Not Another Tooling Podcast’s Post

Transcript

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Not Another Tooling podcast with myself, Austin Pearson, and my co-host Mr. Matt Malcolm. How are you today, Matt? I'm good where I was getting better, always changing things. So it might get a bit of a sweat on, but it's OK. You know what? That's a really interesting point is. I agree. Everybody is better when the when the sun comes out and but I I read a really interesting study recently of somebody who had taken their young child out from when they were born whenever it rains, they took them out to play in the rain and to essentially change that. Then the target excited every time it rained. That was brilliant though. It's raining great. This is amazing. I like that a lot. So that's good. That's think it's conditioning from early age. But anyway, today we are going to talk about. The hackathon proof of value approach and so a little bit different. We talked about POC POV's in the past and this is a different approach to that that simply some companies are using and there are times to use it and times not to use it. So Matt, do you wanna give us an overview of what this approach is? Yeah, in short, what's trying to achieve is. Remove ******** create transparency and understand the culture fit. That's what's happening in the background. A side of the normal things you'd expect from POV POC demo territory. But the the more probably better way to explain it is it's an elongated demo where you are meeting requirements from the ground up versus coming prepared into our sessions so becomes a collaborative experience. And these aren't short. This could be anything from half a day to a day. Wouldn't really need to go over more than one day. Depends on what's happening, but it's all about getting the right people who will be consuming this solution. In the room with the vendor who essentially build all these things in front of them. That sounds like a very sensible way to. And to go really, because there are, there are definitely some interesting, um. I, I've seen, um, and heard many stories of, uh, people doing lots of work behind the scenes and then, yeah, magic, even though it took them four weeks of solid effort to yeah. And to get to that and there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. And so this sounds like a a good way. So when would be a good situation to do to take this approach? What do you think? You could always do this approach. You know what I mean? Having been more involved in it lately, I would. I would find it hard for this not to be a sensible approach. They're all considerations around time. That is the biggest constraint in this. But it's giving you the opportunity to see through that veneer of just a feature rich solution. Like why wouldn't you go for this scenario? Certainly for some product stacks, not all capabilities. But if you're gonna be stuck, stuck being a nice word in this sense, if you're gonna be stuck with a solution for three, five years, this small bit of time investment up front pay dividends. So yeah, to answer your question, I would see hard not to suggest this unless that time constraint was very, very urgent. And I'm talking they need to be turning around. Procurement and commercials in there couple of weeks or so that maybe this wouldn't necessarily be an obvious thing to do, but should certainly be considered. OK. Um, I, so my thinking is I can see it for certain technologies. So something like ISM, for example, yeah, I think it could fit really well there because you're looking at, you're essentially just looking at that platform and that platform's capabilities. Whereas if you were looking at something like discovery or monitoring of those event correlation or. Those kind of things you're very reliant on the vendor having the available technologies, right Most vendors don't have the available technologies right there. Have a snapshot of all that. Yeah, yeah, all the usual stuff but not, you know not loads and loads of different stuff for your reliance on connecting into a customer system which then brings is essentially doing a POC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think however, I think there is still a place for it because. What's? You would want it a vendor to turn up with is your use cases being spot on and saying regardless of the technologies, show us how you would set up and get to. You know, for example, automating and an incident management process whereby you show us what the CIA is, what the affected service is and you automatically collect all the triage data we would need. And so I think it's doable, but it would come back to the use cases, which is the same with ISM, right? I think for this to be successful, you would have to be very clear on what the outcomes. Are that you want to see and have them well documented. And so that everybody is clear what we're after and in these and it's not just, OK, great, you've got a lovely widget. It's ah, that's what's going to be relevant to our organization. And in helping us move the needle forward. I don't understand the grace so the the bit before doing this, hence why the time sensitivity could be an issue. Is pretty solid and clear requirements. What do you need to achieve what is equal that needs to exist so the bit more recently is. Have a list of things which could be widget features, functions, ticking the boxes, whatever. But then this this sort of hackathon slash demo, or whatever text the word would wanna be. Needs to be sort of drawn out. So there's like a story taking place, an activity, a flow of something going through system, which ultimately would encompass several 10s of requirements depending on the volume of them being captured. But it's just you mentioned there are external data factors. So that is a limitation when you essentially do not want to plug in the vendor into your estate for whatever reason. So there needs to be concessions when that might take place. For example, show me how you. Poor using from Azure but not gonna touch that one. So what can we do to like do some steps to emulate it being a real scenario, including which I think is still fine. The idea of flat vials swimming integration for example. It's always the most complex one. Could be event information, could be monitoring data, could be CI wherever it is. In these scenarios, these were used case active scenarios. If there isn't data available at source in whatever systems, it's OK for it to be. So flat file, preconfigure flat file. This is what we need to do because you still are able to demonstrate the flow, it's just not as real. But as long as you can see it as what I'm looking for in these exercise isn't just functionally. What you wanna see how it's being done like you mentioned around there sort of in the background and army people doing stuff have had the scenario on the vendors list that can do all these things. OK, great. How do you do that? Well, we can only do that far, but how can you do the rest of it? We've got an offshore team that can do that development for us. So it becomes a vendor based development. When you said you can do it on the box, well it's not quite. So this is able to tee there that sort of stuff. In order to do that you do have to make concessions because you're not gonna plug them into your state. Yes, I agree. And I think there is a another really good benefit to this which is if you could do this. In conjunction with. A reference call with a. Another of those vendors customers. You could get away with without doing. And on sites or a, you know, a full blown connected POC. I believe I always. I always think of POC is a crazy and thing to do. Um, but yeah, almost every customer does one and because there's like, ohh, our environment is different and to everybody else's. No, it's not, it's no different, right? It's a Cisco switch, it's VMware. It's, you know, you've got some users that are going through an ITM process. Whatever the text back is, you know, it's very similar. So if you could get away. You're doing 1/2 or a full day. Use case demo where they provide a vendor proves that they can. Meet the requirements to move the needle on your stuff and then you go talk to another customer or two of theirs and that have done it live in production. Think how much quicker your process, your evaluation process would be instead of having you know, two to three-week POC's times a couple of vendors, all the prep and whatever out of it. It means you could get to the benefits. That you were hoping for when you started this process really super quick instead of over several months.