change as employees need it to be done. So, um, I remember when I was evaluating, as you were saying about recruiting, I was like, oh, they have this? This is great. I’m like, oh, We’re up with the times, you know, we’re talking about it and we’re acting in a positive way forward. But it’s, I 

Adam McNair: think that’s powerful and helpful, you know, feedback, certainly. Um, and I think it ties into a lot of things. And I think the initial experience, both when you’re looking at a company, but then also as you’re kind of going through that interview and all of that process. It’s great that that came forward that you could actually see it, you know, because I think sometimes there are things you don’t learn about an organization that you’ve been there a while. And so it’s nice that something that is important to us came forward. Fiona, what about, what about you? I, you know, we’ve worked together for a while now. Um, so, so I, you know, I know it’s been been a little while since you, you were someplace else, but what, what did, what had you seen as far as, you know, DEI out there? In a previous career. 

Fiona Sityar: Yeah. So when I was applying to highlight, I mean, truly it wasn’t top of mind at the time. It really has become a whole new level of, um, examination when you’re looking at different companies to look at just in the last couple of years. And I guess in my experience in my current role, I’m seeing that there’s going to continue to be a direct correlation between a company’s level of, or a level or perceived levels, I should say, of diversity, equity, and inclusion versus engagement, disengagement, or even retention, or I guess lack thereof. So. One of my recent focuses has been drawn to, um, accessibility and ensuring that that’s there. So making sure the employees know what resources and assets are available to them here at Highlight. And if they don’t, figuring out what’s not working, what communication channels can we take advantage of to make sure that that is arriving. To employees and that it’s at the forefront, um, and then pivoting what we’re doing in response. If that continues not to work. So 

Adam McNair: there are a lot of I will say that there’s a lot. There are a lot of things that we do that I think are frankly just very, very cool from a standpoint. And I think when you look at when we use Microsoft teams, like, as you were talking about a week or 2 ago, it has the closed caption feature. If somebody is hearing impaired and. You know, those are the kinds of things I, I have, you know, several friends who, who are either, you know, hearing impaired or use cochlear implants or so forth. And the, the idea of now everything is, is remote and, and all of that, just going forward. Turning closed caption on in teams is easy for us and can help people. I know we’ve had conversations. Some of the work that we do on some projects is 508 compliance for accessibility, and we’ve had some comments internally about, hey, when we have reports and things to try to make sure there’s a there’s an indicator. for color in addition to, if you’re going to have a red, yellow, green stoplight, have some, you know, other indicators so that if somebody is, is colorblind that they can see that. I think those are cool kinds of things. And like, I know none of them are earth shattering. Changing the, the colors on a report is not. In and of itself, this, you know, or shaking event, but it might be for one person or two people. And overall, it just is, it’s the mindset of before you do something, you ask yourself, how does this, how does this fit the employee? You know, community and does it does everybody going to, you know, going to be able to access this? And is it going to be helpful? Because as an example, you know, on the recruiting side, we have a lot of different places where we post our jobs and send them out to, and some of them are focused specifically on different socioeconomic communities, and some of them are geographically focused, and some of them are kind of job skill technically focused, and there’s, um, A certain amount of, um, the strategy hits there, but then at the point where people start to apply, they apply from wherever they apply from, and there’s not, there’s not really any, you know, traceability, but things like the, the geographic location where somebody applied are relevant for whether they can do the job if it’s in person or, or, or not. But if somebody was interested in moving, I know it has happened before, not specifically here, but I know in my career in the past. Somebody applies and they’re out of state. Somebody says, well, we don’t want to get involved in somebody moving. Well, there are parts of the country that might be looking for jobs elsewhere. And that’s a limiting factor for them. You know, another thing that we’ve talked about is when you’re going to screen resumes, do you drop the names off? And here’s, here’s a complicated factor about that. Recruiting systems are set up to have the person’s name as the master team. Key field that all the records attached to so you kind of can’t do it that way. And I think some of those things are an indication that the more you think about these kinds of topics, the more pervasively they can drive some, some other decisions. Because when you get down to the level where. It’s coded into the recruiting systems that you can’t drop somebody’s name out. And it would be easy enough to have a review feature where you don’t see somebody’s name until, you know, you decided that you, you qualified them or didn’t, but that’s just not a thing. That’s not a thing that’s, that’s in any of them right now. And so I think the things that we’re doing are helpful and the more that we think about it, because now when we talk to our vendors and ask them questions like that, you know, can we get this capability? It may not happen here, but eventually, you know, when they’re doing their next version, they go, Hey, look, it’d take a developer like six hours to put in this feature. We’ll just go ahead and do it. Why not? Um, I think that’s important. And you’re talking about, you know, we were still talking about diversity programs elsewhere. So Kevin, I’m, I’m guessing I kind of know, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of funny because, you know, Every place you’ve worked, I’ve worked for 15, 16 years now. Yeah. So, um, only one of us needs to answer, but so what, what, what, what’s your feeling about these kinds of programs or how you’ve seen them evolve over time? 

Kevin Long: Yeah, it’s, I feel a lot like Fiona, honestly, that, uh, at prior gigs, uh, what, uh, you know, so at prior gigs, corporate wide, I feel like it was always focused on preventing lawsuits and that’s it, right? Like, uh, every now and then there’d be like, Hey, we want to be able to say where we recruit a bunch of veterans. Hey, tick a box. Are you a veteran? Right. Or, you know, otherwise it was around, you know, don’t harass people and give us your EEOC information, right? Um, and. Within different business groups, I feel like there was some informal, uh, approach to some of this at some places that I’ve worked. But, uh, I think there’s power in the formalizing of it that we’re seeing around here that highlights doing that. It says, you know, this is who we are and this is what we’re doing. And so that’s it’s. It, it is definitely coming up more and more as, uh, you know, in the last couple of years and, you know, stepping out in front of it and, you know, owning what we do and who we are and saying, this is what it is, is it’s awesome. And, you know, I think, you know, it makes me proud to work where we do with. You know, I love what we stand for. So yeah, 

Adam McNair: absolutely. Me too. Um, well, you know, with that, I think that the overarching message really is that we’ve put a lot of work and specifically Fiona, but the team overall has put a lot of work into advancing. Diversity, equity and inclusion as part of part of the ethics and culture of the corporation. And there are a lot of tangible examples of how that’s going forward. But there are also just a lot of that’s that’s kind of a theme that underpins a lot of things that we do. And it continues to evolve. So as we wrap up, uh, Fiona is if if employees happen to be listening to this, what’s the best way for them to get information? About the program, uh, where, where should they go? What’s the best source of information? 

Fiona Sityar: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a diversity, equity and inclusion channel on teams. We’re hoping to use it more in the coming weeks, months. Um, but hoping to start continual dialogue on there and just keep the conversation going and hopefully get some fresh new ideas from our employees as well. And for a more, I guess, direct route to information, we’ve got the employee intranet. There’s a whole webpage dedicated entirely to highlight goals and the actions that we’re taking in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion. So I strongly suggest everyone. Internal at least to check those options out. Um, and HR is always available as well. Open door policy. 

Adam McNair: Fantastic. And so for anybody that’s not an employee, if you apply for one of our positions, our recruiting team has access to all of that information. And those are some of the things that we provide, uh, as just kind of about who we are. And, uh, for anybody else in industry, if you had any questions or wanted to talk about it, you can please, you can just. Feel free to reach out through our website, HighlightTech. com. We’re happy to Ask us about it. Ask us about it. We’re happy to talk about it. It’s something that we’ve, we’ve put a lot of, uh, a lot of work into and something that we’re proud of. So with that, thank you all again for listening to another episode of The Highlight Cast. And uh, thank you, Victoria. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Fiona. We will talk to you guys on the next episode. Goodbye. 

The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect highlight technologies and or any agency of the U. S. government.

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Episode of The Highlight Cast. Hi, I’m Adam McNair here from Highlight, uh, joined by, as always, so Kevin Long. Hi, Kevin. Hey, Adam. How’s it going? Doing great. Thank you. Great. And also, we’re very happy to have with us today, our guest, Norma Wattenpah. Norma, hi, how are you today? 

Norma Wattenpaugh: I’m doing great. And thank you for inviting me to your podcast.

Adam McNair: Absolutely. Glad to have you. So, uh, yeah, Highlight and, uh, and Norma, we’ve been working together here for a few months, I guess. Um, Norma, you want to, Introduce introduce yourself and kind of share the kinds of things that you do with the with the audience 

Norma Wattenpaugh: be happy to. So I’m the CEO and founder of a consultancy group called Phoenix Consulting Group as in transformational partnering and our company focuses on collaborative business relationships, you know, all sorts of B2B types of relationships, whether it’s strategic alliances, technology relationships, business, business, Um, it can be, um, channels or, you know, developer relationships. So that’s kind of our, our wheelhouse is where we focus as a company, but, you know, I’m very, always been very passionate about collaboration and how companies can work together to create. more value, more customer, uh, juiciness, if you will. And in that line, I’ve been very much involved with, um, the standard around collaborative relationships, the ISO 44001. I’ve been on the, uh, committee and led the U. S. delegation in, uh, trying to influence that collaboration. To reflect what we think are the best practices in and how you manage in and work in those kind of collaborative environments. 

Adam McNair: And that’s, I mean, I find fascinating, I think, you know, as we, um, we got started on our path with with ISOs and creating what we call highway, which is our quality framework that integrates a lot of the different standards are. Uh, pretty commonly required in government contracting, which is where we, um, you know, where we spend all of our time as, as company. Um, and as we were looking for ways to solve strategic challenges we had as a corporation there, you know, partnering and, And, and how, how to do business better, how to deliver services better, uh, we ended up going down the route of, we came across 44, 000 and 56, 000. So for collaborative business relationship management, and then also for innovation management, and the way that we found that was, I was out on the ISO website looking around for, um, you know, uh, other, uh, Other ISO standards to draw from to shore up some of the practices we have now, how did, how did your engagement with 44, 000 happen? I mean, what was that? Like, is that a group contact you? Or how does that how does that come about? 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Well, it actually started. Before it started in, uh, I think 2007, 2008, where I was contacted by a group in Britain who are working on a pre standard for the British Standards Institute, which was the precursor to the 44, 000 and just learned that we had a lot in common. He was trying to promote more collaboration in the largely government contracts, large infrastructure. Contracts like, um, the National Air Traffic Control and National Rail and, you know, some of these very large scale projects that required a lot of moving parts, a lot of subcontractors and partners to really execute. And the, the UK government and the MOD actually was very involved in that because they knew they needed a better way to work with, uh, these very complex requirements. And that’s how I got involved in terms of the British standard and being a part of helping to shape that standard at a very early stage and inserting what we knew to be, you know, best practices in, in working with, uh, strategic alliances.

Adam McNair: So that’s what you’re describing is, I mean, from the time that that happened until 44, 000 became a standard, that, that sounds like, uh, you know, 10 year timeline of, of, of evolution there. So 

Norma Wattenpaugh: long road. Yes. So from, 

Adam McNair: from the, the, the creation of the standard, is that, is it like a world Congress type activity? Did everybody go to 1 place? Is this all just trading back and forth emails? How did that happen? 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Yes, yes, that’s kind of, you kind of explained it quite well, is that, um, ISO standards originate from a national standard first. So any country and their standards organization can originate a standard. British took the lead on the collaboration one. Um, I think it was a group here in the U. S. that took the lead on the innovation standard. And when it gets, um, uh, you know, accepted as a national standard, they can then propose to the ISO organization, the International Standards Organization, that it should become an international standard. And at that point, they convene a committee, which has Experts in the subject matter from every country that wishes to participate. So in the collaboration standard, there was like 1516 countries that sent a delegation or representative to an ISO committee meeting to kind of represent their country’s interests and perspectives. So I led the U S delegation. Uh, there were delegations from, uh, the UK of course, cause they kind of started it, but Sweden, um, Austria was in there for a while. Italy has been a steady contributor. Um, but you know, all these different countries, China recently joined in kind of the latter stages and, and taking a stronger role, which is one reason when I think it’s very important that the U S and other countries also, you know, show pay attention and collaborate because. China’s a big trading partner, you know, we love him and hate him, right? So it’s, it’s important, particularly in the tone of collaboration to be able to work that way. 

Adam McNair: So now when you see collaboration as a, as a field, I mean, as a, as a, a work stream, that is something that’s addressed across all these different businesses, what kind of business sectors do you find are Most engaged or interested in in partnership and collaboration as part of their vocabulary, where it’s really something that they’re paying attention to. Now, you’d mentioned a little bit, but where do you see that? 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Yeah, there’s 3 that I see really stand out who have bet their business on collaboration. If you will, construction is 1 area. Uh, technology is another very large partner ecosystems. Everyone partners with everyone and everyone competes with everyone. Um, and pharmaceuticals, um, pharmaceuticals in particular have found that, you know, innovation doesn’t happen in a room full of chemists anymore. It’s geneticists. They partner very heavily with the biotech and, uh, organizations to find the solutions, but pharma. As the, um, the money capital that it takes to put a new, uh, therapy through all the clinical trials and sort of, and, you know, approval through the FDA. So there’s heavy partnering in that area and the R and D side of, and of course we saw that with COVID, you know, we saw credible amount of cooperation and collaboration among the pharmaceuticals and the biotech companies and coming through with vaccines in record time. 

Adam McNair: And that’s interesting, I think, also, because, you know, the, when something like COVID happens, um, I mean, I wouldn’t say that we’ve had, you know, a similar pandemic, at least not, you know, not, not, not in the US, um, you know, like that. Uh, certainly in, you know, during my career, but I do think there are transformational shifts and changes, and I think whether that be going from physical servers to the cloud, whether that be, um, you know, the, the pandemic that has required all this remote work, uh, a lot of the different things, I think you’ve got, um, it’s an interesting impact to other standards. You know, I think when I, as we were going through some of our ISO 27, 000 recertification, and I’m reading some of the documentation that we put forward around the continuity of our business, we were thinking about snowstorms. We were thinking about a pipe breaks in the office power outage. We were thinking about a power 

Norma Wattenpaugh: earthquakes. If you’re in California, 

Adam McNair: right? And, you know, and frankly, you know, even though during this, it did happen during the pandemic here. We had a, we had a drain backup, a storm drain backup that impacted our headquarters office. And it’s funny because all the conversations that we had about what happens if something closes the main office. It had literally zero impact on us at this point, because nobody was there. Nobody was going to go in when you said, Oh, well, it turns out there’s six inches of water on the first floor. Um, you know, they’re calling, the building is calling us. I said, let’s take your time. You know, what, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. And I went over and unplugged some things and that was about the extent of it. But I’m wondering, have you seen these partnerships that have been. Um, that have been in place as COVID has happened, like you’re talking about, have you seen areas where you feel like their involvement in, in collaboration as a real practice, whether they are 44, 000 certified or not? Have you seen areas where you feel like they probably, Handled the adversity and the change of coven better than maybe they would have if they hadn’t been involved with some of the things that you’ve been doing. 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Well, I think what you’re speaking to is that you’re better equipped to respond to a challenge or disruption. If you have the culture and process in place. 1st, trying to put that together in a, in a crisis is, uh, you don’t want to do that. Yeah. So, I think for those organizations, I’m thinking to 1 with, uh, PTC, which is a, they do a lot of modeling and, and engineering modeling. Kind of work and we just had an award nomination through the Association of strategic alliance professionals where they had worked with some of their partners and we’re very quickly able to create new plans and new manufacturing processes for ventilators. And this was, of course, very early in the pandemic, but they were able to increase the supply of ventilators like threefold because they had an existing relationship. And they said, okay, we can apply our skills and what we know, and what we’ve learned in working with each other to this new problem, and we’re able to have a major impact in, um, you know, production of ventilators in the short order.

Adam McNair: Yeah, well, and that’s certainly impactful and helpful for, for everybody. Um, you know, it also, one of the things that it, it makes me think of is, you know, as we, as that was going and sounds like was going well, um, you know, one of the things that does the pandemic was, was starting up is we were running a facility for a customer and our ecosystem of partners, uh, Included a commercial real estate organization and, um, you know, I think I think there were probably areas where that could have been a lot done a lot better. Um, or could have been ironed out a little bit better. I think from a collaboration standpoint, I think we, we entered into that that relationship. Along quite a while ago, I think before we had really gotten as mature as I hopefully think we have in the last couple of years in this area. Um, because Kevin, I mean, that was all your, you got to enjoy the benefit of going to go. Shut down a facility and figure that out remotely and everything else. I think as, as the pandemic started, I was at a, in a conference and, you know, so I was, I was down in New Orleans and Kevin was up in Boston. And so I know that was like, I think you officially took the, the last flight appropriately. 

Announcement: I was the last, last highlight traveler before. Before everything got shut down. Yeah. March 13th, Friday. Friday the 13th. 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Yeah. Friday the 13th. I recall . Yeah. How does 

Adam McNair: the, the interaction with, with our partner, you know, up there from a facility standpoint, did, did, how did that go? 

Announcement: Yeah, well, it went. So we got really used to working with them every day, honestly, and, uh, had been for, you know, six months on the ground with them because they had people in the building. And if there’s one thing, you know, about our customer up there is that, um, uh, they’re quite agile and their demands are, are fluid, which means that, uh, for us to meet our customer’s needs. They had to, I mean, we had to have really strong collaboration between us and our real estate provider, right? I mean, and when I say we talked to them every day that, I mean, that’s underselling it. Like we probably talked to them so much. Every two hours, every two hours of every workday, right, because something was coming up, right? Um, with that, uh, and not everything was bad. It was like, you know, we developed a lot of standard operating procedures and, and, you know, shorthand to, to, to help them out. But as we were shutting it down, I think that we really got to lean heavily on the fact that, uh, That we had those established, documented ways of interacting with them that, you know, say, hey, when we, when we need to collect key cards, this is how we do that. When we, when we need to, to, uh, have a, a change in security or a change in HVAC, you know, this is how we do that. Right. And we had all of that worked out, which, uh, which made it easier, uh, to, To shut it down, um, but then, you know, you just had all of the additional paperwork that was essentially, okay, we’re now going to vacate because it’s not safe to be, you know, three feet from, from your coworker where everybody was, you know, literally sharing like every, like two people would share one computer monitor so they could work together. Right. Yeah. Um, just not safe anymore. It was honestly, it was a lot of, the more work was shutting down. Uh, real estate stuff. It was working with our partners, uh, in the hardware folks, where we then had to put in the clutch and shift to be able to stop having everybody share monitors and all right, now we need to. Leverage our relationships with our providers to get everybody laptops that don’t already have get everybody prepared to work remotely from home. And as they didn’t stop hiring folks for customers, hiring folks as they were coming in. So we were having to to onboard new folks across the country with with hardware. And so we had to really lean on on our, uh, our. norms for working with, uh, you know, CDW and Apple and all of our, all of our hardware vendors to be able to, to really not misappeared and mean to the point where even this customer had an engagement day the other day and made mention of how easy it was to switch to fully remote. So, um, I did a little dance around the room there because it wasn’t easy. It just looked like that to them. You made it look easy. 

Adam McNair: Yes. I, and, you know, based on, out of all of that, and I, I think, you know, or I have a question for you related to this is, you know, I think an area for my viewpoint, the way that kind of shut down went and that whole, you know, involvement, the day to day working relationships that we had. I think were strong and, and worked well. It almost seemed to me like where some of the challenges would come in is when there was a decision to be made above the level of the people that you were used to working with, and sometimes their decisions that they haven’t had to make before, um, whether that be hardware, are we going to allow it to be shipped? Uh, you know, how are we going to allow things to be shipped? Or how are we going to allow that to be billed? Or if we have to use a different vendor, um, at the at the facility level? So, you know, some of those conversations, not just about the day to day operations, but, you know, if we’re going to exit this, you know, engagement, how are we going to do that? Because it, you know, that was certainly not something that looked like was going to be even an option. I mean, every conversation we’d always had there was how do we get more space and how do we get more people in here? Because this thing just continues to grow. And so I think there are, you know, as we were getting the standard. Um, and we were looking at this early on a lot of the people that it seemed like we’re getting 44, 000 certified, uh, were in the U. K. Um, and I saw a lot of utility companies, construction organizations, I think, which, which mirrors normal what you were saying. So I was wondering if you have an organization where. The understanding of partnership and collaboration and the different layers of that business need to kind of get on the same page about how they want to handle partnerships. Are there, are there conferences, are there events, are there, are there places that people like that can go to be able to, to say, hey, partnership in this era, everything’s interconnected. We really ought to have some more thinking about this. Where are there places that you’re involved in where they can go for those kinds of, um, Yeah, those kinds of thoughts. 

Norma Wattenpaugh: Well, absolutely. I have been on the board, full disclosure of an organization called the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, and that is what the mission of the organization is, is to enable those people who are working with partners to have access to best practices to network to share ideas to ask questions. And we do have webinars and conferences and, and other events that we host where we’re partnering professionals can come up with that. And perhaps later I can send you more information on the summit that’s coming up in March. And in fact, I think you are the closing speaker with the interview with our president, Mike Leonetti, and they’ll be having a fireside chat talking to you about. Your journey through collaboration and and building up a systemic capability and collaboration. 

Adam McNair: Yes, certainly looking forward to that as well. Um, and I, um, I think it’s, it’s, it’s good on for just awareness that, uh, you know, that that organization is out there. I think on the government side, we see a lot. of very government focused, uh, organizations, uh, whether that be, we’re, we’re a member of Act IAC. Uh, we are a member of AFCIA and those organizations are great in so many ways. And they do a lot related to the partnership between industry and government. Uh, they also do a lot. Towards tackling very specific and tangible challenges like cyber security, uh, like, you know, cloud computing, um, dev ops, these, these specific things that are, that, that government agencies face. But I think the thing that your organization can add is that the collaboration aspect is a connecting work stream across all of these. And I think it’s a really good way to look at it. And, you know, we’ve said for. Uh, for a long time and eventually got certified in it that collaboration is what makes a lot of programs successful or makes them fail because the days of not being able to make technology do things are, are, are mostly, mostly over. There are still places where you will get to the top end of something and you can’t crunch that much data for some reason and there are some constraints, but for the most part. Everything can kind of work with everything and, and it comes down to relationships and collaboration of how a couple different organizations are going to work together, realizing they got down a path where they now want to change course. And they find out they can’t because they never thought it was ever going to come to that point. And they have kind of painted themselves into a proverbial corner. So, um, so I do think that, you know, we’ve seen a lot of value from, you know, Uh, from the standard and from the best practices. So certainly thank you for all of your, uh, time and effort involved in the last decade to pull all of that together, because we have certainly, uh, stood on that previous work to, to advance our, uh, our partnerships. And, uh, we’ll make sure that we put out on our LinkedIn and our social media information about, uh, ASAP and in the upcoming March event. So with that, we just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to be part of the, uh, part of the podcast and to work with Highlight. Is there anything as a parting message or anything, uh, for whether it be, you know, your organization or anything to, to, to mention or draw folks attention to?

Norma Wattenpaugh: Well, they can certainly reach out to me. Um, my. website www. phoenixcg. com. But I think it’s a parting thought. I think I’d like to leave people thinking that, you know, collaboration is more than a process. It’s a mindset. It’s a culture. It’s a way of doing business. And it’s, it’s important, as you said, it, it, It takes more than just process to make things work. It takes a spirit of collaboration. 

Adam McNair: Great. I appreciate that. And I think that’s a good message for all of us to end on as we continue to try to do the best we can to, to, to. Run organizations and support our customers and support our employees. So, uh, thank you for taking the time to listen to the highlight cast. If you take a look at our LinkedIn page for highlight, we have, uh, content that we, uh, we put out there as well with, uh, some of the, uh, updates from the company, and if you check our website, highlight tech. com, we put up news articles and so forth there for, uh, other ways to, uh, Learn about and engage with the company. Thank you everybody. Thank you for your time and I look forward to talking to you on the next Highlight Cast. 

Announcement: The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect Highlight Technologies and or any agency of the U. S. government.

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

Adam McNair: Everybody to another episode of The Highlight Cast. This is Adam McNair. I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at Highlight. I am joined by our marketing manager, Victoria Robinson. Hi, Victoria. 

Victoria Robinson: Hi, everybody. 

Adam McNair: Uh, also, as, as usual, joined by, uh, Kevin Long, who leads up our development modernization. Good morning, Kevin.

Kevin Long: Morning, Adam. Morning, Victoria. 

Adam McNair: And, and also for this week, we, uh, are happy to have, uh, Emily Scantleberry with us, who is our BD operations manager here at Highlight. Good morning, Emily. 

Emilie Scantlebury: Hey team, and good morning all listeners. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, now in, in full honesty with everybody, I will tell you that we, it’s, we’re allowed to say good morning at kind of at any time with this crew of folks, because both Victoria and Emily are on the West Coast, and Kevin and I are on the East Coast, so the magic of Microsoft Teams allows us to get everybody here in one, one virtual room, but we are kind of spread across the country. Um, now we’re releasing this podcast on, uh, Inauguration Day. And as we wrapped up last year, one of the things that we talked a little bit about was the fact that there was still a fair amount of uncertainty as to priorities of new administration and such. And I think that’s still largely true. But with any transition and switch over, I think there’s, uh, there’s similarity between administration changes with contract transitions. I mean, just change management is, um, is, is always critical to an organization or to a program. Specifically around the administration change, I think that one of the biggest benefits of kind of getting on with the next administration, and this is with any time administrations change, is the last three to six months of any administration, whether they, you know, think they Not when or if they are coming up on, you know, an incumbent and they know that team isn’t eligible for another term. There’s a lot of inertia around not making big wide sweeping decisions and or distraction as you start to have some top, top people in the organizations leave. Um, they, they know that they are more focused on either transition or finding their next role, uh, than You know, they just can’t set long term policy. And so I think it’s, it’s helpful for us, um, as we look for, you know, we’re generally looking on a three or four year time window of things that are coming up in the future. Most of our contracts are five years long. When you’re trying to come up with a roadmap for something, there’s this kind of stopping point that makes it very difficult to look past. Um, But there’s also, in e administration, there’s going to be policy differences, and, um, those are areas where we try to put some estimates in, but it really depends on how much of that’s going to get translated to existing procurements, as opposed to things that will stay on steady, steady, uh, steady state, steady pace. So, Kevin, as far as the. Customers that you’ve interacted with, are you seeing a lot of holds on funding, holds on scope, holds on making large decisions, or is it at, is that kind of at a different level from where your programs reside to where that agency transition is taking place?

Kevin Long: So no one will ever say that it’s because of the transition. But I do notice, you know, procurements that I, that, uh, I was expecting to happen in, you know, late summer or early fall kept getting pushed, kept getting pushed, kept getting pushed. Oh, suddenly new administration is decided and, you know, the GS folks, you know, all of a sudden, you know, Put in some changes to procurement or suddenly drop something that has, uh, uh, that had been waiting since before the election. And it’s now suddenly on the ground and active, but generally, you know, I mean, you do get a lot more. Peren acting close Peren in people’s email signatures for the titles that they’re that they’re in is as the You know presidential appointees, you know, go find their their next gigs. Uh, but I mean it’s This year Previous administrations, really, it’s, it’s, it’s much more boring, I think, than a lot of people might actually think. It’s once the transition starts happening, and you’re suddenly bringing in, you know, new crops of SESs, new crops of presidential appointees, you know, all of the folks that come in, like you were saying, you get the policy changes and, you know, I mean, I’ve run SharePoint teams and so you have a hundred different, you know, Oh, well, here’s the new, uh, bio and the new new head of this. And here’s the new policy documentation. Here’s the new executive orders of the things that they’re going to do that set policy quickly and things like that. I mean, and, you know, I worked the office of the secretary, uh, when secretary Rice was leaving and secretary Clinton was starting. And then when secretary Clinton was leaving. So when you’re doing that, like literally like building or helping them digitize, you know, 23, 000 pages worth of briefing books to get the new secretaries and things like that up to speed to so that they know everything they need to know that that’s where the real work comes in, not so much with, uh, with, with contract funding and things like that, that we’ve seen that the government is very good at, uh, Maintaining itself through, uh, through changes of administration.

Adam McNair: Thankfully, I think that makes it, that makes sense. And I think it, it hits on an area that, um, is essentially a transition, but I have supported organizations that moved from one. Cabinet level agency to another or like when DHS got created I feel like that’s Oh, yeah, that’s actually much more disruptive. I think than a presidential Uh transition, I know when dhs was being created. Um There are questions about I mean this gets kind of mundane, but the details get hard The licensing, you know if you have One platform licensed to one organization and a kind of competing or non, a platform that doesn’t integrate well with that in another organization. Turning all of it off, if they have a multi year enterprise agreement, they may not be able to. 

Kevin Long: Oh yeah. 

Adam McNair: And the architecture is hard. 

Kevin Long: Oh yeah, or do you have a, Dot Miller dot gov, uh, email address all of a sudden, right? I mean, who do you, who do you call when your password needs to be reset? Oh, yeah. Um, that, that is, I mean, yeah, that was way harder than, uh, Than any transition that, that, that I’ve seen and the transition to from rice to, to, to Clinton literally still had paper books that she had to read from Clinton to carry, got to have it all digitized on iPads, um, or tablets of, of one flavor or other. But yeah, when you’re doing large sweeping changes. Like, you know, creating a new, new, uh, cabinet level agency out of, you know, out of a dozen plus other, uh, previously autonomous aid, uh, organizations was, yeah, much harder than that. I mean, and certainly much harder than, uh. You know, just updating your websites, updating your, your, uh, your policies. And I mean, the real thing, depending on where in the hierarchy of an agency you sit, it’s getting to understand how, I mean, you suddenly have a new boss, right? I mean, how they like their information. Uh, what their priorities are and then how you can, I mean, how you can help solve their problems, right? I mean, that’s the whole, the whole reason we’re there, right? If we’re not helping solve their problems, then they will go find someone else that will. And so it’s, um, you know, it’s almost like starting a new job, right? Um, with, uh, with new folks like that, but, uh, you know, much easier for us because we’re part of the, the underlying infrastructure and the, the new folks, new secretaries. Deputy secretaries under secretaries, directors, what have you, um, are, are, are coming in and having to learn a whole new, new system. I actually think this transition, given who I’ve seen so far be named, it’s there are a lot of people who were under secretaries, deputy secretaries, or previous secretaries before, so this will not be their first rodeo. Um, and so I think it’ll be interesting to see how quickly they all and their people hit the ground running once they’re in office spaces in, you know, the Pentagon or Foggy Bottom or, or, you know, Camp Springs or wherever their, their office is going to be. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, it raises a thought for me that I wonder if organizations that are used to. rotation based management Handle this easier than others. I think you know if anybody has supported Department of Defense, you know your your officer core One to two year cycles and and they are you know ready to move out the State Department. 

Kevin Long: Three years and move. 

Adam McNair: Yep. Yeah. And commonly in State Department, if somebody has a three year assignment, uh, about a year’s worth six months on the front and six months on the back end of that is language training to wherever they’re going for their next assignment. Um, because I know I had a, I had a core one time. Who was rotating to Brazil, and I was surprised to find out that he told me at some point, well, I guess this is it. I won’t be seeing you guys. I thought it was months from now. He said, well, yeah, but I have to go learn Portuguese and so I’m going to be at their, you know, uh, the FSI, which is their, their foreign service, you know, kind of college essentially, um, also. There are organizations, especially in law enforcement, you know, I know in, um, in a lot of those locations, agents will be, they will spend time on different desks, they will work South America, then they will work a regional office up here, then they will kind of move around, and so, um, I’m wondering if there is, you know, maybe more of a robust change management kind of built into the culture. The other thing that I have certainly seen is, um, I’ve had customers in the past where they, they have been in that job for 20 or 30. Um, Oh, yeah, I had 1 customer who’d been in her same job for 50 years. And so, I mean, when they, when she retired, obviously, it’s a big deal. And they put a plaque in the in the lobby of the department building for her. But nonetheless, she had that same job for, you know, five decades. And I don’t know how many administrations, um, and so continuity can be helpful from one contractor to the next. But if there are different priorities, it makes me wonder how much stasis might be in that organization. Um, are there, have you seen differences? You know, you’ve worked state a lot. Um, you’ve also worked DOD. Have you seen differences in customers that wanted to just continue to move forward with existing plans they had or those moments where they told you, like, let’s wait and see what, you know, the X administration decides that they, that, you know, they want to say or do.

Kevin Long: Yeah, so, um, generally speaking, uh, well, with DOD, the, the mission of the day is the mission of the day, and they’re going to keep going. And when they get different orders, they’ll put a cleat in the ground and they’ll turn right. In my experience, so, you know, they, they’re, they’re, uh, they’re hardcore keeping with that with, uh, with state department. Well, I mean, where diplomacy is, is sort of. Built into it, right? They do. They do read and it could be that I have twice as much time at state than I do with D. O. T. So it could be just a depth of experience that I see more nuance there that they do do a lot of. Um, and we’ll, we’ll try to, uh, not waste too many cycles, but that said at across most of, of, uh, of the agencies, they’re so large that, I mean, as soon as you get, You know, if you have, you know, three levels down, policy is rarely going, at least as far as IT goes, right, is rarely going to get, get knocked on its ear from a, uh, from a, or from an administration change. You know, I mean, I don’t care who’s president. No one wants to be hacked. Right. I don’t care who’s president. No one wants, uh, uh, outdated, uh, outdated, uh, software and, and hardware for, for their agency. Right. It is things like that are, are, are universal, uh, regardless of politics. And so with that, it’s mainly you’ll see if they think that, Hey, I’ve heard this agency is, is, uh, uh, This president’s um, priority and I think that there might be an increase in funding. They might hold off on putting something out because they think they may get some more money or, hey, I’ve heard this agency is not a president’s priority. Let’s go spend all the budget we have now because And rack and stack priorities to hole up for, uh, you know, cause rainy days could be coming. Um, so you see it some, but, but for the most part, it’s, yeah, I mean, we’re there, they’re very mission oriented and trying to get done with it, what they tried to get done at both, but you know, you’ll definitely see, you know, a new officer comes in or a new foreign service. person comes in and they’re both merit based promotion systems, right? They have, you know, two, three years to prove the value that they’ve got to that they’ve done. And so they want to put their metrics in. And so you see folks, you know, uh, not sometimes you’ll see them not wanting to carry forward what was prior so that they can put their own stamp on something to, you know, show, show how they go with that. Um, But it’s a, you, you rarely see bad ideas come through. You just see, see different approaches and you know, that’s, it’s challenging, but always interesting. 

Adam McNair: I think one of the, so something interesting about things I’ve been involved in is the, the biggest changes in the ways that I had to move forward on programs, honestly, had less to do with who was, you know, In the White House, as opposed to what someone thought about whether it was a state or federal responsibility. Um, yeah, I, at EPA, I’ve, I’ve built systems where the discussion of should this be 50 plus territories? Should this be 53 odd territories? individual systems that feed up with common data standards, or should we have a federal system? Right. And DHS had the same thing around critical infrastructure protection. Um, there’s a lot of those kinds of conversations. Labor 

Kevin Long: has those same things with, you know, you know, labor statistics and things like that, you know, absolutely. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, and so that, that becomes much more complicated, I think, because it’s not, you know, there is no One party that speaks for the states, so it’s a discussion and almost a negotiation with all those different organizations. Um, but, and I also, I mean, I’ve seen that at State Department, frankly, also, where there are some embassies that would build their own applications at times. Yeah, that’s true. There were times that we had a centralized application and then we would go look at the embassy one and realize that the embassy application was actually way more advanced than what we had. So there’s always a little bit of that across stakeholders, I think. Um, now we’ve been through various administration transitions and I’ve, I’ve been around a lot of them. Um, I’ve certainly had customers who sat in on transition teams, and I think, I think all of them are hard. I think, um, the shorter it is, the more difficult. And I, and so I think the incoming administration is going to have, um, extra challenges from the standpoint of not quite as much time to, to prepare. And that’s just like, I equate to contract transitions. Sometimes the hand wringing and discussions and all of the extra thinking and all that that comes in to the transition period, sometimes shorter is almost just as good in some ways, because you can track risks, and you can either track them for 90 days or 30 days, or you can just work on them. And more times better, but I think, you know, as I think about transitions that, That I’ve worked on, or that we’ve worked on. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked on one that was easy, regardless of how much time we had. No, 

Kevin Long: no, transitions will, will expand to fill all available time. Yeah. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, how do you, how do you feel? And one of the things that we often do is, we assign somebody to be the transition manager who’s not the PM so that somebody can, um, you know, focus on transition activities with the thought that there’s going to be enough for PM to do, uh, above and beyond that. Are there other things in transitions that you’ve seen that really seemed to help? Cause you’ve certainly been involved in a lot of them. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. Um, strong knowledge management is really key because, uh, when you’re coming in cold and everybody comes in cold, unless they’re. You know, staying in the same job, right? Um, knowing where you can go to find what you need to know and having organized it in a way, because I mean, there, I mean, there are rabbit holes, you know, even six layers deep in, in an agency, given the level of sophistication of the, of the federal government that someone’s going to need to know, right? If it’s, you know, you know, the deputy assistant undersecretary for, you know, email. Right. Um, there is, uh, there, there is no shortage of things that they don’t know what they don’t know and having a, a good place. That is organized and searchable to be able to, to go in and, and find what you don’t know. I mean, even if it’s just walking in and picking up code base from, for another system, right? It’s what has been done in the past, you know, anything that prevents you from making the same mistake twice, just because you didn’t know is, is so crucial and has been, um, the, the most important thing that I’ve seen in, Any sort of transition, you know, that, that, that 1200 page briefing book that, that lets you know what’s going on, what they’re working on and what needs to happen. And, uh, I’ve seen some transitions where you walk in and they say, we have nothing written down. This is Bob. Bob knows everything. Bob’s going to walk around with you for a week. You can ask him anything you want. And that’s great because Bob knows everything, right? But you don’t necessarily know what. And when Bob goes away in a week It’s painful, um, but I’ve also walked in and been given here’s your login to Confluence. We store everything here. Here’s how you search it. Here’s how you, here’s how you look into it. These are the documents that we put in. If you’re missing something, let us know. We’ll go find it. You may just not have permissions for it. And that, um. It was, I mean, the first time it happened, it was shocking to me. And then I had a big grin on my face and then I, I, you know, had me and the team folks, you know, dive into it and see, see what it was. Uh, and. You know, really have a much better understanding of what we were getting into. So that that’s what I always wish for in any transition is, is knowledge of what you’re walking into in a well organized manner.

Adam McNair: Yeah. And I think that probably ties into, I think one of the major success factors for a transition is how well the procurement was run, you know, as I’m sitting here thinking about kind of the, the, the difficult stories of transitions over the years. When they did not leave themselves, and sometimes this can’t be helped, but when they did not leave themselves enough time for an adequate transition at all. Now look, people protest things, they protest things multiple times. One of the programs we’re on now was protested two or three times before we started and I know we were, well, because at one point we were all flying out there and I was on the plane and didn’t get the note that the thing was cancelled until, uh, I was, I was flying and I got email, uh, I got Wi Fi to check email on the flight and I was flying to St. Louis and got the note that it’s protested and you’re, you’re stopped work. Flight St. Louis 

Kevin Long: through this, through a blizzard.

Adam McNair: yes, through a blizzard and, and it was my daughter’s birthday. So that’s, That’s how I know it was February because it was February 20th because that’s her birthday. So I was, uh, uh, I was flying out there. I was like, well, that’s, that’s exceptional. So I started texting people and telling them, like, I think I got, Kevin, you got to turn around, right? 

Kevin Long: No, I was stuck. See, you guys flew out of national. I was flying out of Dulles. Here’s the irony. Tamar, Adam, and I were all flying out there for that. Tamar made it first. Adam was in the air and then got turned and had to get turned around. I had another customer and had to be in St. Louis and I had my flight canceled. That’s right, because you got stuck in Dulles. Didn’t you end up like in the hotel or something? I ended up at a hotel in Dulles barely making it there because of the, because of the ice storm.

Absolutely. And so y’all got there but had to turn around. I 

Adam McNair: couldn’t actually. That comes back to me now because I started out the flight out of Dulles and And, and because everything was getting canceled and delayed for weather, I switched it to national and drove to national and they kept canceling flights. So by the time I got on a plane, I got there like 6 a. m. By the time I got on a plane at like noon, that was technically the 7 a. m. flight that was supposed to be leaving. And then as I was in the air, Tamar had just landed. And I texted her and told her, so she never left the airport. She just went back to the air desk and said, can you please put me on the next one back home? So she flew back home and I got there. And by the time I got there, there were no other flights back. And so then I came back the following day. So that was, that was exciting, but, but we, we digress, I guess. I think, I think the amount of time that people give themselves For the procurement and the amount of information that goes into it, you know, I won’t get into specific, you know, contract instances, but, um, what, I mean, one of them that is, is old and dated enough now that I don’t think anybody would be, uh, would be, you know, offended by, you know, we did one at USAID about 15 years ago. And we got the note that we were awarded the contract on a Friday afternoon and the contract had ended that day. And so they said, look, if you don’t get these people offer letters and get them signed over the weekend, their badges are going to lapse and we’re not going to be able to, 

Kevin Long: and it’ll take us three months to get them re badged.

Adam McNair: Yeah. And they were working active systems. That turned into a major, major challenge. I mean, we got everybody signed over the weekend and calling people and half of them don’t know who I am. And I’m calling them at their home and saying, you know, by the way, your existing company may not have told you, but your contract is over. And if they have not told you that they’re going to lay you off, that is likely going to happen on Monday. Um, sorry to let you know all that. But good news is here’s an offer letter. Yeah, and You know, so I’ve I’ve I’ve been through that When the government hasn’t told you whether they have incumbent staff or not And so you’re not sure 

Kevin Long: up there and you’re literally introduced to hey, this is Bob He knows everything and you start talking with him and you find out that Bob doesn’t know his contract ended 

Adam McNair: Yes, I’ve had multiple people Actually, you and I were both in the room for one of those. Yes, absolutely. Where we informed someone that their contract was over because we were meeting with them as a transition activity and they didn’t realize their contract was over. Wow. And, and then we’ve also had, uh, You know, situations where the requirements as documented and awarded. Now I sat in a transition kickoff, um, and some organizations will talk to you from the time the contract is awarded and others will not. And so, you know, what I always try to do. Is as soon as you find out you’ve won the contract, you call them and say, Hi, we’re really excited about this award. Can you let me know anything that’s keeping you up at night? Things that you think are big risks, in flight projects that are going on. How staffed is this program? Like, is, is the work going okay or poorly or, you know, help, help get me up to situational awareness for where you are. And sometimes they will do that. And sometimes they will tell you this has to wait until the kickoff and then you’ve lost, I mean, sometimes weeks. I, I’ve had contracts that we’ve won in the past that it, it might be, you might have a 30 day transition period and they can’t get the right people in the room and they won’t have a, a, a kickoff for three weeks. So you’re just sitting there going, I hope this isn’t, isn’t, I hope, I hope they wrote down what they actually needed. Yeah, and I, I sat at a, uh, Department of Justice transition meeting years and years ago. This wasn’t a Highlight contract. And, um, as we sat there, it was an AppDev contract, and they said, well, you know, you’re gonna need, we, we saw your org chart and the people that you proposed, but you’re gonna need an ops team to run the servers. That’s simple. What servers? They said, well, we, we had a couple words in it, about it in the statement of work. Okay. What the Statement of Work said, it was like 15 pages of all this, all these applications that we had to develop against, and there was one line in it that says, and ancillary support as necessary, which may include, and it had various things, servers, etc. Well, it was only an 18 person program, so it’s not like, I mean, if you have hundreds of people at times, there’s a, there’s kind of an economy scale, and you can go, okay, let’s figure out. We, we bid. You know, three, three, six person, um, app teams. Right. And here they’re like, well, who’s going to run the servers? We don’t have any server people. We didn’t bid any. And that’s, that’s a failing of their, of the way that their, their requirements were documented. So I think a lot of times it’s how hard or easy it’s going to be, is almost at times kind of determined before you Before you ever set foot on the ground. 

Kevin Long: Oh, yeah.

Adam McNair: Um, also from a communication standpoint In your experience how how how willing are multiple people to to pick up the phone and just level with you and tell you where things are as opposed to kind of this, um kind of longer term Term formal chain things come to you only once sanitized by somebody else and sent to the contracting officer 

Kevin Long: It’s a coin flip. I mean honestly, uh, and it is not based on the Culture of the agency so much as the culture of the office that you’re walking into and how many How used to transitioning in new contracts they are, right? Um, you know, I’ve had some, uh, I’ve had some really good ones where people were very, very upfront and very frank, but spoke with a level of assumed knowledge that, that was, that made it difficult that you got up to speed in the hindsight after you stepped on a couple landmines. You’re like, oh. Of course you can’t put, you know, Bob in the same room as Joe. Ha! Oops! Right? Um, but But they were very frank, right? And with that, and then I’ve had other ones where, you know, well, you know, send us the slide deck. I’ll tell you if it’s, if it’s okay. And, um, uh, I will only communicate to you through the, uh, Uh, uh, items identified in the quasp as deliverables, and then I will take the three days to review them and I will give you specific comments and then you will have five days to get them back to me. And that is how we will talk. Yeah, right. And then I’ve had other ones where you walk in. It’s like, Hey, we’re so it’s so awesome that you’re here. Uh, we’re excited. These are the things. That we have going on right now. This is what I’m worried about. Um, Do you have someone that knows X, Y, and Z? Because if you don’t, you know, let’s tweak some things. Because, uh, this is the direction that we’re going. That has changed since the procurement dropped. Still in scope, but, you know, a little bit different flavor. And where You know, it’s when, when the customer is, you know, one team with the contractor, right. You know, rah, rah, like that’s, that’s where you, you really, really get it. Um, and not that they’re, you know, trying to do personnel services, things on non personnel services, contracts are telling you who to hire, but giving you information. On what’s going on on the ground to help you succeed. I mean, that’s, that’s crucial. 

Adam McNair: Well, I’ll tell you, it’s just a scenario that comes to mind that I’ve had to deal with a lot of times, which is hard is you get into an organization and you look at the existing team and it becomes clear that one person or a couple of people or a team of people are both absolutely necessary from a technical perspective. standpoint and absolutely also the problem for why that that team has not been able to move forward with modernizing or improving or enhancing things. Yep. And it becomes, it becomes, those are very, very difficult things. What I tell most people, and I know, I know Kevin, we’ve certainly talked through this, is if we can get through a transition period and not have anybody be really, really angry. Oh, 

Kevin Long: that’s a huge win.

 It’s, it’s, that’s majorly successful. Because there’s going to be problems and just the changing nature of it.

Kevin Long: Oh yeah, um, identifying, you know, having someone come and say, all right, on the chance that someone needs to be the bad guy, who’s the one that delivers the bad news, right? Because it doesn’t get better with age and they don’t like to hear it, but we’re, you’re not doing your work if you, if you don’t do it, right. It’s yeah. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. And I, I, um, I won a help desk program, um, one time out in Omaha and showed up to do the transition. And the direct feedback from the customer was the manager is absolutely a problem. He’s absolutely in the way. He won’t listen to me. He’s very argumentative. But I think he’s the only one who knows how to do most of the things that we do technically. So he can’t be our manager long term, but I also don’t think you can do without him. Thanks.

Kevin Long: Here’s our problem. Give him a job. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, and just like, just like when, you know, you talk about, oh, if you’re going to look for somebody to hire, at some point a job wreck turns into people and you’re not going to find a job. 19 bullets of, of, you know, capabilities and skills, it’s a person and you have to figure out how they’re going to interact with other people. I think transitions kind of go that way too. And I think that’s the, you know, the preparation is one thing. And, um, you know, but mindset of customers and staff and how well they work together or not, because one of the things, a lot of the times that we end up winning a contract, you know, It is likely because things were not perfect in that environment or you would have not taken it away from another vendor. Uh, now there are times, that’s another thing that happens in the industry that’s a whole nother conversation is, sometimes things are awarded on cost and so you might have a 30 person high performing team and show up and say, Well, based on the way your procurement was written, we bid 25. Right. That, and that’s, can be also be disruptive. Um, but, you know, talking about, you know, procurements, I, I think the whole pandemic, everybody going remote, I was concerned that we were going to see no procurements come out for, you And I think at some level, contracting offices have kept up with or been just as responsive, if not more so, uh, than when they were working in the office. And I think that might be one of those things that, you know, when their phone doesn’t ring off the hook or they don’t have people constantly with that, well, they didn’t get back to me yet. I’m just going to go stand by their office and wait to talk to them type of scenarios. Um, so we haven’t had that problem of nothing, you know, nothing coming out. Um, but have you seen a change in procurement, whether it be kind of tailing off of this administration or from the pandemic? I mean, have you seen procurement things change over the last, you know, six or eight months that, that are, that have interested you?

Kevin Long: I think it’s, um, I agree other than like, you know, some different delays that have come out, but, you know, we’ve been seeing white papers come out. We’ve been seeing, you know, uh, RFPs drop. I mean, things are still still churning. Uh, for sure. I mean, I’d love to hear what Emily thinks. With that, since she’s neck deep in, in all of the analytics around that and could actually probably speak, speak with, with, you know, more than just the gut feel that I love to run with.

Emilie Scantlebury: Yeah, I mean, there is a significant rise. In procuring emerging tech, and I think that makes sense. You know, as the I. T. Targets is constantly shifting and moving. Um, the federal government is really focusing on on progressing are advancing and emerging technologies. Um, I think that’s reflected in a lot of things like just a Polaris just, uh, drop that draft R. P. Um, and being able to focus on. On that emerging tech now, additionally, the administration also said that they’re going to be focusing on procuring through small business. Um, so I anticipate that there may be a rise in procuring, uh, through some of our socioeconomic set asides, um, or small business set asides as well. So 2 interesting shifts there and I, I think the, the emerging tech is, um. That is a topic that is, it is, it is hard to decide how to procure around that. I have seen, do you put Emerging Tech into your regular procurement and then you’re going to have a company that doesn’t specialize in it? Or do you try to only buy around Emerging Tech? And I think it, I don’t know if there’s a, if there’s a right way to do it. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen some of these emerging tech type contracts and they’re, they’ve always been agency specific. They’ve not been GSA, you know, specific that I’ve, at least that I’ve been involved in. And they, they lent themselves to smaller task orders, a couple hundred thousand dollars to go in and do, you know, back when it was called big data or whatever. Um, and then I’ve seen it kind of folded into to other deals. I, I don’t know if there’s a, a right way to do that. Um, Emily, so you, you mentioned GSA Polaris and there, there have been other kind of, we’ve got, we’re, we’re in a season of other large procurements, uh, G wax like that. I mean DIA site three is under evaluation now. Um, the. Polaris program has been talked about a lot. COSP4 is out there, you know, STARS3 went in a little while ago, still under evaluation. As far as procurement methods or the way they talk about it, are you seeing more accessibility based on the pandemic than, The way we had before, are they talking about things differently? Are they doing things differently that you’ve seen in terms of the pandemic? You know, of course they still have those clauses nestled in to, to the proposals and the draft RFPs on being able to really thrive in a virtual workspace. And I think as an aside, uh, that goes even beyond just emerging tech. We also see that in our communications, um, and strategic comms proposals as well. Um, in terms of the way they’re procuring these, you know, Adam, you’re right. It’s a mixed bag. It’s sometimes nestled under task orders, sometimes, um, pushed into a larger procurement. So kind of a bit of both. Yeah. 

Kevin Long: And I, and Simmers are all over the place too now with OTs and whatnot. 

Adam McNair: I do like the fact that the online industry day, I think is a major, major positive advancement. Um, there’s been so many times where either you couldn’t get in and you couldn’t get signed up for one of them. Or you’re there trying to furiously take notes because they’re, they’re just transmitting a ton of information and it’s very, very hard to capture all of it. You know, not to mention the fact that, I mean, down into kind of the boring details of sometimes you couldn’t hear. Sometimes you’re crammed into a relatively tiny room. I went to one for, um, out in Pax River about two years ago, and they didn’t have mics for the people asking questions. And so you’re getting answers from the government that seem impactful, but you’re kind of trying to play like, like Jeopardy to figure out what the question actually was. And it very hard. So like the, the online nature of it, I think is, um, is great. And 

Kevin Long: I haven’t had to sit behind someone six and a half feet tall on an online industry day yet. It’s great. 

Emilie Scantlebury: And, and not just the industry too, you know, from a procurement professional standpoint, it seems simple, but it saves them a huge chunk of time and travel, um, and having to get some of that set up and they can use that time to focus on the procurement itself.

Adam McNair: Yeah. One other thing that I think is interesting in the way that they’re pushing some of these procurements out is at least a couple of the ones that we are looking at, uh, require oral presentations of of some type. Yeah. And it appears that we’re able to do that as a recorded video. And the first times that I heard about doing an oral presentation as a recorded video, it was met with immediate pushback, at least from the companies that I was at, because they said that’s going to cost us a fortune to go in and edit video and do all of that. And I feel like maybe, And Victoria and Emily, I know you both, you know, are embedded with the tools a lot at this point. I feel like all of the collaboration tools and ability to record and all of that has come a long way, um, you know, for, for the kinds of things that you’re seeing. Are there, are the standard tools that essentially ship out of the box almost with Microsoft or a Mac at this point, are you able to produce that type of media without major strain?

Victoria Robinson: I mean, I think that a lot of these tools are built just for times like this, and I think that a lot of these Boxed, you know, software that you can just get are ready to meet these needs that we have across the industry right now with the pandemic. I think, uh, teams is obviously a great resource for us when we come to, you know, doing mediums like this, like a podcast. And then you can go even further and use, um, SharePoint sites. And then on top of that, Microsoft Stream and all these other resources, you can build off of it with Adobe. And, you know, you’re ready to meet the needs of the government in that way to make sure that you’re producing things that reflect the brand or the company that you’re working for. So I think. I think we have the resources that we need for these kinds of requests. I think we, people have been anticipating this need for a little while. So it’s just kind of coming to fruition now. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, it does. It does feel like we’ve hit a spot where we’re not having significant challenges from a technology standpoint, at least as far as working together or producing a product. I mean, I think the The Office 365 tools, I mean, even since we’ve been using Teams to record the podcast, they’ve added capabilities in stream that allows us to manipulate the video and move it around so much more easily. Than uh even it was a year ago. So I I think we are Um, we are seeing that move forward, um in in easier ways Um, and yeah one of the I guess Talking a little bit about communication channels. So emily as you go in and as you’re seeing the government release information about Procurements and their procurement forecasts. Where are we, where are we finding out that they are doing these things? You know, when GSA is doing Polaris, is this a check on their website? Is this the go to gov when, and they’re mentioning it? Are we, are we on some mailing list? that it’s coming in? Are we, we reading, you know, Washington technology and GCN and all of the other industry papers? How are we actually finding out when they’re trying to communicate to us? 

Emilie Scantlebury: Well, we, we look for smoke signals. No, I’m just kidding. Obviously. Um, no 

Kevin Long: carrier pigeons.

Emilie Scantlebury: Exactly. Um, no, it’s been really interesting. I I’ve seen kind of a modernization. You bring up Polaris is a really good example of this. Um, their GSA in particular is really focused on using their communities of interest, um, which are almost functioning as blogs where industry can go in and literally drop a comment as government releases, uh, some of those, some of those draft RFPs and some of, you know, even RFIs for that matter. Um, It is open. The digitization of our workforce has opened the boundaries and communication channels to the government in ways that I have not seen in my career thus far. Um, it’s been really impactful. Not just that, uh, a rise in LinkedIn functionality. It sounds a little bit silly, I’m sure, but, um, a lot of connectivity in LinkedIn, both from a partner engagement standpoint, but also from the government. I’ve seen them contracting officers put up. Hey, we’ve released an RFI. Um, have you considered responding? So, kind of really, it’s opened the floodgates, um, and kind of really connected us in a way that is interesting to look at as we all sit in our homes. I feel that we are. able to really talk to them more clearly. So, 

Adam McNair: yeah, I, so that, that’s, that’s interesting. I, I, I didn’t realize that they were using a community of interest that way. And I think it’s, it’s nice to not have to search too hard and that if you, if you kind of know where you can look for things, I think um, that was always, that was always a challenge. I’ve had different accounts that I was responsible for, um, whether it was, it was Justice or DHS or state or whatever over the years and I was trying to stay on top of events or things that I should be aware of or involved in and It was always really really hard. It was a combination of Of me and our BD teams and all of that. And I, you know, I’d get a call from, from Liz, who was my BD counterpart for a long time. And she said, have you registered for such and such? And I said, I haven’t even heard of what that is. What do you, what is that? And it would, it was a lot of, And then it was a lot of sending paperwork to them and waiting for them to verify that you were going to be in on it and kind of not getting information out. Um, and then finding out later that maybe slides got posted, but you weren’t sure if they were emailed out or whatever. So I think there’s, um, Some predictability in those, those channels for, for communication. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s encouraging to know that, that that’s, that that’s improving. And I know, um, I think category management in general on, on these procurements is, is also helping a lot. I know, um, I had the benefit of when I was in the Voyagers program with ActDiak, um, uh, Laura from GSA, who now runs category management, was, uh, was part of that program at the same time. And, um, She was a leadership from, at the time, a co chair or something like that, as I recall, and super, super sharp. And I think, I think she and GSA have done a lot of work in the last however many years to take some of the ambiguity out of what these different vehicles are. Because, you know, I’ve had conversations with customers over the years, well, why would I want to go to STARS II versus COSP II? I don’t know, I mean Pick either one, and if you want to, you can call both of them and see who’s willing to give you a lower procurement fee, or, but I don’t really care. Having multiple vehicles that have a lot of overlap and not knowing where to put things, uh, you know, for a while, this goes back quite a ways, but at one point GSA had their answer contract that was supposed to be their big, this is where we’re going to put all of our major programs, and then they had the millennia contract. And then they had Millennia Light, and they were close enough in scope that it really became about what vendors were in what area of what vehicle as to, as to what, which, you know, what got where. Originally they thought they were going to use Millennia for really big deals, and Millennia Light for smaller things, but then there was also Answer, and, and, as, as, as technology converged, they used to have contracts for telecom, And then IT services. Well, telecom’s IT services now. It’s not twisting copper wire for phones anymore. So, um, I think, I think the category management is, is certainly helping a lot on that. Um, I’ll leave you with, with, with one thought here around the idea of, of getting conflicting information. Uh, something that happened several years ago that was, I had a customer that they sent us the procurement in paper. And it was, it was our recompete, and we got a call that said, well, they mailed it. You should, you know, cause they, my PM said, Hey, our recompete’s out. I said, I haven’t seen it. Well, they mailed it to us, mailed it to us. So they mailed it to us and I get the copy of it at my office. And then I get a call from the security office of the company that says, Hey, in another building over here, we got a cleared package for you. So I go over to go open it. It’s the RFP. Again, but this RFP has a paragraph, one paragraph that is classified. So we respond and we noticed they had different due dates. They were off by like a couple of days. And so we called and called the contracting officer and said, Hey, I’m trying to de conflict the, which, which date is correct, took a while for him to get back to us. So we responded, we submitted for the one that was the early one. And they finally called back and they said, well, no, those are two procurements. Well, but they’re the same statement of work and they said, well, yeah, one of them is going to be high side. And one of them is going to be on class. And only one of them was my work. And so what happened was we ended up winning both of them, but we had no staff to do the one on the high side because I didn’t know that that wasn’t our contract. And so they said, well, where’s all of the TSSCI people that are going to do this? And I said, well, I really didn’t. I’m sorry, but I, I didn’t know these were different programs and we wrote them and I submitted proposals to both of them because I was concerned that you put different numbers on them. I thought it was some kind of clerical error. So I submitted to both. Right. And we won both. And it was such an awkward, weird transition time because we had no idea even what the other program was. And, um, but that was paper and that really wasn’t that long ago. So those are the kinds of things that have happened in government contracting with, you know, kind of lack of lack of planning around, you know, good communication channels and, um, and planning on procurements. Well, with that, uh, thank you guys for your, uh, for your time listening to us today. We have some other topics that we’re going to include on future episodes. We’ve had some employees who have asked us, uh, one of the topics around leadership development and, um, how do you, how do you develop leadership in a company, uh, specifically going from a, from a project into management roles, whether that be a project manager or department manager, things like that. Uh, we also had a question around the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion program at Highlight and how we, uh, how we’ve come about to have that program, how it operates, uh, what our thoughts and intent are there, and that is something that we’ve put a lot of, uh, work and effort into, so we’ll make sure that we, uh, we address both of those topics on, uh, on future episodes, and, uh, so thank you, uh, Victoria, thank you, Kevin, thank you, Emily, and, uh, everybody, uh, take, take care. We’ll talk to you on the next Highlight cast. Thank you. Thanks y’all. Thank you. 

Announcement: The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect highlight technologies and or any agency of the US government.

 

Announcement: Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia, you are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long. 

Adam McNair: Welcome to another episode of The Highlight Cast, so this is Adam McNair and I’m joined for our special year end podcast edition with, uh, as always, uh, Kevin Long, but also this session, we’re joined with, by Ashley Nichols, Tamar Mintz, and Victoria Robinson. So this is our, uh, leadership and marketing team, um, here at, at Highlight, and wanted to get some representation from both the, uh, The Ops side and the BD side and our marketing team. So, uh, Victoria leads up marketing, uh, Tamar and Kevin are part of the leadership team, two of the leaders of our, uh, our delivery organization. And, uh, Ashley leads up corporate development here. So, uh, thank you for, uh, taking time to participate in the highlight cast. Welcome everybody. All right. So as we look at 2020 and what we are going to talk about here today. So some of the podcasts we’ve done here earlier, we’ve talked about what a strange and different year it really has been. We’ve gone completely to telework. We’ve, um, we’ve got a pandemic. Um, You know, that has really changed the way we do business and some of the kinds of business that we are doing. Um, and I think the, the first thing we wanted to talk about before we get into some of those specifics would be, uh, what’s everybody most, most proud of that they were able to accomplish this year. Uh, we can just go, uh, around the room, uh, go, go to. Tomorrow first, maybe, or there’s, what’s, what’s something that you look back on that you think is, um, you’re proud about from, from this year? 

Tamar Mintz: Uh, so that’s such a good question. I think the thing I’m most proud of is how our team has cohesively come together. I think this year has been tumultuous to say the least, and allowing for flexibility, increased communication, and letting our team be okay with, uh, the somewhat lack of structure. And being okay with experiencing whatever they have to feel in this time, um, has been something that I think our organization has done really well as a whole. And I think that our employees have really felt the fact that, you know, the priority is obviously. And we’ll always be our customer, but we can’t support our customer without the team that we have. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I think that’s a very, very good point because I do think, um, and we’ll certainly talk more about this as we talk about some of the support that, um, specifically your team has, has been engaged in, but the whole company. Um, but I don’t think you can, Consider yourself to be a reasonable person and sit and have a conversation about acting like it’s just business as usual and just go get things done. And, um, I mean, when you’re at the point where you’re wiping groceries down with wipes and having to have conversations about, is this a thing that we’re supposed to do? Like, life’s just not normal. And so pretending that everybody is going to be able to act like it isn’t, I think is foolish. Shouldn’t it? At least when you went to an office, you could maybe compartmentalize a little bit. So if you had somebody, you know, painting your living room, you’re like, Wow, that’s a disruption, but I’m going to the office. You didn’t get out of this because you’re also working at it at home as well. Um, Ashley, how about you? What’s Uh, you know, kind of sticks out to you about, uh, about the year. 

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, I think that, you know, from a growth and development perspective, I think that, uh, you know, in the last, you know, half of the year, especially we’ve really been able to grow the team, you know, and that was obviously the ability to do that is based on some external factors, you know, with some other like corporate growth that we had. But to really bring in some folks, I think, who really enhance that process to, to really, I think the skills, uh, of our team have really come up in this last year when it comes to growth. And I’m talking across the board, like proposals, you know, BD, capture, especially in this environment where you can’t do all of the networking and, and normal stuff that you do. You know, folks have gotten. Proactive and creative about how they are, you know, leaning into some of the new paradigm for for how you connect with people. Um, and strangely enough, even given all the limitations, we’ve developed some of our largest best most strategic relationships during this time. Um, and, you know, that speaks a lot to the team and their flexibility.

And, uh, you know, I really liked the way it set us up for the next year, honestly. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I, I, I agree. And I, I, I think in the business, the, um, the ability to network and have those kinds of conversations is really different. I’ve done some zoom. You know, Microsoft Teams, virtual networking activities, and I think it is, they are as effective as, as the planning that goes into them a lot of times, um, the ones that are kind of just one big room and nothing’s facilitated, it’s tough to just sit there and kind of, uh, Um, you know, big mosaic of a bunch of squares of people. Um, but the ones where they have breakout sessions or smaller groups and they allow you to have kind of the, uh, that speed dating, a few minutes with a small group and then go to another one, those seem to be pretty effective. Um, I think Kevin for, oh, go ahead, Ashley. 

Ashley Nichols: As I said, I, one of the things that I’ve noticed that a couple of the folks are doing that was really effective, you know, that Go to lunch, have a coffee is where you really cemented some of those personal relationships, because as much as you like to get away from it, personal relationships and the vibe you get from people is a lot of the reasons why people team with you or vice versa. And I think people have really been spending the extra time to try and create that personal connection in these, you know, weird new constrictions. So their efforts are, Yeah, 

Adam McNair: and I will say this much. It is, it is so much easier from a logistics standpoint. I mean, one of the things that I always really did not look forward to about networking sessions is there’s nothing worse. There are a lot of things worse, but it’s not a good thing to get done with your work day and have it be like 530 or six o’clock. All right, now I gotta go drive in traffic for an hour and 20 minutes to go get to DC to then be friendly for an hour and a half and get home at 9 30 or 10 o’clock at night. That’s I mean, some people may thrive off of that. I will tell you that that’s not that’s not something I’m crazy about. Um, but the ability to have somebody say, Hey, can we jump on a call and chat at five o’clock? Yeah, if I’m just sitting here working, absolutely. You know, I’m, I’m happy to do that. Um, and, and taking the logistical part of it, um, has been, has big, been a big impact. But I also think that’s just in general, um, the, the, the, Nature of of not having both the commute, but also, you know, offices as I look back on, um, the amount of miles I would put just either going to D. C. or Rockville or Ashburn or wherever that whole day. You’ve got a big slice disrupted out of it. And you don’t have that as much anymore. And so when you talk about commutes to the office, there’s I mean, one of the things that Kevin used to say was that you could, your commute to our office or your commute to Boston took the same amount of time. Absolutely did. And so I know there was a lot of, of changes in your operational corner of the, of the, of the company, uh, as things change. So what, what, what, what things are you proud of from the year? 

Kevin Long: Yeah, so Tamar and Ashley got the, the. All those things too. And so I’ll hit the, the logistical, uh, things. I, I’m stunned. And Adam mentioned Boston. So that’s where I’ll go. Uh, that we were able to, uh, when COVID hit in early March, uh, I was visiting our Kessel Run team in Boston. At where we had an entire office building floor set up for for software developers and folks, um, and we’re providing hardware and software tools, but, you know, hardware for hundreds of developers, uh, designed to work in a specific location and in. In a week, they put in the clutch, shifted gears, and literally was able to move out of a space, store the hardware that couldn’t be put in someone’s house, procure different types of hardware, install, configure, secure, lock down, repack, ship out, confirm they got it, and have people up and running for 600 developers? In a week, so the fact that that we were able to really help our customers move from we’re co locating and we’re working and we’re working side by side to we’re all going to work from home. We need different equipment and different technology to. simulate working side by side in, in no time at all. It was, uh, I don’t know how they did it, but they did it. It was amazing. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. And I, I agree with you. I think there’s so many, um, you know, your example, certainly. And when we start to talk about SBA, that’ll be another, I think to Ashley’s point about just the, the operations as a whole, um, there were so many things that we accomplished that would have been difficult anyway, would have been Let alone to be doing them in the midst of we’re not going to do it from the office. We’re going to do it from home and we’re going to do it with a pandemic going on and all the other things that happened with that. Um, now, Victoria, you’re, um, you, you just joined us this year, but certainly in that, this amount of time, I feel like have, Um, it really advanced the way we communicate externally and have been a real integral part of the team. Uh, and the time that you’ve, um, you know, as you look back at, at this year and joining the company, you know, what are, what are things that you’re proud of? 

Victoria Robinson: I mean, a big aspect of it is being able to even join the team amidst a pandemic. I mean, finding a job in the middle of a pandemic is already challenging. I also, uh, moved across the country this year. So being a part of a new team, also transitioning to being remote full time and, Being able to, you know, put that structure in place for a marketing department that, you know, hasn’t gotten a lot of, you know, resources recently, you know, it’s been a great transition. And it’s really cool to see all the growth this year and how we can, you know, Elevate that for next year too. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I do. I remember, uh, as, as Victoria and I were talking, it was, you know, well, I’m, I’m here locally and I can get the laptop, but then in a couple of weeks, I’m going to be in California. And, um, you know, that that’s, that’s something that I think has been really powerful for us as a company is the, uh, the, the mindset of we can have, you Folks that are working from anywhere. And so, uh, we have, it’s interesting kind of the intellectual boundaries you set up. We’ve always had a team in Cincinnati that’s been supporting some of our internal activities. But somehow that was, that was more okay. Or that wasn’t an issue. But if you just said eight months ago or 10 months ago or a year ago, um, are, are we going to have some people that are running into their team leads and managers and functions in the company that are going to work from California? But I say, well, not California. Like, I don’t know what it is. It’s different about Cincinnati as it is California, but somehow it would have been like, ah, that seems too far, two more 

Ashley Nichols: hours. Two time zones. 

Adam McNair: And, and I think, uh, the ability to, um, draw on talent, you know, from across the country is, is important. And I think, um, the ability to have. Um, you know, different, different viewpoints and different perspectives and diversity of opinion. And, uh, I don’t know if there’s something, you know, innate to say that somebody with a Midwestern opinion or a West Coast opinion is, is going to look at something, you know, are our marketing materials going to look different? Maybe, you know, and I, I think, um, I think it’s good to get some different, you know, viewpoints and just, um, Tactically, it’s also handy because now, uh, you know, Victoria is always available in the evening because the evening’s not really the evening. It’s, it’s the afternoon for her. So that’s, uh, that’s helpful often as well. Yeah, I would, um, I’d say for something, you know, that I, I am, am proud of is that, um, there were a lot of things that were different and changed and growth and everything this year. And I think that, um, I think everyone handled it really, really professionally as a, you know, positive and, and thinking we were going to be able to do it. And I’ve worked a lot of places where internal departments screamed at each other. And, um, you know, there was a lot of, of kind of infighting or arguing and all of that. And, um, whether it be bids we were doing in the middle of this or, or the, you know, the big programs that, That we were ramping up or, you know, the, the relocation of teams in Boston, all these things. Um, I, I feel like it, I’m not going to say that it wasn’t stressful, but I would say that I felt like we weren’t creating our own stress, you know, not creating your own stress and not creating your own problems, I think is, um, Is a real testament to Just 

Kevin Long: the team not making the world any harder than it already is this year. Absolutely 

Adam McNair: Yeah, yeah, and I I think that’s um I really respect the people we have on our team because I think that’s a personal thing I don’t think that’s uh, you know, you set a corporate policy that you’re not going to be, you know Not going to be difficult. Um, I I think that’s hr policy 

Ashley Nichols: 2. 3. 1. Why did not do not be difficult?

Adam McNair: All right. And subsection four. Please see the, don’t do stupid things clause. Yeah. Like I, you know, I, I think we’ve, um, and I think that goes back to culture. You know, I, I think that, um, there are, there have been books written about the value of culture in an organization and, uh, There’s, there’s so much that you can do from a policy standpoint and write and say, but I think as everybody acts and the behaviors they exhibit, that’s, that’s, that also sets the pace for other people. And, um, it’s just kind of a known thing that you’re not gonna, uh, what you’re not going to do and what you are going to do from a. The way that you engage and talk and everything else. And so I think that’s, that’s the whole group that has, um, it’s helped us be that way. And, um, and so I, I think, you know, going into, um, into more details on things that happened this year. And, um, you know, I think our support of, um, Our small business administration customer has been really, really hugely transformational. Um, and I mean, I, I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s the biggest, it’s the biggest undertaking that I’ve ever seen or been a part of. And, uh, you know, I, I used to be really impressed about the fact that I’d been involved in like four or five hundred person contract transitions and that doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal anymore. Um, Tamara, you want to talk a little bit about just You know, the personal experience of what it was like, because, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about it here and, um, you know, this company’s talked a little bit about it, that we’re supporting their, uh, some of the loan processing, and it was involved in ramping up, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people, but I was legitimately concerned about you or, you know, during a lot of that in a lot of our team during, during a lot of that. But personally, what was the tempo of that like from about, I guess, I guess we started, what was it, about March, I guess? 

Tamar Mintz: March, yeah. Um, So I think, you know, this program came to us sort of as a little bit of a surprise. Um, we’ve been supporting SBA since 2017 and have been supporting, um, disasters across the country since then. So that work wasn’t foreign to us. But the scale of the SBA work was, and so I think we were just starting to get into the new norm of how to communicate, how to work with each other remotely, and then the customer said, um, small businesses are being impacted. We need more help. And I think this is a true testament to that. That they came to us is based off of the relationship that we have with the customer and the work that’s been done by our staff. And I think the funniest thing that happened is, um, they said, we need you to bring 500 people, brand new people. And Adam and I talked and said, okay, what is this going to look like? We can definitely do this. And we’re like, it will take us a month. And they said, yes, a month we can do this. And then. The next day, the contracting officer called us and goes, consider, and it was very funny how he said it, consider this your first change order you have until the end of the week. And so I think what is right for them, right? And it’s. So I will say that was the start of my seven hour work weeks for probably four months. But, um, I mean, seven day work weeks, not seven hour, um, still, still, uh, getting back to normal. Um, I think, you know, the, the one thing that I would say that I, um, can’t imagine being anywhere else is that when that happens, it’s not a, Oh no, this is going to go wrong. It is, what do we have to do collectively to make it work? And I think by setting expectations with everyone internally and saying, this is going to be really hard, we’re going to mess up and then we’ll fix it, helped all of us to come together and it’s bringing everyone on board and ensuring communication to make it work. So, um, that was the first, uh, task order that we had with, uh, our SBA customer with, um, OCA and then. And because of the fact that we were actually successful in bringing on 500 people, um, and that was related to our PPP work, they said, we need more help. And I think at a certain point, it’s really hard to say no when you start seeing the impact. Um, and so the rewarding part about doing this work is that you have people reaching out to applicants who are impacted, who say, you know, because of the fact that your team was able to help, we were able to run payroll. We were able to keep our doors open. Um, and you’re also hiring from a group of people who were severely impacted. You know, these are people who may not have had a professional job. We’re able to give them benefits. We’re able to make sure that they know when their next paycheck is coming. And it seems somewhat surreal, but, um, you’re working with individuals nationwide who just want an opportunity. And so, um, Um, that’s not to say that it hasn’t been difficult at some times. Um, the big difference here is that the landscape is constantly changing. No one was really prepared for a global pandemic and no one knew what the impact would be and no one knows what the impact will be three years from now. And so I think we’re constantly just trying to, um, Continue on and that enabled us to bring on, um, over a thousand more to support the office of disaster and assistance and the loans that came about from the cares act. And so we have a infrastructure set up of remote staff, um, an amazing team of subcontractors who make it possible. You know, I completely agree with Ashley when, um, she mentioned that some of our more strategic relationships have been built during a time when we’re all remote. And I think it’s, it says something to the human factor. Like we are all showing up on video at 7am in whatever we feel comfortable wearing and you know, that’s important. Like it makes you human. And I think that’s something that, um, has been a positive of being home and working remotely is that you see the. human side of everyone that you’re interacting with on a daily basis, and it’s something you don’t necessarily see.

Adam McNair: And, and to give some context to where this started, I mean, when, when we were asked to start ramping up, I think we had closed the office for a week. I think it was the Friday, the week after we closed, um, because it was like a, it was Um, Friday evening call to start mobilizing this from, from the customer. And that was in the thick of the lockdowns were starting. So as, as companies were saying, I, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m a restaurant. I’m an event venue. I’m a, the gym, I’m whatever. How do I. You know, keep people employed with no money coming in. That’s everything that was on, on the news at that point. And also, you know, to Tamara’s point, when, when we were hiring, uh, folks, it was, they were a, A team from maybe a hotel chain that had had proactively downsized because they saw an impact of their business. And so we were finding pockets of people around the country that that were unemployed. And, um, you know, some of the things that we’re doing now, we’ve launched a career development initiative. So, um, so this year they’re going to have the opportunity to have a resume brush up session, have a conversation about how do you sell yourself for a professional job, and how do you market yourself and talk about yourself, um, and, and also some career planning about what do they want to do? Because I think one of the things that a lot of times, not just people like, you know, from, from the, um, you know, You know, this, this loan support that we’re doing, but across professional services, we see that, um, it, it’s hard for people to correlate their, their experience on one, uh, one job to another. And so helping them find some of those underlying skills versus that, well, actually, what you’re doing is you’re doing, you’re doing analysis. Of data and metrics just because you’re doing that on a loan. It could be on any number of things. They’re transferable skills. And so that’s 1 of the things we’re going to try to help the folks on those programs internalize and document so that as they as they look for for careers in the future, um, That’s easier for them. And I know one of the blog posts that we, um, we, we had recently, uh, one of the things that we do internally is we, we, uh, offer employees the opportunity to, to submit topics and, and put blog content out there for, um, employees. You know, for the community at whole, not just our company, but for people in the workforce, and one of the employees on the SBA contract, uh, wrote a blog post about the fact that this is her first, um, you know, her first time teleworking, her first time kind of just logged into a system for eight hours a day, and there’s a lot of that kind of, um, growth and opportunities. So it, it is the entirety of the support of that, that program really was at the core of everything you saw on the news every day. Um, you know, and I, I feel like, and I’m, I’m sure Tamara and her team and the internal ops team and everybody feels this way that kind of sometime in March through maybe. I don’t know, August or September was kind of a blur of activity. Um, and, and not that it’s way slower now, um, but it is a little bit more structured. I think the figuring out things on the fly and so forth, um, pared down a little bit. Now, Kevin, on your side, you talked a little bit about, um, you know, the one, the one program that, uh, where you guys moved out of space. In, you know, in your programs, um, you know, what most of them ended up working remotely, some, some on site. Well, how did that, how did that go in your organization? 

Kevin Long: Yeah, it’s, you, I got very surprised to just how quickly, how many different programs that prior to COVID, the customer and everyone was dead set convinced had to happen. On site had to happen in a skiff had to happen, you know, uh, you know, only near people that have, you know, taken, uh, polygraphs and things like that. And suddenly are issuing them laptops and sending them home. So, uh, literally. 100 percent of my programs went remote, so even even ones in in Intel spaces where where the space eventually became available. But, you know, I mean, the buildings were all shut down. I mean, you know, when you work in an intelligence area, sometimes you have people going to different parts of the world, even in a pandemic and. Then they have to scrub every hard surface in the building. And they had to do that a few different times with, with some of our customers. And so we found people getting really good at finding the unclassified bits of their work that they can do at home to then be able to hand it off to, you know, a much smaller period of time in space where they. Put in special sauce, you know, the stuff that that can’t be done on an open line. And so, yeah, it’s, uh, I mean, we have, we’ve had, you know, a new, a new CIO at FCC start that has literally never met their team, like the government folks. So, I mean, they started, uh, what, uh, the last week in February and we’re Meeting. They were bringing on their staff and we were scheduled to meet with them in March and then it shut down. And so, you know, they’re trying to figure out how to do an entire I. T. infrastructure set up and, you know, office move and everything else. Having never laid eyes on on anybody that they work with. Really? So, yeah, we’ve seen everyone everyone move, uh, You know, uh, offsite remote and, you know, with a remarkable amount of success, honestly. 

Adam McNair: Well, and so I think that speaks to the fact that some of the things that we do are pretty easy and not terribly affected by Being remote, um, what I’m curious to ask is, what are the things, uh, and actually maybe if you have some, some thoughts around this, what are some of the things that you’ve encountered that are really hard to do, um, in, in the remote, and it’s not just remote, it’s also remote and pandemic, because even if it was remote, travel is a thing that you can do and do some things, you know, in person, and I know we’ve, we’ve worked in companies where, you know, The proposal shot might be someplace else. The contract shot might be someplace else. But occasionally, like for a kickoff or something, you could decide to go get everybody in a room. Are there, are there, what are some things that strike you as being significantly more difficult that you then kind of, 

Ashley Nichols: yeah, 

Adam McNair: the way we did it last February? 

Ashley Nichols: Yeah, uh, solutioning by far is, is the hardest, right?

Um, This is an activity that involves a lot of whiteboards, flip charts, and sticky notes. And none of those things work on the computer. Uh, so, you know, it’s, it’s a situation where we’re, we’re toying with some new technologies, you know, um, zoom and teams and whatnot have whiteboard features, but if you are not set up to use whiteboard features, like using it with a mouse, like that’s, Right. So I’ve just bought myself a new piece of equipment that I’m going to see how it works. One of these drawing pads, it’s going to hopefully allow me to, um, mark things up in real time, uh, whiteboard, some ideas, a race in real time, you know, as we move into it, in fact, I’ll, I’ll probably use it for the first time tomorrow with the big solution session. So I would say any kind of truly collaborative. Opportunity that involves this kind of capture of information that you’re used to doing in a room with people and also looking around and be able to see their faces and sort of knowledge their buy in. Right? Am I going in the right direction? You know, when we’re on zoom and we’re solutioning. You know, I had this one project where we started where nobody was ever on camera. Right. And I was going to force people to do that. They don’t love it necessarily. But I started being on camera all the time. And I think that had other people be on there. So I don’t have to ask all the time. Does that make sense to you guys? Because I see your head’s nodding and things like that, um, so, you know, collaboration, while there are a lot of fantastic tools will continue to be a challenge, but I will one of the kind of benefits of the remote working is that resources that you normally can’t get to during regular hours. Now can be made available like if they have a break in their custom work and they can take it half an hour to talk to you or an hour about your technical solutions and things like that. Whereas they would never dream of doing that from the customer site because you’re on the customer site, but the remote work allows them that flexibility. They need to put in their time, do their customer work, and that is the important part, but if it’s during their lunch or other times that it works for them, I feel like there’s an increased accessibility to those people, which has been a plus to this process that I might not have foreseen. Yeah, I think 

Adam McNair: that’s a good point, because I think. You know, we block out meeting times and we block out our days in hour, half hour increments. And occasionally you have a conversation where you feel like it took exactly the amount of time as was budgeted for it, but otherwise you end up in the 10 or 15 minutes of you’re just like, well, I’m already sitting here in this conference room. We’ll go ahead and chat about something else. Or you hit a lot of moments where there’s. You’ve got 27 minutes. And what do I do in 27 minutes? And those are the times that when somebody that you’ve asked for feedback on something, that they’ll hit you up on Teams and call you up and fill you in on it, or they’ll say, hey, when you get a minute, can you call me? And I know for me personally, I probably have 30 or 40 minutes free every day. I just don’t know when that’s gonna be. It’s all, it’s all booked. So 

Ashley Nichols: much of it is Hey, you, you hang out after this meeting, right? We’re already on a call. I know it was blocked until 12 and it’s only 1140. So I know you’ve got 20 minutes. Let’s pivot real quick to this. And I find that the downside to those scheduling and those increments has been. There’s no commute time. People have been like jam packing every block of time. And I have been having these conversations and I have been blocking off half hour periods so that I can mentally pivot to new discussion sometimes. Um, so that, that, that’s sort of like the downside of trying to figure out what that time is and that it’s all scheduled because there is very little time for the pop up. Like as many times I, you know, I’ll hit Adam up and I’d be like, I need five minutes. And he’s like, yes, I have five minutes and eight hours. You know what I mean? 

Tamar Mintz: the other thing that I think is beneficial is because most of us are using video now, you know, in my opinion, the days of multitasking are fewer and far between. And I think we’ve all done this and it’s not good or bad, but some of us are good at multitasking, but they say, no matter what your productivity and your ability to spend time. By being on video and talking with someone, like it’s, it’s genuinely rude. Like you can see someone who’s like texting on their phone or something else. And it forces you to be like, okay, I’m going to give you everything for the five to 10 minutes. I’m not going to be, you won’t see me typing. And I think you get more from people than, In the past, because all of us were running around, you know, we had meetings, we were on customer sites and so being able to sit and talk for five to 10 minutes and it’s like this new level of just total collaboration and respect. And not that it was at lack of respect before. But it’s showing people that we’re giving our full and undivided attention, which I think also, um, is beneficial to the organization. 

Ashley Nichols: I think I’ve been describing it as like intent and creating intent around the things that we’re doing. And I think to your point, Everything has to be much more intentional, right?

That’s absolutely 

Kevin Long: the word that I had in mind. Oh, yes. Yeah, 

Ashley Nichols: because we’re not going to pick it up later, right? And it’s the intent around, you know, solving the problem that we’re, we’re solving over the 10 or 15 minutes or a half an hour that we have. And we are much more efficient at getting things done when we are all less distracted and not doing stuff during that meeting. And then I think there’s a lot of intention that’s lost. Spreads out into how we want people to experience this COVID pandemic inside of our company, right? Like what are, what do we, what is the effect on that culture and what do we want it to be and being pretty intentional about that, um, you know, some of it happened just by default, right? You know, you realize everyone can tell when I’m doing something else. And so I need to not look like a jerk. Right. Um, but I think it’s created some really healthy habits. Around balance, around acceptance, around all kinds of things that then pervade the larger culture or can in a more intentional way, even when we go back to the office.

Victoria Robinson: Well, there’s also the point of like, usually when you have an idea, you, you just jump into somebody’s office and say, Hey, do you have 10 minutes? And you obviously see that they have 10 minutes to talk. And now you’re trying to think of what meeting do I have with the group of people? I need to, to bring up this topic that I put together. Probably should wait until we can have a discussion rather than just trying to hop in their office and then leave people out. So I feel like it almost brings more people into the conversation than usual, because you’re remembering when to have those conversations and being intentional about it. 

Kevin Long: It is, I will, I will admit, I do miss the chance encounter for problem solving that. Where you have where we have all these people in the meetings and when you have all of the people in the in the virtual room, you can do that. But it’s, it’s at least around HQ, you know, where, where everyone was there, even if someone wasn’t necessarily in the conference room, I can talk pretty loud. And so someone may be right. See, I see that tomorrow, then someone may, someone may poke their head. And it’s like, you know, I have something for that. And that you miss the, I, I do, I do, I do miss that, but you know, having the pickup meeting, right? Yeah. Um, you, that in MBWA, you know, management by walking around, um, is, is, uh, is, is something that I do miss, but I, I do love watching, you know, uh, Tamar’s Adam’s and Victoria’s, you know, attention as, You know, when you’re working on something, and it’s not just, at least not anymore, overcoming the technical hurdles of how you can do that, but around the problem that you’re trying to solve, and it’s, I 

Adam McNair: think the, the, the spontaneity of being in the office and being able to stop in and say hello to somebody is, is something that we do lose. I think that, Being intentional and finding spots to make sure that you’ve talked with those folks that you, you need to check in with at least weekly has become much more intentional for me. I know a lot of the things that are on my calendar are, you know, making sure that, um, we’ve had a venue to talk about a topic or, or, or just with the, with the person. And sometimes those are the ones where it. They literally might be five minutes. It’s like, no, there’s nothing going on this week. Okay. But I feel like if we don’t have that on the, on the, on the calendar, it’s very, very easy. I know about a month into this, uh, one of the people from our, our office, who’s, who’s, who, who’s, his actual office is down by the, uh, like the, the break room and coffee machine. I realized I hadn’t talked to him in about four weeks. I was like, oh, I, we need to create a mechanism for Yeah. Cause I That just doesn’t happen. And the one thing that I do think is, is helpful, and this goes to Tamar’s point about, um, kind of focus, is it would be very, very common, certainly for me, and I think a lot of us, that you’re sitting at your desk doing, um, You know, quote, your job or work and somebody says, Hey, do you have a minute? What you do, but what you’ve done is now stop, change gears, stop working on what you were working on. Try to unpack that out of your head, engage on something else. And I don’t know if everybody is this way, but it’s very hard for me if I was in the middle of, oh, here’s how we’re going to do service desk ticket management or, you know, I’m looking at financials for something or whatever.

And now it’s, hey, this employee is interested in advancement. Where do you think we can have a team lead spot open up in the next six weeks? They’re totally different things. And to try to, A lot of those feel to me like when you’re at the airport back when we used to go to airports and they have those little people mover things and you step off the the moving walkway and there’s this kind of weird inertia thing that catches up with you and it’s almost jarring going from one topics to the next and then trying to get back into it you just it it feels very very different and so I think the ability to have someone say hey can 10 minutes absolutely love to it allows you to kind of Find a natural stopping point in what you were doing and then have a conversation and, you know, like Ashley, like you were saying, I’ve tried to book almost transitions or work time in my schedule because it’s so easy to say, okay, we have to hit these topics and those topics and maybe by Thursday I’ll actually have time to sit down and put, you know, put some work on, on paper, you know, digitally. Um. 

Ashley Nichols: But then to that point on Thursday, like I’ve had to start and this was just, you know, something I’ve been working on, like Monday of this week, like yesterday, I looked at next week and plugged in all of my transition and blocks of time for things I needed to do, because if I started on like this week to do it, this week’s done for right? Like it’s done for already. People have filled in every nook and cranny that they want to for the most part, Part so, um, you know, like you, there’s a lot of meetings that I need to be in. Right. And I, and I like to have at least enough time to change pivot to what this meeting is about so I can be focused on it when it starts, whether it’s like just 10 minutes or something, but there’s, if I have to ideate on anything, right, solutions, you know, working on better defining highway for Victoria. I can’t do that in an hour, you know what I mean? I need, I need to work through some stuff and so I gotta block that time off or I won’t get it. 

Speaker 6: Yeah. 

Ashley Nichols: Uh, because I think as managers of people too, we’re probably all hyper vigilant about trying to be available when people do need us and reach out to us. Um, and so it’s finding that balance. I think that has been one of the challenges of this and why it really feels like when you’re working eight hours, like if you work a full eight hours, it feels like you work 12 hours. Like if you’re just cranking out all day, you’re like, I’m just going to fall over. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to take a nap at five o’clock for like half an hour before I can finish doing chores or whatever. 

Tamar Mintz: I’m still trying to figure out why I’m in the same chair that I purchased for casual dining. I think I’m, I think I need an OSHA audit. 

Adam McNair: Oh, God, God, God forbid, and I would like to go ahead and officially offer that I would be happy to bring you a chair. You tell me what chair you want. I will be happy to bring it right over. Um, well, and I will say, you know, we, as we do the podcast, we, we connected. You know, on video here so that we can have that interaction, but we strip that out and just put the audio format out. But, uh, Tamar definitely wins, I think from the, the artful background. Uh, my, the room that I’m in is so, so kind of not appealing that I use a digital background. Um, you know, Kevin uses a digital background. Victoria’s, you know, is, is certainly classing it. It wasn’t 

Victoria Robinson: at first, though, because the first three weeks I was living in this apartment, the only thing behind me was a lamp. And every time I got on video, he was like, how’s apartment, uh, set up going? And he would go, the lamp hasn’t moved yet. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I have enjoyed watching Victoria’s apartment, like, start to get, get furnished and the pictures would go up and now she has a chair and all of that. But yeah, definitely, uh, actually, Kevin and I are, are more in a, just. You know, extra room of the house as opposed to the, um, I’m impressed by people that can have that, uh, kind of, I think you call it mees on sin maybe. Um, for, 

Tamar Mintz: actually it’s actually 

Ashley Nichols: called, um, limited room rating. What people, it, it a big thing on Twitter and everything now called room rating and people rate your room that you’re Oh, rate, oh my gosh. So this is actually 

Tamar Mintz: the, the result of limited space. So because there’re so limited space, I mean, they’re here. Or I’m in my kitchen or I’m in my bedroom. And this felt like meetings from my kitchen. 

Ashley Nichols: It just looks like this. 

Victoria Robinson: Before I moved my first week highlight, I was literally at my parents house because I hadn’t moved yet. And every time I got on a call, I had this ugly curtain behind me in this like. Forbidden chair because it was the only place in the house that I couldn’t get bothered during a meeting. I was like, I’m so sorry. I had not discovered the custom backgrounds yet. I was like, well this will do. 

Adam McNair: And you know, it’s interesting going to one of the other things that I think is difficult during this time. One of the things that we’ve had very limited success and we’ve actually stopped, stopped really trying to engage with them for a little while is during the pandemic. Obviously recruiting fairs. Are all virtual now, and we’ve found that they’re not as well attended. Um, the interaction is not as valuable as as when you have an event in person. And I think, um, whereas the way that they used to operate where everybody would sign up and attend in person now they can. Sign up electronically and they can show up and have a a person to person session, but a lot of the candidates don’t bother. They feel like if they uploaded their resume they’ve they’ve attended and that’s enough. Um. There’s nowhere near as much buy in. And so, so I think, you know, recruiting, we’re doing more of the, just the typical recruiting. It is certainly easier to get a hold of candidates now than it, than it used to be. Um, but I was curious at asking, so, you know, Victoria, you’ve got a unique perspective on, as you mentioned, um, joining an organization during COVID and, um, what was the, Like the new employee experience, like, like, how, how did you, how did you meet everybody? Like, how did, you know, I know you, you were technically here, you know, locally when you, when you, you signed on. So I think you got to see the office in person, maybe. I did. I don’t know if you were allowed to go inside or not. That was during like major lockdown time. But could you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Victoria Robinson: Well, it was unique because I remember us having a couple interviews and I remember talking to Ashley and it was both of the times I talked to both of you, it was probably the most, it felt like very informal. So you probably got more of the, you know, uh, authentic like person you’re going to work with than you would normally would, cause you’re not sitting in an office freaking out about an interview and then. I think it was most of the jumping on calls going, Oh, these are the people I work with now, and then trying to figure out, okay, where’s the org chart so I can figure out what, like what level of the organization are they in, who do they work with? I’m still probably working through that, but you know, uh, luckily the nice thing is that because I’ve come on later in the year, uh, Fiona, our HR person, and then, um, A couple other people have put in Paycom and those kinds of things to help me understand where things are. I think it was easier than I expected it to be, but it was definitely some of those moments where it’s like, well, this is not normal. 

Adam McNair: Now, as far as meeting people, was it mostly just sitting in group meetings that you had been invited to? Or were you reaching out to people individually? Are people individually reaching out to you? Kind of, how did that, how did that go? 

Victoria Robinson: Um, at first it was mostly going to group meetings and then trying to figure out, Okay, well this is the person I need to follow up with to know this topic. And it’s kind of like you’re playing a big investigation game. And I know the first week I was, I asked around and I was like, Well, who’s in charge of this? And then I would schedule 30 minutes on their calendar and they’re like, I don’t know who this person is. I was like, I’m the marketing manager. And they were like, we have a marketing manager again. That’s awesome. Here are the 30 things I’ve been waiting for to give to you. 

Adam McNair: Well, yeah, that, that, and that is, I think probably. As far as meeting people specifically, you know, in your, in your position, you work with so many people in the organization that it, it probably drove some of that, um, some of that interaction with everybody kind of off the bat. And, uh, it wasn’t, you know, it’s not, I don’t have any of these jobs we have like this, but it’s not just as good go sit and. You know, do your own job and you receive an input and send something out. There’s no real, uh, kind of, kind of cross pollination across the organization. That’s that’s really required. Um, well, so we’ve got probably, uh, you know, 10 or 15 minutes here more to talk. And I just wanted to ask the question as far as. Um, for, for your kind of personal work goals for, for next year, um, you know, and I’m not talking, you know, corporate goals, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve been working on those and communicating them and so forth, but, um, now that you’ve been working remotely for, I don’t know, I guess, nine months now, and, um, we have some amount more, you know, going, you know, going forward, but, you know, what are the kinds of things that, that you, um, And, you know, maybe actually if you have any, um, if you want to want to start, but from, uh, things that you think you want to, you want to start doing next year, things that you want to stop, you know, you want to do differently. Um, any thoughts about. You know, kind of the, the things that you, you’re doing going into next year. 

Ashley Nichols: You must’ve been a fly on my wall the last couple of days. I feel like that’s all I talk about. Um, you know, time management has a big thing I’ve been learning about, you know, during this, during this period. And we talked a little bit about, um, making sure that I’m setting up times for my meeting transition and just like my thought transition so that I can be giving, um, my best. Participation to what’s happening next. Um, and some of it, you know, and as we, as we look at, maybe on the outset, looking like adding more meetings for next year as we talk about accounts and line of business and stuff is taking a look at those collection of meetings and finding out, um, how much of it needs to be in a meeting. Right? And can they be 45 minutes? Can half an hour meetings be 15 minutes, um, and actually scheduling them for that. So people know what kind of time they really have to work within their day. Um, because it’d be very easy to get overwhelmed with all the meetings and leave very little time for, for some of the work that we talked about. So I find time management and, you know, I’ve already made some changes the way that I’m doing it, you know, for myself that hopefully is going to yield some better results. You know, better participation, but I think too, with some of the changes that we’ve made in the organization this year, um, and really sort of delineating a bit between like the day to day BD operations and the strategy and development and how to spend more time on those things. And what’s a valuable, you know, use of my time, it, it, it, figuring out how to spend those times on ideation. What needs the most. Um, focus, what groups need the most help, you know, how do we really, you know, lines of business is one of the things we’re talking about that is going to have such a huge impact on strategy and how we define that and the materials that we create around it are going to be a huge part of the way our folks go out in the world and talk about what we do. So, you know, I think, you know, letting go of some of the stuff that I felt like I was trying to stay on top of for so long and letting it sink in. Sort of exist in this other space and really spending the time and focus on those so that we have this toolbar of, of things for how we present ourselves out there and not just marketing stuff, but really like how we tell the highlight story and making sure all of our people know how to, how to tell that story effectively. So 

Adam McNair: I, I think that, um, I think that makes, you know, a lot of sense, probably for a lot of us. I think those ideas around intentionality and, um, also I think being able to divide out, you know, what the real expectations are, um, is, is certainly something that I think is a good point for, um, Certainly for me for next year and dividing out the kind of the daily, um, the daily activity and the strategic activity. I mean, to quote, I mean, I, I, something that it was impactful to me years ago, Vish Varma, who we used to work with, um, said that, you know, the things and it’s probably. Probably not, not originally attributed to him, but it was something that he said frequently is that the things that are urgent are often not important. And the things that are important are often not urgent. And, you know, I think the, those things that just have to happen on a regular basis and you’ve got, you know, we’re shipping equipment to Boston and we’re onboarding and we’re off boarding and all of those things. Um, Making sure that that becomes routine and as error free as possible has been a big area of emphasis for us and I think will continue, um, in the next year. That you have to, the fundamentals of what you’re doing, you have to be able to, to execute on and not have to have it take all your attention, but it’s just so easy for it to take all your attention. 

Ashley Nichols: So to think about that is like, do we strategically to be able to shift and be like, okay, the operations run, right? So now we can think about, um, strategically, is this a line of business we want to be in? And if it is kind of skills and qualifications, do we have to add? Right. Um, and cause I think there’s a lot of that in our future. You know, is the, who we want to be when we grow up that, I mean, it takes some people sitting around noodle and some things out and spitball and ideas with each other and being like, okay, we agree. These are areas where we want to focus. And so we want to get some people certified in this and that. And that’s part of it. Part of how those lines of business are going to grow and and then super important to the opportunity owners and the capture and the marketing, uh, of what we do. So they’re sort of, you know, just intrinsically intertwined. They’re, um, going forward 

Adam McNair: for sure. Um, Yeah. So Kevin, um, I see that you’re, you’re, you’re off mute, uh, which is either, either a digital signal that you had some thoughts or inadvertent lack of mute button. But, uh, your thoughts for, for things like that for next year? 

Kevin Long: Uh, I, I couldn’t agree more. Right. I mean, 2019 2020 was about making sure that we were doing the right things day to day. And I think that we focused a lot on that. Um, you know, how do you take the hill and, uh, With uh, next year really looking at, you know, what hill do we want to take, right? It is taking the time to look at, at, you know, how do we want to, to position ourselves if doing, you know, DevOps, DevSecOps, right? How are we going to Be able to, uh, compete in, you know, a world where tech challenges are more and more, uh, common and things like that. And the ways to, to put, uh, highlight and in a direction that is, uh, good for the government. Interesting to me. And good for the, the folks that, uh, that, that, that work with us, uh, are, are really the, the things that I, I’m looking at, at, for, you know, making sure that we get 20, 21 squared away with that. And it’s, and, and, you know, for someone whose motto is you. Often solve today’s problems today. It’s a, it is a, uh, it’s a different part of my brain. Right. And so it’s, it’s exciting. So, 

Adam McNair: yeah, I, and I, I, I agree with you. I mean, I’m, I’m often in that, that camp. Well, because I, I think, you know, our business, especially where. The capture and BD side of things and the operational side are related. And we’ve, we’ve done a lot of work to try to make sure that we only propose things that can truly be executed and that we’re not going to go to a price. We can’t do the work and any of those kinds of things. Um, so I, I think we’ve, I think we, we bid, bid work that is more executable than, you know, maybe other places I’ve been in the past or, you know, people I’ve worked with. But. There are still details that you’re not going to be able to work everything out during that, that, you know, BD phase, you know, and I look at things like, well, we have to find a facility for the, you know, to do this workout. We have to find a hardware provider. We’re going to have to find a real niche technology expert. You know, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get to it. And, uh, those, those kind of problems that, that are, you know, either winner’s problems or opportunities that aren’t there yet or any of those things, you know, like, well, when do, you know, sometimes you inherit a whole bunch of those and you end up having to solve a lot of that. Um, you’ve certainly had also quite the year, um, in an unparalleled way that I could ever certainly have seen. Are there things, you know, other than not working seven days a week, are there, are there, are there, you know, and maybe getting a chair that is not a casual dining chair. Were there, were there things that you were thinking about that you wanted to do for next year? Thank you. 

Tamar Mintz: Yeah. So I think if you’ve ever worked on a program with me, um, my biggest challenge is if it’s not perfect, it’s done wrong. And I think, you know, this past year has, I see a lot of smiles. I’m tough. I know it. But, um, I think the big thing for me is that this year has really shown a lot of like actual problems, like real things we have to worry about and it provided a lot of perspective. So it allowed us to collectively say, okay, what’s actually the most important thing and has helped prioritize. And I think that’s something that I hope that I’m able to continue with over the next year. Um, yes. And I, um, Perfect is the enemy of good. And that’s something that I’ve heard from many people. And I know that that’s a reality. We’re all imperfect people. Um, the second thing is every year, I think my goal is always to get a little smarter. And I think that means different things to different people. So personally, it’s how do I help support the PMs? that work in the mission support organization. How do I support them better? How do I help them think outside the box a little more because they all have different challenges and that’s something that is an exciting opportunity for me. And also bigger picture. How do we increase our ability to support the customer? Like what are we not bringing to the table now? And I think some of it is just a lack of knowledge. I don’t know if it’s technical, I don’t know if it’s. Just not thinking about it, having the discussion. So kind of forcing our collective group to be uncomfortable with, um, comfortable with being uncomfortable, sorry, comfortable with being uncomfortable in that setting, because if, um, the more standard things are, the less. The less we’re really helping ourselves. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that I think happens is you get used to the day, the day to day. And so every year I tell myself, okay, I need to get smarter about something. Otherwise I’m going to be, I’m going to become complacent. And, um, it’s, it’s one of my. Biggest, um, nightmares to happen. So I’m hoping that this year that I know it sounds silly, but I think we all want to be the best we can be. And so I think for me, it’s always, what can I do better that I didn’t do last year? How can I be smarter? So, you know, and I know that we work with a lot of really smart people. So how can I leverage that? And 

Adam McNair: here’s one thing that I will say, and I think that goes, you know, it’s another part of my previous comments about the culture of the organization is. I think all of us really are constantly trying to do things better. And, and I think that there’s a lot of organizations, you know, that I’ve been exposed to where you maybe don’t find that as uniformly across the board. And, um, you know, this is not a. I mean, to, to, to look behind, you know, the kind of the way that we operate, you know, just from a service delivery standpoint, uh, I’m never calling anybody and asking, um, you know, are you doing what you’re supposed to be doing? Oh, our organization’s not like that. It’s, it’s, if there’s, you know, call me if I can help, or if we need to talk something over, because I, everybody here is really trying to push in the right direction and, and do the right things. And, and so I think that’s, that speaks again to the, to the, you know, to the people that, that we’re all trying to get better on, on an ongoing basis. And I think that’s, um, I think whether it be the SBA work, whether it be the, the, the Boston work that Kevin mentioned, you know, some of the things I, I think about all the programs that we’ve won in the last several years. And some of them it was like, Hey, look, we, we know, we know, and have done a lot of this part of this work lots and lots of times, but every program is always a little bit unique, a little bit different. It’s like, okay, we’re going to go figure that out. We’re going to go learn that. And that was the fun part, the exciting part. It wasn’t just like, Oh, no, I can’t believe we have to go, you know, do something new. And you look for an opportunity to learn something and get better. Um, now, Victoria, just, you know, what are your thoughts about things that you want to do going into next year? Thank you. 

Victoria Robinson: Well, I luckily have the luxury of being on the West Coast in three hours behind everyone else. So I think one of the big goals is getting all my meetings in the morning so I can have uninterrupted, like, three or four hours of work in the afternoon and trying to figure out the balance between having that informal meeting time where I can just touch base and go, Hey, I thought about this thing. What do you think? Or, Hey, we haven’t talked in a while. Let’s talk about something while we both have 15 minutes. And then. Having those structured meetings of, Hey, this is the strategy going forward, or this is the message we’re trying to push and trying to figure out that balance of having those intentional conversations versus those informal. And, you know, still trying to meet everyone and make sure everyone’s needs are met from an external and an internal. Kind of perspective and making sure those messages get out. So, it’s kind of a mishmash. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, well, I, I think that, that, you know, that intentionality, and I do think that that’s, you know, being a more mature organization, there’s a piece of that. Being a more mature professional, it plays into that. I, I will say that the couple of things that I, I’m going to try to focus on next year. The first one is, and we’ve been doing a lot of this, is the mature fundamentals of the business and so that those things that are supposed to happen on a recurring basis are happening on their own on a recurring basis so that we’re not having to slow down and figure out what didn’t get done. Not that we’re having those problems, but a lot of the things that we’ve been trying to do internally, like we We know what agenda we’re going to have for the conversation we’re going to have on Mondays at 11. And if we’re going to stagger what we talk about there that we remember that and do it and it’s intentional and just things like the agenda and the artifacts for that conversation they’re going to come out 24 hours ahead of time so that if somebody wants to read ahead they can do it. And those are just the, the, the organizational maturity that I’ll say I, I’ve not really Been around that much. I don’t know if there are some of the kind of marquee names in, in technology or GovCon or wherever that, that, that operate that way. But certainly the places that I’ve been were typically not that way. There were some, I would see some like big BD meetings when you CCI back in the days, you, you might get a read ahead and get some things before then. But um, I think at the time I viewed it as like, well, this is just more stuff that I, I need to do, but I think there’s a way you can do it where, and this is where you make sure that people aren’t overtasked, hopefully, that if you can have people where it is part of their job to do that, and it’s part of the time that they’re supposed to budget. And it’s not just saying. This is somebody else’s, you know, not ninth extra responsibility, uh, and setting up those kind of routine organizational structures, I think is a big, um, a big area of focus for next year. And then the other one, but which is, I think much more esoteric is, I think When you look back in government contracting, there have been groups of people that were influential and you look and you would hear later on that that was the group of people that was together at whatever company, uh, BTG back in the day. was one of those. There was an STG group of people back in the day, um, RSIS, um, Indus. These were companies that grew back, yeah, some to the size that we are today, some larger, um, ISS, which was a company that got acquired by, uh, CSCI years ago. And if you watched the leadership teams of those organizations over the course of their career, um, you could come back and say that there was a common thread that they were, they picked up skills and experience and were positioned for the remainder of their career with real leadership success. And it kind of came back to a common. Worked at that company and it creates a cohort mesh kind of across the industry, I think, and you’d look back and you go, those, those people that worked there were immensely successful and, uh, Whether the company stayed together or, or, or it, it, you know, sometimes there’s acquisitions and, you know, 10 years from now, who knows what, what highlight will will look like or not. Um, but even if, even if we are all still together, it’s looking at, there was a period of years where the, this team was, you know, Impactful to government contracting as a whole and advanced government and did impactful things. And so I think we, I think we’re kind of at one of those inflection points where I’d kind of say, I think we may, may be there at some level already. And, um, you know, when you’re at a couple hundred million dollar, you know, business, it’s, um, You certainly are on that playing field, and I think looking at lining up people’s objectives, because there’s a lot to this business, and some people want exposure to a lot of different parts of it, some people want to specialize in different areas, and I think we have a An opportunity to make sure that, um, at this scale, people can have the experience, whether it’s being involved in the pipeline or involved in solutioning or ops or financials or, you know, contracts or whatever piece, because I know a lot of times when people a super large business. It’s like, well, I was never allowed to touch pricing, right? And we don’t have to be that way. And so I think this, this coming year of making sure that, um, that we can use the corporation to provide expanded experience and, and backfilling skill sets for, uh, for the people in the corporation is, um, It’s something that I, I want to figure out how we continue to do or how we expand doing. And I think that’s one of the areas that the virtual remote work really helps because when you have somebody on a project and they’re on a project and like, as Ashley was saying, they don’t have 20 minutes. Well, they can’t drive out, you don’t want them to sit and do some corporate activity, and you don’t say, okay, well, if you have to drive from DC to Ashburn, I don’t want to ask you to stop midway in Fairfax at 530. Those things are easier now. And we’ve, we’ve had an opportunity to engage some people from our Cincinnati team. And, uh, one of our employees from a project that’s, that lives in West Virginia. And some of our BDM proposal efforts, um, giving, you know, other folks that are, um, working delivery, working, whatever, you know, part of the business that we’re going to price something. Hey, you can come sit in to the strategy session for that and talk it, talk it over, um, That’s something that I think is good. We have a, there’s a potential for a unique opportunity to give people that exposure to the inner workings of the company, especially because it’s remote. Like we just, it just, you just couldn’t, you couldn’t get there, uh, in the same way that you can now, uh, with allowing people to be able to flex into other areas. So I think that’s, um, you know, certainly something that, that I’m looking for next year. Um, Well, anybody have any, any, um, You know, kind of final thoughts, I think, as we wrap up here. We appreciate the, uh, you know, everybody’s, uh, time and, uh, and engagement on, uh, on, on the highlight cast here. Um, any, any final thoughts, uh, before we, uh, before we wrap up? All right. Well, thank you. Um, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to listen to the HighlightCast. If you take a look at our LinkedIn page for Highlight, we have, uh, content that we, uh, we put out there as well with, uh, some of the, uh, updates from the company. And if you check our website, HighlightTech. com, we put up news articles and so forth there for, uh, other ways to, uh, learn more. Learn about and engage with the company. Thank you everybody. Thank you for your time and I look forward to talking to you on the next Highlight Cast. 

The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect Highlight Technologies and or any agency of the U. S. government.

Announcement: [00:00:00] Broadcasting from Fairfax, Virginia. You are now tuned in to The Highlight Cast with your hosts, Adam McNair and Kevin Long.

 Adam McNair: Welcome to The Highlight Cast. This is Adam McNair  joined by Kevin Long. Hi, Kevin.

Kevin Long: How’s it going, Adam? Good to hear your voice. See your face.

 Adam McNair: Absolutely, yeah. So, uh, this has been, uh, several months since we’ve done one of these, and The world ended in between. A a absolutely, yeah. It’s It’s been very, very different, obviously, as I think it has been for everybody. Uh, we, for, for transparency’s sake, we closed down our main office in March. And as we sit here today, it is now September. So we’ve all been remote. Um, I guess my, you know, my, my. Overall business perspective, there’s a lot of things about and all of that. I will tell you from the personal angle of it. I started out thinking that maybe this would be a month or something and set up temporarily and in the kitchen and then moved to the kind of the next stage was, well, this might be a while and set up in the basement. And the third phase for me has been this might really, really be a while, and I have now established an upstairs room as an office. Out of the dungeon. Yeah, absolutely. So that’s kind of how it has gone here. How has your just personal logistics worked out? 

 

Kevin Long: Seriously, yeah. I mean, it’s been, it’s been crazy. Uh, I felt exactly the same way. I started with Okay, well, I mean, I’ve got a laptop so I can work from home and, you know, uh, my wife works from home too. So she has the work from home space normally set up. And so I was working other places so as to not disturb her. [00:02:00] So I’d have my laptop on my lap and I did that for a while. And then I was like, you know, this is, this is, this is not going to end super soon. I’m going to get me a keyboard and I’m going to get set up with a desk and some place to work. Right. And so, uh, uh, and ironically, I just also migrated to a second floor room myself with a desk. And so it’s, uh, more comfortable. So thumbs up there. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I would tell you the little logistical challenges that I have had to overcome, uh, the, the inability to have cell service in the basement was the first one.

Kevin Long: Wow. 

Adam McNair: Um, and so I had to get some Wi Fi extenders and figure that out. Um, I have, have turned back on a home phone so that I can have a, a, another line in the event that I am going to be on a longer call that’s not [00:03:00] some digital platform. Um, and, and the, the echo factor, the microphone, headset, so forth, um, you know, what I’ve found is that a lot of these calls, some of them do better than others, depending on the Depending on what platform you’re on of absolutely using whatever algorithm they used to separate out the voice track. And some of them don’t do it very well at all. And, um, so I’ve, I think I’m now set up and able to communicate without echo and all of those things, but it’s just interesting. Those are the kinds of things that you just. When you when you have a meeting here or there remotely, you just don’t have that big a problem with 

Kevin Long: right?

Yeah, it was uh, I literally had to get set up with with the microphone and everything as well I mean, I never realized like I I would walk around the office I mean mbwa management by walking around right and hear about what’s going on things like that Now you’re jumping on to zoom or skype Or [00:04:00] teams or Google Hangouts or, or a cell phone call, um, to do the same stuff. And if I couldn’t just walk in there or I was out and about, I’d essentially be in my car on Bluetooth, right? And so I found out that. My cell phone and computer microphone speakers sucked for everybody else that I was talking to, right? They’re like, Kevin, you’re talking through a tunnel and we don’t think you are, we see you on the camera, you know, please fix. And so, yeah, it was, uh, it’s a totally different, different set of must haves for, for being able to communicate well to a group and, and around. It’s, it’s been really, yeah, and honestly, headphones that are comfortable to wear for four straight hours, right? 

Adam McNair: Yeah, and I, I, that, that interaction from walking around was a big thing [00:05:00] for me to figure out how to replace. I mean, different people work differently. And I think, um, the layout of our, uh, Our physical office as best I recall it from six months ago. What? Everything that I would do when we have kind of two floors in our building, and I’d go from one to the other, and you pretty much walk through most of the the areas of the office going from one to the other, and I would just catch up with people on things and and trying to find structured ways to do that where you’re not just, you know, running into people.

Kevin Long: Yeah. Solving problems before they become problems because you heard or overheard a conversation of people trying to solve something. In the common room, right? It is. Oh, it is such a challenge for me because it, it is, it is absolutely the way, the way I prefer to operate that, you know, now when I walk around, all I do is have, you know, my wife looking at me saying, you know, I’m working too. And my dog saying, does this mean we’re taking a walk 

Adam McNair: now? Yeah. Yeah, it’s, um, it’s very, very different and it’s, it is, it feels strange to me to be so excited about collaboration tools. Like, I, the only one that I can really say that I felt that way about from a, Technical perspective at any point was when, when the first time that I went from developing a proposal with the old check in, check out the document method and everyone could be in the document at one current 

Kevin Long: collaboration as this is amazing, 

Adam McNair: right? And now that we have gone, um, we had Microsoft teams on our backlog of things to accomplish. But it was still, it still felt like kind of a, um. Evolving tool. [00:07:00] Yeah, and we were going to get to it and we had been on Skype for business and it’s okay for going back to the creating a dial in bridge so that everybody can dial into something from their phones. It works just fine for that. Um, but there’s a reason it’s an end of life tool now and Microsoft teams. It’s so cool. It’s so much better and I actually feel like it’s chat functionality because it allows us to have almost like digital informal conversations that are themed and separated and it’s not just, you know, by person, um, you know, that’s like random history 

Kevin Long: and timestamp.

Adam McNair: Exactly. I mean, cause one of the things that I had had to evolve to a long time ago was there’s so much email come again. That, I mean, you know this, I tell everybody, [00:08:00] if you need something, you need to text me because I’m going to get 500 emails a day. 

Kevin Long: I will get to your email eventually. If it’s time sensitive, don’t put it in email unless there’s a text that accompanies it that says, check your email.

Adam McNair: Yeah. And, um, And so there’s, there’s just so much of that and, and text was okay, but then when you’re in the basement, it doesn’t get signal. So I solved that problem. That was the first, the first piece was not now my texts don’t work, but then once they did, because it was becoming a communication platform, now all of a sudden I’m getting so many texts. I can’t, I’m losing track of texts. 

Kevin Long: Oh no. 

Adam McNair: But Teams has really handled that. I mean, it really, um, the integration on mobile, the, the ability to work, uh, collaboratively to work in documents, to have conversations, to have team based conversations. I mean, it’s been, um, yeah, 

Kevin Long: it’s great. I mean, last night I was, you know, Stan needed a, uh, Stan and Raj needed a quick catch up on a proposal that they were working on. So Stan texts me and says, Hey, do you have a quick second for a Teams call? And I replied back, sure. Only this via cell phone, though, because I wasn’t at my computer. I could put it on on speaker and I could keep making dinner and get them the information that they needed. Right. It was it was great. And I’m still learning everything that teams can do. Well, I mean, I just got out of a meeting with a partner that that has been using teams for years and the stuff that he’s talking through on that. I mean, I was already excited. I’m super excited to figure out all of that stuff. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. Um, yeah. Yeah, so I, I think that that was, is the biggest change that, you know, that we’ve made, um, as we’ve been, um, remote here, remote extensively. Um, and, [00:10:00] yeah, um, Since we’ve, we’ve closed the office, uh, I’ve been in there three or four times where something needed to be done in paper or, you know, signed with ink, cause that’s still a thing or, or something like that. Um, but. Yeah, one thing for a second. So yeah, we did get to have that happen. And I mean, luckily, if you’re going to pick a time to have an office flood, it’s good to have it flood when no one is using it. But yeah, the storm drain for the building backed up in one of the major rainstorms we had, and they got to, you know, Replace all the carpet and the bottom 14 inches of drywall on the entire, it wasn’t just our suite, it was the entire first floor of the building. So it was, uh, pretty extensive. Yeah. Uh, well, you know, it’s interesting. We just, um, kind of settled up all the back and forth. And, and of course, when that happens, there was some wiring that had to be done after the fact and whatever. So that’s, um, that’s getting, you know, Getting closed up and we we did we use Microsoft Teams to share our COVID reopening plan, uh, which what we are trying to do is figure out just the minimum number of people that really have, um, Physical requirements for space and it ends up being contracts and procurement and finance. There are some things that, um, they still have to handle in paper for one reason or another. Right? Um, so we’re trying to do HR 

Kevin Long: probably too. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, a little bit. You know, a lot of the things that we’ve, we’ve digitized the offer letter process. All of the signature is, uh, is, is digital. Um, the I nine verification is all digital. So a lot of that stuff we’ve been able to, um, To streamline and [00:12:00] minimize that, um, you know, the other thing that we have is that we have added some, uh, support organization staff during during this period. And so we, we, frankly, we wouldn’t have an office for everybody under old space guidelines, let alone. Uh, trying to keep people distanced and yeah, you know, and regardless of what the, the recommendations for square footage and everything are, it’s just important that I don’t want people to sit there and be uncomfortable. I mean, even when it gets to a point where, um, you know, whether the state tells you you can or you can’t or whatever, um, I don’t want to go tell two people.

Kevin Long: Hey, hey, here, here you go. You can sit on either side of this plastic screen. Yeah. I mean, and if work can be done. Someplace where someone’s more comfortable doing it, right? I mean, we’re an it company, 

Adam McNair: right? Let’s eat our own dog food. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that I [00:13:00] have found interesting is so many of those, um, you know, support recs as we open them, it’s like, well, location is in Fairfax, Virginia, and then you pause for a second. You’re like, but I guess it doesn’t really need to be 

Kevin Long: never going to walk in here. Unless something unusual happens. So yeah, how about Topeka? 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I’ve the last several interviews that, that I’ve been conducting, um, California, Florida, and then frankly, a couple of people, I’m not even sure where they are, I know they weren’t local, but they were someplace else. And it’s just not. It’s not a, uh, a factor to weigh into, you know, this, the staffing decision. Uh, yeah. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. I mean, if, if you’re not, if the intention is to have them be a hundred percent remote, I mean, right. I mean, wherever that’s, I mean, that’s exciting. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. The one thing that I did have is a, is an interesting thought.[00:14:00] Um, one of these interviews that I was conducting recently was there is now a whole technical stress layer on top of it that for the, for the applicant, you know, ordinarily they’re coming in to get interviewed and, uh, What happens if there’s traffic? What happens if I can’t find the building? There’s those kinds of things that has been alleviated, but that has been replaced by 

Kevin Long: what happens if my internet goes out, 

Adam McNair: internet goes out, I can’t get my camera to work, um, you know, and it’s, it, I find it to be interesting because you’ll send out a Skype teams, whatever invite, and if the person just calls in by phone, it does, it gives, gives me the, the momentary thought of like, well, how’s this remote work work for you? Are you kind of comfortable with that? Um, yeah, 

Kevin Long: absolutely. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. Cause I, I did an interview where the person was like, you know, they couldn’t get the camera to work. Uh, Hey, I can’t get, Um, the speakers to work. Um, then I had one where we ended up, they left their camera on and had to dial in from cell phone for the audio part. And, um, you know, it’s like, where’s that, where’s that line between it coaching on how to get this to work? And just, we’re supposed to be talking about a job, right? 

Kevin Long: Oh, absolutely. And, and how tech, I mean, it’s, it’s nice. Cause at least for partially technical. Roles, you know, welcome to welcome to an informal skills test, 

Adam McNair: right? I mean, essentially, and if you think about, you know, all the things that we do, if you’re not proficient in teams, general online collaboration tools, those kinds of things, it would be hard [00:16:00] to support what we’re doing right now, if you couldn’t use those things. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, I mean, For the foreseeable future. I mean, cause I mean, I, I read that plan and to, for reoccupancy and it’s, I mean, uh, at least in the meetings that we’ve been having, it was always, you know, it started in March. I mean, I, I flew back from Boston, St. Louis Friday, the 13th in March. And you texted me and said, we’re shutting down the office work from home. And then we’re like, we’ll reassess in June. Came to June, we’re going to reassess in July, July came, we’re going to reassess in September, September came, we’re right now it’s November. We’re looking at for a few people going back in and so, yeah, I mean, if you can’t do, uh, which awesome reassessment, great decisions, uh, I think, especially with how successful it has been in, in making sure that people can continue to work, um, I mean, I, they’ve resolved the two IT tickets for me today with random things. So huzzah, but, uh, yeah, it’s, if you, if you’re going to have people that aren’t comfortable with the new normal, right. Yeah. That, that answers a lot of your questions already. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. And you know, the, so it’s, it’s a, that’s a point to bring up is, you know, the way that we established a date for reopening of an office. So when all this happened, you know, it was kind of to be determined. The state of Virginia had mandated that things closed down there for a while. And, um, so we, we were closing and the schools closed. Uh, so we closed on, Essentially, the same time schools closed, we made the call a week before schools closed that we were going to close in a week. And so that that Monday that schools closed, we were had closed the office as well. Um, but the all the different factors that. Into the decision, we [00:18:00] got a note from our health care provider that offered from a best practice. It basically said, if you are knowledge workers, if you are in an industry that where you can do things remote. They believed that in their guidance that to protect the, um, health and welfare of your employees that, or I want to say it was something like 22nd or 27th or something like that, seemed to be a good date to which to extend the, uh, the remote work. And so certainly there’s, The health and welfare aspect. So that was one angle and underlying it. I mean, certainly far secondary, but certainly when you’re looking at the overall span of things that could play into the decision, uh, the cost associated with. I don’t want anybody to get sick ever, but also coupled with that, the potential cost exposure of if you had a bunch of people that got, um, that got very sick, I mean, a COVID outbreak in a company, um, if you think about that, all tracing up to the company’s health plan, uh, there’s a lot of costs that goes, goes in there and your renewal every year is big, Based on what you experienced last year. And so there’s, there’s financial risk exposure. 

Kevin Long: Double whammy. Cause people are too sick to work and we’re, we’re still pretty small, right? So goes through HQ. And so you don’t have HR proposal and. And half of ops management, they’re laid out sick and they’re laid out sick. So then now, now work’s not getting done and your, your insurance premiums quintuple because seven people are hospitalized.

Adam McNair: Yeah, 

Kevin Long: absolutely. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. The, the operational risk to the company was [00:20:00] also something that. Um, you know, okay, yeah, I want to make sure that nobody, you know, gets, gets sick. We don’t expose people to things. I also, I mean, hey, all our life is stressful enough and jobs are stressful enough and enough things happen. You don’t have to, if you can avoid having somebody sit there and worry about, you know, getting sick or, or taking it home, um, you, you do that. But as you say, we’re, we’re in 30. To this point, but our nerve center, if you will, is, uh, 6, 000 square feet of office space, right? And, and shared break rooms and all of that kind of thing. And so, um, we. We have a lot of it redundancy and a lot of cross training and all of that. But if about 25 people were out of commission for a couple of weeks, assuming best case, I better, uh, you know, even if it was the flu, whatever it was, if something [00:21:00] happened and it took, uh, several of our, of our folks offline for a couple of weeks, be a really bad, um, impact to the, to the business, um, I don’t want to have 

Kevin Long: to learn how to run payroll.

Adam McNair: No, no. And nobody wants me doing that. Trust me, uh, yeah, and, and then the other thing, I think, um, everybody, you know, the logistics of, of life and how to do things, accomplish things, uh, people whose kids are in school, out of school. online only two days a week and that is changing. And again, I, you know, dynamic changing landscape, things change. So I get that, but it’s also hard to plan. And it’s, it’s hard to tell somebody that they have to show up every day when they don’t even know if their kids are going to be in school. 

Kevin Long: Absolutely. I mean, as I interview people for new jobs, I’ll tell you, like there are a couple of questions that I always get. And one of them is, Always, I have kids, when are things going to require me to no longer be at, at home? Like, when will I have to start showing up on a site? And I have, I mean, some customers know that answer, some customers don’t. Uh, HQ people, you know, we definitely know that answer. But, yeah, I mean, it is. It is a question everybody asks. I mean, if you have kids and, you know, uh, a huge number of folks that I know are, are doing partial, I mean, I don’t know, let me rephrase that. I don’t know any school system. That I have people that I know in that has a hundred percent on site students that we’re doing. And so it is, you know, the, the, how do I continue to provide value for the company and continue to do what is necessary for my family is [00:23:00] always the question.

Adam McNair: Right. And you know, there are some things that I do think this will, this will kind of permanently impact the remote versus in person. Um, yeah. Not only do people want the flexibility, I think a lot of people, I mean, not everybody, everybody’s different. A lot of people want the flexibility to be able to work from home and fit things into their schedule and so forth. Um, but I think that the, the collaboration tools and the familiarity with them and kind of that personal barrier to entry for, for doing this has been out of necessity pushed through and kind of fought through as we’ve done, as we all had to work from home. And I think there were, there was a lot of just, um, kind of, uh, Stasis around these things have to be done in person, 

Kevin Long: right? And they’ve had to be [00:24:00] done in person because they were always done in person. Not and not because there was technology that would allow you to not do it. And, you know, it’s it’s staggering how many things. People have have decided cannot be done in person, like Intel community customers working remote, except for, you know, very specific things. Uh, you have, uh, customers doing, you know, major banking, uh, support and loan support. like FSA, all remote. I mean, just, you know, scattered to the wind. I mean, and we’ve had, I mean, we’ve had people literally be able to be like, well, I mean, I can work from anywhere. So I’m going to head to the country with a hotspot. And cause I know that they have 5G and so I can do what I need to do from there. 

Adam McNair: Yeah. Right. Yeah. So have you, [00:25:00] have you seen any functions that you’ve had to, Accomplish where you felt like remote was just really that if we had the option to get everybody back in a room that that particular thing that you did was would have really benefited from from in person.

Kevin Long: Yeah, 

Adam McNair: one. 

Kevin Long: Uh, solution sessions 100 percent when you’re trying to figure out how to approach a complicated problem, how to put up a solution diagram, how to put together a complicated workflow, things like that. It is, there are tools out there that you can do whiteboarding and things like that online, but they are, at least for me, and you know, uh, core competency of mine is looking around the and figuring out who thinks what we’re doing is crazy. Right. That is just, it is not the same because some people turn off their cameras, some people dial in some people. And [00:26:00] so being able to, to, to focus on that, um, is you can do it, but it is, it is a slower process. 

Adam McNair: That was actually my answer, too, frankly. Um, that was what was stuck in my head because I’ve been on two or three different sets of solutioning calls that, like you say, I think if, if everybody was really focused and video on and took it as a collaboration session.

Kevin Long: And everybody had a white board where they were working. Right. I 

Adam McNair: think you’d have more of a likelihood of having it really work. Yeah. Um, I’ve been on a lot, most of the ones I’ve been on. Um, and again, it’s multiple companies coming together around specific opportunities, you’ve got people with different platform, uh, comfort. And so some of them aren’t familiar with the tool that you’re using and how to, how to interact. And then you’ve got 30 percent of them are only dialed in and you only see their kind of icon. Um, There’s clearly a couple of people that dialed in and never said anything. And I think that’s kind of the, uh, 

Kevin Long: never come off mute.

Adam McNair: And it’s like, it’s like going to a class in college and putting your coat on a chair and leaving and coming back and getting it at the end. So somebody thought you were there kind of thing. You know, I, 

Kevin Long: yeah, 

Adam McNair: uh, so that happens. Um, but yeah, I think the solution session piece and I, um, maybe we’ll figure it out.

You know, I, I think, um, you know, there’s a lot of commercial businesses and multinational corporations and all of that, that have teams around the globe and have, have figured this out. And I think we’re, um, you know, still probably though, some of those aspects are still stuck a little bit further back in the get everybody in a [00:28:00] room and nobody leaves until the picture’s drawn kind of right.

Kevin Long: And just being able to, to hand someone A whiteboard marker and say, what do you write? And it’s just, uh, then, yeah, I mean, the, not everybody’s on a touchscreen tablet and I mean, in drawing with a mouse is not the same thing as, as drawing with your hand, it’s, you know, the, The dexterity and physical limitations around some of that are, are, uh, are still frustrating. And I, I expect that if there aren’t major innovations already coming or stuff already out there that we don’t know about, which I’m sure is the case, at least some point there’s, there’s going to be new stuff to, to address all. All of that, you know, live collaboration that isn’t just talking back and forth having a meeting, things like that, [00:29:00] um, where you’re collaborating on, on a to be determined diagram workflow, something like that.

Adam McNair: Yeah. Yeah. And I, um, I also wonder how much like as we were talking about just kind of personal, um, you know, evolution of our work space and in logistics and all of that, how much is, is other people catching up to that? And, um, what, what comes down to individual, you know, circumstances, um, all of those things that are kind of real life stuff about, well, I only have wifi in this part of my house and I don’t have good coverage over there, or I’m trying to work and somebody else is trying to do online classes in another area of the house, or, you know, Dogs, construction, um, Ambulances, [00:30:00] ambulances, all 

Kevin Long: of those kinds of things. Um, I live under the flight path of Dulles. We have a guy who lives under the flight path of Dulles. Um, so, right. I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s an absolute thing, but I mean, I’ll tell you, uh, before I got the keyboard to be able to make my life easier. I absolutely had to go out and get a new wireless router because it was, um, I had great internet, but an older router and it was stripping 50 percent of my throughput, which was fine when When only one of us was working from home, but when both of us are working from home and, uh, all doing stuff online and, you know, streaming video and streaming audio and streaming television and streaming all that stuff. Yeah, no, it, it, it, we absolutely had to figure out how we could expand coverage to parts of the house that would allow folks to [00:31:00] work independently and not step on each other’s toes. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, 

Adam McNair: the one thing that I haven’t figured out just quite yet is from a corporate culture standpoint, it feels to me like it’s important to get everybody to be on camera and be able to see people.

Um, I mean, I think in these times where. I’m not really going anywhere for the most part. I’m not, um, you know, I’m, I’m, we’re probably not just up for the fact that we’re busy with with work and everything, but we’re probably airing on the side of stay in a phase or so behind wherever the, um. Kind of reopening is, but, um, seeing everybody from that perspective, maintaining a team morale and interaction, but then just the, from the speaker interaction side, when [00:32:00] somebody wants to say something and you can tell non verbally that they’re getting ready to want to say something to avoid that 19 people talking over top of each other, and then everybody is real quiet for a minute or two. And then they try it again. And, um, But also from the participant side that I’m not saying we have any of these kind of folks in our company, certainly, but somebody that kind of like that jacket on the chair type that has simply dialed in is not really engaged 

Kevin Long: with, without, without a camera. Turned on, you could absolutely connect to a meeting, put it on mute, and walk away. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Without a doubt, you really, you really could. Uh, I mean, it’s, get the cardboard cut out, you know, for, to turn on and just sit there and with your, with a smile on your face, sitting in a chair. Yeah. 

Adam McNair: So I think trying to encourage that. Now, is that something, how are you handling that with teams and [00:33:00] the meetings that you run? Are you? Um. Absolutely. Trying to keep everybody online or on camera? 

Kevin Long: So meetings that I control, I mean, even if I look like crazy and I need a haircut and I haven’t shaved in four days, my camera’s on, right? I mean, the digital backgrounds that you can get are awesome so that you can’t necessarily see that, you know, I need to, I need to put some stuff away in the room behind me. Right. I mean, it’s great, but I’ll turn the camera on. Cool. And that, I mean, is it, it’s not, it’s, it’s a nonspecific cue, but it says, Hey, I’m here. You can look at me. Let’s, let’s do that. And people will do the same by and large meetings that my customers do that I’m not running that I don’t control, um, 0 percent of them use cameras. They are all still treating it like dialing. [00:34:00] 

Adam McNair: Yeah, I would say that, um, like I just, I had a customer meeting today and everybody is, it’s just their icon. There’s nobody is using a camera. Nobody’s nobody’s visible. Yeah. 

Kevin Long: Yeah. So, Uh, the meetings that I run, you know, with, you know, industry and teammates and things like that. And I mean, again, you know, if I can’t see, I mean, that, that someone thinks what I’m saying is crazy, then I’ll just assume they think I’m great and keep going. Uh, you know, that’s the egocentricity of, uh, that I have there, but. But yeah, it’s being able to see, be able to say something like, Hey, you know, Milner looks like you disagree with me. Let’s let’s work this out. Right. Um, absolutely. It is, uh, it’s, it’s great. And honestly, it’s sort of democratizing because I have several teams that are geographically distributed. [00:35:00] Anyway, right. So, you know, I’m not always even, even beforehand, I couldn’t always be in Boston, couldn’t always be in St. Louis. Right. So now even the folks that are, you know, in Montgomery County that, or downtown DC that I would normally get into a car and drive to, you know, it’s all, all the same. And I think that as it goes on and depending on how long This continues, I think that we’ll, we’ll likely see, uh, more customers using cameras as well.

Adam McNair: Yeah. I, and there’s also the supply chain of, you know, a lot, a lot of organizations didn’t have cameras integrated because they, they either 

Kevin Long: didn’t need some of their Hardware needs to be able to go into secure rooms, and so they explicitly deactivate cameras. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, and, and in a lot of buildings, I know the collaborative [00:36:00] rooms, building out video teleconferencing rooms, um, a lot of money, a lot of space has gone into that.

And the, the setup for, okay, everybody has their own mic, their own camera pointed at them, we’re going to do this. It’s going to be this big collaborative little, little nerve center inside of a, of a, of our building. We know if you, if you want people to use those, you don’t put cameras on their desks, because if you put cameras on everybody’s desk, nobody ever leaves their desk and they just VTC from each, um, you know, each of their locations. But I think they’ll get a little bit catch up on that on the hardware side. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, I think you’re right. Yeah, I mean, it’s the difference between, like, how public schools work. Like, our IT is set up to provide a robust IT learning experience from these particular buildings slash rooms. Yeah. And now it’s, now we’re needing to transition to providing a robust IT, uh, uh, presence wherever there’s a piece of IT [00:37:00] hardware.

Adam McNair: Yeah, I think, you know, from a hardware standpoint, that’s not too different to me from when they finally had the, um, HSPD 12 PIV cards that they wanted you to actually use those and plug them into a laptop and have a card reader. And when that first happened, I remember having a lot of conversations about, well, we don’t have any of those readers. And now our standard corporate image laptop has one in it. Yep. And everybody has them. I mean, we buy from Dell and Dell offers it as a standard. Standard plug in. Yep. Standard plug in. Um, So I, I think there’ll be some, some catch up there, um, certainly. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, well, certainly as, as I mean, cause some of our customers, like I’ve been reached out to, I have a GFE laptop for one of our customers and they pay me saying, Hey, your laptop’s old. You can get a new one if you want. I mean, I don’t want to drive into the middle of the city to do it, and so [00:38:00] it’s fine. Like, I can do my job with it, and so I let them know that that was fine. But there, as, as hardware cycles through their, uh, their processes, I’d be surprised if they didn’t start issuing more things that were more capable of that. Yeah, I would think that sort of robust, uh, uh, VTC collaboration suites. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, so last question for you is, have you done any conference industry event type, um, you know, whether it was conferences or little seminars or anything like that. Have you done any of those kinds of things? Yeah. Remotely. 

Kevin Long: Yeah, I attended a lunchtime, uh, speaking, uh, thing on, you know, about, uh, COVID and its impact on, on some of the IT industry a few months ago that was, um, Oracle put it on. Um, [00:39:00] it was, it was pretty well done, honestly. Um, You know, with these, those types of, I mean, you lose the looking around the room and seeing who’s there handing out business cards, hearing conversations and talking with folks about, about what they’re doing. You lose that, but you definitely get more attention on here’s the topic, you know, and here’s what’s going on with that. So, uh, I think it’ll be interesting to figure out how we can replace. The networking portion of it, not just the learning portion, because yeah, I have not seen or heard of any really successful versions of seminars like that, where you can have. You know, the, the, the standard half hour before you stand up and FCA does the pledge and you, and you get, you have your, your [00:40:00] coffee and your, and your, and your Danish and 75 people in suits walking around talking about what they’re all working on and, and, you know, putting teams together and figuring that stuff out. Um, and yeah, not seen anybody successfully do that yet or heard of, uh, uh, a way to, to replace that yet. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, so I’m, I’m going to sign up for, uh, the Act IAC, ELC, Imagination, that, that big of the kind of, that’s always been their big capstone annual event. And I’m going to go ahead and sign up for that. And that’s a day or two, and they’re still going to have speakers and all the tracks and all of that. And they’re, yeah, that’s a nice month, right? It’s normally October, right? Yeah. I think they might be doing the beginning of November this year. Um, but it, you know, the benefits, I think, um, I didn’t go the last year or two because it was several [00:41:00] days and I’d look at them like, wow, I have to go to either Williamsburg or Philadelphia.

Yeah. I’m going to burn three days or four out of the office. And that’s tough. And, um, yeah, And then you have, you know, the Costa Hotel and all the rest of that that goes into it that makes you decide how many people you want to send and all that. But then plus, the sign up for different tracks, go to this event, go to that event. There’s been a lot of times that, um, there was some topic I’d be interested in and I’d stick my head in and I realized, like, this room is, is jam packed. Right. I’m interested, but not interested enough to stand in the back for an hour and a half for an hour and a half. So, you know, nevermind. Um, and as much as you shouldn’t multitask, take phone calls, do all those things, sometimes stuff comes up and that whole step out and then you don’t want to interrupt the speaker. Am I going to go back in and all that? I think, [00:42:00] um, that’s going to make it a lot easier, but I, I do. Networking interaction piece will be interesting to see, I mean, Act I Act does a good job on, um, on a lot of their events and it’s going to be interesting to see if they figure out a, you know, technology angle. Uh, that that bridges that gap. Um, I know we similarly in an area where I think, um, it can be a little challenging is we, we recently have been doing, um, we did a CMMI appraisal. And we also, uh, we did the first CMMC, which we’ll talk about in a future podcast here, but there, we, we did the first CMMC, uh, assessment gap analysis, uh, that was done in the country and, um, both of those are very important. Intensive activities [00:43:00] and generally benefit from a lot of discussion and interaction and all of that. They are also full eight hour days focused on that. And 

Kevin Long: the auditors really like to be in person to make sure that people aren’t, you know. Blowing sunshine and going, you know, texting people to get answers for them to get the right stuff. So 

Adam McNair: yeah, so they required for these, we had to, uh, we had to video record them. And so on the CMMI side, CMMI reserved the right to go in and Um, essentially audit the video to check in at any points to make sure that we were really doing what we were supposed to be doing and, um, that it was being conducted in accordance with all of the rules and so [00:44:00] forth. So, um, you know, I think that’s, it, it’s, it’s interesting to see the, the technology challenges. And again, this is probably Where we’re talking about the ACT IAC conference, there’s probably a tool out there that either isn’t intended for the networking angle or is used for it in some other industry or something that, that will come to the forefront. And, you know, I think between niche players like that and enhancements of big provider, like Microsoft Teams, you know, the, The what are they going to do to to counter that, you know, engage in that market? Um, some of these event companies, you know, we have a contract that involves events and event hosting and strategy and marketing and all of that and working through how that’s gonna operate. I think [00:45:00] those tool those sets of tool of analysis of tools. Um, I think that’s now a, A growing niche market that there’s probably somebody that has a small niche company that has some tool that, uh, you know, six months from now is going to get acquired by Microsoft and, and, and, and, and bolted into one of these platforms and, um, probably make a lot of money out of that process.

It’s usually. Works. 

Kevin Long: right? And if it can solve that problem worth every penny. 

Adam McNair: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so I think so for the for the next highlight cast, we’ll we’ll first get to see the experiment here of the Microsoft teams recorded podcast translated to audio file and then we’ll We can dig into CMMC. And I think there’s a lot to talk about there, uh, that it’s just, it’s just an interesting, uh, [00:46:00] paradigm of, of change in the government around that new certification around cybersecurity. Uh, and it’s a very, very different, much more detailed way to become compliance. We’ll talk about that. But, uh, until then, we’ll go work on our technical work and see if we can’t make this a podcast.

Kevin Long: Outstanding. 

Adam McNair: All right. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin Long: Thanks, Adam.