We all have our own, everyday superpower. It could be remembering the name of everyone you meet; knowing where to go without a map; or choosing a perfectly ripe avocado every single time. My superpower is connecting with others.

I’m not just talking about chatting with the barista during the morning coffee run or getting a smile out of a TSA agent (though those moments are nice too). I’m talking about moments of genuine human connection—the kinds of connections that can transform a relationship.

Acting (and Reacting) with Empathy

When we root our actions and our reactions in empathy, something magical happens. Here’s an example: a client once reached out to me in a panic, sheepishly admitting that she had dropped a bottle of water onto her laptop. She felt stupid and was embarrassed to be asking for my help. I knew why she was flustered; who wouldn’t be? She was worried that I would be judgmental or shame her for being careless.

Sensing her distress, I instead told her it was just a laptop and that the most important thing was that she was safe. I then launched into a story about my first day working at the Apple Store. Being hired at Apple was my first interview experience, and I had made it through six grueling rounds before getting the offer. I was eager to be there and wanted to make a great impression.

That morning, before work, I treated myself to a large iced coffee with caramel to celebrate my first day. And wouldn’t you know it: moments after walking in the door at my brand-new job, I managed to spill the entire sugary, milky, icy thing on a display table, destroying two iPads and two iPhones in the process.

Shared Experiences Create a Sense of Belonging

When I shared this story with the client, you could feel her anxiety dissipate. Her energy shifted, and the tone of the conversation shifted. Instead of the stereotype of a troubled user speaking with a finger-wagging technician, it became a safe zone. We were just two people bonding over an embarrassing moment—and a shared background, as it turned out she’d also worked at an Apple store. We quickly arranged for a new laptop so she could get back up and running as soon as possible.

The most important thing for me is that my client walked away from the interaction feeling like she could approach me with any problem or issue in the future: without shame, without judgment, without worrying about asking a “dumb” question. I gained her trust and, in turn, Pliancy gained an advocate who encourages her colleagues to be proactive in reaching out to consultants.

From Transactional to Transformative

Whether at managed service providers or consultancies, many interactions in the IT industry feel strictly transactional. A ticket is opened, a problem is resolved, and a ticket is closed.

Pliancy, on the other hand, was built on the idea that good relationships are the strongest foundation for any partnership. When it comes to company culture, saying “people-first” means acknowledging that we are all people, first and foremost, before we are technologists, consultants, clients, or users.

Relating to others on an individual level is the keystone in our consulting philosophy. Being a great IT consultancy isn’t only about doing the right thing; it’s not only about investing in our people. It’s about doing all that and infusing humanity, warmth, and joy into the work we do every day.

Being Human Is Superhuman

Imagine if we were all robots, living exactly according to our programming. If we never let conversations wander, if we never pursued the unexpected, if we never made exceptions to the rules… the world would be a boring place.

There are times for strictness and precision, of course. And there are times for being human, too. We rely on one another for novelty, kinship, and all the unplanned moments that keep life interesting.

Life is what happens in between the moments of precision: it’s a water bottle emptying itself onto your computer. It’s someone telling you that it’s going to be okay. It’s knowing that no matter what else happens, you have someone you can go to for help. After all, helping others is what people with superpowers do.

Project management is often shrouded in mystery. It’s a process that people are vaguely aware exists, yet the details are foggy. As a project manager, I’m pulling back the curtain to explain what a project management office is, how they help teams succeed, and how we imbue our people-first approach into project management.

What Is a Project Management Office?

I am the founding member of Pliancy’s project management office (PMO), the team that executes project management work. PMOs are responsible for improving project management by improving efficiencies. They create and maintain documents, track progress, and provide guidance for moving projects forward. Depending on their size, these teams employ project managers, support staff (schedulers, planners, controllers), project coordinators, and project analysts.

Project management offices are often stereotyped as siloed departments cut off from reality. You may imagine prescriptive sticklers who care more about rigid project management methodologies and charging towards success metrics rather than the process that gets us there.

But even among the most prescriptive of us, one thing remains true: PMOs exist to help you achieve success.

How Can a PMO Help You?

Let’s use a simple example to show just how much a PMO can help you. Imagine you’re in charge of a project to replace every light bulb in an office. Seems pretty straightforward, right? I bet the person who assigned the task thought so.

However, like any project, there are a ton of little (and not-so-little) things that many people don’t think about until the project is already well underway. Things like:

How many bulbs do we need? Are they all the same size, shape, and type?

Are any bulbs being changed from one size, shape, or type to another? Do we need cross-functional feedback to decide what kind of replacement bulbs to select?

Who is our light bulb supplier? Do we need or want to collect quotes from multiple suppliers? If so, how long will that process take, and what stakeholders will be involved?

What is our bulb budget? Will we need to purchase any equipment or pay any contractors to execute the project?

Who is responsible for physically replacing the bulbs? Are there liability issues that would require certificates of insurance or other documentation?

Do the bulbs need to be replaced outside of regular business hours? If so, do we need to request special weekend or evening access to the building? Will installation involve non-exempt employees who must be paid overtime?

How should we get rid of the old bulbs? Can or should they be recycled? Are there city, county, or state requirements regarding safe and environmentally friendly disposal?

It’s clear this project is much more complex than screwing in a light bulb, tossing the old one out the window, and calling it a day. A project manager helps with:

– Project plan development
– Risk assessment
– Timeline management and accountability
– Definition of scope
– Success metrics
– Celebrating your wins

A PMO Centered on People, Not Process

It’s easy to get overwhelmed without the support of a PMO—especially while your other responsibilities compete for your time and attention. A project management tool like Asana, Monday, or Trello may even be hurting more than helping. You might feel scattered, disorganized, and just plain stressed.

As your project manager, my first concern wouldn’t be how messy (or blank) your Asana boards are or how many RFP emails you’ve sent. My first question during check-in meetings is often “How are you feeling?”

I really want to know. If you’re stressed, let’s talk about why. Is it related to your team dynamic? Does it have to do with your workload? Is it something in your personal life? As long as you feel comfortable discussing it, I’m here to listen.

Made-to-Measure Project Management

Here’s the thing: there are a number of project management methodologies designed to fit different project types, but ultimately it is a deeply personal endeavor.

To set a project up for success, you have to understand the brain of the person leading it and the team members involved. You must take into account their thought processes, their collaboration styles, what overwhelms them, what else they’re working on, and even the time of day when they prefer to work. All of these qualities can impact project roles, workflow, deadlines, decision-making, project performance, and more.

As a project manager, I don’t want to be known as a person who only pokes their head in when something is wrong. No matter the stage of the project, my colleagues should know that I’m right there in the trenches with them, celebrating every win and overcoming every obstacle together.

Flexibility Over Frustration

Deadlines are a perfect example of how a person-centric approach to project management breaks away from PMO stereotypes.

Popular belief is that missing a deadline is the end-all-be-all worst thing that can happen, and that project success becomes impossible if this happens. Yes, there are times when a due date is absolutely not moveable. In those cases, I’ll give you all the tools I can to help you meet it.

But missing a deadline is not, in and of itself, a failure. No matter how well-managed a project is, life will always throw a wrench in the gears somewhere, somehow. Being a good project manager means accepting that fact and knowing how to recover.

A Holistic View of Success

In short: I make a plan to break a plan.

In the grand scheme of things, we can almost always make adjustments so that duties feel balanced, goals are attainable, and deadlines are manageable.

I believe that a successful PMO should not be evaluated solely by the volume of projects taken across the finish line. Instead, we should give the team’s welfare equal weight. Is completing as many projects as possible truly a victory if it costs your colleagues their mental health and emotional well-being?

For me, the answer is no. I would much rather complete fewer projects in a way that is healthy for my colleagues in the long run. This is the type of PMO I would want to build at any company, but at Pliancy, I have the added support of an organization that believes compassion is a vital part of everything we do.

When we say we put people first, we mean it. By making decisions that protect the long-term interests of our teammates (and ourselves), we build a stronger foundation for our organization’s future.

Project Management at Pliancy

For many companies, employing a dedicated project manager wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Creating an entire project management office, however, is not the norm. Pliancy’s growth shows no signs of slowing, and establishing a PMO has been identified as a strategic necessity for the company’s success.

A scrappy, start-up mentality can take you far; that’s a huge part of Pliancy’s history and our DNA. But as any company grows, there is a fundamental need for process. That doesn’t mean restrictions and guardrails purely for the sake of it. Instead, it means supporting our colleagues so they can focus on the core technologies and client relationships that drive our business forward.

Building Toward Something Greater

The project management team will pave the path toward sustainable growth with accessible guidelines, clear documentation, and a bird’s-eye view of everything our colleagues create. (We’ll make sure they have the right light bulbs, too.) Building this mission-critical infrastructure will allow us to accomplish bigger, better, and more ambitious things.

Pliancy has never been satisfied with the status quo, whether in our approach to IT or the way we value our employees. With the support of a PMO, who knows what we’ll revolutionize next?

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.