Did you always know what you wanted to be when you grew up? There are dancers who started training at 3 years old; lawyers who dedicated hours to mock trial in high school. For many of us, though, our careers are not the product of a lifelong dream. That doesn’t mean they’re any less meaningful.

My path took me from studying Communications to customer service to a media services internship before getting my start in the IT industry. As unrelated as they might seem, each of these waypoints has shaped me into the IT professional I am today.

The Right Audience & the Right Message

After high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I chose to major in Communications because I knew that skill set could be applied almost anywhere.

My studies explored reaching the right audience with the right message. This can seem divorced from daily life, but it’s something we do naturally. Think about how you would adjust your tone in these situations:

– Asking your partner to take out the trash
– Answering an interview question from a hiring manager
– Teaching someone how to use a tool

In each scenario, you need to take into account who you’re speaking to, what your message is, why they should care, and what you want them to do about it. It’s a two-way street: knowing how to craft messages teaches you how to deconstruct and interpret messages too.

My major offered a deep dive into this practice, demonstrating how it can be applied to fields like business, advertising, journalism, and government in nuanced ways. As an IT consultant, these skills help ensure my clients and I are on the same page, no matter the issue.

360-Degree Empathy

As I grew more confident in my communication skills, my part-time job in customer service gave me a place to put them into action. Working with customers helped me hone my soft skills, develop patience, and lead with empathy.

Understanding a customer or client is a great starting point. But what then?

Especially at Pliancy, being an IT consultant isn’t about just giving people whatever they want, no questions asked. It’s about understanding their needs to make sure they have the proper solution.

Imagine that someone asks for a flash drive. To recommend the right storage capacity, you’ll need to find out what they plan to use it for. They may reveal they’re backing up files, and you could recommend they use an external hard drive or a cloud-based solution instead.

This 360-degree mindset acknowledges that no request and no experience exists in a vacuum. People in customer-facing roles need to know the full story, and then use that information to act.

Breaking Stereotypes in the IT Field

I’ve always been interested in technology. I’m an avid gamer, I build PCs, and working with technology comes easily to me. But I never imagined those interests would turn into a full-time career in tech. It felt even less accessible because it was, and is, a male-dominated field. So when I started working at Harvard Law School, first as a part-time media services coordinator and then in an entry-level IT position, it was eye-opening to see so many women who were technicians. They showed me that an IT career wasn’t out of reach.

Encouraged by the community around me, I gained more work experience and moved up the ranks from tier 1 to tier 3 support, solving more advanced issues. What started as my next step turned into my next stage and set the tone for my career path.

My communication skills and ability to problem-solve with empathy proved a perfect match for my technical know-how.

I provide clients with a person-centric experience that focuses on trust and partnership.

I want to break the stereotype of IT professionals as socially awkward tinkerers with rigid ideas about technology—and I’d like to think I’m doing that, one personable conversation at a time.

Forging My Own Path to an IT Career

There are times when I’m self-conscious about not having the same background as many peers. I don’t have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and I didn’t have any certifications or credentials before my first IT job.

However, no certification program could have shaped my approach to consulting as much or as well as my varied experience has.

The Ricki Laird in another universe who grew up dreaming about information technology, majored in computer science, and studied cybersecurity for fun would have her own distinct consulting philosophy. Her background would shape the way she solves problems and interacts with clients, just as mine does.

We are the sum of everything we’ve done and everything we’ve been through. With that mindset, a detour is never really a detour.

It’s been said that a person is only as good as their tools. While there’s no denying that good tools are important, using their minimum functionality means missing out.

Yes, you could drive a V8 engine in stop-and-go traffic—but you need open road to see what it can really do.

Pliancy uses Google Workspace to connect, collaborate, and share information. Most people are familiar with individual tools like Gmail or Google Docs. But before all of this was known as Google Workspace, even before it was G Suite, it was Google Apps. In the past 13 years, I’ve attended and hosted many Google Apps meetups, tracked down bugs, and beta-tested new features. I’ve seen it evolve from a fringe platform to a suite of tools that many of us use daily.

I rarely encountered others with comparable knowledge of Google Workspace before I joined Pliancy in early 2020. When I came on board, I was genuinely impressed by how Pliancy leveraged existing apps in clever ways to streamline the way we support clients.

Questioning the Status Quo for Digital Workspaces

When a consultant is enjoying vacation time or otherwise unavailable, fellow consultants seamlessly step in to monitor service and respond to requests. At other companies, this kind of coverage would require an administrator to manually change who has access to information and who receives alerts. While the task is small on its own, time adds up quickly when coverage can change almost daily.

Why not leave off-duty consultants in these groups? The stream of tickets and notifications from multiple clients can quickly overwhelm a mailbox—to the point that it becomes noise. Every minute spent weeding through outdated alerts is one less minute spent resolving actual issues.

Stretching Google Workspace to Its Limits

To manage the flow of information, Pliancy maintains hundreds of client-specific Google Groups. This lesser-known service can message out to all members (similar to a LISTSERV), which we use to alert consultants to outstanding requests. Without requiring the oversight of an administrator, individuals can quickly join and leave groups, receive automated calendar invites, and access shared files.

This self-service approach makes it easy for consultants to provide client coverage on the fly without tedious handover meetings.

Google Workspace excels at allowing users to tailor when, where, and how they receive information. This will come as no surprise to the casual Gmail user who is used to starring important messages, tagging conversations, or using preset tabs like “Promotions” or “Social.” But with our team’s deep knowledge, we can stretch these features to their limits and improve our employee experience. Gmail’s powerful filtering and UI features make managing high-volume email traffic from multiple clients a breeze.

Here are a few ways our consultants create order from chaos:

– Creating mini-inboxes with “skip the inbox” and “show if unread” features
– Nesting relevant labels to quickly group messages
– Color-coding messages to identify clients at a glance
– Viewing multiple inboxes side by side

It’s important to emphasize that this flexibility does not come at the cost of security. First and foremost, we enforce MFA (multi-factor authentication) on all Workspace connections to reduce the risk of unauthorized access. We also apply a security baseline to all of our Google Workspace tenants, ensuring that clients have the same level of protection. Finally, we use a cloud-based third-party backup solution that maintains copies of Workspace data in a secondary location. This protects us against losing data in the unlikely event that the originals are compromised or corrupted. Bolstering our workspace with these security measures offers the best of both worlds, allowing us to have peace of mind while leveraging a powerful, user-friendly tool.

Making Tools Work for You

Maximizing features isn’t limited to your workspace. You can apply this approach to maximize the features of any given tool:

– Identify pain points. What are you or other end users wasting time on? What would make your lives easier?
– Find the boundaries. What is possible within the tool—and what’s not? Answering these questions will show you how much room you have to explore. If you need more guidance, then…
– Consult an expert. Find someone who knows more about the tool than you do. This might be a colleague with deep knowledge or a representative from the tool’s developer. Find out what features they feel are underused, or ask about the most creative use they’ve seen.
– Test the fences. Now that you know the confines, build with the goal of failure. It seems counterintuitive, but you may be surprised by how far you can go.

At Pliancy, we’re not satisfied with “good.” Whether we’re enabling autonomy or customizing the flow of information, innovating toward simplicity is the name of the game. For ourselves and for our clients, we are thoughtful and intentional about testing boundaries to discover what’s possible through automation and more. It’s by exploring a tool’s full potential that we can use commonplace resources in extraordinary ways.

By swearing the Hippocratic Oath, doctors pledge to first do no harm. This means prioritizing the well-being of their patients above all else. An old boss told me that every person should try to live by the same principle, no matter their vocation. That’s how doing what is right became my guiding light as an IT consultant.

Problem Solving and Consultant-Client Relationships

The consultant-client relationship mirrors that of a doctor and their patient. Lives may not hang in the balance for IT, but both relationships involve deep subject-matter experience and shared decision-making. Most importantly, these types of relationships require a high degree of trust to be successful.

Few patients can say that they fully understand their doctors’ every decree. Still, we trust that our physicians and other healthcare professionals use their years of education and training to inform each recommendation.

A similar thing can be said for a successful consultant. As their friendly, neighborhood IT strategist, our clients trust me to bring specific knowledge and experience to the table. Just as doctors have continuing education requirements, I stay up to date on the latest technologies and best practices—so clients can focus on other aspects of their business.

Prioritizing Client Needs for Effective Consulting

Now, it would be naive to say that every IT consultant prioritizes each client’s needs. While working at another managed service provider (MSP), I worked with a client organization whose business model was to purchase and resell overstock and secondhand technology. Selling hardware at a markup is a huge revenue stream for traditional MSPs. The previous provider attempted to force the client’s hand by refusing to complete new projects on hardware they did not sell. The provider was frustrated by their lost revenue; the client was frustrated by the MSP’s lack of flexibility.

I inherited an unstable infrastructure that had been pieced together by many different hands. I knew the client deserved better, and they were willing to trust me to build it for them.

My vision was a streamlined system that could scale and provide a repeatable support experience.

There was no direct monetary gain: they didn’t buy any new hardware, and improving the system meant fewer future support tickets (and fewer billable hours). But I could rest easy knowing that I, as an engineer, delivered the best solution possible.

When I finished implementing the new system, the client took one look and said, “All it took was one conversation about making this work?” Not quite. Yes, it took one conversation, but it required the right mindset to bridge the gap.

Consultant-Client Relationships and the Pliancy Ethos

That was the last time I was allowed to honor a client’s needs over profitability in that job. I eventually left that MSP; in fact, I stopped working at MSPs altogether. When I met Marcus, Pliancy’s founder, I realized that he was building a team whose approach to IT consulting aligned with mine.

It’s about more than just a business model or a paycheck. It’s an ethos, a constant search for better understanding, and I can confidently say I’m empowered to prioritize excellent service over the bottom line.

If I can leave you with one piece of advice, it’s to expect more from your IT consultant and the consultancy process. They shouldn’t have to supplement their services with hardware sales. Instead, you should feel confident that they are a trusted advisor and a steward of your systems. Your consulting team should commit to doing no harm—or, even better, they should commit to doing what’s right.

What drives you as a person? It’s a scary question, and exploring it requires introspection, vulnerability, and honesty. No number of lists or charts or graphs will lead you to a final, definite answer. Purpose is a moving target: one that evolves as you change.

When Pliancy launched (then called TSG) in 2008, it was a tiny operation. This meant that at its most basic level, Pliancy’s purpose could be what drove me as an individual. However, no person, and no company, is static forever.

We now have over 120 team members solving the question of how technology can help companies work better, faster, and smarter. Pliancy was built around this endeavor, and it will always be part of our identity.

To make sure we stay on course, we need to ensure that the force driving us forward reflects our shared values and our capabilities. Evolving Pliancy’s purpose has been a foundational step toward sustainable growth.

Shifting the IT Mentality

Before we can talk about where we’re going, we need to talk about where we’ve been. From day one, I wanted to shift the mentality around IT from low-level problem solvers to innovators who could create long-term value.

Pliancy was formed because I was tired of wasting time on the same old issues when I could tackle bigger—and more interesting—questions instead:

What is the company trying to accomplish? How can I add value through technology?

What kinds of tools could I introduce to help them get more done? To work more efficiently? To make technology seem easy and accessible to any user?

Answering these bigger questions has remained at the core of Pliancy even as we’ve experienced immense growth. When I wrote my last post in March 2021, we had just hit 60 people. A year later, we are now 120 team members strong and anticipate having close to 200 employees by the end of the year.

But growth, like most things in life, is complex. What gets you from A to B won’t necessarily get you from B to C. My individual vision was no longer enough. As much as we still operate like a scrappy startup, I understood how important it was to hone and mature our sense of purpose so Pliancy could move forward with clarity and intention.

Pliancy’s Purpose & Mission Statements

OUR PURPOSE

Pliancy empowers tomorrow’s technology leaders to revolutionize how organizations value technology.

OUR MISSION

Pliancy invests in the long-term success of our team with a culture of mentorship. We develop leaders who accelerate the missions of emerging companies with well-architected technology.

Creating a new purpose statement required balance. It was important that it feel bigger than any one person, while still being rooted in our people-first approach. It needed to be simple enough to resonate without requiring too much explanation—yet grand enough to honor the talent and ambition of our team.

With this in mind, there were expansive discussions among leadership and with long-time team members about why we’re here and what we’re trying to do. Many of us had an internalized sense of Pliancy’s purpose, each one informed by our roles, our experiences, and our personal histories.

Reflecting upon these ideas as a group allowed us to find common threads and weave them into something that felt like a natural progression of why Pliancy was founded in the first place.

Communicating Purpose to Guide Action

Our next hurdle was to communicate these principles to our growing team. We’ve seen firsthand that communication is one of the most difficult things to scale.

A quick chat by the water cooler used to be the most effective way to distribute knowledge. With seven offices and a mostly remote workforce, it was clear that was no longer true. A lot of people think you can fix a communication problem by communicating more. But overcommunication leads to fatigue; it becomes noise, messages get distorted, and suddenly people are even less informed than before.

The real solution is not about frequency, but quality. With that in mind, we first had to solidify what we wanted to accomplish. What do we want team members to do with these guiding principles?

Ultimately, our goal is to empower them to make decisions that move us all toward a shared vision.

We want each person’s individual, day-to-day choices to reflect the same thought process that underpins our identity as a company.

From that moment, we realized we shouldn’t jump ahead to the what or the how. Instead, we should start with why.

We rolled out our revised purpose statement and core values in September 2021. The purpose statement and core values acted as the foundation for a set of key initiatives shared in January 2022. These initiatives will guide our work throughout the year and help Pliancy build sustainable processes to support our continued evolution.

Spacing out this information allowed people time to digest everything being shared. Instead of dumping everything from abstract concepts to brass tacks all at once, a staggered release provided space to understand how each element functions within the whole.

A Foundational Thought Process

In isolation, saying we want our team to make decisions that move us toward a shared vision sounds like hot air. So, what does it look like in practice?

We want consultants to push the way they think about solutions. How can they solve a problem in a way that makes the client rethink what technology can do for them? This could be as simple as automating a repetitive and tiresome task, saving the client time and energy in aggregate. It could also mean architecting an ambitious technical solution that takes many months and multiple teams to implement—one that may radically change and improve how the client does business.

Fundamentally, it’s never about just solving the issue at hand. That’s reactive thinking.

It’s about giving people the context and information they need to think in a particular way, to do the kind of work we value, and to trust them to work through that thought process independently.

Where We Go From Here

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a grand experiment, and it’s real. It’s not a fabrication for a marketing campaign. It’s not meant to feel calculated: we’re ready to be vulnerable with you.

Maybe our plan will work, or maybe we’ll realize we’ve been misguided. No matter the result, we see the Pliancy blog as an opportunity to be transparent about our goals, strategies, successes, and failures.

It’s easy to craft a narrative when you already know the ending. With every piece in front of you, you can mold events into clean story arcs and tie them off with tidy bows. In contrast, we’re a work in progress.

So if our purpose-driven community interests you, stay tuned as we share updates about our journey. I look forward to having you along for the ride.

I remember having a conversation one afternoon with a friend who was an MIT Grad student at the time. She was brilliant. While we talked once about the expectations I have of those around me, she told me, “Hiram, you know what your problem is? You assume competence!” She believed that upwards of 50% of the folks we all assumed were competent were indeed incompetent, and we simply frustrated ourselves when we assumed anything different.

My mind was blown. It was as though someone hit me with a brick. I was intrigued, so I looked up the word “incompetence” in the dictionary. One definition equates it with being ineffective. The fact that a substantial number of us could be ineffective… that’s certainly within the realm of possibility.

I’m reminded of the Thomas Edison quote that spoke to his troubles inventing the light bulb: “I haven’t failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” I do believe there is an inherent benefit to failure. It would make sense for organizations to allow more room for failure, because it helps you grow.

Pain & Gain

After picking yourself up from a momentary failure, when you do finally have that “light-bulb” moment, that solution tends to stay with you much longer. Why? Because failure is painful, and pain etches itself into our long-term memory so we modify our behavior.

Learning requires a development/sandbox environment, where scenarios can be tested in safe conditions. We need Failure Safe-Zones. Sometimes failing a few times at something is critical to truly understanding a thing. It’s the equivalent of breaking stuff as a kid, taking it apart, and gaining a new understanding of the inner workings. How can you forget that? But if you were made too afraid to break a thing, you never got this opportunity to see the inner workings. It’s very cathartic. When I say “understanding,” I mean mastery. I’m not talking about messing around with something aimlessly until something shakes loose and saying, “I fixed it.” I never say that I understand a thing unless I have mastered it. It’s a gift… and a curse.

Teaching for Mastery

My Discrete Math Professor at BU, Prof. A, is a distinguished academic and a seriously smart, no nonsense guy. One day, Prof. A. was giving his lecture in his thick Russian accent, when he realized that the majority of the class was having a difficult time understanding a new concept. I fully expected him to do what most professors do, and simply steamroll through his presentation as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Surprisingly, Prof. A. stopped the class in dramatic fashion and asked, “What am I doing wrong? Because it’s not all of you, so it’s me.” He then explained Combinations and Permutations using a few Coke cans he had in the room, and suddenly the light bulb went off. In his closing arguments, Professor A. said, “I don’t care if someone can do something really well—it does not mean they understand a subject. If they cannot explain it to a 5-year-old, they don’t truly understand it. It doesn’t matter if they won a Nobel Prize for it!” That blew my socks off and changed my thought process for good.

If you can teach it, you have a good grasp of it.

If you can teach it to a 5-year-old, then you truly understand it.

Most people who can fix a thing don’t necessarily understand it. They sometimes understand a few methods that work most of the time; they’re working the law of averages. Unless you become a master in something, you won’t create real innovation or real art with it. You’ll just get by. In IT, it’s like the old, “have you turned it off and on?” method. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking this true-blue method! It may very well work. But turning it off and on does not require mastery. It’s just about getting it back to a default state to see if there is a real problem, or if it’s just an anomaly.

My grad student friend proposed that most people we meet every day are most likely incompetent, aka ineffective. That was hard for me to accept. The way I was taught, when you said you knew something, that meant mastery. Inevitably you were going to be called on it. Meanwhile, the concept of the day is “Fake it till you make it.” Have you seen the LinkedIn meme with Branson that says, “If someone asks you if you can do something, say yes, then figure out how to do it later”? I love the boldness of this, but that method is not going to work for everyone. We need to find safe ways to break things to their essence, so that, as masters, we can find simpler ways to explain them to others.

When I started college I knew nothing about computers. I knew they would allow me to research, create, write, and read. But the computer itself? That was magical. And it was slow.

At the advice of a trusted friend of a friend, I bought RAM. RAM was supposed to make my computer faster but as soon as I installed it, my computer started doing funny things. Like turning itself off while I wrote my midterms.

What once was slow was now unreliable, so I called support for my PC and the tier-one support rep used their script to ask if I had reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled the operating system. No, I had not. “OK, let’s do that,” he said, so I did.

Great, we’re back online. Now, where are my files?

“You can restore them from backup,” he said.

“You didn’t mention anything about a backup before reformatting my hard drive…”

Now, where are my midterms? My entire senior year of English? My SimCities? Gone.

Worse still, rebuilding my PC didn’t do anything to stop what turned out to be the wrong type of RAM from changing my magic box into a box of frustration. It was my first experience with technological powerlessness and unmanageability, and I vowed never to let it happen again.

Learning the Ropes

At the start of the next semester I got a job with Alan, the father of a close friend who was looking for someone to help with his consulting business. I told him the story of my college PC and he offered to teach me about computers.

That year, Alan taught me how to take apart a PC and, more importantly, put it back together better than I left it. He taught me basic networking skills and what a server was. I stopped being afraid of dip switches and driver updates. I learned how to back up—and I got paid to do it.

My tech skills came with practice and patience. But learning to work with clients was even more valuable. I had been working after school and weekends since I was 16, but those jobs weren’t stepping stones to building a career. This was different. This was local businesses partnering with a caring professional to keep things running smoothly.

There is also a difference between clocking in and making yourself available. At the time, I was in school and working a job on the weekends. Sometimes the work would be an hour here or there. Other times we’d need larger blocks for bigger projects. But it was the emergency calls that were the greatest learning experiences for working with clients.

I let Alan take the lead, and he’d let me overhear his assessment of a situation. He’d get the client to take us back to when things were working normally—what did that look like? Then he’d have them walk us through what happened. He would take the time to let them go into as much detail as they needed and didn’t pass judgement or shut them down.

Sometimes the issues were larger issues, like the network being down or a server offline. After getting as much information as possible without condescending or patronizing the client, he’d give them an estimate of how long they could expect to be offline so we could have a window of opportunity to get to the bottom of things. Seems simple, but I’ve seen a lot of people over the years forget to give themselves the time they need to accurately assess and resolve a situation.

A lot of what I was there for was to be a sounding board. Everyone needs someone to bounce ideas off of, and Alan was a one-man show. Clients don’t need to hear every idea that comes into an engineer’s head, they need to know how long before things are working and that we have what we need to get the job done. Having an assistant meant he had someone who could go get the missing part or check the other end of a cable.

But First, Chocolate

I learned the importance of chocolate in the art of troubleshooting. If something was seriously messed up, the first thing Alan did was reach for the best chocolate he could find and have a piece. I’d be up and running out the door, but he would always wait just a minute while he collected his thoughts on the matter and savored that last bit of calm before diving into whatever needed to be fixed. When Alan said, “We need chocolate,” I knew he meant, “Let’s have a think before we do anything.”

IT folks are easily forgotten. We’re mostly behind the scenes and disappear when things are good. Alan had a thing about two-dollar bills. They were his calling card. He always kept a few on-hand and would give them to people he met, and they’d keep them on their desks to remind them who to call. I forgot about them until someone brought one to his memorial service and spoke about it, and him. And how he always took time with his clients to connect them with the people behind the work.

Welcome to the Pliancy blog. Our first goal here is to give you a preview of what it’s like to work with us.

A blog opens a window into a company. It’s really hard, as a potential employee or client in this industry, to decipher the difference between one company and its competitors. We’re inviting you into our thought processes so you can see what makes us so different.

We had no online presence until about a year ago. And although we’ve been around and growing successfully for over a decade now, we recently reached a size that necessitated searching for clients and employees outside our network.

New clients, at least, were vetting us through peers. But we realized at some point that job candidates had to spend way too much time trying to determine if we were the right fit for each other. If you have no presence online at all, people are hesitant when your job ads are as positive as ours. We often hear from new employees that our role descriptions sounded “too good to be true,” until they saw what the company and culture was like for themselves.

Creativity and camaraderie are often undervalued in IT organizations. We continue to challenge that status quo by championing creative solutions as a team.

And now, with 60 team members and counting, it seems like a good time to start explaining to others how we advance our profession as a team in our own creative ways.

We didn’t want to put out just any blog. We wanted to really do something different—more authentic (an overused word for an under-used concept).

We want to be totally transparent about the challenges of what we do and how we think through them. When we talk about technology, we want to explore why it’s important. Or better yet, how we apply it.

We don’t want to talk about tech for tech’s sake or to advance an agenda. The latest and greatest technology products, why you should fear getting left behind… that sort of thing. You won’t find that here.

Put simply, this blog is about how we’re leveraging technology to create better experiences for ourselves and, in turn, for the companies we support.

We think very differently in our industry. Our approach to marketing is an extension of our general approach: everything revolves around, and is driven by, our people. We want our blog to reflect their voices and amplify their ideas.

We want to keep pushing the envelope in terms of transparency. We don’t guard secrets. In fact, we don’t have any magical ingredients in our special sauce: It’s all about the chefs themselves and how they work. By itself, the technology we use isn’t extraordinary; it’s how we implement it, orchestrate it, and train users to embrace it.

On a personal level, I’m just constantly impressed by the Pliancy team. They feed my faith in people daily. They renew my belief in the potential of creative problem solving within a strong team dynamic. They’re not afraid of what they’ll find by shining a light somewhere new. And ultimately, I believe that sharing our thoughts and expertise will advance our industry.

We’re excited to see where this journey leads us. Thanks for joining.

How was your first day of work? Can you tell if this company cares about who you are and what you value? Do they care about your experiences and see you as an essential employee of the company? You can tell a lot from an onboarding experience.

You should receive a seamless red-carpet experience from day one, right? Yes! The technological experience should definitely be impressive, especially when you’re joining a biotech or capital management company. You should have all your tools laid out to plot your next big projects and goals! You should be left with the feeling that your new company is proactively working to make their employees’ lives easier. At the end of the day, it’s a realistic approach to investing back into their own company.

I’m a projects engineer at Pliancy, with a focus on helping our life sciences and finance clients create impressive onboarding experiences for their new hires. My position was brand new when I started here. It was a bit intimidating to engineer my own role, but once I started strategizing, it got really exciting and my ideas kept growing and growing (even though not all of them were the best, ha). After laying everything “onboarding” out in front of me, the first step was breaking the concept of onboarding into components: what are the key milestones and expectations of the onboarding experience on both sides of the relationship?

When we first take on a new client, it requires onboarding an initial set of employees, then becomes a rolling admissions process of new employees as they join the client’s company. I started with what I knew. What had I experienced in previous positions when I was being onboarded as an employee? How did I want to make it better? What did I want to understand earlier that wasn’t made clear to me? What would have helped me become better at my job faster?

To Scale

I listed all the things a person would do when they first join a company, or what the particular client should do for their first-time users. They would introduce the hardware, the software, all the equipment they’re using, the company standards. I made so many lists. I gathered all the information, ran it by teammates and asked for their input, and then began grouping the information into a process that I could start streamlining.

From there, I created a basic presentation laying out the essentials every client needs when they onboard new hires. But I knew we needed to go deeper. So much of the Pliancy experience is tailored white-glove service. Every client is unique. Onboarding according to individual client needs is a must for us, but it seemed really labor intensive to recreate the wheel every time we worked with a new client.

So my next question became: how do we make this scalable and tailored for all our clients? The answer was automation.

Start With What You Know

I started by automating the client onboarding presentation I had created. I was familiar with Google Slides already, and I knew there was some way to make template functions. So I researched like crazy to figure out how to manipulate the fields inside the slides to automatically pull the client data. I ended up creating a form for consultants to use to fill out their client information. This form generates a slide for a client, and also generates folders within the Pliancy G Drive to organize the new material.

So now, the presentation ties everything together in a neat package: everything a new user needs to securely and confidently do their jobs using their company’s technology applications. They know who to contact and how. They know how to access everything they need to access. It’s something they can refer back to throughout their relationship with Pliancy, and it’s easy for us to update as we evolve their technology stack. And it only takes about an hour for us to create a presentation that’s perfectly suited to the client.

Gathering Data, Simplified

We want to help our clients go deeper in onboarding, instead of just introducing the standard software and application practices to their new hires. As a team, we wanted to perfect communication and data collection, even before the new employee’s start date.

The next problem to solve was: how do we collect the client data to fill out these fields without bugging people? We have to make sure we get all the information we need about the user— when they first joined, what applications and permission levels they need, etc. I’ll meet with recruiting managers to determine what usually happens after users are created.

I created a different form for that. It automatically generates and sends a request to IT saying, ‘we need to set up these accounts and this computer for them with all these applications.’ Things like making sure they have their access card, or making sure they’re properly entered into the finance system for payroll and benefits.

So whenever users are created, not only does this form send the proper requests to IT, it creates a checklist of all these things. And then it assigns each task to whomever is supposed to do it. We can go back to that list and say, ‘Okay, what’s the status on this new user? Are they ready to move to the next task or is their onboarding complete?’

My teammate Wesley introduced me to different integration tools like Integromat and Zapier. They allow you to create different processes and integrations. I really enjoyed learning to use them, because they allowed me to achieve things with technology I’d only been able to conceptualize before. The applications could now all talk to each other, creating smooth, seamless onboarding and ALSO off-boarding experiences. Processes could be made for every part of the employee lifecycle!

Closing the Loop

First, I started with the client’s employee onboarding. Then, I started opening the realm of client employee off-boarding. Now, I have started learning about the actual client onboarding and off-boarding as well. Taking part in onboarding a whole client and working with all their standard applications has been so fun and insightful!

It’s easier creating a process from scratch now, throwing any preconceived or outdated ideas out the window. I’ve proven to myself that getting in the new employee’s or new client’s shoes is the best starting point for any great onboarding process. I meet with the client and ask how we can make their people’s lives easier. From there, it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it.

The finance industry has a rap for moving slowly with respect to technology—and more specifically—IT security. However, because finance companies potentially have billions of dollars in assets under management, they’re highly targeted by bad actors.

It’s also important for security technology to be managed in such a way that it doesn’t have a large impact on user experience. You don’t want “security theater,” where the IT infrastructure seems very obvious and secure to the user, but isn’t really. Hackers can see right through security theater. And security through obscurity is akin to putting keys under your doormat.

When we first begin working with clients, we unfortunately see many poor implementations for modern systems like Single Sign-On or Multi-Factor Authentication. The other thing we often see is weak email security—one of the biggest threats for companies in general, and especially for financial firms.

These are problems we’ve taken particular interest in solving as a team of technologists, and doing so in a way that isn’t obtrusive to the user. In general, you could sum up our entire approach by saying we build guardrails that encourage best practices with respect to security, while also precluding bad behavior. We aim to make it easier to be secure than it is to not be.

Many people view security and user experience as diametrically opposed. It doesn’t have to be that way. You just have to think creatively in how you approach security implementation.

A 360-DEGREE APPROACH

At Pliancy, we hit 100% Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) compliance, which means that every single user employs MFA across all of our clients. In the finance field that’s incredibly rare, especially because we also take the extra steps to make it a good experience.

Typically we have clients come to us with 7-10 different systems that they log into on any given day. They have a username and password for each system, all of which they have to remember.

So we set them up with a Single Sign-On: each user signs once into our platform, which is verified with Multi-Factor Authentication. Once they’ve signed in using just one username and password, they can launch any of their applications with a single click.

It isn’t cumbersome. They don’t have to pull out some physical token on a keychain and read off digits, or anything like that. It’s just a push on their phone—click yes or no. That allows them access to all their systems for the day; they don’t have to worry about it again, and it’s far more secure.

We engineer each client platform to consolidate audit logs and perform anomaly detection. This will flag anything that seems odd by the parameters of each user. For instance, a user suddenly has 15 random login attempts from another country. We’ve designed the system to block those attempts automatically instead of having to look manually for those kinds of discrepancies after the fact.

SECURITY VIA EDUCATION

We’re constantly looking for new ways to heighten security behind the scenes that are completely transparent to the user. We’ve done a lot of problem-solving to enhance email security. Email security is notoriously terrible, and notoriously intrusive to the user.

Sure, an overactive filter on your emails to catch phishing attempts or other threats probably does the job. And a lot of companies will try to solve email security with a purely technical approach like this. They install systems that filter email, scan for various things, etc.

But fundamentally, your best approach to solving that problem isn’t simply having that technical aspect in place: It’s layering that technical aspect with a user training process.

We’ve found there’s no technological substitute for informed users—those who are trained to identify emails that might be fishy. At the end of the day, the threat landing in your inbox isn’t going to compromise you. The breach happens when a user clicks on it. And that kind of stuff happens all the time.

So the approach we’ve taken is layering the technical implementation with a strong but unobtrusive educational component. We partner with a vendor that provides training materials, which we tailor to the client and review with them to teach them what looks suspicious, what looks legitimate, and how to tell them apart. We favor interactive training that employees can take at their own leisure.

We also send users test email campaigns that mimic common phishing tactics. Then we monitor the number of people who opened the email, the number of people who click on the links in the email, the number of people who filled data out on the fake page skinned to look like a Microsoft login page (for instance), and so on.

We track patterns and watch how they change over time with the introduction of security concepts through training. This allows us to tailor training to individual users who are struggling with specific security issues. Because nobody wants the mandatory three-hour training when they already understand the content, unless they need it for compliance regulation.

That’s just one example of how we can unobtrusively figure out where we need to focus our efforts to have the highest value. We know when clients are getting really good at identifying threats, because end users will start forwarding those test emails to our consultants and say, “Hey, this looks phishy. Did this not get caught by your system?”

That’s the goal.

We can all agree that attracting and retaining great employees is fundamental to running a successful business. Investing in the development of your employees is a no-brainer if you intend to keep them happy.

Sadly, IT is still seen by many as a “cul-de-sac” industry. Usually the only way to move in an organization is out, not up. Think of a conventional IT department: the typical company doesn’t have a big IT organization, unless it’s a large Fortune 500 or technology focused company. Usually, the IT department is perceived to be similar to the accounting department, in that it serves as a utility for the company to do its business—but doesn’t directly serve the core of the company’s business.

IT professionals within that department are on a hyper-specialized professional carousel. They become technological gatekeepers to the busy, sometimes tech-averse professionals around them. They might wait for years, boxed into a narrow process, for the one manager position to become available. Becoming a manager maybe isn’t necessarily something they’re even interested in. It’s a real motivation killer, and it’s one of the dark industry-wide corners where the stereotype of the self-isolating IT nerd is born. Worse even is if you do develop the individual, or they take it upon themselves, you’re met with the other stereotypical results of low retention. It often feels as though the cards are stacked against you.

So in order to flourish professionally, they have to leave their organization. It’s not even necessarily the organization’s fault. They might love the mission and their leadership—they just aren’t connected to them anymore, if they ever were in the first place.

This is pretty depressing. Not just because it deprives the end users of better solutions, but because the kind of people who go into IT tend to be inherently creative thinkers. A “patch factory” process really stifles curious minds.

Disrupting the Cul-de-sac

One of the approaches we’ve taken at Pliancy to prevent the cul-de-sac problem is to encourage people to venture into every part of the business. So whether that’s finance, operations, process development, business development, whatever—we really want people to think outside their zone to apply their creative skills and knowledge of technology.

In many cases, once they begin to understand another job function better, the curtain drops and their natural curiosity can run wild marrying creative solutions to common business problems through the lens of a technologist. It’s a lot easier to think creatively when you can abandon the habit of doing ‘what worked before.’

Avoiding Burnout

Of course, Pliancy isn’t an IT department in a larger organization with a parallel mission. We’re a consulting firm. Our mission is to create incredible technology experiences.

But the other half of our mission is to always put our people first, and measure growth in terms of innovation and human achievement. And specifically in this industry, there tends to be a lot of burnout because it’s a competitive industry that often commoditizes itself. Which ends in a serious inability to keep good people and retain a culture of personal growth.

I never worry about whether developing our employees — or giving them space and resources to develop themselves — will set them up to leave for greener pastures. It’s the alternative I’m afraid of: becoming a dying pasture full of stifled people with nothing more to contribute each passing year. You have to train your people. You have to help them develop professionally. And if you’re really good at it, they’ll probably find value to add to your organization. They won’t want to leave, because they’re fulfilled.

We try to head off the burnout problem by instituting an employee development standard we call the 75/25 Rule. This means 75% of your time is billable to the clients and the other 25% you get to spend working with peers to develop new skills—to add more value to yourself and the organization, which is your true purpose.

Through this model (which is not particularly easy to execute), we find that we have more sustainability. Our attrition rate is probably the lowest in our industry. Not only that, but each person is now adding exponential value by doing things for the organization that impact multiple consultants or multiple clients.

One example is Emily from our Boston office. She embodies success for an IT person who’s dropped into an organization, given permission to traverse the whole company, and completely transforms everything she touches.

She was initially hired to improve the onboarding experience for new employees when they join a client we support. She took that in, went to the Nth degree with it, and leveraged the 75/25 Rule to build it out in a way no one had imagined. By engineering automation into the entire workflow, she saved time and money for all of us. She developed a kickass presentation. She figured out an innovative way to set meetings with these new employees and create an impressive onboarding experience, beyond just the technical aspects. She used the 75% to deliver an amazing experience to the clients she was directly servicing due to hyper growth, then leveraged the 25% to create a process around empowering the rest of the company to use the technology with their clients.

She branched out into every area of our company to scale a 2D process up to the 4th dimension. And she shaped a broader role for herself with more responsibility, to suit her interests. She’s still constantly surprising us with awesome new ideas and processes.

Growing Together

It’s a bit of a ouija-board effect the way people develop here. We’re often assisting others to develop solutions rather than working in a silo, so we tend to grow together as we inch towards new solutions. In order for people to accomplish this, we’ve taken transparency and inclusion to an extreme: across our five offices, the only doors that exist lead to our conference rooms.

So we’ve become kind of like a co-op— each member with his and her own specialities and a cohesive organizational mindset. And that’s proven to be a good solution to the cul-de-sac problem.

It’s also easy to promote people to new positions or give them raises, but that stuff only lasts about 6 months to a year, tops, before you’re back where you started. You really have to figure out a more sustainable way to keep people engaged.

We find that our platform has provided some of that, and our culture the other. Because helping others develop is oftentimes more rewarding than helping yourself. Especially for the caliber of team player we’re careful to hire.

By intentionally creating a culture of teaching others, people feel naturally engaged—and the more people we add, the more people they can impact. It’s somewhat self-fulfilling, in a way. I guess the bottom line is that it makes it that much more exciting to start work every day.