4 Pillars of IT with Phil Bianco, CTO of Melillo Consulting

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Phil, CTO of Melillo Consulting, and we discuss Melillo's four pillars of IT infrastructure. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) So tell me a little bit about you, man. How did you first get into tech?

(Phil at 00:00:55) Yeah, so I've always enjoyed technology. I have a comp sci degree. So after college, I did a little development and programming, and I did some consulting. And then I joined a company where we grew through acquisition. So we started out about $200 million in revenue and grew to $2 billion in revenue in an eleven-year period, and we went through 28 acquisitions. So during that, I did a lot of work with consolidation efforts and tool reconciliation. When I left there, I was the head of infrastructure, and then I took a CTO job at a nationally chartered bank. And at that nationally chartered bank, we really focused on supporting the fintech environment. So if you think back eight, ten years ago, how digital banking looked, we really supported the people that were the disruptors of the industry.

(Phil at 00:01:50) So we focused, and I helped launch the Google Wallet. I helped launch Apple Pay. I helped launch PayPal and all the back-end financial pieces. So those organizations that I just mentioned—they're not depository, so they really can't do banking services. So what we wrote was an API infrastructure, and I helped design and implement that for them to really take advantage of core financial services that they couldn't deliver themselves, and they had to deliver through a bank.

(Phil at 00:02:19) I transitioned from there to another nationally chartered bank out of Manhattan and built their infrastructure to do cross-border payments. So international transfers utilizing outside of wire transfer. So we built coin technology and just things that we would build back and forth. And then also we did merchant acquiring, and we also did banking services like I did at the previous bank as well. So that's really in a nutshell what I've done in my career. So I have a lot of infrastructure experience. I have a lot of development experience, and I've worked with some really large organizations to develop solutions that really scaled out pretty wide.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:01) Yeah, that's really cool. So when you're saying that you helped launch, like, the Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, that wasn't just within that bank. That was, like, providing the infrastructure for those services?

(Phil at 00:03:15) Yeah. So in that, you have what they call a digital wallet behind that. And in order to have a digital wallet, you need to be able to deposit funds. So we helped define what that wallet looked like and the rule set that would go around it and the API infrastructure to move and change balances and things in and out of that wallet for that platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) That's really cool. So how did you go from the fintech space to find your way to Melillo today?

(Phil at 00:03:45) So I've been a customer of Melillo Consulting for over twenty years. And when I was at the last bank I worked at, Mark Melillo, our founder, reached out to me and said, "Look, I'm really going to do a transformation on my professional services organization, and I'd like to talk to you about how we can make that happen." So I sat down with Mark, and it took probably four or five months for us to hammer through what his vision was and how I felt we could really bring it to market. And then we came to an agreement, and I love solving those business problems. So at Melillo, I have an opportunity to go into not just one organization, but hundreds of organizations that we support on a yearly basis and help them solve their business and their digital transformation challenges and how to implement best-in-breed solutions associated with that. So that really struck my love of what I do as an IT professional.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) So as a consulting firm, where is Melillo's specialty? Like, what is the problem that companies are having that they come to you guys for?

(Phil at 00:04:47) Yeah. So there's several. So really at Melillo Consulting, we focus on what I call the four pillars of IT. So we have our infrastructure design and management organization. That's where you go through and you design how an infrastructure comes to be supported. Should I use on-premise hardware? Should I use on-premise storage? Should I use hyperconverged infrastructure? Should I use HCI? Should I use public hypervisor? Should it be 100% in a cloud? Should it be a hybrid environment between the two? So that one pillar that we have, I have a bunch of certified engineers here that help deploy that. I have project management that sits on top of that, and I have solution architects that can help design that solution for our customer. So that's our first pillar.

(Phil at 00:05:33) Our second pillar is development. And, you know, if you first hear development, you think, "Oh, well, I come to this company with an idea. They're going to build me an application, and we move on." We will do that, but we don't really do that often. We'll do that for a customer that we've had a long-term relationship with, and we'll help them define that. Really, what my development team here does is platform transformations and digital transformations within your organization. So let's say you have a monolithic application that you want to put in a container environment out in the public hypervisor. We'll help you define how to make that from a monolithic application design to a service-oriented application design and how to scale that into containers and how to break that up so that you can develop that into a container platform. What we also do is platform migration. So let's say I have a customer that is either on-premise using SQL, or they're in a cloud environment and they're using infrastructure as a service with a SQL Server installed on top of that, and they want to transition that to a managed instance of SQL in the Azure cloud, or they want to move it into an AWS-supported database. What we do is we go through and do an application analysis of your app, define any deprecated features that are associated, but document that for you, give you a path forward on how to redevelop that or refactor your code so that it doesn't change the logic, but it does change how it interfaces with the resources behind it. And we can either help you with the actual development, or we can hand off the plan to your internal development staff and then have them implement it, or we can be a hybrid scenario where we do some of the development, your team does some of the development. So that's where we focus on in our pillar two of development.

(Phil at 00:07:22) Pillar three that we have is security. So application security, infrastructure security—it's a core practice of ours here. So you really can't do pillar one or pillar two without understanding security. But now I have a practice that just focuses on security 100%. So we do IT risk analysis for companies. We'll do business continuity planning for a company with business impact analysis. We'll do legislation. So let's say you're an organization that has PII data that you need to secure and you fall under PCI. So we'll help you remediate from your QSA assessment in there. So let's say they have some findings that you need to shore up, we'll help you define that. We'll help you write the policies and procedures to support that. We'll do control mapping. So if you want to come in and do a NIST control mapping, we'll go through the NIST platform or framework and then map that to the controls that you have in place. We'll identify anywhere you don't have controls, and then we can help you define those controls as well, whether it be a technology or a policy or procedure that needs to be put in there. And then the fourth pillar that we focus on is data management.

(Phil at 00:08:32) And data management is an explosion of data collection that's been happening over the last thirty years. I mean, thirty years ago, we collected a lot of data. We collect exponentially more data now than we ever did before, and next year or next month, it'll continue up that exponential curve. And the amount of data that we're collecting as a society is just tremendous. So what we help customers do is identify how to manage that data, whether it be from security—I have to classify my data because I need to make sure that I understand what egresses or ingresses into my network, how it should be classified, and how I should protect that. Can I send it to this third party? Can I not send it to this third party? Can I send it out through this vehicle, or does it have to go out through another? When I store that, how do I protect it? Does it have to be data-at-rest encryption? When I move it around in my internal network, do I have to encrypt that? If it goes outside or traverses my network, how do I have to secure that, and how do I account for it? And how do I monitor that? And then, basically, where do I store it? Right? Should I store it on-premise? Should I store it in a cloud? Should I have a hybrid scenario between that where some of my data is on-premise and some of my data is in the cloud? And then how do I connect that, and how do I account for it, and how do I monitor it? So that's really what that practice focuses on and the types of answers—or the questions—that we really work with our customers to answer in that space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) So in the data management, answering those questions, are you helping connect your clients to solutions in the market, or do you guys have solutions that you are offering, or are you acting as, like, a channel partner that helps manage services of solutions that are out in the market? What does it look like?

(Phil at 00:10:21) Yeah. So we play in all three of those spaces, to be honest with you. We have a management structure that we can help you define that we've developed. So we have methodologies that we bring to the table because we've done it with other customers and we've really streamlined that and really critiqued it enough, and it's now something that we're very familiar with. But what I don't do is I don't take my formula and say your business needs to fit it. What I do is I listen to what the business wants, and then based on my experience and the experience of the people that do delivery here, we take our formula and adjust it so that it fits your business and that it's scalable and it's something that you can support over time. Now I do represent a lot of different products that you can buy off the shelf, and we have expertise on how to implement that. So it could be that monitoring system that I talked about. We would recommend that based on your size organization or the type of data you have or how it's laid out in your organization, this is the monitoring product that we recommend you implement, and these are the types of reports that you can see. And then based off of that, we can help you define your incident response management plan for that. So, really, it all ties together, and all four pillars are something that we understand how to do the transitions associated with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) So hearing you kind of explain your business as a whole, it sounds to me like a lot of your clients are probably the type of companies that maybe tried—or you didn't say this to me, but I'm imagining a lot of your clients are probably companies that tried to do this kind of stuff, then they end up looking around and they end up finding you guys. But I guess what advice would you have for companies to be able to recognize their need to go to an outside expert like yourself for answers to these before sinking in a bunch of costs just to find out that they're not able to do it themselves?

(Phil at 00:12:24) Yeah. To your point, events typically drive an engagement with a consulting firm. Right? So a lot of events that we see that drive that would be a merger and acquisition. Right? So we've had a lot of experience with that. If you're in the process of going through that, typically, the workforce that you have pre-merger already had full-time jobs. The entity that you're going to take over or merge with, typically, they all had full-time jobs. So who's going to bridge that gap as you consolidate those efforts? I would say reach out to Melillo Consulting, and we can come in and augment your staff to help with that and then really apply our methodology associated with that.

(Phil at 00:13:05) Other events would be moving an application. Right? It used to be an on-premise application. I want to move it into the cloud. We can do an assessment and say, does it make sense to move that application into the cloud? Because sometimes it doesn't. Because as you move applications around in your organization or out into different locations with different support models, performance can be impacted. I mean, if it's very client-side dependent where a lot of the processing happens on the client and a lot of data's moving between your app and the client itself, moving that out with a latency of a WAN that now sits between that where it used to be a LAN may have performance impact associated for your end user's experience. So I would say before you try that and you run into a brick wall because you don't know why it's not working, bring in an expert like Melillo to look through that and say, "Well, let me do an application assessment for you. Let me see how it works, how it moves data around in your organization, where your workloads are, what I call the data gravity associated with that." So how much pull does the data have for the experience that an end user will see? And then we can help you make the right decisions so that it's seamless to your end user, your performance doesn't go down, and you make overall your business partners happy with the transition associated with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) That makes sense.

(Phil at 00:14:25) Another event that happens a lot is a new leader comes into an organization and there's not much documentation in that organization. They'll reach out to Melillo and say, "Look, I know I don't know what I don't know. So can you go find that out for me?" Right? So we'll walk through an assessment of the infrastructure itself, document that, and then come back and tell them where we think they have some issues, whether it be security or performance, or they have an old deprecated piece of equipment that's not under maintenance. So we'll identify all those weaknesses and then show you the criticality associated with that. So, really, an event starts the conversation with us, and any of those events could really start it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) With the new leader event, what's the process like of figuring out what the state of the organization is? Is it a lot of stress testing of their systems, or are you doing a lot of interviews with the frontline engineers to get, like, a qualitative understanding of what's going on, or both? I'm curious what that kind of looks like in practice.

(Phil at 00:15:38) So typically, it's both. Right? So we have automated tools that can come in and gather metrics from your organization. And then based off of that, we understand where data is being pushed around in the organization, what the demands are on the infrastructure. It gives us product age associated with that. We can do security scans or vulnerability scans to identify, are you up to date in patching? Where does your vulnerability look like? We can scan your data to see, do I see any PII data that's in an unsecured location? Do I see any PII data? Because we do a lot of work with hospital networks. We do a lot of work with financial organizations and insurance companies. All of those are highly regulated organizations, and you need to make sure that your data is treated properly as it transitions through your organization. And then we sit down with the people that are managing that infrastructure and ask questions. So we walk through an interview process, and we walk through and understand what their day-to-day looks like, what type of challenges they have on a daily basis. Is there a business person or somebody that comes to them frequently and says, "I wish you could do this," or "The turnaround from my reporting changes is three weeks," and your business customer wants that done in a week or they want a digital dashboard that they can manage on their own? So we can help define solutions around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:01) So you describing those interviews just kind of made me curious about you at such an organization with such a broad scope. What does your day-to-day actually look like?

(Phil at 00:17:13) So my day-to-day is I spend probably 60 to 70% of my time with our customers, understanding what their issues are and helping to find solutions for them, and managing our solution architects and helping them define our new solutions and things of that sort. And then the rest of that 40% is being the executive. Right? So I do manage from an executive perspective here the financials of the organization that I have to support and the contract language and also partners that we bring in to help. So obviously, we have partnerships with HPE and Dell and other product support.

(Phil at 00:17:48) We need to manage those relationships as much as we manage our customer relationships too, because we need to understand their new product, their new offerings, and how that can fit into a solution that we're going to design for our customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:01) Yeah. I actually saw on the Melillo website a section on HPE GreenLake platform, and that piqued my interest just because we actually had HPE's CIO, Rashmi, on the show pretty recently. And so I'm curious, like, I know that they do a lot of work with channel partners to sell and manage their services. Is that the kind of relationship that you have with them?

(Phil at 00:18:30) Absolutely. So we have a very tight relationship with HPE. We're a platinum partner with them. We're very familiar with their consumption-based model, which they refer to as GreenLake. It's a very powerful tool for an end user.

(Phil at 00:18:42) So you can pay for what you utilize in your data center. So you have the security of an infrastructure that is maintaining a colo or your local data center that you support with the ability to pay for what you use, and it could be scalable. So you can quickly scale that infrastructure as needed, very similar thing that you can do in the public hypervisor, with much more control and flexibility associated to how to solve your business problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) Is pay-for-what-you-use not the norm in terms of cloud services?

(Phil at 00:19:17) So cloud services—well, public hypervisors, you've always looked at that as you pay as you go, or you can have reserved instances. In a traditional infrastructure where it was in your data center, it was typically what was referred to as a capital expense where you would purchase that equipment, and then you would amortize that over a period of time on your books. So an organization would carry that asset in their accounting books. With pay-as-you-go or a consumption-based model, that asset never reaches your books and it's not amortized. It moves into an operational expense. And it gives you a lot of flexibility and cash flow.

(Phil at 00:19:52) It gives you a lot of flexibility and scaling. And with the GreenLake deal, typically you're utilizing 80% of the infrastructure that's installed with a burst capability of 20%. So as your business grows, you don't have to reach out to the channel partner of Melillo to purchase another disk array or additional compute power. It's already been installed at your organization based on the fact that HPE and Melillo come in and help you with the capacity planning. So on a quarterly basis, we come in and say, "This is what you've utilized in the past quarter. This is what we're projecting you're going to use in the new quarter. We're going to adjust your burst capability." So we're going to bring online more capacity for you, and then we're going to bring in additional hardware to make sure the 80-20 ratio remains in your organization so that you have that burst ability. So that long-term capacity planning that we used to have to do ten years ago as an organization within an IT group now is being managed by a manufacturer which understands how to do that. And there's specific tool sets that we're going to install—AI and things like that—that help us define that.

(Phil at 00:21:02) And then our industry experience in doing this. I've been in this seat for twenty-five years, and HPE has been around for many, many more years than that, working in technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:13) So do you ever build in more than a 20% buffer if, for example, you're working with a company that's in an industry that's susceptible to hype? Like if they're in the crypto space or social media or something where you could see higher than usual growth?

(Phil at 00:21:38) Yeah, absolutely. And it's really dependent on the customer. Right? So the 80-20 is the rule where we start at. And then based on the understanding we get when we sit down with the customer, we define a solution that's going to meet their needs. You're right. If there is hypergrowth in that organization, we may recommend more than that 20% associated to that so they can keep up with their workload.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:00) Yeah. I mean, it's a good problem to have, but also you want to make sure you can get it right.

(Phil at 00:22:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) But so when you were talking about the infrastructure pillar and the four pillars, you mentioned hyperconverged infrastructures, which I am not familiar with. Can you break that down for me?

(Phil at 00:22:21) Yeah. So hyperconverged infrastructure is compute, storage, and memory in one deliverable envelope. So the opposite of that would be three-tier. Right? So you have your memory and your compute and everything, and then you have your storage in a separate array. This consolidates those and makes a storage, compute, and memory frame or a network that you can use, and that's why we call it hyperconverged. So as you scale one component, the other components scale in succession with it so that it makes capacity planning much easier. And that's based on a lot of research and a lot of analysis over the years of how those resources grow in tandem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Okay. So like, when it's not hyperconverged, it's like you're dealing with three different—maybe not different vendors, but different sources for those services—and you have to, on your own, scale up, pay more when you need to, purchase more for each?

(Phil at 00:23:23) Well, you're supporting three individual components. Right? So you have your memory and compute. You have your networking that connects them, and then you have your storage environment. And that traditional three-tier, you're increasing each of those independently. So you need a storage expert, you need a network expert, and you need a compute or a computing host expert associated to that to manage those three organizations. With a hyperconverged, you have single-button upgrades. If you want to expand the infrastructure, you add another node into that, and it automatically increases that capacity in scale across all three of those areas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) Cool. That makes sense. Thanks for explaining that for me. I also want to hear a little bit about—I guess just because I've been thinking a lot about IoT recently with some interviews we've done. We had this one company called Augury that has these devices that listen to your machines on a manufacturing floor and run AI on the sound waves that these little IoT devices pick up to evaluate the health of the machines and do preventative maintenance and stuff. I thought it was just a really cool device and offering, especially as an audio engineer. But so I've just been thinking about IoT, and I'm curious, do you guys partner with anybody in that space and offer IoT solutions to any of your clients?

(Phil at 00:24:58) We do, and we've done some interesting work in that space. So yeah, we've worked with sensor data similar to what you were just explaining for physical plant of a building. Right? So let's say you have a building and you have air conditioning and power and all that stuff. So it would collect vibration data from an air conditioner to see if there's a belt or a fan or something that's off balance and manage that over time and do trend analysis associated to that.

(Phil at 00:25:26) We do—and it would take temperature readings and stuff throughout the facility. And then from that, it would do predictive maintenance associated to the physical plant infrastructure that's there. In addition to that, you have the same thing that runs within an IT organization. Right? So it can do predictive analytics within your organization from a security perspective. So that's all—it's not necessarily IoT, but it's predictive analytics associated to your organization. So it's about trend analysis within data points that are captured. We've worked with an organization that puts IoT devices on buses and tracks that, and it's like the black box for a bus. And we collect that data and help them with the—you know, they have their own proprietary analytics associated to that, but we've built the infrastructure to support it. And we helped connect all the IoT communications back to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) What kind of insights and optimizations do you get from running analysis on the black box of a bus, as you said?

(Phil at 00:26:25) Well, some of this could be preventive maintenance. Like, you know, there's vibration here, or the fuel efficiency is going down. So are we over capacity in that bus? If there's a vibration, does that need to go into maintenance? Because if you can do a preventive maintenance, maybe that bus is down for less time because you can quickly switch out a part before it actually fails, and then you get it back into service more quickly. Or you can prevent side-of-the-road failures where you have a bus full of people and you have to send out another bus to transition. And, you know, it's a bad day for everybody that was on that bus, for sure. So those are the types of things. And then, you know, the black box also is just like a black box in a plane when it does have an accident or a traffic issue. Data from the bus can be taken and used for whatever purposes they need it to be.

(Phil at 00:27:17) It could be legal aspect. It could be maintenance. It could be how many people were on the bus. There's a lot of different areas that people would use that data associated to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) So I'm curious to hear a little bit about what the work culture is like at Melillo, because I have a good friend of mine who works at another large consulting firm. And for him, he's a lower-level consultant. He's just kind of put on a job to figure out how to help this company find a solution. And when he's on a job, it's like twelve-hour days, five to six days a week. And then he just gets time off to recharge, and that's how they find balance for their work-life balance. And he thinks it's awesome for him because he really enjoys the time off and the work he does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) But I'm curious—that's my only secondhand experience of a consulting firm. What's the work culture like at Melillo?

(Phil at 00:28:23) So we try to be a little more strategic than that. We don't like to overutilize one of our employees. And the way we do that is we have a dedicated project management office here that manages that—not only our resources that are working on a project, but also the customer's resources. So there's a synergy associated to that. I'm not going to say that there's never an opportunity where I've asked consultants to work extra hours, because if you're doing a migration and it's over a weekend and you have a very specific point in time to do that, we're obviously all going to circle the wagons and do that. We try to time-shift people where we can bring one resource in to replace another resource so that we don't have somebody working twenty-four hours a day. But we're a very family-oriented organization. We're all focused on customer service. That's our number one aspect here.

(Phil at 00:29:16) We want to make sure that our customers have white-glove support associated when we engage with them. Everybody delivers what we call the Melillo Way, and the Melillo Way is customer service first. And then, you know, making sure that when we make a recommendation for a solution, that we feel very confident in that. And I never want any of my delivery agents, my solution architects, or even my project managers to feel like they're unsupported in a delivery. If they feel uncomfortable with the technology, there is somebody here at Melillo that I can pair them with that is an expert in that. So we are very supportive in our delivery. I never put somebody out there and just tell them to figure it out, because we've been there before. We've done that before. And we have that experience. So we've been in business for over thirty-four years.

(Phil at 00:30:03) And throughout that transition, we've seen a lot of transformational activities in IT. I mean, if you think back thirty-four years ago, you were installing HPE PDP-11s. You know, we're not doing that anymore. It's completely different how you manage that. Networking has changed tremendously. Security has changed tremendously. And the solutions and the scale of the solutions have changed quite a bit as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) That's awesome. That sounds like you've reached a scale that you're able to provide a much more stable environment. So that's really cool. What are some attributes that you look for when you're hiring and finding great people that are able to—like, I think of consultants as some of the smartest people because they just have to be really malleable with figuring out how to—they're the expert that are brought in. I'm sorry. I'm butchering this question. But what are some attributes that you look for in hiring great consultants?

(Phil at 00:31:07) Yeah. So the first thing is I look at, will they fit our culture? Right? Are they going to make sure that the Melillo Way is pushed forward? Do they have that drive to be customer-centric? Right? And then the next thing is, do they have a command for the technology that I'm asking them to work within? Right? So there's some technical aspects associated to that. So if somebody's coming to me and they want to be—you know, they're representing themselves as an expert in Microsoft—I'm going to want to understand what area of Microsoft they have expertise in. Or if they're an expert at HPE and Synergy, you know, I want to vet the fact that they understand how to install that and how to implement that and how that is created or how that's managed in an organization. And then the next thing is—you're right—I do look for people that are flexible. Right? So I look at people that understand the technology they're in, but that they have that thirst to learn other things. Right?

(Phil at 00:31:59) I don't want somebody that's going to stay stagnant in one application or one area because things do change. Right? Even in Microsoft, if you're a Microsoft expert, Microsoft has changed in the last thirty-four years. It's not the same NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5, and I'm installing it. Now I'm transitioning people into an Office 365 location, or I'm using the Azure cloud, and I'm connecting that through Azure Stack to an infrastructure that I'm now building in SimpliVity. Right? And so there's a lot of transition, a lot of complexity associated to that. And I look for their ability to work with others too, because there's never one project where I have one person doing 100% of the delivery. So they need to be able to work in a group environment, not only with peers from Melillo, but our partners that we have at the customers too. They need to be able to be, you know, with the right demeanor and not get upset if somebody says no.

(Phil at 00:32:52) We need to help them explain or understand why they're saying no. It's not always what we say is right. It's about making sure that what we've designed fits the customer's requirements too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) So for the technical acumen, there's tests for that to figure out exactly what people know. But for the culture fit and the desire to learn more, how do you evaluate that when, I mean, you only have so many rounds of interviews to talk to a person, you know? What are your evaluation tactics there?

(Phil at 00:33:29) Yeah. So typically, it's a conversation very similar to what you and I are having right now. It's kind of a back and forth. You know, I ask them to tell me a little bit about what you're doing and what you've done in the past couple years. And what did you like about it?

(Phil at 00:33:43) Was there any adversity that you found yourself in at one point? How did you overcome that? Was there ever a disagreement that you had to diffuse? Walk me through what you did there. And it really evolves from how they respond back to me, and I walk through that to see how they would respond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) Yeah. That makes sense. So do you do any mentorship in your career, like helping raise up the next generation of leaders?

(Phil at 00:34:13) Yeah. So I do a lot of work in that space. I'm a member of Philadelphia SIM, so Society of Information Managers. Not necessarily mentorship there. You know, other CIOs, so we communicate on how we do things and what we see working in the organization.

(Phil at 00:34:29) I certainly do mentorship for people that work here at Melillo. So I do bring people in and I help bring them up to the next level. I always want to see people progressing in their career, and I spend a lot of time doing that. And I've worked with other organizations where I've gone in and taught classes or had speaking engagements where I go through and help that. And if anybody ever reaches out to me and asks if they want me as a mentor, I certainly evaluate that.

(Phil at 00:34:55) And I make sure that it's something that's going to be valued to me and value to the individual that wants to be mentored, because I learn a lot by mentoring too. Because you see different perspectives. You see that next generation, how they're looking at things. So it's really interesting on both sides of that fence for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) So what's one piece of advice you would give to someone that has been an individual contributor for years and they're just now moving into management for the first time?

(Phil at 00:35:23) So I would say that transition starts before the day you start as a manager. Right? And my recommendation for individuals that are thinking about going in that path is look at the managers that you've had in your career, identify what they've done well in your opinion, and identify what they've done not so well in your opinion. And then evaluate the effectiveness of what they've done. You're not always going to agree with what a manager does, but you have to look beyond what is happening in that scenario.

(Phil at 00:35:51) So compensation is a model that we can use. You mentioned giving vacation and stuff like that. But, you know, changing somebody's direction, you kind of have to do that. You know, sometimes you go to the carrot and sometimes you go to the stick. I like to go to the carrot more often.

(Phil at 00:36:08) Right? So it's easier to help entice somebody than to try and force them in that direction. So for me, it's really evaluate the people that are around you and see how they do it. Because we all learn from what we've seen in the past. Read books.

(Phil at 00:36:25) There's a lot of great books out there to show what management techniques are available. And again, make it your own. Not one person's management style is going to fit you to a tee. And I adjust my management style based on the people that work for me too. So you have to be, you know, again, where I say the formula I have doesn't always fit the business I'm going into.

(Phil at 00:36:48) The formula I have as a manager sometimes gets changed a little bit based on the work team that I have under me. So when I work with a high level development team, I may motivate them in different ways than if I'm working with an infrastructure team or a networking team or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, everybody learns differently, their best way. You know? You've got to be able to cater to that.

(Phil at 00:37:13) Yeah. So everybody learns differently, and everybody's motivated differently too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) So figure

(Phil at 00:37:16) out what your team's motivation is and adjust that. Make sure that it still meets your goals, but make sure that you can meet their goals too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) So before we wrap up, I want to give one last kind of shout out for Melillo or wherever you want to draw some focus. What's, is there anything we didn't get to cover that we want to make sure that we touch on at the end here?

(Phil at 00:37:41) We've covered a lot of different areas, and I think we've covered everything that I had on my mind. Definitely, if anybody out there is looking for a conversation with somebody here at Melillo, can help solve business problems or help with an implementation or a challenge that you have in an IT setting, I would say please reach out to us for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:03) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.