Ian Waring – Be Curios – The PHIT Podcast

In this episode, Gethyn and Mark chat with Ian Waring, covering everything from growing a software business… the managers balance dilemma between engaging with one’s people versus letting them do their jobs… Good and bad work from home habits and… meeting Bill Gates!
If you’d like to listen to any of the others from Series 1 and Series 2 to date, you’ll find the links where you can listen and/or see them below. Once again, the questions we asked in this episode were (except where we, of course, veer off track!)

The Questions

1.     Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job/role?
2.     Thinking about the (people and/or technology impacts of the) last year, what lessons will you take forward and how do you see these being delivered?
3.     Do you think users have grown in their confidence in using technology since lockdown?
4.     What’s the best piece of business and/or career advice you’ve been given?

The Links

You can view – Be Curious – Ian Waring Part 1 on YouTube
You can Listen to – Be Curious – Ian Waring Part 1 on Anchor or Spotify

Previous Episodes

You can view all previous episodes here https://www.gethynellis.com/podcasts

Summary Keywords

people, business, pandemic, office, software, employees, question, licensing, cpm, dynamics, bristol, thought, finance, computers, ibm pc

Key Takeaways

So the Key takeaways are

• You need at least 3 careers in licensing 4.08
• I had 1 question, now I’ve got 3 more 5.00
• 35 ideas to grow a software business… 5.15
• Just simplify it to death 6.00
• 85% of people have a job roles that could definitely be done from home 7.38
• It’s always a manager’s dilemma 12.10
• people have different working styles 12.21
• bad habit is not actually having a proper work from home boundary 13.30
• get stuff done 15.00
• people come to work to do a good job 18.00
• we had a visit from a bloke called Bill Gates 22.40
• show some curiosity and ask questions 25.00
• …The ones where the customer visitor space was closer to the front door really prospered / your attitude to your customers is probably a good leading indicator of whether you’ll be successful in business or not 26.50

The Transcript

Question 1 – Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job / role? 

Ian Waring 01:33

Okay, one thing as you said, I’m head of finance systems and projects at JISC. And JISC are a charity that operates the computing network that connects all UK universities to the internet. That’s all 160 universities, further education colleges, all the research councils. Now we connect out to all the other similar national research and education networks right across Europe. So that all goes under an umbrella organization called GEANT.

So in some of our services, if a student can log into their university Wi Fi in the UK, they can do the same thing at any other university in Europe, for instance. Now it’s just one of our services. So primary business is the internet conductivity, superfast internet connectivity. Secondary business is the single source buyer of publications and journals and data on behalf of the same member base. That’s sort of 100 million pound plus business. And we’ve got lots of ancillary services just really protecting those network assets and help helping a members protect there’s. Which during COVID times, it’s been quite a nice experience. Just talking to one vendor yesterday, they said they’ve seen that the number of insider finance related frauds actually go up by 300% during COVID. That’s something we were paranoid about all the time. Just “is our system secure”. I’ve actually largely spent the last eight weeks just completely nuked out, just actually securing finance systems and just making sure… anyway, there’s a whole career in actually trying to secure these networks. Dynamics itself is quite a career in itself. Several careers one career in security, one security in electronic reporting, another one in licensing.

Gethyn Ellis  04:03

You need at least three careers in licensing to get your head around that.

Ian Waring 04:12

You say that? When I worked at Digital, running UK software business back up until 1991. And one of the things I discovered early on in my career is that, I got told by someone – We got a couple of distributors, they sell some of these mini computers. Can you come up with some ideas to sell more software? And you actually sit just overhearing conversations going on. And someone would come in with a software license question. So, the licensing group say, we’ve got a question about software licensing. And, just listen to the conversation, about three to five minutes later, they put the phone down they said well, I did have one question. I’ve now got three more. So one of the things that I did a bit later on is come up with a few ideas to help grow the software business. I came in with a document 35 ideas to grow software business. And the sales manager just read it through and then tossed it back at me and said, right implement it. So did that. And that business went 700 / 770k A year 1.1 million, 2 million, 6 million, we actually grew up quite aggressively. Then they gave me catalogue business to look after said we want to sell more software through our catalog. And half, half of that was I’ve got 2 teller sellers, sorry, five, to tech support, and 25,000 catalogs to send out and we had to try and get it so customers could actually toss the orders in and get their licensing completely right without touching it. And it just simplified it to death. And release 25,000 catalogs first two weeks, absolute triple A business and then hardly anything. And then suddenly, the business started rolling in. And that went 100 million in in a few months. And further the UK profits at that.

Question 2 What impact did the last year have…how has in effected your business / people…?  06:29

Ian Waring 07:11

We were very fortunate we had a very, very switched-on HR team. And one of the things they did early on in the pandemic, was they thought this is going to last some time. And now everybody’s on office based contracts. And is that the right thing. And they actually conclusion that they’re doing a bit of research that they found that 85% of people have a job roles that could definitely be done from home.

Now there’s some salespeople out on the road who have nominal home base but are traveling most of the time, there are other people like facilities, where we do have a few on prem servers, and people have to be in the office looking after them. But the vast majority, actually 85%, we could put on people on hybrid contracts. So, I’m one of them, flowers beyond me on the wall. Physically now, anybody, any employee can choose which days they go into the office. They’re not told. In fact, in the pandemic I’ve actually hired a couple of people to work in my team, one of them’s in Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Another one’s in Southport in Lancashire on the on the coast. And I think since I employed them, I’ve met them physically once in the last two years. We’re based Harwell, near Oxford? We’ve got Bristol, we’ve got London, we’ve got Manchester we have various peripheral offices, Newcastle, Glasgow. So most of this is actually cloud based these days.

So with your business in the cloud and 85% hybrid working, what have you done about office space?

Ian Waring 09:24

That’s quite an interesting. We’ve been watching it because we, just by chance, we didn’t do it on purpose, though, we were looking at changing some of the software behind some of our door entry systems in the offices. And conclusion. We weren’t getting good, good data out of it. So we started actually tracking people’s IP addresses as they logged into Microsoft 365. Yeah, and where they’re coming from and see if they’re coming from an office address. And we started actually doing nice little graphs things showing what the office utilization was. And it’s basically About 5%.

But during the pandemic, as soon as soon as one of the senior managers or the CEO appears at an office, then suddenly the utilization ramps right up, but then as soon as they leave it goes right back down again. But they’re generally where the car parks used to be absolutely full, and if you got into the office anytime after five to nine, you can’t get a car parking space. Now the car parks completely empty, you tend to only find only 7-10 people in the office. The capacity is 200 people.

What’s your thoughts on the right balance between being in an office versus elsewhere? 10:37

Ian Waring 11:29

Encouraging it, particularly getting team meetings, things you miss in the office environment is the ad hoc meeting of people at the water tap saying, Oh, what are you doing? Oh, well, I’m doing this now. So that goes, it  becomes a lot more regimented during fixed meetings than the ad hoc conversations that happen so readily. Now we do have some tools like you know, Yammer and Teams and stuff like that. So we do have some online discussions, but they’re fairly lightly used. Really, the company actually tend to just tend to leave it to the individual teams to manage it.

It’s always a manager’s dilemma. Because I always think to myself, am I actually socializing with my team enough? Am I doing it too much? That people have different working styles. I know that one of my other careers was at Demon internet a few years ago. And one of the things we found is that there are some people who like having a lot of phone traffic served at them all day. Saying, right, ansser the next call, answer the next call… The minute you take them off the phone traffic, give them a role where they’ve got to start thinking and they don’t have to worry about incoming interruptions, and actually ended up one guy who ended up in the mental institution after, trying to do that transition. No, so I’ve always doubly paranoid about now, am I talking to you enough? Am I talking to you not enough? Now, should we be having team meetings in the office? And, and we’re largely working that out as we go along. As I see it, I seem to have much more contact with my peer managers than I do with my own staff at the moment, which seems to be fairly happy. They always tell me I send too many emails but no, that’s a habit, I tend to tend to like to be inclusive and actually tell them that I’d like over communicate rather than under communicate, that with email, and that’s probably one of one of my bad habits. The other bad habit is not actually having a proper work, work and working from home boundary. Now, I got used, because my parents were well, my mother was a housewife. But my father so varied between being a carpenter or being a baker. And I came home with maths homework at night and say that grammar school and he didn’t know the answers, whereas all my friends had had parents at local atomic weapons establishment and scientists, and they explain things so I got used to work working late, late at night, no maths would take me take me ages and I’ve never broken that habit.

Now, so we’ve got this this thing called Microsoft viva, which is layered on top of Microsoft 365. And it actually keeps on nagging me saying Do you realize you went forward from there four nights last week past midnight, that’s your golden sleeping time between 12 o’clock and six o’clock – don’t do it. So I’m always told off for actually working too many hours. But having said that, I actually love it to bits. Company are brilliant, fairly good freedoms, leave you alone, get on with things and as long as you keep on delivering, and you need to go out for an hour to do some shopping on the afternoon they tend not to mind too much. As long as you get stuff done.

Question 3  Do you think users have grown in their confidence in using technology since lockdown?  

Ian Waring 16:32

Not that I’ve perceived, we’ve got a fairly tech savvy audience anyway, to be honest, that most people actually just used to use using the systems in the office. I guess that’s they’ve done a few little things, nobody, you tend to have to be a lot more careful about, about, particularly when you’re rotating staff and no one’s getting the trains. And what used to happen, we used to have formal training courses every now and again, like once every six months, let’s train people up on accounts payable or accounts receivable or credit control. And now it tends to work much more by Chinese whispers. Oh, I’ve got to rotate this role someone’s on holiday next week. Oh, can you show me what your process is and as the process of going through.

Chinese whispers, like, they go into variations. And, and particularly when we’ve when we’ve been trying to try and tie down security actually to say, well, we just record your process, we play it through the tool on dynamics, and we see what we’re finding that the different people are offering, following different happy and unhappy paths through their processes. That so we put the security rules and then find they can’t do their job and then have to start again. Start again. Yeah, that that takes longer. But in general, I say is as a manager, I tend to assume people come to work to do a good job. Yeah, I don’t think they slack every time I need to get hold of someone I seem to be able to get hold of them quickly. If they’re going to be out for a meeting or they’re gonna take their wife to doctors or something like that. Then they just say oh, by the way, I’m going to be off for an hour in the morning. But then as long as that communication is going, that’s fine. Even though one of my employees you know, she’s Italian. She said Well, do you mind if I work from home next week? I said okay, I’ll book a flight then! Bristol to Venice. This is December – that must cost an absolute fortune. She said Oh no, it’s 32 quid return. is actually costs more to pick her up from the airport and go off into the Dolomites. But that worked well. She used to just come on…They’d say well, that’s a nice blue background – all mountains, chalets at the mountainside. And she said, No, zoom background. That’s my sister’s house. Awesome. So but I recently lost her because her partners who runs the software company at Airbus in Bristol, and they gave him a nice contract and he’s working 18 hours a day, seven days a week and she’s sitting in the flat in filter and you’re saying I’ve got no life. I’ve got no life. I don’t see my friends. So she went back to Italy. So she’s quite lucky. I’m just to replace her at the moment and then that that’s, that’s quite an experience. So just trying to find entry level employee train on dynamics 365 load from ground up just looking for someone know with six months post grad experience that we can actually train up. And I’ve gone through 44 CV’s, and I think, I think two of them, I think only two of them are even bother interviewing. And I think even though those two, not sure.

Question 4 What’s the best piece of business or career advice you’ve ever been given?

Ian Waring 21:06

If I can do the ultimate name drop, I had an experience back in 1983, when I was in Digital’s PC group, that we were actually coming out with a range of personal computers to compete against this, this thing called the IBM PC, which rudely appeared in August 1981. Three months after, the Chairman said that they’re going to go into small computers over his dead body. And he retired and they went straight in. And it did a fairly good job.

By the way, though, Philip Estridge, who ran the IBM PC Division at the time. Absolutely legend, though, complete respect even from his competitors. But part of that at the time, though, there were two competing operating systems, there was this thing called CPM, and the thing called MS DOS for PC DOS, as it was on the IBM PC.

And we had a visit from this bloke called Bill Gates. And now he walks in with this, this this compact PC, which is about the size of a portable sewing machine. Now 38 pounds, and I put it on the desk, and we’re just waiting for all the management to come down to have a chat with this bloke who actually runs this little software company out of Seattle. And we just sort of sit around 14 of us sitting around the table, and they’re all just twiddling their thumbs just look looking at his, his computer. And I said, Do you mind if I ask you a real dumb question? No, I’m looking at your mouse there. You got two buttons on it?

No, no, I saw Apple Last week. That’s predecessor of the MAC. I said the mouse has got one button on it. And the people who engineered VisiCalc know who are doing a product called Vizion. And that’s got a three button mouse. Why have you got two buttons? And he went on for about 15 minutes just going through? Well, if you go into SAM, the word you find do this, do this, you get stuck in a mode over here. And that many buttons is too much or that many buttons isn’t enough. And he was he was going through every single spreadsheet, word processor, things like that in all the competitive products in the industry of how they work in conjunction with a mouse. You know, this guy is deep. He knows this stuff. Anyway, at that point, but all the execs walked in and say Oh, hello, my name is Bill Gates. My name is Bill Gates. You’re shaking people’s hands saying when you’re going to drop CPM, go to DOS when you go to drop CPM, what are you gonna drop CPM, just relentlessly and he had a very, very frustrating meeting because the company decided to standardize on concurrent CPM, which is the new multi multi display version of CPM rather than MS DOS. So he left the meeting very frustrated. And the sales guy is guy called Phil Scott Sutcliffe phoned me up afterwards, he said, I was taking Bill back bill back to the UK headquarters of Microsoft, which is elsewhere in Reading at the time. And he said to me, there’s only one bloke in that room. He knows what he’s talking about the hiring. They say well, who’s which one was like that. He said, that’s you. And that’s to throw a real stupid question. But the more I thought, I think about it, I think if you’re ever in an interview, you get to the end of an interview people say Oh, have you got any questions? For us, that that is the golden moment. That’s where you show some curiosity and ask questions. And of all the employees I’ve ever employed, people who actually asked that question with a golden piece of inquisitive, why are you doing this this way? How does this work? Stuff like that? They’re normally the real golden employees who really grow really aggressively.

So be curious.

25:28

I mean, the one other slight, slight detour. I was up in up in Yorkshire, with an account manager recruiting, recruiting a PC dealer. And we got out the car at this PC dealer, which we’re looking to sign up because we’re we’re looking to sign up but 120 dealers at the time. And the account manager just handed me the end of a measuring tape and said, Oh, can you stand over there by the front door? I thought what? And he measured the distance from the nearest director’s car parking space to the front door. I said, so what? And anyway, he said just a second. And he went and walked over to the nearest visitor’s car parking space, and measured the distance there. And he said this one passes. I said, What do you mean, it passes? He said, If the director’s spot is nearer to the front door than the first visitor slot, I will not recruit them. And I thought at the time, What a bizarre thing to say. Now roll on two years? and look down which PCB really succeeded and which ones were there really, for people who said essentially make lots of money and try and sell out and stuff like that. The ones where the customer visitor space was closer to the front door really prospered. And the ones the ones where they had it the other way around, it actually just died on the vine. It just sort of says that, that your attitude to your customers is probably a good leading indicator of whether you’ll be successful in business or not.