Transcripts
W. Curtis Preston: hi, and welcome to
Speaker:I'm a host w Curtis Preston, aka Mr.
Speaker:Backup, and I have with me my software troubles consultant, Prasanna Malaiyandi.
Speaker:How's it going, Prasanna?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm good Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And like software troubles.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You should expect it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You've been in the industry for how long now?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like it
W. Curtis Preston:I know, but I, I, you know, that I generally don't
W. Curtis Preston:like, I generally, so like, I like tech and then like, I like working
W. Curtis Preston:on tech, but then I like using tech and the tech that I'm using.
W. Curtis Preston:I just want it to work.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not TiVo anymore, but you know, when I had the TiVo, that's why I
W. Curtis Preston:opted for TiVo and not Linux box.
W. Curtis Preston:With hard drive in some software that will record my TV stream, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the stuff that I actually use on a day to day basis.
W. Curtis Preston:I want to just, I want it to just work.
W. Curtis Preston:And I've broken that trend by, uh, upgrading a tool that I love, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I love descript, but I've decided to go on the bleeding edge with
W. Curtis Preston:their new version, which is amazing.
W. Curtis Preston:But it's in beta and I'm and I'm using a beta tool for the first time.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I push this button and it doesn't, it doesn't do the thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And then, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But, but, but at least you have to hand it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to the descript support folks for actually like, taking your calls and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your chats and your emails, Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And be like, Hey, let me walk you through that.
W. Curtis Preston:they're good with live chat.
W. Curtis Preston:Although there's been a handful where.
W. Curtis Preston:Where at some point they're like, you know, I think it's
W. Curtis Preston:best to transfer this to email.
W. Curtis Preston:That's when you know, you've put, you've asked like one too
W. Curtis Preston:many questions in a support chat.
W. Curtis Preston:They're like, I think maybe you should put all your questions in an email.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, But that's not, that's not how my brain works.
W. Curtis Preston:Like I, I get a question, I get it answered.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for a little bit a while and then I get another question, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sometimes it unblocks you and then you like hit the next
Prasanna Malaiyandi:thing and you're like, Oh, what is this?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Which is why if you're a good product manager, right, you go in front
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of customers and you're like, Hey, show me what you're doing and let me
Prasanna Malaiyandi:figure out like what your problems are, what your pain points are,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:what features I should be building?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and it is, it is kind of funny though that I now, I'm like
W. Curtis Preston:on a first name basis with like four or so of their, of their, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:shout out to the descript support team
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Shout out to for putting up with my, uh, my questions.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause it's like, it's a combination of, the new version is significantly
W. Curtis Preston:different than the old version.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so it's a, it's a combination between Is this the way it's
W. Curtis Preston:supposed to work now or is this the way it's supposed to work?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I
W. Curtis Preston:think it's broken.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think for a lot of the features, right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they're building the right things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like just talking to you like they've optimized some of your flows and some of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the things that you've spent so much time working on in the past, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So it's going to get there, It's just, it's gonna take a little bit of time.
W. Curtis Preston:But it's been, it's been a difficult
W. Curtis Preston:couple of weeks, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, anyway, let's bring on our longtime friend.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I, I've known him for, I don't know, for forever, and he's for, he's
W. Curtis Preston:been on the podcast multiple times.
W. Curtis Preston:You may remember him from, from such hits as how does Hollywood do backup?
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, he is also.
W. Curtis Preston:A, uh, a co-author on my book, uh, latest book, uh, Modern Data
W. Curtis Preston:Protection, which by the way, you can get free by going to druva.com/ebook.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, he wrote the chapter that we're gonna talk about today
W. Curtis Preston:in our Back to basic series.
W. Curtis Preston:He is now the head of Technical Operations for Frame Store, a
W. Curtis Preston:visual effects studio in Hollywood.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast Jeff Rochlin.
Jeff Rochlin:Hey.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:. . Woo-hoo.
Jeff Rochlin:Hi guys.
Jeff Rochlin:How are ya?
W. Curtis Preston:How's it going, Jeff?
Jeff Rochlin:It's going.
Jeff Rochlin:It's going well.
Jeff Rochlin:It's going.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it's, uh, it, it is it nice to be back?
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz I know for a while you weren't, you weren't, you, you've always
W. Curtis Preston:enjoyed sort of combining the tech side of you and the, and the, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, the entertainment side of you.
W. Curtis Preston:And for a while you weren't in that space Right now it's good to be
W. Curtis Preston:back with, you're a full person.
W. Curtis Preston:You get to be in entertainment and be in tech at the same time.
Jeff Rochlin:definitely.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, I love the creative.
Jeff Rochlin:Part of it.
Jeff Rochlin:And I love dealing with the crazy people that make creative things.
Jeff Rochlin:And so it's, that's, that's why I've spent, you know, the better part
Jeff Rochlin:of the last 30 years working at, um, uh, some kind of movie studios,
Jeff Rochlin:preferably in production and not, you know, it cause anybody, this will get
Jeff Rochlin:me in trouble, anybody can do email.
Jeff Rochlin:But, you know, dealing, dealing with the, dealing with the executive
Jeff Rochlin:producer who's trying to get his movie out on time is a different kind of,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, I can only imagine the pressure with that
Jeff Rochlin:Um, yeah, the, the only place I've worked in the past that
Jeff Rochlin:where the pressure was worse in a different kind of way was Wall Street.
Jeff Rochlin:Working on a trading floor in Wall Street is a different piece also,
Jeff Rochlin:but
W. Curtis Preston:cuz that's where like you're, you know, you're making a
W. Curtis Preston:trade or you're trying to make a trade or you're trying to make thousands of
W. Curtis Preston:trades and suddenly the system goes down.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:And it's, and it's all time critical, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Because the price is not sitting static waiting for you to close the trade.
Jeff Rochlin:If you don't buy it right now, then five minutes from now it's gonna be, you know,
Jeff Rochlin:a hundred million dollars more in cost and there goes your profit margin, right?
Jeff Rochlin:So,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Which is why, at least in in my IT experience, and I spent a, I spent a good
W. Curtis Preston:time in and outta Wall Street and working with other consultants that I knew that
W. Curtis Preston:were working on Wall Street, and I, I got the sense, it was the one place that I've
W. Curtis Preston:seen where it's like money is no object.
W. Curtis Preston:So they do, they do what is right.
W. Curtis Preston:To, um, to have fully, highly available systems.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I, I'd say Hollywood might be right behind that, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because you've got all these super expensive actors, um, and super expensive,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, both above and below the line.
W. Curtis Preston:People see, I learned from you, I learned that
Jeff Rochlin:You did.
Jeff Rochlin:you.
Jeff Rochlin:did.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and, and they're all sitting there and, and
W. Curtis Preston:you know, and if, and if they can't do it because the computers are down,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What's above and below the lo line?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By the way,
W. Curtis Preston:oh.
Jeff Rochlin:anybody in the creative titles, actors, directors, producers,
Jeff Rochlin:writers are called Above the line.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, anybody in the skilled trades and the crew, right?
Jeff Rochlin:The, the camera, the, uh, the gaffer, who's the electrician, uh, you know,
Jeff Rochlin:those kind of got the stage hands.
Jeff Rochlin:Those are below the line.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and the best way to describe it is, I guess if you watch the credits of a
Jeff Rochlin:movie, um, at the end, you know, they always run the, the cast gets their,
Jeff Rochlin:their individual cards and the people who wrote the movie get their cards,
Jeff Rochlin:and then it goes into that long scroll.
Jeff Rochlin:Of everybody else that's kind of above and below the line, you know, visually.
Jeff Rochlin:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Interesting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:so Hollywood is kind of always walking that middle line between,
Jeff Rochlin:I wanna, I want perfection and I really don't want to have to pay for it.
Jeff Rochlin:You know what I mean?
Jeff Rochlin:Which is sort of what the rest of the world is doing as well.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, how can I strike the balance so that I know I'll get a hundred percent of what
Jeff Rochlin:I need and yet at the same time, not have to spend the money to, to make it happen?
Jeff Rochlin:Uh, backups are a, backups and storage in a production are a
Jeff Rochlin:perfect example of this, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Because artists iterate their work over and over and over again.
Jeff Rochlin:They create a lot of files at the end of the day that they don't need because.
Jeff Rochlin:They've done, you know, they've done 20 versions of the scene and the
Jeff Rochlin:21st is the one they're gonna use.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and then you go back to them and say, We're out of space.
Jeff Rochlin:Go clean up.
Jeff Rochlin:And they look at you like, Well, I don't have time to clean up.
Jeff Rochlin:I'm busy making art.
Jeff Rochlin:If you want somebody to clean up, then I can't make art.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:. And you're looking at 'em and going, Well, I can go spend a hundred
Jeff Rochlin:thousand dollars and buy more storage for you to put more stuff on.
Jeff Rochlin:But eventually somebody's gotta clean this up cuz you don't need that storage.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and that's been a kind of a standard theme throughout my career in Hollywood.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, they, they are upset when it's broken.
Jeff Rochlin:They, it costs them a lot of extra money to make up for it when it's broken, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Because over time on skilled trade and union people is not cheap.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and so we do everything we can to make sure that it doesn't break..
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I'm guessing, like especially with Hollywood, right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:when you're producing or creating right, uh, content, right, Those are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like significantly large files, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, like you said, if you're doing like 21 versions of it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The only other industries I could really think of that are similar is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:probably things in like the, uh, genome space or the mining space, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Where you just have a whole bunch of data all coming in at once, but.
Jeff Rochlin:And we're in, uh, from a, like a rendering, the, the final
Jeff Rochlin:stage of production compute process.
Jeff Rochlin:It's the same kind of technology being used, right?
Jeff Rochlin:We run supercomputing clusters on the back end to render large projects, uh,
Jeff Rochlin:just like oil and gas, use supercomputing clusters to analyze data to figure
Jeff Rochlin:out where to drill next, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and as the, the beautiful picture that you get on your TV at home gets
Jeff Rochlin:better and better when it moves from two K to 4k to eight K to 16 K plugged
Jeff Rochlin:directly into the headset that's connected into your cerebral cortex so that you're
Jeff Rochlin:living in the picture , that the files get exponentially larger every time.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and I think I did the math for you a long time ago where, think about a.
Jeff Rochlin:From the perspective of there are 23 frames, still pictures in every
Jeff Rochlin:second of the film, and the film averages two and a half hours.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:That's a lot of, that's a lot of images,
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and, you know, and, and I'm glad, I'm glad we sort of started with this
W. Curtis Preston:part of the discussion because what we wanted to talk about, you know, this is
W. Curtis Preston:our back to basic series and I'll take this opportunity to do our disclaimer,
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, Prasanna and I and Jeff, we all work for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for Druva, Prasanna works for Zoom, and Jeff works for Frame Store.
W. Curtis Preston:We're not speaking for our companies.
W. Curtis Preston:We're speaking, uh, our individual, um, uh, opinions.
W. Curtis Preston:And uh, also if you would like to rate us, we'd love you to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:We're.
W. Curtis Preston:Running our Santa Claus special . If you, if you want to see this beard get
W. Curtis Preston:longer and longer to turn into a Santa Claus beard by Christmas, then uh,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, you gotta get us a few more comments in, uh, specifically in iTunes.
W. Curtis Preston:So go to the iTunes, just scroll to the bottom, you know, click on and give us
W. Curtis Preston:a, give us a rating, give us a comment.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, if you'd like to be a part of this conversation, please reach
W. Curtis Preston:out to me at WC preston on Twitter or w Curtis Preston on gmail.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, so we, we've been doing this back to the basics, uh, series, Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, so basically I'm, I'm pulling out, you know, my favorite book, Modern
W. Curtis Preston:Modern Data Protection, which you may recall having, having a part in.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, we already did chapter one, it was Why We back up.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Risks, what are all the things that, that could do damage to data.
W. Curtis Preston:and what I really want, you know, we talk a lot about, in the backup space, we
W. Curtis Preston:talk a lot about, um, the fact that too many times, those of us in technology,
W. Curtis Preston:we focus only on the technology, and then we find ourself asking questions, kind of
W. Curtis Preston:like you were talking about the stores.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, what should my retention be?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:How long should I keep my backups?
W. Curtis Preston:How long, how, how often should I do backups?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:What, So, and you know, and how quickly should I backup and how
W. Curtis Preston:quickly should I be able to restore?
W. Curtis Preston:And what I'm constantly telling people is, you should not be
W. Curtis Preston:the one answering this question.
W. Curtis Preston:You should always go back to the business because the business is
W. Curtis Preston:why you are doing what you're doing.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, Chapter two is about, um, gathering and determining
W. Curtis Preston:your service levels.
W. Curtis Preston:we have to realize what our organization does, whether it's
W. Curtis Preston:a government organization or a business organization, and I think
W. Curtis Preston:you always understood that role.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:Well, so one of the things that we do as workers at any particular company we
Jeff Rochlin:go to is we focus on the job we have to.
Jeff Rochlin:Learning everything we need to learn about the job and, and understanding
Jeff Rochlin:that so we could be good at it, right?
Jeff Rochlin:But very few people started a company and then sit down and say, I wanna
Jeff Rochlin:understand the product we produce.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:I wanna understand what the marketing is all about.
Jeff Rochlin:I wanna understand everything this business does because I don't just see
Jeff Rochlin:myself as a worker for the company.
Jeff Rochlin:I see myself as part owner of this business, right?
Jeff Rochlin:I'm, I'm a critical cog in the wheel that makes the place produce something.
Jeff Rochlin:And so that's always been my approach to my jobs.
Jeff Rochlin:It's not good enough to just know I'm a sysadmin.
Jeff Rochlin:I have to be able to write scripts to run this Unix box.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, I wanna understand that we rent cars to people all
Jeff Rochlin:over the, all over the world.
Jeff Rochlin:And there's a process involved in how that works or.
Jeff Rochlin:When I worked in, in broadcasting, right, I took the time to understand what
Jeff Rochlin:the actual broadcast chain is, right?
Jeff Rochlin:We create an image, it goes into a bunch of systems before
Jeff Rochlin:it goes out over the air.
Jeff Rochlin:It passes through a dozen different things that layer different sub carriers on it.
Jeff Rochlin:Like your Nielsen ratings box, right?
Jeff Rochlin:There's a, there's a subcarrier running on the signal that tweaks
Jeff Rochlin:your Nielsen box that says, Hey, he's watching Channel nine, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and I wanted to understand all of that right up to the, the
Jeff Rochlin:transmitter, because I'm crazy that way.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and what you Yeah, exactly right.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and what, what you find as you become that interested in the business
Jeff Rochlin:also is that the people who are running the business part of the business, they
Jeff Rochlin:don't know anything about technology.
Jeff Rochlin:It could be a technology company.
Jeff Rochlin:The guy who's running the business isn't thinking about
Jeff Rochlin:how the engine actually operates.
Jeff Rochlin:He just wants the engine moving fast.
W. Curtis Preston:It's kind of like, kind of like it in the earlier
W. Curtis Preston:part, you know, when I was saying I, I just want my technology to work.
W. Curtis Preston:That's the way they are with tech.
Jeff Rochlin:exactly.
Jeff Rochlin:Exactly.
Jeff Rochlin:And they, and they don't really care about the details.
Jeff Rochlin:It's not important to them.
Jeff Rochlin:What they care about is they're gonna get what they expect on the outside
Jeff Rochlin:of the business right now because it people being who we are, think
Jeff Rochlin:that the technology is the do all end, all of what makes the business
Jeff Rochlin:work, especially in big corporations.
Jeff Rochlin:IT departments tend to do it for the sake of doing it.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:They make systems for everybody else to use that are complicated,
Jeff Rochlin:uh, because they work really well inside the machine, right?
Jeff Rochlin:They take advantage of faster databases, faster storage, so
Jeff Rochlin:that things on the back end, which are complicated work really well.
Jeff Rochlin:But then when you and I have to go, you know, fill out our payroll record, you get
Jeff Rochlin:this screen that looks like it's something from 1954 off of an IBM mainframe, right?
Jeff Rochlin:In a world where.
W. Curtis Preston:possibly is
Jeff Rochlin:Uh, true, but, but you're in a world where everything is,
Jeff Rochlin:um, you know, graphical interfaces.
Jeff Rochlin:There's no reason why it has to be that way, and that's why I've always
Jeff Rochlin:taken it, that you have to understand what the business is doing, and you
Jeff Rochlin:have to understand what the people in the business are expecting the
Jeff Rochlin:business to do in order to be able to deliver to them effective systems.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I've always had that similar opinion and, and it could
W. Curtis Preston:be because my very first technology job when I was at MBNA, the bank that
W. Curtis Preston:everybody of a certain level had to spend four hours a month as a customer
W. Curtis Preston:support rep talking to cardholders,
Jeff Rochlin:that's cool.
Jeff Rochlin:That's really great.
W. Curtis Preston:and, and it really gave you a sense of like,
W. Curtis Preston:this is what we were about.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:We are about the cardholder out there spending money that we are lending
W. Curtis Preston:them because that's how a credit card company is judged, is the outstanding
W. Curtis Preston:balance of everybody added all up, which in that world was 35 billion.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Which is just staggering to think about it.
Jeff Rochlin:the, the old adage, the customer is always right, is absolutely
Jeff Rochlin:true all of the time, even when they're wrong and there are pains in your butt.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, because if you're not going in with that attitude, Then people are gonna
Jeff Rochlin:say, Well, especially nowadays, right?
Jeff Rochlin:When there's a big in different choices, they're gonna say, Well, screw this.
Jeff Rochlin:I'll just go somewhere else.
Jeff Rochlin:I don't need,
W. Curtis Preston:We talk about building a framework and building review
W. Curtis Preston:and advisory boards in that chapter.
W. Curtis Preston:What, what is, what is that?
Jeff Rochlin:First of all, um, think about.
Jeff Rochlin:A pilot flying an airplane, right?
Jeff Rochlin:He's got a checklist that he goes through to make sure that he's
Jeff Rochlin:checked all the important critical things about the system, right?
Jeff Rochlin:And the reason why he has it written on a checklist is because those are
Jeff Rochlin:things you don't wanna forget,
Jeff Rochlin:So that's why you build a framework with anything that's important, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You wanna make sure you capture all of the things you need to understand
Jeff Rochlin:and have them on a list that you can check off so that you don't find out
Jeff Rochlin:after you've built the building that, oh, you forgot to dig the foundation.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and, and it just assures that, you know, it's, you build things, right?
Jeff Rochlin:So it's, it's, it's that same concept of you measure twice and you cut once, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You don't wanna have to go back and have to redo it all again afterwards.
Jeff Rochlin:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:question I have for you, Jeff, is I'm guessing the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:checklist is kind of what the, like you said, the pilot uses, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In a term that, in this case, it would be like the backup admin would use
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and they would have their checklist in terms of, Okay, these are the things
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I need to make sure that I cover.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I, and I know we'll talk about this in a minute, but like that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:not necessarily though exactly what you're going to be like word for word.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're not gonna be asking like the business, okay, what is your rto, Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because I'm guessing that like what you understand, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You need some translation between like what's on that checklist
Prasanna Malaiyandi:into what you're asking the
Jeff Rochlin:When you're out collecting requirements for what your system
Jeff Rochlin:needs to be able to do, you may have to translate the question, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You may not go up to the, the CEO of the company and say, What,
Jeff Rochlin:what rto are you looking for?
Jeff Rochlin:But you may go up to and say, So the building burns down tomorrow.
Jeff Rochlin:At what point does it become no longer effective for you to reopen the business.
Jeff Rochlin:At what point is it bankruptcy and we're gone versus we can
Jeff Rochlin:survive this and move forward.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:And again, that's extreme, but it's translating the question and, and a
Jeff Rochlin:checklist is like collecting, uh, the, uh, the requirements for any project, right?
Jeff Rochlin:It's.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:The context that I remember in the chapter was we talked about that
W. Curtis Preston:process that we, that we had at that company where you and I worked.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that was, it was a very rigid process for developing a new product.
W. Curtis Preston:And it was, you know, there was the,
Jeff Rochlin:we were working together in aerospace and you have to remember
Jeff Rochlin:that aerospace is one of those businesses where if you miss a step
Jeff Rochlin:in the process, things go bad, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Everything has to be measured and, and has to be checked
Jeff Rochlin:off on to make sure it's safe.
Jeff Rochlin:, Um, they took a lot of that and they've translated that down into their IT
Jeff Rochlin:processes, which by the way, are the same things that they give you in ITIL right?
Jeff Rochlin:If you're an IT person, which is a 34 letter word in most certainly
Jeff Rochlin:creative companies to drop it l um, it teaches you the idea of
Jeff Rochlin:things have to be structured right?
Jeff Rochlin:There's a, there's a right way to do things and you just need
Jeff Rochlin:to try to follow the right.
Jeff Rochlin:In the case of the aerospace company, part of that process is make sure that to
Jeff Rochlin:keep you on track, check in with people all the time, and make sure that they
Jeff Rochlin:agreed that we're still on track, right?
Jeff Rochlin:I, I spend a month collecting, um, the project plan and what the
Jeff Rochlin:requirements are, and then I send it out the stakeholders that are
Jeff Rochlin:gonna need to use this later and say, Just tell me did I get it right?
Jeff Rochlin:Is this what you wanted?
Jeff Rochlin:And they come back and go, Yay.
Jeff Rochlin:Or they come back and go, No.
Jeff Rochlin:And then you.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:you check in and you do the same thing, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You come back and say, Okay, we're moving along this way, and is this still okay?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, or did your plans change?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So totally makes sense having this board that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you go check back with, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Figuring out process.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What are some examples of, uh, requirements or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:questions you would ask Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For specifically around backup, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:As you're going through this process.
Jeff Rochlin:yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, the very first question I always ask, and it's the hardest question
Jeff Rochlin:for any business to be able to answer, is, what is acceptable downtime?
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:If, if, if something happens, we can't control it, what can you live with?
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:I realize it's always gonna be zero.
Jeff Rochlin:. But now dig down deep in your heart cuz it's gonna happen and
Jeff Rochlin:tell me what's acceptable on that.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and remember that I can give you as close to zero downtime as humanly
Jeff Rochlin:possible, but it's gonna cost you a lot
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That that's, that's exactly what I was gonna ask.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like, do you then tell them, Hey, by the way, you won zero downtime,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's gonna cost you 5 billion.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or something like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And
Jeff Rochlin:So for me, you always present it in multiple stages, right?
Jeff Rochlin:There's the, this is, this is the worst.
Jeff Rochlin:You don't want to do this.
Jeff Rochlin:This is survival mode, how much it'll cost.
Jeff Rochlin:This is.
Jeff Rochlin:This is like gold plated, the greatest it'll ever be in the world.
Jeff Rochlin:Once you get this, you'll be the happiest person ever.
Jeff Rochlin:It's gonna cost you this much.
Jeff Rochlin:And then this is probably the answer you want.
Jeff Rochlin:This is the middle, this is the price, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, but you always go back to the business and the business
Jeff Rochlin:has to decide how critical is it?
Jeff Rochlin:And it, and it could be for this piece of the business, right?
Jeff Rochlin:For my, for my call center, I need a hundred percent uptime because
Jeff Rochlin:worst case, they can write the order down on paper and we can key 'em in.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, whereas, you know, for the database service, if it's down for an hour,
Jeff Rochlin:it's down for two hours, maybe that's okay, as long as I can recover it to
Jeff Rochlin:within a, a certain period of time,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And would you say that that's probably
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the most important question?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:To always start with
Jeff Rochlin:Yes.
Jeff Rochlin:I, I believe it is because, um, it drives everything else right.
W. Curtis Preston:The thing is downtime is sort of measured in two D.
W. Curtis Preston:Ways, Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So there's downtime in terms of like how long the system is down.
W. Curtis Preston:There's also downtime in terms of how much data we lost, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we translate that into RTO and rpo, which I, I know we already did a, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:a podcast back to basics podcast on, Um, so that, that's the big thing is,
W. Curtis Preston:is making sure that whatever it is that we're getting ready to design that.
W. Curtis Preston:We're designing it based on the requirements that business
W. Curtis Preston:came, you know, they gave us
W. Curtis Preston:. Jeff Rochlin: But that's why you have
W. Curtis Preston:you go back and you feed it back to them every once in a while and say,
W. Curtis Preston:Right, this is what you asked for.
W. Curtis Preston:Correct.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause this is what we're gonna build.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:We're good.
W. Curtis Preston:And you do it multiple times so that at the end of the day, if something,
W. Curtis Preston:Assuming you did everything right and the system performs the way you
W. Curtis Preston:expected to perform, and they come back and go, What the hell, man?
W. Curtis Preston:You can look at them and go, Six times you came back and said this was acceptable,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Six times.
W. Curtis Preston:you and I both agreed that a six hour RTO was acceptable because a two
W. Curtis Preston:hour RTO was gonna cost us 3 billion.
W. Curtis Preston:You and I agree, remember that I have it in writing here.
W. Curtis Preston:And so the, the fact that this, you know, that we met a six hour RTO is good
Jeff Rochlin:yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and it's documented.
Jeff Rochlin:yeah, yeah, exactly.
Jeff Rochlin:It's, it's, you know, there's a, there's some element of you're
Jeff Rochlin:covering your own ass when you're doing it right, But we all have to.
Jeff Rochlin:Be sure that we're delivering what the business needs.
Jeff Rochlin:And that's why you have to understand what the business does because if
Jeff Rochlin:you understand what the business does and somebody comes back and you know,
Jeff Rochlin:you're in a business where you're talking to customers constantly and
Jeff Rochlin:somebody comes back when you ask them.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, what's acceptable and they go, ah, if we're down for a day or two, that's fine.
Jeff Rochlin:You know, they're wrong.
Jeff Rochlin:You know that they're not telling you the truth.
Jeff Rochlin:You know that they're trying to give you the easy answer.
Jeff Rochlin:And if you understand what the business does, you can look back
Jeff Rochlin:at them and say, But wait a second.
Jeff Rochlin:We answer calls 24 hours a day from customers.
Jeff Rochlin:You're okay with not answering calls 24 hours a day for those customers?
Jeff Rochlin:Uh, at which point they go, Oh, no, no, I don't mean that
W. Curtis Preston:I, I did, I did work with a business once,
W. Curtis Preston:Jeff, that had a two week rto.
W. Curtis Preston:You know what, You know what it was?
W. Curtis Preston:They, they were a paper mill.
W. Curtis Preston:I.
W. Curtis Preston:And they were like, If the computer sit down for a couple of weeks, we don't care.
W. Curtis Preston:Like we're, we're gonna keep cutting down trees.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna keep turning it into pulp and we're gonna keep making paper.
W. Curtis Preston:If, if you can't, if you can't bill anybody, uh, what
W. Curtis Preston:They'll still need paper.
W. Curtis Preston:We'll be, that was their attitude.
W. Curtis Preston:And so for them, a two week RTO was fine, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But it goes back to the first thing we started with it, it goes with
W. Curtis Preston:what kind of business you are.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Most businesses, you start using the word day
Jeff Rochlin:They're,
W. Curtis Preston:in your rto.
W. Curtis Preston:They're not gonna be okay with that.
Jeff Rochlin:If you're in a retail business, you know, and you're down,
Jeff Rochlin:you know, you're, you're running a big, uh, online catalog service and you've
Jeff Rochlin:got call centers all around the world taking calls from people or websites that
Jeff Rochlin:are, you know, taking, uh, selling movie tickets, let's say, which I have a certain
Jeff Rochlin:amount of experience within the past.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:And that opening weekend for the next Star Wars movie is coming up and
Jeff Rochlin:your systems go down for 10 hours.
Jeff Rochlin:You.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah, you're in trouble, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Cause you know that that money is going to go somewhere else.
Jeff Rochlin:It's not like they're gonna sit there and go, Well, I'll
Jeff Rochlin:keep hitting return until I can
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, it's not like they're gonna not
W. Curtis Preston:buy tickets for that movie.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:They're gonna, they're gonna do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, gosh.
W. Curtis Preston:You remember when we used to stand in line, Jeff
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah, I do.
Jeff Rochlin:You know, there was, there was a certain charm to it, but
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I remember standing in line, like, you stood
W. Curtis Preston:in line to stand in line, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You, you got up there, there's a big line and you're like, you, you know, it's one
W. Curtis Preston:o'clock, you want the four o'clock show?
W. Curtis Preston:And they're like, Oh, the four o'clock show already sold out.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay, so I guess we're doing the seven o'clock show and uh, and
W. Curtis Preston:you bought tickets for the seven o'clock show at one o'clock, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And then you went and did something with yourself for the next six hours.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, Sorry, two old guys remeniscing about back in the day.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so you, Yeah, you, you, Jeff, in the next section, in the chapter, you
W. Curtis Preston:talked about drawing up multiple designs.
W. Curtis Preston:I think that you hinted at that already about the, here's the
W. Curtis Preston:one you definitely don't want.
W. Curtis Preston:Here's the one you're probably not gonna pay for.
W. Curtis Preston:And here, you know, here's the Goldilocks zone.
Jeff Rochlin:People want to feel like they have choices.
Jeff Rochlin:It's part of just the way life is, right, And everybody wants gold plated, but
Jeff Rochlin:they don't want to pay for gold plated.
Jeff Rochlin:So the best way to show them is there aren't, you know, I'm not narrow minded.
Jeff Rochlin:There are multiple ways you can do this.
Jeff Rochlin:You can solve this problem.
Jeff Rochlin:And at different cost levels, and I'm gonna leave it to you to decide how much
Jeff Rochlin:money you wanna spend based on that.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and then just from experience, uh, I know that you present three layers
Jeff Rochlin:because there, you know, it's, there's a little psychology involved in it.
Jeff Rochlin:It's like when you write a budget, there's always something in the budget
Jeff Rochlin:that you're willing to cut because you know they're gonna come back no
Jeff Rochlin:matter what, and they're gonna ask you to cut something out of the budget.
Jeff Rochlin:It's almost like a goodwill kind of thing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So far we've kind of been talking about like the requirements
Prasanna Malaiyandi:are a little bit in stone, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sort of, uh, the business comes, gives you the requirements, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:come back with the proposals, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But as we all know, like business needs and requirements change, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:How do you sort of account for those changes as you're like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so you had these three options.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They picked the middle option, business requirements change.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:How do you sort of incorporate that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because you can't be like, Hey, by the way, we already started on our way
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and so now you have to wait 12 months before we can incorporate those in.
Jeff Rochlin:We're agile now, right?
Jeff Rochlin:We don't actually.
Jeff Rochlin:We don't build projects that we set a two-year goal and then we check
Jeff Rochlin:in at the end of year two and say, Here's what we've got to find out.
Jeff Rochlin:We got it wrong.
Jeff Rochlin:The biggest challenge in that space to me is when you're at
Jeff Rochlin:the foundation level, right?
Jeff Rochlin:It's like if I'm building a house and we've designed the house and we've
Jeff Rochlin:decided the bathroom's gonna go here, the kitchen's gonna go there, right?
Jeff Rochlin:I'm running pipes now out of the foundation to go to those places.
Jeff Rochlin:You can't come back to.
Jeff Rochlin:Three weeks later and say, I've decided to put the bathroom at the totally
Jeff Rochlin:opposite end of the house cuz I've already poured the concrete and that
Jeff Rochlin:pipe is not gonna move on its own.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, well, Or well not move on its own.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I guess that's the thing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Is it's okay to go back and say, Yeah, this requires sort of like a redesign
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or a rethought re-implementation, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's gonna affect your timelines for sure, but if that's what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the business needs, we could.
Jeff Rochlin:So I think it, I, I think the best way you deal with this kind
Jeff Rochlin:of thing is in the ordering of how your project is established, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You've gotta get the core, the solid infrastructure that isn't
Jeff Rochlin:going to change, um, done first.
Jeff Rochlin:And you have to make sure the buy off is there and you have to keep
Jeff Rochlin:going back and saying, Right, we're going to build this network.
Jeff Rochlin:We're going to buy this kind of storage, We're going to buy these kinds of tape.
Jeff Rochlin:We can go back and change out systems and how they operate.
Jeff Rochlin:We can change schedules, we can add, but if you turn around after
Jeff Rochlin:that check is written and say, I don't want to use that anymore.
Jeff Rochlin:I can't get you that money back, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You've spent it.
Jeff Rochlin:So you need to be sure your foundation is solid in what you're trying to
Jeff Rochlin:build on, and you need to know that.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, features can change, right?
Jeff Rochlin:But the core foundation of it has to be once you've started laying it down.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I, I guess Curtis, this would probably be your.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Pitch that you would say.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like, Hey.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, but with the SaaS like service, you may not need to put
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all that money up front, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:To pay for something.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It does give you some amount of flexibility to be like,
W. Curtis Preston:That that dynamic scaling up and down is definitely a
W. Curtis Preston:real value of a SaaS product, but like any other product you, you have to take
W. Curtis Preston:into account a little bit of the future.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And you know, the one, the one challenge, I'm gonna say, a backing up to a SaaS
W. Curtis Preston:provider is to just make sure that we've, we've calculated in the laws of physics,
Jeff Rochlin:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Because if you, if you've got, if you've
W. Curtis Preston:got 10, you know, petabyte and a T1 line, it's not gonna work.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So as long as we've ca love, as we're not at the upper edge of your bandwidth
W. Curtis Preston:utilization, you should be able to grow, uh, significantly on the back end without
W. Curtis Preston:having to have a change on the, on the,
Jeff Rochlin:But again, but again, that's the foundation, right?
Jeff Rochlin:That's the, that's the core infrastructure that you have to agree on up front.
Jeff Rochlin:How much data do I have?
Jeff Rochlin:How fast do I need to get it up to that damn service in the cloud?
Jeff Rochlin:And do I have enough bandwidth and capability to do that?
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and those are the things that become immutable in the beginning.
Jeff Rochlin:You lay 'em down.
Jeff Rochlin:You understand them, and then you can build on top of it whatever
Jeff Rochlin:you want because you have a foundation that'll support it.
Jeff Rochlin:You can't turn around though afterwards and say, Well, I didn't really have
Jeff Rochlin:that much network bandwidth, and it turns out that in order to get that much
Jeff Rochlin:network bandwidth, I have to have this, pay this guy over here to dig a tunnel
Jeff Rochlin:underneath, you know, the, the biggest avenue in town to run a fiber optics to my
Jeff Rochlin:building, and I'm not gonna pay for that.
Jeff Rochlin:So I guess we'll have to figure out how to do it without the bandwidth.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:That's when it, that's when the tower collapses and none of it's ever.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, so I, I'd say that, So we, so
W. Curtis Preston:we, we got the requirements.
W. Curtis Preston:We've got, um, and we, we've, we've done this iterative process of going
W. Curtis Preston:back to the stakeholders to make sure we understand the requirements.
W. Curtis Preston:We've built out theoretical system.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the next phase that I think is, is really important is to make sure.
W. Curtis Preston:The product that we, that we're supposed to be buying does what it
W. Curtis Preston:is that it was supposed to do, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we're talking about things like POCs and pilots.
Jeff Rochlin:I, I do the POC early, right.
Jeff Rochlin:I do it like before I even, I go back to, if the business comes back to me and
Jeff Rochlin:says we need to update backups, I go out and start doing the POC on the backup of
Jeff Rochlin:products before I come back and propose here's what I think the solution would be.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, you know, There are the sales guys and there are the sales engineers, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Don't listen to anything the sales guys have to say to you.
Jeff Rochlin:Cause the sales guys are sales guys.
Jeff Rochlin:That's what they do.
Jeff Rochlin:Let them buy you lunch and then don't worry about it.
Jeff Rochlin:Find yourself a good sales engineer who's attached to the account.
Jeff Rochlin:Connect up with them.
Jeff Rochlin:They'll give you this straight answer, and then give them your real
Jeff Rochlin:world, your real world scenario, that's kind of where I come from.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:If you're gonna, if you're gonna go to the trouble of selling me a service
Jeff Rochlin:up in the cloud somewhere, then it should do everything it needs to do.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:And.
Jeff Rochlin:Go on a tangent, which I know you'll cut cuz you hate when I go on tangent.
Jeff Rochlin:So I'm keeping you from doing other
W. Curtis Preston:It depends on the value of the tangent, Jeff
Jeff Rochlin:um.
Jeff Rochlin:When, when people, especially the non-technical people go off
Jeff Rochlin:and think of the cloud, right?
Jeff Rochlin:They think the cloud is a solution for everything, right?
Jeff Rochlin:I want to go store things in the cloud, so I will just copy all of my
Jeff Rochlin:data up into the cloud and things will be wonderful, and it's like, No, you
Jeff Rochlin:copy your stuff up into the cloud and all you're doing is you're handing it
Jeff Rochlin:off to somebody else's data center.
Jeff Rochlin:That doesn't mean it's properly backed up.
Jeff Rochlin:That doesn't mean it's redundantly stored in multiple locations
Jeff Rochlin:in case there's a disaster.
Jeff Rochlin:You still need a systems engineer to look at the problem and come up
Jeff Rochlin:with a solution within the context of the cloud as if it was your own.
Jeff Rochlin:But, but cloud is a marketing term, right?
Jeff Rochlin:That we sell to people who don't understand technology about a,
Jeff Rochlin:here the solution is there, baby.
Jeff Rochlin:Just buy this and, and, and your life will be better and everything will just
W. Curtis Preston:It, You know what you need, Jeff, In that
W. Curtis Preston:scenario, you, you need a Prasanna.
W. Curtis Preston:That is what Prasanna does.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, he's actually, he's actually, you know, I'm gonna say he's
W. Curtis Preston:more technical than I am, and when we talk about current cloud technology,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, he's actually making things happen and actually understands that stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:So you need somebody like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, it's not, like the cloud doesn't just like, Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:we don't need any IT people,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:We just need different kinds of IT people.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:But you would be surprised at the number of C level and especially
Jeff Rochlin:financial people out there who think.
Jeff Rochlin:By buying into a cloud service, they can throw away their data center and they
Jeff Rochlin:no longer need as big an IT department
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:there.
W. Curtis Preston:might, might
W. Curtis Preston:need as big, but Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:you're gonna eliminate certain positions, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You're gonna eliminate the guys that are handling your hardware.
Jeff Rochlin:But, um, there, there is this perception and that's why everybody
Jeff Rochlin:thinks the cloud is cheaper, right?
Jeff Rochlin:In many cases it's more expensive than running your own data
Jeff Rochlin:center depending on what you're
W. Curtis Preston:It, It, definitely depends on how you implemented it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:But,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:talk to Corey Quinn or follow him on Twitter, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's his big thing.
Jeff Rochlin:yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:so anyway, that was, that was my tangent, but I thought it might
W. Curtis Preston:That was a good tangent, Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, alright, so the, so the final thing here of, of, you know, of, of,
W. Curtis Preston:in this chapter was about documenting and implementing the new system, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Yep.
Jeff Rochlin:The job, the job that nobody ever wants to have to do is documentation.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know what,
Jeff Rochlin:You,
W. Curtis Preston:that about?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Do do I have to, do I have to document?
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:You have to.
Jeff Rochlin:Sorry.
Jeff Rochlin:You know, cuz it's like that's your proof of life, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You have, you have it down in writing, you have a plan that you're working from.
Jeff Rochlin:It's the checklist, right?
Jeff Rochlin:And it's visible to everybody.
Jeff Rochlin:You can hand a copy to somebody and say, I want you to read this, and then
Jeff Rochlin:I want you to sign on the bottom of it so that I know that you've read
Jeff Rochlin:it and you either agree or you don't.
Jeff Rochlin:And then if they take it and they just sign it and hand it back
Jeff Rochlin:to you when there's something in there that they didn't like or
Jeff Rochlin:that they didn't expect, you look at them and go, You signed for it.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:Would you sign a contract without reading it?
Jeff Rochlin:Would you, You know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all the time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I agree.
Jeff Rochlin:Written.
Jeff Rochlin:The written documentation, especially the design documentation is actually kind of
Jeff Rochlin:like a contract with your customer, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Your customer being the business.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:this design document, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It, I'm guessing it also sort of restates, Hey, here are all the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:requirements that I built against, Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That we had agreed to during the sort of the checklist and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:those initial discussions.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And these are sort of the requirements that this design satisfies.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:When you, when you write that initial document once, once everybody has
Jeff Rochlin:blessed it and signed off on it, you may never go back to it again.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:You may never have to go back to the printed document, except for the
Jeff Rochlin:fact that it's part of your completed set of things you need to have.
Jeff Rochlin:That's just there for the future.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:And if you've ever been involved in any kind of construction, right on the back
Jeff Rochlin:end of the construction, there are the as-builts, right there is the actual
Jeff Rochlin:design document in the blueprints of the building as it was completed by
Jeff Rochlin:the contractors who did all the work that you stick in a box somewhere and
Jeff Rochlin:only go back to when you're trying to figure out where that damn wire that's
Jeff Rochlin:powering your wifi, uh, device is running.
Jeff Rochlin:Because that's when you need your as-builts, right?
Jeff Rochlin:You need to understand how things are wired.
Jeff Rochlin:This becomes the as-built for the project.
Jeff Rochlin:It gives you esoteric details that you really don't care about until
Jeff Rochlin:for some reason you need to know about it, and then it's there.
W. Curtis Preston:When I, when I think about the value of documentation, I'm
W. Curtis Preston:speaking in this case more operational documentation than design documentation,
W. Curtis Preston:but I go all the way back to when my oldest daughter was born, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I was in Delaware, uh, and uh, I was at the hospital in my wife's delivery room.
W. Curtis Preston:Nina was born, She's, you know, brand new baby, and I'm, I'm standing in, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, in New Father Bliss Zone, right.
W. Curtis Preston:And the phone rings in my wife's hospital room and you know, this
W. Curtis Preston:is pre-cellphone days, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, I, um, I picked up the phone.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, Why is this phone, It's the bank on the phone, and I.
W. Curtis Preston:What, And they said, Well, well we have this restore, uh, that we need to do.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, I am in my wife's hospital room.
W. Curtis Preston:And they're like, Well, we don't understand abc.
W. Curtis Preston:And I said, Well,
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:did you read the documentation?
W. Curtis Preston:Is there a problem with the documentation?
W. Curtis Preston:They said, Oh, we haven't looked at it.
W. Curtis Preston:Slam.
W. Curtis Preston:I just slammed down the phone, , I.
W. Curtis Preston:The, I had good documentation and that was, you know, I, I was like, I'm good.
Jeff Rochlin:I, I regularly go to developers when they're writing software
Jeff Rochlin:that I'm involved in having to support and telling them that, um, because
Jeff Rochlin:I run operations as well, right?
Jeff Rochlin:And telling them that, um, it is in there enlightened self.
Jeff Rochlin:To write good documentation for their product because I will call them at
Jeff Rochlin:two o'clock in the morning on Saturday.
Jeff Rochlin:If it breaks and there's something broken, not only will I call you, I'm
Jeff Rochlin:gonna make sure I have your wife's cell phone number as well, and I
Jeff Rochlin:will call her if you choose not to
W. Curtis Preston:I call your mom
Jeff Rochlin:Cause if the, I would, Cause if the business is flat out, down
Jeff Rochlin:on its ass and I have the CEO of the company who's going to come looking for
Jeff Rochlin:me because I'm responsible for operations.
Jeff Rochlin:What am I gonna tell 'em?
Jeff Rochlin:Sorry, the software doesn't work.
Jeff Rochlin:We'll get back to you on Monday.
Jeff Rochlin:Right?
Jeff Rochlin:It's like, no, it doesn't work that way.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and that's why everything, the better the documentation is, the
Jeff Rochlin:less the operations guys have to go and bother the people who wrote it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It just going back to the earlier thread that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was on, how do you ensure that cuz things will change, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The system will change.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The designs will change.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Is that part of the process that any time like you get new
Prasanna Malaiyandi:requirements or anything else like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Always go back and update the documentation.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
Jeff Rochlin:Should be, should be.
Jeff Rochlin:Without a doubt.
Jeff Rochlin:And if it's happening during the development process, you take it
Jeff Rochlin:back to the review boards so that again, everybody's aware of it
Jeff Rochlin:and everybody checks off on it.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:That they're okay with the change.
Jeff Rochlin:That it's not a surprise to finance.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:And it's not a surprise to, uh, facilities operations that you're,
Jeff Rochlin:you know, all of a sudden gonna re.
Jeff Rochlin:Uh, the, the waterlines or something like that to make it work?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I, I would say it's your job as the technology side
W. Curtis Preston:of things to watch what's happening with the business side of things and
W. Curtis Preston:to see if there are changes, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If all of a sudden to, to use your world.
W. Curtis Preston:Jeff, you know, you are normally doing 10 movies at a time and you happen
W. Curtis Preston:to be in some quarterly meeting and you hear that, They're like, Listen,
W. Curtis Preston:we're gonna double production.
W. Curtis Preston:We've, you know, we've had some great sales and we're
W. Curtis Preston:gonna do 20 movies at a time.
W. Curtis Preston:You're gonna be like, um,
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, current capacity is based on 10 movies at a time.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna need twice as much
Jeff Rochlin:yeah, I guess examples in my life of that were like, um, I was working
Jeff Rochlin:at Disney at the time and, uh, I sat in a meeting and they said, Hey, we're gonna,
Jeff Rochlin:we're gonna release this one in imax.
Jeff Rochlin:You know, sitting there going, Wait, I have a system that's designed to
Jeff Rochlin:create two K frames on the back end.
Jeff Rochlin:I don't even know what IMAX is at this point.
Jeff Rochlin:Or, Hey, we're gonna start doing 3d.
Jeff Rochlin:That was like, ah, right.
Jeff Rochlin:When it comes to things like storage, right, The transition from,
Jeff Rochlin:we're gonna do two k, we're gonna.
Jeff Rochlin:4k, we wanna do these special formats.
Jeff Rochlin:Oh wait, we're gonna start doing live action visual effects.
Jeff Rochlin:That means we've gotta shoot, you know, real film back plates,
Jeff Rochlin:uh, that you're gonna put stuff on top
Jeff Rochlin:of,
W. Curtis Preston:The point here is that you need to be keeping an
W. Curtis Preston:eye to going back, sort of bringing this all back to the beginning.
W. Curtis Preston:Your organization, what is its function, right?
W. Curtis Preston:This, that idea works for businesses, it works for government, uh, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So what is the purpose of your organization and what do you, what
W. Curtis Preston:purpose do you serve within that purpose?
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:I can, I can promise you that the head, the, the, the chief creative
Jeff Rochlin:officer at Disney is not thinking about the difference in storage capacity
Jeff Rochlin:between a two K movie and an 8K movie.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it's not, not their job
Jeff Rochlin:right.
Jeff Rochlin:But you have to be listening to him to hear that he just said eight K, and go,
Jeff Rochlin:Well, okay, I need to go figure out what that means, and then I need to go find
Jeff Rochlin:the right executive who's willing to go ask him if he's willing to spend money on
Jeff Rochlin:that or if he was just talking about it.
W. Curtis Preston:This whole thing was about gathering the requirements,
W. Curtis Preston:just making sure what your company does, making sure that you are doing
W. Curtis Preston:the things that you need to do to, to, to meet those requirements.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and, and that, and that you should absolutely not be
W. Curtis Preston:determining those requirements.
W. Curtis Preston:You should not be determining retention.
W. Curtis Preston:Recovery time, objective, rpo, any of that stuff that should
W. Curtis Preston:all come back from the business.
Jeff Rochlin:Yeah, be an active participant in your company, right?
Jeff Rochlin:It's more, be more at your job than just your job.
Jeff Rochlin:Understand what your business does, Um, understand why it's doing it,
Jeff Rochlin:what makes it, you know, special.
Jeff Rochlin:in whatever it is that it's doing.
Jeff Rochlin:And when you understand all that stuff, you'll get to know the people
Jeff Rochlin:in the business better because you know, like I said, the guy in
Jeff Rochlin:customer service doesn't care about what's going on in the computer room.
Jeff Rochlin:But if you get to know the guy in customer service because you understand
Jeff Rochlin:what he's up against, all of a sudden you can build that relationship.
Jeff Rochlin:That'll make it easier to get the info you need later and then document the hell out
Jeff Rochlin:of it and make sure everybody signs off.
Jeff Rochlin:So, Accountability is spread evenly across the whole
Jeff Rochlin:organization at the end of the day.
Jeff Rochlin:Cause you don't want to be the guy that everybody points to and
Jeff Rochlin:says, Well, we're down for a week.
Jeff Rochlin:Because, you know, he decided that we could be down for a week
Jeff Rochlin:and go, No, here's the book.
Jeff Rochlin:Right.
Jeff Rochlin:And then you document it all through an inch of its life so that a,
Jeff Rochlin:you have it as a reference, right?
Jeff Rochlin:Cause other people are going to have to operate it if you don't want to
Jeff Rochlin:be the only person who gets called at two o'clock in the morning cause they
Jeff Rochlin:can't figure out how your system works.
Jeff Rochlin:Then you describe to people how your system works so they can figure it out at
Jeff Rochlin:two o'clock in the morning without you.
Jeff Rochlin:Um, and that, um, all of the parameters are covered so that you can now move
Jeff Rochlin:up to be the president of the company and the next guy coming in behind you
Jeff Rochlin:will be able to just easily step into.
Jeff Rochlin:Past role cuz he can just open the books and it's all there for
W. Curtis Preston:I like it.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, thanks Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:Always, always a treat.
Jeff Rochlin:My pleasure guys.
Jeff Rochlin:Thanks for having me.
W. Curtis Preston:Thanks.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna.
W. Curtis Preston:I know between Jeff and I, you didn't get a word in edge wise in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I
Jeff Rochlin:He asks good
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
:to the old man, old men
Jeff Rochlin:Hello?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By the way, if you wanna listen to the two of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:them talk more, they do have their, another podcast, right, where you
W. Curtis Preston:We do, we do
W. Curtis Preston:the, the things that entertain us Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Is the name of our other podcast.
Jeff Rochlin:May maybe, maybe Curtis will stick a link in in the, uh, show notes.
Jeff Rochlin:Who
W. Curtis Preston:maybe, maybe he will, Maybe he will.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, all right.
W. Curtis Preston:And thanks again to our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:We're nothing without you.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.