Digital Transformation: A Retrospective with Global Strategy Group

Carolyn Norton 00:02 Hello to everyone we are back. Welcome to Season Two of campfire 365. As always, I'm your host, Carolyn Norton. First and foremost, I want to take a moment and sincerely thank everyone who tuned in to season one, the big disaster. It was a huge success, and we truly hope the series helped organizations understand, plan for possibly prevent, and even be prepared for any of the possible disasters that can crumble in organization. If you missed it, be sure to catch the replays and learn how to disaster proof your organization. I'm so excited to kick off our second season of our podcast, understanding digital transformation. In this highly anticipated season, we're gonna take a look at how to bust the buzzword and understand what we keep hearing about what exactly is digital transformation? Is it right for my organization? Where do I even start in this process? And what are the benefits for your organization? All these questions and much more are going to be covered throughout the season. Now onto our first episode, at the heart of a company's digital transformation are the people who are impacted. Today, I'm sitting down with our client, Andrew hohe. Head of it is a global strategy group, and a cohort of technology experts as we relive GSDs journey from start to finish with pragmatic insights from the clients and consultants. We'll be covering multiple perspectives of gsts transformation journey, including the highs and the lows. With that being said, let's jump into our first episode, digital transformation, a retrospective with Global Strategy Group. Welcome, everyone. We're here today to talk about digital transformation. What does it mean? And how does it help your organization? Many have discussed this topic and general terms, but we wanted to highlight gsts transformation journey. And so we have a panel of speakers today to talk about that experience. I'm your host, Carolyn Norton on the cloud Director of Engineering and Operations here at velocio. Andrew Ho 02:31 Mandy, I am Andy Howell, I am the head of it and offer services at Global Strategy Group or GSG. So I guess something asked here. So we'll get to Lorna Link 02:45 Hi, I'm Lorna link. And I am the BC Express practice director at velocity when I had the great pleasure of working with Andy and his team. Ryhaan Gil 02:55 Hey there, my name is Ron Gill, I'm the director of digital transformation, our new advisory services, practice hearing philosophy, you know, where we provide, you know, corrective advisory services, more detailed and discovery cycle to create really a robust and concrete foundation for our clients to ease them into transformative process and transition from legacy technologies over to our new rage modern based technologies in the Microsoft tech stack. Erica Ellis 03:23 Hi, my name is Eric Ellis, and I'm a Principal Consultant at velocio on the dynamics customer engagement team, and I actually helped Global Strategy Group implement dynamics in their organization. Carolyn Norton 03:39 Amazing, amazing group of people here that have worked with TST in their journey. So, Andy, let's set the table here. Let's talk about when you came into GSG. What was the environment like? What did it look like? What was the technology landscape? What what did you come into when you became a part of the GSG? Family? Andrew Ho 04:03 Sure. So when I started at GSG, it was like the summer it was a summer 2015. And, surprisingly, at least to me at the time was that GSD had been in business already for 20 years by the time I got there, but when I got there I was their first full time it hire ever. They had mainly just depended upon, like a mix of like their office manager finance and there was like a part time, like consultant CIO that was helping out prior prior to me getting there and also an MSP that did tech support. And often in an off site, MSP that was doing tech support for it. But everything was still from a tech perspective very much a mom and pop shop like most of the laptops weren't purchased through a business account they like it was like the office manager literally running the Best Buy and buying laptops for free Before, it seemed like, you know, when they started, it was, you know, they had just before I gotten there, the they they did migrate everyone to office 365. And then brought some level of consistency in regards to the Productivity Suite and email. But there was still like a mix of like shared drives here, network drives were like file storage, as well as different people using different things. So some people using Dropbox, one, you know, OneDrive, SharePoint, you name it, someone was probably using it at that point. So there was not much standardization to that. From like an internal state system standpoint, the firm had been using Salesforce for some time for for CRM. But ironically, they had modified Salesforce so heavily to handle how GSG does your business, which I'll talk about in a second. But so that not only was the CRM system, they had modified Salesforce to the point where it was also many ways a PSA or professional services automation system. And through that they use Salesforce as a timesheet system to track people's hours to these projects. And it had gotten to the point that when I got there, and people knew that I, you know, the employees that were there knew I was going to be taking over Salesforce or like, oh, you know, so you're gonna take over our timesheet system. And I was like, oh, what's your timesheet system, they're like Salesforce, I'm like, you realize that outside of these four walls, you're not gonna find a single person that refers to Salesforce as a timesheet system, like no one thinks. If people would just be like, really, you know, people like they were floored that, like, they just assumed everyone if everyone use timesheets, they will use Salesforce. And I was just like, and meanwhile I'm like, no, no, you guys are anomaly. So it was sort of that atmosphere there was you know, it was and, you know, with with different things that, you know, this case of Salesforce not being used properly, or things that were just a little more scattershot. And the firm knew this. And they the reason they brought me in was because they knew it was time to professionalize, to put structure have a real IT strategy and a plan moving forward and to move the firm forward. And embracing technology and so forth, that the firm is not going to grow and not be competitive, if it if it stayed in the in the current state it was when I got there. And so I didn't explain what GSG does for everyone. Everyone that doesn't know or hasn't taken the time to Google this. So Global Strategy Group is a political research a democratic political research firm, as well as a communications and public affairs firm. So we focus on supporting, you know, politicians at the at the National to state level, across the country on the Democratic spectrum, as well as working with corporations and with nonprofits, on on the various causes and Public Affairs drives that they're looking for. So in many ways, it's we are very much like a consulting firm, in that sense. You know, our staff are our resources. We get projects, whether it's a polling, or whether it is building out a communication strategy or a public affairs plan. And, you know, we built ours to it, you know, just like any other consulting firm, you would expect it sometimes it's fixed price, sometimes foreign per hour, and so forth. But that's the business that we did. Carolyn Norton 08:29 That's really great insight to a, who GSD was and is and what challenges we were facing. And it sounds like you were the organization knew of these challenges they brought you in, once they started to understand where the organization could use some themes, like some strategic guidance. How did you come up with what business outcomes you were trying to achieve? And what to tackle in terms of focusing on those challenges? Andrew Ho 09:04 The first areas that I tackled were things that I saw as immediate pain points, and one of the biggest ones was was file management because they were still on network drives. And they had already by the time I got there, they had already went out of server space. And my predecessor, who left in a in a bit of mysterious circumstances, like he literally just ghosted and never came back. had set up in a while and at least the story is that he had set up and in his your site that had moved a lot of the art and archive a lot of documents to it, but he never left the password for it or anything, or anyone. And so one of my first challenges was trying to guess and decipher what he could have used as a password. Fortunately, our MSP was pretty handy in this and fortunately, he didn't have the best password. Uh, you know, password standards in regards to your Pap password like best practices Carolyn Norton 10:06 work in your favor. Andrew Ho 10:08 A favor because yeah, in this day and age I, you know, you get shot if you, you did some of the things but I mean, again, there's a reason why there was a reason why they brought me in to do. But we were able to figure it out. And it was a concern because because of network drives, and because some of it was archived in a place that was temporarily inaccessible, to still be inaccessible, so we got to it. And also is for anyone that recalls back in the day of network drives, and everything being localized, as the only way you can access it is through VPN. And VPN, especially back in 2015, can prove I just said that, it, you know, it can be very slow and cumbersome. And so, you know, our staff just complained, like, you know, we were running out of space for files, things were hard to find when they work from home or anywhere else, it was incredibly slow. And so that became my first, you know, one of the immediate areas, you know, we got to fix that because like, I'm not, we're not gonna see the end of the year. That's what it felt like, we're not going to see the end of the year unless this guy thinks. So that was one, the Salesforce one was a big issue because we were using as a CRM, and a PSA Salesforce, as hopefully everyone here knows is not designed to be a PSA. And it will, it had been, in many ways cobbled together and Frankenstein into becoming one. And it was in all of that custom development was showing, you know, showing the cracks at this point. And initial plan was figuring out how to stabilize it and get it to work better, there was never a plan of like, move off Salesforce, you know, so worked with Salesforce signed, I think was to two years or three year deal the time to, you know, the lock in our licensing costs, and we're going to Alright, we're going to dig in and figure this out and get Salesforce to work. So that was another priority. And then some of the other priorities we tackled were like, like hardware infrastructure related within the offices, we also tackle a need for more instantaneous communications. You know, like constant emailing was driving a lot of people, certain people, not certain number of people nuts, where you get like one word email responses, and then you jump into a thread or into a thread. And it's like, you have no idea because people reply to different parts of the thread. And then you have like, all these conversation threads, and so forth. This was back when Microsoft saw well, they still haven't, but they were running Yammer as their main source of that and Yammer was was people did not like Yammer at all. And so, you know, folks wanted something that, you know, that bridge that gap. So I think those were probably the big three things that that was there when I got there. Carolyn Norton 13:03 User experience was definitely a challenge factor that you wanted to tackle. Right? Andrew Ho 13:09 User experience was one, well, actually that user experience was a huge one that I that, that both I wanted to tackle in personally wanted to focus on, as my sort of IT strategy. Like most of my it is very more people focused and process focused than it is really on straight technology focused. The other example I can give to that I focused on was with our MSP. And I think I've told some of you this story in previous conversations. But like when I when I got the GSG and I started talking with staff, and I started learning about all the different tech issues people are having, like, this doesn't work that doesn't work. And you know, someone was working with a keyboard where like, half the keys didn't work, and that they would use another keyboard, like all sorts of craziness. And I'd be like, why wouldn't you raise it to the tech support, and they're like, oh, there's such a pain to deal with, you have to open a ticket, and then they get back to you after so much time, there's all this back and forth. So we're just like, whatever. So they don't really contact tech support. Unless they're, they literally cannot cannot work anymore. And then I have my you know, Intro conversation with the tech support firm. And I talk with them and they come in and we're like, you know, you are our favorite customer, your best customer you guys never have any issues. And I'm like, interesting you say little do you know, you're not wrong in this far rather, it's not too much. We don't have any issues. We don't open very many tickets. And that's where we want to dig into so we worked with them in one of the key changes at the start with is we started having on site tech support. Not having someone on site there's like a I quickly discovered there is a mental barrier to raising tickets on your phone, you have to force someone to email or call if they have to open a ticket of some sort. If there's someone literally sitting there that you can walk up to, you're gonna walk up to them and talk to them. About something versus As you know, if you had open a ticket, you'll just not say anything, most people just won't say anything. And so that immediately, you know, move that away in my philosophy, oftentimes with tech support is I actually hate metrics that talked about, like, you know, this is number tickets, we had number of tickets song, because it's like that old Dilbert like incentives of, you know, you just want to increase the amount of tickets and solve the tickets, but it doesn't measure customer satisfaction is whether or not everything is working the way it should. And I wanted to focus on our staff happy can do they have everything they need to work? And are they happy with how long it took to resolve it? Or how quickly it resolved? So that that's, that's a great thing to your point, Carolyn, is that that was, you know, that was a large part of my focus. It's like, Let's Get everyone working and happy about what you know what they're working with. Carolyn Norton 15:52 And it sounds like you weren't, you didn't come in gung ho, you got that. You have that end user experience to focus on. But the initially when and saying, Alright, let's see, let's work with what we have. Let's see what we can do in the organization at some point. When did you recognize that perhaps there might be other solutions that need to be in contention with what you have today? It what other options are available beyond what you have today? Andrew Ho 16:24 Oh, pretty much immediately, like, as soon as, like, recognizing that these are issues like, you know, my brain already started spinning as to like, what are the possibilities? Like, like, for example, like with file storage, right? So it's like, you spot the issue and immediately, like, Okay, we, you know, out of the box, because we had already the firm had already moved to Office 365 Like, so what's wrong with OneDrive? What's wrong with you know, SharePoint, what have we done so far, and digging into that, and discovering that people hated both SharePoint and OneDrive. Personally, I hate SharePoint anyway. But I'm happy to discover that no one there like that, either. But no one liked OneDrive either. In fact, despite the fact that the firm had pushed office 365, and everyone seemed to embrace it, almost immediately, the one part of the one piece of Office that only like four or five people jumped into was one drive. Almost. So almost universally, the firm's that took one look at one drive was like, Yeah, nevermind, we're gonna keep doing what we were doing before. In the, you know, in so and so for some cases, it was I'd rather deal with all the problems than network network drive, then move to one drive. For others who want it more of the convenience of having like, the web experience, the cloud, the share, and everything else, they would just move to Google Drive your personal Google Drive or Dropbox, because they were familiar that with with, you know, their personal files, and they're like, well just use that at simpler, Carolyn Norton 17:57 which your experience, you're also contending with adoption, and making sure that your what you're providing, is actually going to get adopted by your end users. Andrew Ho 18:09 Yeah, because if you're you, and users don't adopt what you put together, then you might you've just wasted a ton of money. I mean, it's as simple as that. Like, it doesn't matter how great you think your solution is, or how efficient it is, or how much money you're gonna save. If your end users don't adopt it, or you spend a ton of money forcing them to adopt it, like, you know, squishing like a round peg into a square hole. It's not it's not going to work. The best systems are the ones that your users immediately gravitate toward, and start using and leveraging and as quickly as possible. And if you can't get to that point, you know, if you can't, if you can't build up to that point, then you're you're you're wasting your time and money anyways, like you need you need to, that's what you need to focus on. And for us, you know, like the solutions that we adopted, for example, like file management, which is box ultimately. And even for like messaging, we ended up going with Slack are two perfect examples where adoption was near immediate. I mean, Slack was like to stay, we moved our entire firm to Slack and in his singularly the most organic. He's migration adoption I've ever done in my entire career. Like it was literally like, Slack is available. And people are already like posting GIF, ease and emojis and the all sorts of channels are being built and people are already coming up with structures. I was like, Okay, that was my work is that it was, you know, it was like opening a toy box. And everyone instantly knew how to use it like opening for opening a box of Legos and everyone knows you know what to do next. Carolyn Norton 19:42 That's a perfect analogy, right if the kid doesn't want to play with the toy, off to the corner echoes. So how did velocio get introduced with GSG? Where in this journey it sounds like again, you had the strong focus on end user experience. You recognize that there was adaption opportunities or reassessments. You mentioned other solutions in your organization that you recognize, again, there's an area of opportunity here to help your organization. How did velocio get in the mix? And how did that relationship start. Andrew Ho 20:17 So the Alpha lawsuit got into this mix actually comes back to Salesforce or old friend, Salesforce. So like I mentioned, my initial intent was to figure out how to get Salesforce to work and we bought ourselves time locking and everything. And we spent two years like truly giving it the absolute college try of getting Salesforce to work and meet all the requirements that we had. But one of the biggest challenges that we have as GSG in regards to how we feel a CRM should work is how we measure our our opportunities, our business, and how we reward people for bringing in business to the firm. Because for starters, at GSG, we don't have dedicated salespeople. So we there's not a sales team that that, you know, works leads, brings and brings and brings in sales, and then transfers it over to a project team. Our partners are senior VPs, you know, they're the ones and senior directors and so forth. They're the ones that go out and bring in the business. And the way we measure this is like a typical CRM, like out of the box, you know, opportunities come in, you start tracking it, and then the moment that opportunity becomes like, you know, sold one, you close the opportunity. And that's the that's the end of that. And then the person that brought it in gets credit for that, that when that GSG, the credit doesn't actually get allocated at the moment the the opportunity closes, closes as one, we continue tracking what happens after that opportunity, like what projects are spun off that opportunity. Oftentimes, it's one to one opportunity closes, it's once one project, but sometimes it can be more than one project. And then we want to track what happens to those projects, and are those projects completed to in all the revenue has been recognized from those projects, because our people don't get full credit for the sale until all the revenue is recognized at the end of the project, which is why this PSAPs is so important to us. And why like timesheets, and everything else was very important to us is because it's only your you've only done half your job, if you get the client in the door, you don't do your full job until you fully satisfy the client and they paid you in finances recognize that money. And until that magical moment, you know, you're not done yet. In essence, so you know, so we had cobbled Salesforce to continue tracking the work beyond the typical, you know, one close piece through that. And that was the part that was was really as the year was when as the one year went by, and the second year went by, it was really starting to show all the cracks of accustomed development that didn't take into account like a business that was evolving and different things. And we recognize that it was going to in essence, we couldn't we can no longer like modify our way out of the hole that it was in. We if we were going to stay with Salesforce, we we were going to have to start from scratch with in essence a fresh instance of Salesforce and build from that. And the idea from there was not to build something custom like we did previously. But to leverage one of Salesforce as partners that does PSA. And build it together in a way that would meet all of our business requirements. So even up to this point, our goal was pure Salesforce, but recognizing that, you know, it was gonna be much broader and more expensive to do working Carolyn Norton 23:41 for a more total solution for GSA, right? Not necessarily, here's the product and let's see if it works for the org, you really wanted to approach it as is this is the current solution, whether it's Salesforce or not going to the nuances of GSG, as you highlighted earlier, yep. So entrepreneur, thought Microsoft, how did that how did that happen? Andrew Ho 24:05 So it happened? It didn't happen. It didn't I didn't immediately think Microsoft either is it's it's. So what happened really quickly was that went back to Salesforce, explaining what the situation was and wanting to see if they can extend our licensing costs at the same rate. And they basically told us they basically, for all intents and purposes laugh told us Yeah, that's funny. We're going to increase your we plan to increase your licensing cost by 7%. And that the only way we would prevent that is if we just bought more licenses or spent more money on Salesforce. But in essence they were like you need to spend way more money on us. And there was a definitely a strong undertone of arrogance because they were clearly not expecting us to do anything else but spend all that money on them. But the only the unfortunate piece was that for us. I had entered that discussion in the second of our third, you know, before our third year of our contract. So we have one year. So after that discussion, I was like we're done, you know, I, you know, internally talk with all the folks in GSDs, like we're done with Salesforce. Basically, this is what they are saying, we have one year to switch. Because if we don't, we're paying 7%, here's the mountain that we have to pay just to, just to just to stay in the game. And that was when I started doing a search of okay, what are all the replacements for Salesforce for a firm of our size, which was at the time just under 100, staff members, so about 100, you know, just about 100, licensed or at licenses at the time, being able to do CRM, PSA, so forth, and pulled in a bunch of different folks from NetSuite to Microsoft Dynamics, to Zoho to a bunch of boutique ones that, you know, have various names and so forth, across the board, and just started reaching out to him. For Microsoft, because I didn't know anyone that did dynamics. At that time, I literally just went on to, you know, to the Microsoft form, filled it out, said I'm interested in dynamics. And I got connected with a person that I still keep in touch with at Microsoft, who was fantastic, because he reached out and was like, and we got into a whole conversation explained the whole situation. And he was like, I have to, I think I have the perfect firm for you, from our partners. And he's like, I'm gonna go check with him and come back. And he came back. And it was, you know, what Valencia was at the time, which associates and it was like, this is the firm they're based, you know, they're based in Columbus, Ohio, I think they will, I think they're a perfect fit for who you guys are and what you guys want to do. So from there, he just put us put me in touch with, with associates. Now velocio And the rest is literally history from there. But that's how I got to you guys into Microsoft. And from there you guys were in like Microsoft basically anointed you guys the their champion for this fight, right? Because even then, I wasn't like in my head, like, we're definitely going Microsoft like at all like, Carolyn Norton 27:10 sounds gonna be my next question. All right, you have your different options here. You're again, you have all the menu is yours, you can choose where you want to go with what led you down this particular solution as it relates to again, what you're facing. And what I love, Andy is that you gave it the college try you identify the user impact to the organization, obviously the organization recognized challenges. And then you didn't wait till that end of the contract with Salesforce. He started investigating, again that college try that you mentioned earlier, what more can you do with this solution and recognized early on? Alright, we need to make a serious decision on our challenge here. Otherwise, we're kind of stuck again. And, and damn, Dan, we have an increase in our in our overall cost. So you know, and I call that out because very often organizations kind of wait very close to the end, and then it becomes a rush for them to really pick a solution make sure it's right for them, forcing users to you know, get onto it quickly, which is again adoption super important. And there may not be that sometimes there's positive results but sometimes there are not results good results. So again, just calling out the timeline was is very interesting for you guys, because it seems to have worked out Andrew Ho 28:38 well yeah. And part of that was like very, like we I had we had a very specific end date like literally just marked on the calendar, this is when our Salesforce licenses end, and then working backwards. Like that means that we have to have we migrated off of Salesforce by like by this point, or we're screwed, and then working backwards from there paying you know, knowing that means requirements need to be here. This means you know, all these things all the way backwards. That's great. And then to your original question, so yeah, so we we've lined up all of our horses and and to be perfectly blunt, I was never expecting Microsoft to win this like ever like so prior to even coming to GST like I've had experience with a lot of experience with Salesforce. I've worked with SAP I've worked with Siebel back when Siebel was the thing before Oracle got bought I was actually expecting like potentially NetSuite to work its way out or maybe one of the boutique ones. There was also one Sugar CRM that I thought might you know might be an intriguing as well. Because I'd heard very great things about it. But Microsoft had never entered the entered the equation in my head like when I first started this because it was like Microsoft, because in some ways, Microsoft like with Office is like you know, makes things super easy. But I always joke with everyone is that Microsoft has this stunning ability to make something both incredibly easy See incredibly complex, often at the exact same moment. They they are, they can, they're frustrating. And that that there are some things that can be super easy. And then like you flip to the Admin Console, and you're like, What the heck is going on? Like, why is this thing such a mess? And so and it carries over across everything that they do. So long story short, didn't expect it. But your team did a great job and presenting Microsoft and demonstrating how dynamics had out of the box had both the ability to do CRM and PSA, which, which helped make it fairly unique in amongst all the different systems that we were looking at the majority of the ones that we looked at, required, like some level of custom development to create the PSA. And, and we really did not want to go down that path after our experience with Salesforce accustomed developing, and others like NetSuite at the time required us like yes, they're like, oh, yeah, we can do PSA. We can do CRM, but they're like, we don't do implementations unless you first change your ERP to us. And we're like, yes, we plan on changing our ERP. But we have to change our CRM, because again, the timeline of when Salesforce is going to end. And we don't have the time or energy to replace the ERP first to do and then new CRM. And so NetSuite took themselves out because they're like, We won't work with you unless you change your ERP first. So like, Okay, thanks. And so and so long and short of it, you know, Microsoft, Sugar CRM, and in a very boutique company, were the three finalists amongst this. And after, like final presentations, and going through everything, you know, it was basically down to Microsoft and Sugar CRM. And the pros and cons of the two were almost diametrically opposed, because the pros of Microsoft was CRM PSA right out of the box. But the cons is that it was, you know, from the demos, and everything else, people felt it was clunky, there was a lot of clunkiness, to how Microsoft worked. And there were definitely things that were like, Yeah, Microsoft says do this, but we don't really do that. Or we don't do that in, but they love the fact that they can see the clear, you know, the clear parts that were that were already built in place, that one didn't have to be custom developed. And Sugar CRM, you know, presented something that was very, you know, very streamlined, in very pretty. And also it was, you know, customized because it's built like on, you know, in essence on Drupal. But, um, but we knew we had to custom build the PSA. And at the end of the day, the decision was, we do not want to custom build anything. And so Microsoft went out on this. And so then we went out to Microsoft, and we got introduced Erica, and and then the timeline began. All right now now we've decided on this, we've got to get started in build this out. Carolyn Norton 33:07 Erica, based on based on everything Andy has said, How has velocio, you know, taken dynamic CE CRM and help that solution meet gsts needs? How are we able to do that? Erica Ellis 33:24 Yeah, so going back to what Andy said about out of the box, PSA, had all of the functionality that they needed, but it also had more that they didn't need, it just didn't meet their business requirements. And but fortunately, the system, we could configure it to smooth over those parts, right? So we were able to sit down and say, Okay, we have this great solution out of the box, what can we do to improve the user experience and make it as easy as possible for them, the users that GSG it's a very hard working, busy group of people. So they needed things to be fast, easy to use all of that good stuff. So we sat down and figured out what that flows look like and use the simple configuration tools within PSA and dynamics to smooth those edges out and keep that user experience as quick and simple as possible. Carolyn Norton 34:22 Amazing, now, so that helped with the aggressive timeline of oh, we gotta get off the slack as soon as possible. I also know that at some point, there was a decision to go into Dynamics BC, which is another dynamics family. And Microsoft has, how did that come about? Andrew Ho 34:45 So Well, that was so the idea that we needed to change our ERP was always in the back of our heads. Because besides Salesforce, we were also on the European and ERP is a very cheap First term for this, like an accounting system that we were using was called it was sage 50, which, for those familiar from back in the day, it was just peach tree. So in essence, it's an accounting software that back in the day you would buy out of a box from Best Buy and use it for your, your mom and pop shop to do your your small business accounting needs. That at this point yesterday had long since outgrown. But the and knew that we had to move on to a to a better, more robust system. But unlike Salesforce, Sage 50 is fairly inexpensive. And unlike Salesforce in the way it was falling apart, Sage 50 wasn't necessarily falling apart. Yes, it didn't have all the you know, the full controls that a medium sized firm needs are, yes, there are certain things that are clunky and don't work that great or there are certain limitations. But at the end of the day, you know, you know, invoices are being sent things revenue is being recognized, the GL is being you know, all that work. Right, it got the job done. So it was not the priority to start until, until we had our CRM fixed. And then once that was done that was then we're like, okay, we need to replace sage, Sage 50. And the other thing I want to say before we jump down the BC side to it just in regards to just the the accelerated timeline, I want to point out that her and her team, we actually finished the project early. So like I said, we, in the sense that we had it was the end of September to switch from like was once sales forces licenses ended. We finished before the summer like right before the summer, I want to say like, right after Memorial Day, June, the project was technically done. And we made a decision to delay the delay the user rollout, because summer vacations started kicking in. And we were like, We need people back in the like everyone back in the office. We can't roll out a system that everyone uses while everyone half the firm is going to be on vacation. And so So yeah, so we actually finished the project early and intentionally delayed rollout for about two months to everything, we didn't roll it out to the week after Labor Day, we're like, we give everyone the Labor Day. And then they come back, they get back back into the groove. And then we're going to force migrate everyone at that point. So Carolyn Norton 37:29 that leads me to a really question. We talked about user experience. Again, the timeline is working out amazing. How did you guys help end user adoption? How did you get the buy in from the users that the solution? You know, again, we talked about earlier, you're picking a solution? Everything seems to be the right fit for GSG? How did you get their buy in? How did you get leadership buy in? And how did the adoption get rolled out? Andrew Ho 37:58 So buy in started from leadership from the very beginning, from the moment we decided that like, from the decision that we were leaving Salesforce and going with someone else, it had to be bought in from from our most senior leadership. And so I report to our Managing Partner and our managing partner and I were adamant that we would get full buy in across the board. And he made a special point that he was going to make them sign like something just to like just somewhat for the show of it. But also something that he's just like, I want them to realize the seriousness that there's no backing out no pointing fingers afterwards or anything else that you are bought in. And at that point forward, you are going to do nothing else but support that this is going to work. So the decision to leave Salesforce the decision to move with Microsoft, and then the decision of like rollout and everything else that you know, they were, you know, fully bought into it from beginning so it was very top down. You never I never had a fight up to be able to convince someone or you know, reword how something is positioned or anything else it was this is what we're doing? Yes, we would have discussions and back and forth. And some things may change. But the bottom line is our plan was bought in from the top down to me. And then from there, it was sort of multi pronged. I would present in staff meetings through emails through slack. What we were doing were the next steps, what to expect and the from senior leadership to the practice managers down, they would reinforce that and ensure that people were complying and there were obviously people that would be like, oh, yeah, whatever. And then they would get feedback from you know, from their business side that no, this is not a what forever, whatever, you do need to listen to this. You do need to follow this. So it was very helpful in keeping it structured. So folks knew that like, we were planning we were like we told them at the beginning of summer that, you know, we didn't actually say oh, we're done and ready but we're Just like we're going to roll this out at, you know, the week after Labor Day, this is what you need to prepare for. And you know, people going in and vacations. And we would occasionally remind folks, internally, like, we started doing the migration near the, like, end of August, like we started our work. Like, it's not like we wait till after Labor Day to start our work internally, but like so. And this summer, we've basically fired everything back up again, started getting everything ready started doing like, the initial prep for the migration, all that, you know, we got our like, right around Labor Day, we, you know, I had an, I presented an all star staff, again, what we were doing, we had, like, our internal team had already, like, user you at the whole thing. And we had, we basically split them up to sit with different users, like, you know, folks and travel to different offices to make sure that, you know, the week of rollout, we had a very clear timeline of, you know, like, Monday here in Salesforce Tuesday, you're in Salesforce at the end at 5pm. If it's not in Salesforce, it's not going in period. Like that's it, you're stopped. Systems lock, right, that whatever it is that you think you need that in there, write it out, you know, type it into Word, write it out note thing, it's not going into a system until this time on, like Thursday or Friday, but like whatever time it was, you know, it was it wasn't going in until, you know, the windchill dynamics went live on the on the subway, it wasn't yet, but the following week. And so people had very clear guidelines of what they were to do and stuff and people were getting, like, you know, excited or at least talking about it like, oh my god, yeah, it's like, you know, how I don't I get off and put this in today or whatever. So folks knew and then the day they came, and folks got in. And yeah, there were hiccups. But it wasn't nothing, nothing that egregious. Right, Erica, like, I don't remember, like, nothing stands out, in my mind as particularly egregious or, like, nothing blew up, you know, or I want to say knock on wood. But it's like, so many years ago, it's not really all safe now. But um, yeah, nothing, nothing bad. Nothing truly bad happened. Like, they in a lot of the stuff was people just getting used to the new UI. But yeah, it worked as smooth as can be. So you could ask for, for for, you know, all a firmwide system of this nature. Ryhaan Gil 42:28 I think it's a testament especially to how well you plan, you know, your strategic, you know, output overall. And then you put them at the forefront of everything he focused on change management and adoption. At the start, I think that's really important in a digital transformation cycle, is to kick started off right away with change management, not leave until the last, you know, day after you 80. And then training, you know, everybody else to get up system. Starting early, right? Lorna Link 42:55 Starting early and continuing the process. And because even when you went through the CRM process, once you moved into BC, you didn't back off, you got your whole financial team involved. And you were there. Carolyn Norton 43:10 One, these two implementations didn't happen at the same time, right? They were one after the other. Did your users experience you know, change fatigue? Oh, my gosh, we just, you know, learn dynamics, you're doing this again, for us? You know, how did that get translated as you moved over to the new project? Andrew Ho 43:34 Oh, it wasn't too bad. Well, we spent after we went live, we spent another nine months refining dynamics. So we had another like, we had queued up a lot of stuff that had not made the cut, so to speak, to just to make sure we hit our go live for the transition. Right. And there's also things that we discovered as people started actually using the system. Of course, my boss decides he was calling right now that, um, that, you know, as people were using it, we discovered there, you know, certain things that were still clunky that we could, that we can streamline out are things that we thought we were gonna use that we were no longer using and things that we were like, I will never touch that and like, Oh, I think we need that. But so. So after go live, we end up having like a smaller like, like a couple months later, we did like a little like, almost like a point release. And then we had a much larger update to just how we use dynamics done, I think six or so months afterwards. So after like about nine months, we got dynamics, more or less of the place that we're at now. Like we've done some tweaks here and there. But there hasn't we haven't done like a massive change to how we use dynamics since you know, since those initial set of releases, so that was Carolyn Norton 44:55 and then you did a pulse check. It sounds like Okay, Andrew Ho 44:59 and so we still During all that we still didn't touch ERP, because to your, to your point, there was fatigue in regards to like, our financing was like, we're getting used to this, too. We're not, we're not touching it. So but once CRM, you know, studied itself, then our finance team was like, okay, like, let's start thinking through this. But in between that, before we started fully looking at it, we started looking at Power BI, as well, for reporting, because the rec part of the part of the recognition as we were doing CRM was out of the box dynamics reporting. You know, it's basically spreadsheets, they're basically glorified spreadsheets with some tables and stuff. And there's a lot more in depth analytics that our internal teams wanted to do. And so we started putting a heavy emphasis in exploring Power BI. And so we ended up doing that for a bit before we actually ended up getting a power internal Power BI resource, which was the key trigger to solving the Power BI like sort of mystery there. But we did work from last year to get Power BI set up connected to dynamics and get get us kick started. And then once we had our internal resource, it like, immediately, like, took off from there. And so it was a little bit of that before we really jumped headfirst into interior ERP into into looking at business Central. Carolyn Norton 46:20 And I assume again, you just picked dynamics DC, that's the answer for me, Andrew Ho 46:31 where it worked out perfectly. But um, you know, so somewhat similar situation of we like we very much wanted to be a fair game. I think at that point, in my mind. Initially, I wasn't sure because Business Central, I can't remember the year the years are blurring. But I know Business Central was relatively new. Like when we when impartially like, by delaying us going to it, it worked out because business central became ready for us to jump to it. Because if it wasn't Business Central, I strongly doubt we would have went to Microsoft, because I feel that their solutions prior to Business Central didn't fit us as an organization. And I say that in the sense that, like we as a firm, you know, at this point, we had grown to about 100 staff. So you know, still a small midsize firm. But the way we handle a lot of our finances was very similar to firms much much larger than us. And one of the things that I discovered very quickly in looking at the marketplaces for for, you know, similar ERP systems is that you have ones that are big, you have your, you know, your Oracle's your SCPs, you know, your, your old school, Great Plains, and all the old Microsoft legacy platforms, or you have things like sage 50 in like small mom and pop like, small, like systems that are aimed for mom and pop shops, or like independent contractors and so forth. And that middle ground is shockingly not well serviced in, in the industry. And so Business Central came around, like, in many ways. So you know, when we started looking at systems like we, you know, we kicked the tires again at NetSuite, but we kind of knew at that point, since we didn't clearly didn't go CRM with NetSuite that it really didn't make wouldn't make much sense to be like, Oh, we went Microsoft here, and let's go NetSuite because that would just create more problems in the long term. So for us, it ended up becoming Microsoft Business Central, because it seemed to fit perfectly into what we wanted to do. And so, so this time around, in my mind, that was my personal front runner. But the other end, we also looked at two other firms. Again, one other boutique one, and then we looked at Sage, of course, has their own suite of products, and they had one that was also cloud based and aimed at a similar, you know, market or industry sizes us. So it became down to those three, and then the boutique, one fell out very quickly. And it was really between sage and visacentral. In here, in many ways Microsoft just one out by sheer simplicity of cost. And just like straight cost period, both simplicity and just straight costs, because Microsoft was just like, how many uses do you have, this is what we're gonna charge. And that's pretty much it. And it was very inexpensive per user. Whereas sage had like there was an a charge for the engine, there was a charge for the reporting piece, there was another charge for this. And then there was like these licensing charges on top of that, and then it was it was like shocking to me it was like an order of magnitude more expensive than than Microsoft to and so it was an absolute no brainer, because functionally did the same thing. So we knew like from an implantation, you know, at least, you know, roughly implementation should be roughly the same. But our licensing on Microsoft would be you know, Have a fraction absolute fraction of what we would have had to pay stage for the same thing. Carolyn Norton 50:04 And you mentioned that your current ERP was doing the job. It was it was getting things done. So moving to BC awesome. There's there's savings there, or it's not that much more expensive. It sounds like Andrew Ho 50:18 yeah, wouldn't it wasn't gonna be a saving space on sage 50, but nothing would have been Carolyn Norton 50:22 are your next iteration? Good point. Beyond that, did you get anything additional that that maybe you were looking for? Because again, your product, you know, at that time, was getting the job done? Did you get any thing in on top of just the day to day operations? Find the magic thing that, you know, you guys were like, Oh, Lorna Link 50:49 can we go with cloud based? Yeah. So all of a sudden that there's no servers anymore. Everything's up there in the cloud. You also ended up with when when PSA was up and running, and BC is up and running, you have a highly sophisticated integration between the two products. That's, that's updating your financial system, it's keeping your CRM system in line. And I mean, that's pretty significant. I know you had it with sage, but what you got in the end is probably five times better than you had Andrew Ho 51:20 way better. It's, it's, it's, it's just, ya know, it's it's a difference between like a look a country road between, like a dirt country road between stage and in Dynamics versus a superhighway that runs between BC and CRM. Lorna Link 51:36 Yeah. And when we did this deployment, it was also 2020. So it was it was the height of COVID, it was there was a lot of stress, and people were working from home. So being able to do that implementation, the way my team does it all very remote, is was was a blessing, but also probably a big challenge to your team, Andrew Ho 51:53 it was a huge challenge for our finance team. Because until COVID, our financing all the teams was the one that was by far, always in the office, always sitting together in their pod always working together. And suddenly, they're all split up, you know, working from home, and even in. And so for them just getting used to the new work dynamics was hard. And so, you know, for them to keep up with their day to day job, in many ways was you know, it for them, some of them, for some of them was a challenge just to to adjust. And then oh, yeah, by the way, we still need you to like, you know, give feedback to learners team, and then eventually you at and double check this and they're like, I just want, like, I just need to make sure I pay invoices, or I need to make sure I'm doing this or that. And, you know, and so there were there was definitely that curve, for them to get through on top of it. So we definitely it this one, you know, the project did get delayed because of that, because our not because of anything that that Lorna velocio did. But just simply like our team just needed more time to get re acclimated to everything, Lorna Link 53:05 react limited. And Andy we did change the scope and the style of the project, because we went in with an idea of of the modules that we're going to deploy and how it was going to work. And and once we got in there, we put the brakes on and said this, this isn't right. It's not the right, you know, whatever module, it's not the right tool, we have to go back. And thankfully, you were there to keep your team motivated. And, you know, goes back to your change management skill where you you kept them focused on the end result. Yeah, and collaborating with us, and in telling us what they really need it. Andrew Ho 53:38 Because this is, this is actually a great point, because one of the things that through my experience you discover is folks that have done their job for a very long time, they're often they'll give the requirements, they'll be like, I need to do a and then I end up and then you say and then you and then the you know, the person takes those requirements, and they try to build a system do A, B and C, when the question should be, what is your end goal? Like? What are you trying to accomplish? Oh, I need to produce an invoice that has these fields. Okay, so technically, you don't have to do A, B or C, you just need this end product of an invoice that has these things. So instead of doing a, b, and c, you're now going to do you're going to swipe left and, and do this instead. And it'll be faster and you do that. And part of the challenge is sometimes folks are so set in their ways. Like, I can't swipe left, I have to do a beat and seems like but well, you know, and it's working with them. Muscle memory. Yeah. And but it's also just working with them to understood, you know, they, they they want to be heard, they want you know, they want to feel like they're understood. And they eventually you get them around to understanding like the end goal is you need to produce this by this period, this by that period, and you need to have this and the data has to be accurate. So those are the things that are that are important. The physical steps that you do, can change a million different ways and hope and our goal is that if they do change they're going to change for the better. It'll be easier and easier, meaning less steps, not that you're not used to it like so you know, and it's getting to understand that, like, it's may look different, it may have different colors, the fields may be arranged a little differently, or, you know, the steps you do are different. But that doesn't mean it's bad, or it doesn't mean it's not meeting your requirements. And that was that was a lot of like what Lorna was implying was that that was a lot of discussions that I was having with the finance team about it. And one of the nice things of doing dynamics, first with Erica was that they had seen how it worked. And they saw that it did work. Because I I do feel that if had we done this first, there would have been a lot more distrust and a lot more stress about believing in believing in the process. Yeah, but yeah, absolutely. But because they they saw Erica's team, like, do the literally the same thing. And they were very happy with their souls and not directly with them. But they just knew that this this is what happened. And they were like, well, that work like because because one of their first questions that like one of our former finance folks will almost always ask, Well, how did this work in dynamics? And then they'll be able to be like, well, this is what we did with Eric is to be like, okay, okay. And then so Carolyn Norton 56:13 important to call out. These are two different teams, Lorna and Erica's team. I mean, they they have their focus areas. But again, you know, the user experience is incredibly important. And just to your point, Andy, they saw success the first time around, you know, it is another set of people, but they have that trust, and guess what it's delivered just like the first group of people. So I know we're almost at time. So I don't want to rush through this. But I do want to take a moment to talk about the end, right, we got you got past the urgency of getting off a Salesforce, you took an opportunity to reevaluate your ERP solution. You know, basically, what were the lessons learned? I think you hit on that. So there might not be a lot there. But, you know, how did this partnership work out for GSG? Was that what you were looking for, that the organization meet to meet the needs? get their needs met in regards to a total solution in this endeavor that you've gone through over the years? And what does that look like for GST for the future? Andrew Ho 57:22 I mean, 100%, I mean, just I mean, as a partner, you're basically everything that I want for for a partner, because I can turn to Lauren, I can turn to Eric, I can turn to a number of other people not not on this call from Blasio and ask questions, and get answers and get answers in a way of people trying to solve what's what's, what's wrong, as opposed to, you know, sometimes you work with with like, you know, companies and their their first thought is the bottom line, or how I or how they can I can sell this to you, or, or how can I upsell or anything else. And here, everything has been about, like, let's figure out how to solve the problem, whatever the problem may be, and some of it is pretty, you know, is pretty, pretty simple. And some of it gets more complex. But the but things are always like, let's figure out how to solve it. And I have some some of my best brainstorming discussions with like, with, you know, people from Blasio, like, in some of its spans, he well beyond the realm of Microsoft Dynamics, like it may start there. And next thing, you know, we're talking about stuff that, like, you know, that are, that's it related, that isn't even necessarily your wheelhouse or anything else, but we get into these in depth discussions, and we come up with these great ideas. And then and then it gets me to the point where, like, I tried to figure out, like, how can I use you guys in this, as opposed to you guys trying to sell me on how to, you know, how can we like sell your Carolyn Norton 58:50 ratatouille session? Oh, that's great. How does that work? Andrew Ho 58:54 I mean, Ryan knows this, like we've we've had, you know, discussions where it's just about, like, general IT strategy and structure and stuff. And it's been great. Like for, you know, from both ends, like I get a lot out of it, I'm sure he does, too. And, you know, and with others that are that aren't on this call, we have these discussions about, you know, how, you know, how can we move things, you know, forward what's, what are what is that next step? Like sometimes I don't know any more than you do? And so I just want to like, throw some darts at the board and see how people react as to Yeah, I think that will work or No, any that's absolutely crazy. Go go through it again. Carolyn Norton 59:29 How do you feel like all of this has set up? GSD for the future? I mean, you you came in to an organization, many moons ago, you You saw some areas of opportunity. Leadership has some area of opportunities, and users has had areas of opportunity. It seems like you've tackled a good chunk of that. How is GST is GST setup for the future now based on all that you've done thus far? I mean, I Andrew Ho 59:55 feel like GST is set up very well for the future. We have We have a platform that the moment we're very happy with, it gets the work done. It is scalable and expandable to at least all the things that we can currently foresee. So, so taking into account like things that we can, or any dramatic changes in the business and anything else. But you know, and that's kind of what the best that you can hope for for any system is that if you presume business as usual or presume everything that you kind of project could happen, and the systems that you have, can help you meet those, you're in a great place. And I genuinely feel like in this time, I will say knock on wood, that we are in, in a very good place that that, you know that, you know, for the last year and even this year, a lot of our a lot of the areas that I've been focusing on for like improvement or more incremental improvement, or areas that are just things, new things that we're trying to do as a firm, as opposed to coming back and doing an overhaul like we did when I first got like, there's no plans to, you know, overhaul any of these systems like we did with Salesforce, or with any of the legacy systems that I inherited. And when I first got here, everything that Carolyn Norton 1:01:08 now you're in the Innovate phase, where you're looking for, you know, what knew what next? What, is there an opportunity here, not just let's fix and improve here? Yep. Awesome, awesome. Good stuff. Um, I know we're at time, I don't want to cut anyone off. Does anyone else have any feedback on GSG? And all that they've gone through in this, essentially, this is what it is. It's a modernization project you, Andy came in. And again, there was an opportunity to modernize and set up GSG not only for today's, you know, needs and requirements, but now he's at the point where now that it can look forward and look at what else can GSG do, what areas of opportunity, can they expand with any feedback? Erica Lorna Reihan. Lorna Link 1:02:01 I'm just going to echo the Andy the change management, your ability to and this is both sides, the ability to collaborate because we had to collaborate. And I'm sure Erica, during your project, too, you had there was a lot of collaboration is because we may have had it we may have thought we had a vision for it from the velocio. And GSG is like you guys just don't quite get it. It's sitting down at the table and in listening. And then also coming to a to an agreement that makes sense that GSG can say yes, that will work. And velocio says, yeah, we can do this work. And it will be successful. There won't be any backlash six months from now. Andrew Ho 1:02:37 Right? Listening is the I think is a key word like from from both sides. This is not not sticking to your own agenda or what you have in your head but listening with the truly listening to what the other side is saying. Carolyn Norton 1:02:48 All right, everyone, that was an interesting journey. What did you think change can be hard, there's no doubt about it. But when done right, digital transformation can lead to a competitive advantage. Let's not forget, it's not just the organization that it's affecting. It's also the people within it. Stay tuned throughout this season. We have so much more for you as we help clarify some of the complexities of digital transformation. In our next episode, we will offer a pragmatic guidance for planning and navigating a digital transformation journey. As we have learned today, there's no such thing as a one size fits all strategy when it comes to digital transformation. We'll discuss how to know if your company is ready for this change what the best practices are, and how to map out the process in accordance with your business initiatives and ROI. It's a lot to cover, but we're gonna break it down step by step to make sure you have a clearer picture of the process. Digital transformation will modernize your business for today and set up your organization for the future positioned for continued growth and success. Until next time, this is your host Carolyn Norton.