Ian Waring Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

In this episode Gethyn and Mark continue with Ian Waring, covering everything from simplifying (everything)… why Dynamics platform updates is like drinking from a fire hose and that its better to seek forgiveness than permission (sometimes!)

If you’d like to listen to Part 1 of Ian’s podcast or any of the others from Series 1 and Series 2 to date, you’ll find the links where you can listenbelow. Once again, the questions we asked in this episode were (except where we, of course, veer off track!):

The Questions

1.     Thinking about (Digital) Transformation…do you think most organizations need to “transform” or is it more about “continual improvement”…and why?
2.     Should there be a weighting factor between investment decisions? i.e. technology versus people investment?
3.     What advice would you give your younger self or those starting out / changing their career?
4.     Tell me a fun fact about yourself that perhaps nobody else knows about you?

The Links

You can view – Simplify, Simplify, Simplify – Ian Waring on YouTube
You can Listen to – Simplify, Simplify, Simplify – Ian Waring on Anchor or Spotify

Key Takeaways

• Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
• that’s the way we’ve always done it
• getting rid of these nuances that that just don’t seem that don’t add value to the process.
• do not go creating custom code everywhere 
• it’s very much like a mobile phone
• It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose here
• It just encourages the wrong behaviors.
• how to behave in a price war.
• it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission 

The Transcript

Question 1 – Thinking about (Digital) Transformation…do you think most organizations need to “transform” or is it more about “continual improvement”…and why?

Ian Waring 01:37
Simplify, simplify, simplify. I feel very much like an imposter here. One of the things, we ran up our Dynamics CRM system in a period of four months, right from bid to having it live. Now, which is no fun. It’s extremely quick. And we got a lot of things, right. But the things we got wrong are quite deep and taken a lot of lot of time to undo. But one of the things we did we put the system in, and the vendor we had at the time, was saying, Okay, well, let’s run some workshops of how you need to progress the system. So they’re putting people from all over the organization saying, what improvements would you like to see. And everybody was just looking to replicate their existing processes on top of what we had. But we ended up with 68 pages with customizations that we needed. And we went back to the vendor, right. 68 pages of customizations, how much we thought that we’ve got budgeted about that. 250k at the time, we thought that should actually be plenty. But they came back and said 890k, please. We thought, Okay, no, okay, we’re not going to do that then. So we went off. What about e commerce sites actually on Dynamics platform, they did that for probably about nine months, and then then actually returned back to say, Okay, we want to start putting our processes on. And at that point, we actually had, the new CFO came in. The one thing, the first bit of homework she did, she took home that six eight page document and actually read it and said that there’s no way you’re doing this, are you? And I said, No, I didn’t need you to actually read it as a boilerplate. This is just, these are what the individual teams are actually asking for. So she said, Okay, well, let’s put that to one side. I’m, I’m new here, I’ve got 100 days that I’m just going to start attaching myself to bits of paper and working their way around the organization. She would actually just say right now that I’m attached to that customer order, every time it moves, tell me where it is, who it’s with, and stuff like that. And she goes to people and say, Okay, we’ve got this bill to pay for the supplier. It goes into accounts receivable. Right? Why is this coming to you? She said, Well, I checked the budget to see if we still got enough money to spend on that project. And if we haven’t got enough, I’m going to say no. To what you mean to say no, you’re not the budget holder. Why is the accounting function actually acting as a policeman, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

So she said right, and as of now she said, the budget holder actually holds the budget not finance and as of now they do. They’re measured on it. And if the budget holder tells tyou to actually spend it, you spend that. No, they also be the consequences. If they don’t do it, and so, we started going through all sorts of process the thing, okay. Now once let’s pick another one sales order, okay, we find ourselves all the way through, comes to pay it, all the bill comes out to about 50, more than what we actually put on the purchase order, because there’s an extra delivery charge. Okay, what do you do now? Well, we go back, go back to the requisition er, and ask them to raise another purchase order for the difference? And she said, right, the IDs, get on the British universities, financial directors group forum, the NGO grants who all are members actually say, right, how would you handle situations like that? And quite a few of them came back and said, Oh, well, what we do if it’s within 5%, or lower, or 5%, or 50, grid, we just pay it. Yeah. And she said, Okay, implement that. Done. So it’s gradually working away, getting rid of these little nuances that that just don’t seem that don’t add value to the process. So yeah, so when we now start to under undergo a much wider program, for me, standardizing our processes and actually trying to make them as simple as possible.

that sounds like small changes, as opposed to the big bang approach, which is, I guess, we will go to probably the continuous improvement of that, as well,

Ian Waring 06:20
while we were starting on all the big bang… if you go to the Vodafone website, if you go to their investor relations section, they’ve got the complete 70 Page PowerPoint of their digital transformation program. They started about three, four years ago. Yeah, but you, you read through it, and you think no, that is that is absolute world class, they’ve done it really properly. No, we could really learn from this. And so what we’re doing is we’ve actually started a formal digital transformation program. And we, we reckon it’s gonna take two years to go through it. reverse some of the decisions we made early on, right, we got a between eight and 900 employees, for instance, though, which is just because we didn’t do the design of our Chart of Accounts properly, right, we’re going to change that. We’re going to start using Project operations and start being able to do time materials and stuff for consultancy. Looking at various other Microsoft offerings that help us but it’s a long journey, rather than the destination.

Ian Waring 08:48
One of her edicts was no, if dynamics is doing it, it’s probably based on experience with 1000s of customers? Yeah, well, we just follow that model? That’s default, and do not vote do not go creating custom code everywhere. Yeah. One of the other things we do is we take a new version of dynamics every single months. Okay, yes, absolutely. Now when they first went through a sort of evergreening process, back in 2019, April 2019. And they said, it’s very much like a mobile phone. Now you have an underlying platform. And then you have applications and data on top of it, and any customizations are put it in with plugins. And so what happens first Sunday, first Sunday of every month, they’ll drop a new version of dynamics on their staging server and say, there you go. If you don’t say anything that’s going to be on your production site next week. And so what we do is we got set of automated tests, which we run which is about but it’s just over 50 tests that actually get run through automatically we it takes about four hours to run automatically. If that’s a clean bill of health, then we just sit there and, update the operating system on our core block So I say update the operating system. For me, if you look at their roadmap, they publish the roadmap twice a year, no, April, October. And the last one, while the October one this this year, runs a 400 pages of changes. They’re making some dynamics about Blackboard. And we’re thinking Jesus Christ. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose here. But yeah, but we’re getting that as part of our subscription. So we did that did. We’re conscious that we’re still trying to do basics, real, real basics, and they’re coming up with AI. Things like say, oh, no, we’ve got this AI that looks your customer payment performance, we can guess what they know what your cash flow is gonna be. It’s, it’s just going, it’s just running before we could walk.

Question 2 Should there be a weighting factor between investment decisions? i.e. technology versus people investment?

Ian Waring 11:20
We’ve actually, we’ve actually done some advanced development with AI builder. Now in this part of the power platform, but we’ve already got it doing is actually you know, when we get customer invoices coming in, on email, it picks emails out, and we’ve got it so that it actually sees who’s actually sent the invoice and it only takes us five invoices to train the model. That covers about 70% of our invoice load coming in. Now 10 of our suppliers actually give us more than five invoices per year that we could we can train up. So, we’ve got all we’ve got, we’ve got that set so that things come into the invoice register, sorry, things come in by email, and the AI builder will actually go and tap in tap in the details. It’s the invoice register just hand out to somebody to say, right, this is what I’ve typed in. Here’s a PDF of what I actually see. Is it accurate? Yes or no?. So we went to implement that nice, they said, Oh, you’re using your invoice register? Well, we’re actually using payment journals at the moment, since we’re not using standard functionality on the system. Okay some of the other things that were their AI stuff. Microsoft has actually done some things with which are just a bit naive. Think things like it’s got a thing where it guesses, guesses what people’s payment performance was. And they’ve got a model that says, right, How much discount do you have to have to give to make that customer actually pay you early? And we’re thinking that that’s completely the wrong credit control discipline? They owe you money? You don’t you don’t actually say oh, no, we’ll give you 5% off if you pay it now. It just encourages the wrong behaviors.

Ian Waring 13:19
Yeah, well, okay. I had experience with that. No. One of my earlier other companies I worked for was computer distributor. And they work on about 1% gross margins. And the cash, cash collection performance is absolutely key to actually just, like feed the monster. Because if that if they’re not doing it, then you can easily be they gave me the Microsoft distribution business to run for four months. They said, Oh, no, this business is in trouble. Can you look after it for us, please? Oh, by the way, we’re on a performance improvement program with Microsoft at the moment. Okay, so how much are we making? Well, 1 million pounds a month, what percent margin? Now, they said, You got to get that way up. Otherwise, we’re gonna get fired because they got six distributors they’re looking to go. So one of the things I learned when I was at Digital, I got put in the course by a guy called John Winkler about how to how to manage your pricing. And one of the things he did is actually told you how to behave in a price war. And I’ve never had to apply it before but in that case, now you’re competing against people selling it. Oh, you Mr dealer buying at cost plus 2, we’ll off your cost plus 1. You say well, how do you compete against that? So just follow his advice, which is quite simple with two things you have to do with the price war. And it worked like a vengeance. That business went from the 1 million a month up to five up to 5 million a month within four months. But then that caused the company to start overtrading and we couldn’t collect cash fast enough to actually fund the growth. So it had to keep on going back to stock market say, Well, we’re growing really aggressively. Can we have some more money, please? And, in fact, that’s what that’s when I left that company. And we thought I thought that we actually had the discussion with Microsoft. They said, No, we’re gonna fire you anyway. So I left and went to Demon internet at the time. And then I got a phone call. About a month later, they said, Oh, by the way, we appealed it to Microsoft Europe, and they put us back in. So they managed to retain the contract. They said, Well, that’s very good. And they said, Oh, by the way, you know, we didn’t give you any share options last year before you left. So here’s a check for 1000 quid.

Ian Waring 15:48
I thought it’s one of the things. When computer distributors were growing like Topsy. And what happened is, as they grew, they kept on going back to stock market, we’ll be one of the ones that survive so give us more money. And invariably, at least one would drop off each quarter. And I thought we’re going to be the next one.

Question 3 What advice would you give your younger self or those starting out / changing their career?

Ian Waring 16:54
It’s very multifaceted. One of the things that happened to me, I mean, I largely learnt all my manager craft at digital and then and, actually, a lot of the behaviors that I try to encourage now I got I got from there. The guy at the top of the company at the time was guy called Shonto, Peta Schmitz. And he used to go around with a catchphrase that saying it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission. And we did. We did have an incident on that way when somebody took it. Absolutely, literally. And then we had a dirty, great big machine, at Hatfield Polytechnic, it’s a DEC system 10, big, big mainframe. And it went way down one afternoon, those 120 students are sitting there on their hands, not able to do anything. And the field service engineer came out and said, oh, we need this component. And they phoned into the field service stock group. So they’ve got this component. They said, No, we haven’t. And by the way, we haven’t got any of those in the UK at the moment though. We have got one over in the manufacturing plant in Galway. And, and he went to his manager said right the parts over in Galway and the manager said that I’m busy I’m going into a meeting. Just do whatever it takes. And he just disappeared off to his meeting. Well, if he phoned up Galway and said, Now I need to get that part but it’s customer systems down and guy Galway said oh no well Pierre Carly Filote, vice president Europe is actually in Galway today. And his private jet is down downing in Shannon. So what we do, he’s not going to leave his private jet until six o’clock tonight. And this is like mid morning. He said so what we’ll do, we’ll actually just jump in a car take the park down from from Galway down to Shannon but an hour drive, we’ll give it to the digital the digital beat chair 120 and actually get it flown out to Heathrow so you pick it up from Heathrow and you take it up to Hatfield and install it on the machine. Jobs a good un

19:13
Absolutely deliriously happy, though but the other one the one thing the field service engineer did he said Oh right. We actually we can hire the jet. What’s your cost centre? And he said all my managers cost center is xx xx xx. They said okay. That’s fine. No worries we’ll send over. So manager came out at the meeting. And so then I just had a phone call from the system manager that Hatfield Poly, the service is absolutely brilliant. What do you do? And he said, Well, I got Pierre Carlos, private jet and I got overflown from Galway. He said, you realize you just hit my cost center for about $25,000. And the engineer just looked at him. He said it’s better to seek forgiveness with permission He’s manager said just don’t do that again

Question 4 Tell me a fun fact about yourself that perhaps nobody else knows about you?

Ian Waring 20:32
My whole family are at the bakery trade. I’m the one who escaped to grammar school and actually got on the computer and actually got out but when I when I left school, they said Oh, you like your job in the bakery? No, nine to five and I said great. They said that’s 9pm to 5am, I said no so no, I just went to get a job at Digital instead.

So you said you like to work late is that where that comes from?

Ian Waring 21:07
Yeah, that’s a bit too much. For me. It’s all very well good, go play golf during the day, but you tend to need sleep and 9pm to 5am was a bit much. Yeah. But a few years later, actually demonstrating a PC to a guy at Bramall Lane, the Sheffield United football grounds. And this guy walks in and says oh we’ll trade you and said my family run a bakery. He said, I could see… too many sticky buns.

I had a job interview with a guy called Peter Wilkinson who run the company called planet online that basically started freeserve by the way, they he had the idea for freeserve. And when I was in reception was one of the people I used to work with a digital was there and he said, Oh, you’re seeing Peter Wilkinson said? I said yeah, just noticed this there’s this Ferrari outside, but it’s a blue Ferrari. And he said, right. What do you do when you get into his office. He shared an office the CFO and the CEO CFO shared an office. He said when you get into his office, just ask him if that’s his ford probe outside. I walked up the stairs and got into his office and the CFO is working away and Peter says Welcome. Have you been here before? Is that your ford probe outside? And he said get out.

He said no, no, that was a joke. He can come back in here. He actually took me up to a pizza restaurant at lunchtime and he parked on the yellow lines outside this pizza shop in Leeds and he said you just parked on yellow lines he said. He said all traffic wardens come up and down here all the time. But if the traffic wardens come anywhere near that Ferrari outside that pizza joint, that manager the pizza parlor actually just chases them away. He wants to know, people who drive a Ferrari eat in his pizza join.

Peter was very impressive because the one thing he did is he said he wanted me to actually join their internet company and he gave me a copy of the business plan for free serve and said this is my business plan. But it’s something I also learned like the computer centre a lot that that sales guys can limbo up a organization chart like tomorrow, but they plan very, very thoroughly. No, and I think That’s probably a very underused skill.