DEM in 20 – That Change Management Success Rate Struggle

Transcript

Alex:
Hello everyone. I am one of your co-hosts for today. I'm Alex, and I'm with you with Michael. How are you? How are you doing?

Michael:
Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for joining everyone, really appreciate it. I'm Michael, Director of Product Marketing. We're delighted you're all joining us for episode four. In fact, in the Chat, let us know where you're joining us from. I'm joining from Northern Ireland, not from Northern Ireland, from Tennessee actually, which is one state below where our guest is joining us from, Kentucky. And Alex, you're joining us from London, right?

Alex:
From London. Getting a couple of days of good weather. Feels pretty good. And, this is DEM IN 20. It's the show where we have our guests solve real-world digital experience issues in less than 20 minutes, because we spend a little bit being polite, having a little chat or your money back. So, definitely call up Michael and get your money back if you've paid for this entry.

Alex:
I know that the time is ticking, so let's talk about the topic today. So, the topic for today as we can all see, is the change management success rate struggle. I know that might be vague for some of us in the audience, or it's a burning pain that we're dealing with. From my understanding, it's everything from understanding the impact of the change, planning, implementing, and communicating that change with the users to make sure that you're having a positive outcome to everyone who's affected, which is almost everyone at the scale of changes I see here in our business. So Michael, before I introduce our guest today, do you want to tell us how we're incentivizing the Chat activity today?

Michael:
Yeah, please do get involved in the Chat, whether that's through the Q&A button down at the bottom, we're happy to shout out what we're seeing in there. We also are giving away two prizes. So, each prize is worth $25, pounds, whatever your local currency is. And we're just under that threshold to make it appropriate to ensure that you can claim that without getting into trouble, because we just love to promote. And thank you for your being on the show. So, get involved in the Chat. That's an opportunity. We'll also award someone randomly attending, so we appreciate that.

Michael:
And if you aren't familiar with the previous three episodes, then check out those on our website. Everything that we do is being recorded live, but then it goes on there to get caught up. Last week was a good one as well, as we talked about patching things, and then just making sure that stuff was working in your environment. And today, we are talking about change management. So, back to you Alex, on who our special guest is.

Alex:
So, I'm really happy to introduce Rob Key. He's a Senior Solutions Engineer at 1E. And Rob, so briefly cover the challenges of change management. Do you want to introduce yourself once more for the audience, and talk to us a little bit about the problems you'll be solving today. Good to have you on the show.

Rob Key:
Hey, Alex and Michael, thanks for having me. Like you said, I'm Rob Key, Senior Solutions Engineer here at 1E. I had worked in IT for about 20 years, just very corporate positions, manufacturing IT, different things like that. So, change control has been a part of my life for a long time. And it's something that most of us in IT do not love to talk about, because as administrators, we like to get things done, we see change control as a hurdle. So, I'm excited to talk about how different options are available to sort of help speed that up and make sure that, that's successful.

Michael:
Well, that's great, because we definitely need people onsite that makes sure those things happen in real time, and successfully at that. In fact, I don't know how many of you have seen what's on the web at the moment. There's some leaked images of what Windows 11 is going to look like, and that's going to be a big push to change everyone's desktops, and how they interact with, and what that functions. But you've got a couple examples today, don't you, for us?

Rob Key:
Sure. Sure.

Michael:
Of where there's been some change management initiatives, and what happens there.

Rob Key:
Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen if that's okay. And I'll just show you a few different things. I'm going to start with sort of the end in mind with a change report, and how we would create that change report. I'm going to focus in on what 1E can do. But, why is change control important? If we think about it from HDI, they referenced that 80% of incidents are caused by internal change. 80% of incidents caused by internal change, that's a crazy staggering number. So if we think about it, if we can just control that a bit better, bring that down, sort of get an idea of what the outcome is before we roll it to production, then those incidents are going to come down drastically.

Rob Key:
I've got a change control request form here. Traditionally, in my life and in some of our customers that I've talked to, there's a couple of different things that folks are doing today for change control. We are either sending it to IT, maybe sending out a survey and say, "Hey, how did that affect your machine?" But, depending on what that change is, IT may not really dig in as much as we'd like, or it might be a UAT group that we send it out, and so on. I'm going to look at it from a little bit different perspective. Not only can we do some monitoring with 1E Experience, but we can also do some health and compliance policies to make sure that when we test on test machines, we actually see that a machine stays in the same healthy configuration that we want it to stay in.

Rob Key:
I'm going to scroll down just to give you a couple of screenshots. So for the sake of time, because we're keeping this in 20 minutes, I went ahead and did the pre-change, just showing some compliance. And I'll show you the rules in this compliance policy here in a bit. And, it's just a small example of what it could be. But, we've got a pre-change compliance, and I broke it into two different groups. I've got manufacturing and I've got marketing. Those are two very different parts of the organization and they have different needs, and so on. So, as you can see on this report, we've got a fully compliant pre-change. So before we change anything, we know everything is how we want it to be, whether that's services running, and so on.

Rob Key:
We dig down and look at Experience a bit here on this screen. We can see that the machine is quite healthy. All of our numbers are looking good. And then, we can dig into what software's installed. We can actually see the version in real time from 1E Experience, bring that up, and then actually see the services running. Now I wanted to highlight, this is a Zoom sharing service. If we think about Zoom sharing, and that giving someone the ability to use our machine, if we're in marketing, that might not be a big deal. That might not be a big deal at all. But when we're in manufacturing, that might be a much larger deal.

Rob Key:
So, what we've done is, we've created a policy to say, "Do not allow Zoom sharing on the manufacturing group, but it's okay to allow that service to run on the marketing group." So, just an example of how you could split that up into different areas of the organization. Now Michael, are you familiar with any of the previous Zoom concerns? I know when COVID started, there were lots of security concerns out there.

Michael:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Some bit of my background. I was in cybersecurity a bit before this space. And yeah, it was definitely a hot topic because yes, Zoom was blowing up, being used everywhere and they were giving away free time and everything so families can stay connected and do a Chat for the first 45 minutes. But then, we ended up seeing state departments using Zoom, and courtrooms using Zoom, and then people Zoom bomb or Zoom hacking into those and taking them over because their security, maybe wasn't up to spec. So, they were really keen to address those things and fix them, because their market share has grown substantially.

Michael:
And that's true. If you want to ensure everyone is compliant and on the right version, and making sure that, that's not opening yourself up to those vulnerabilities, then things like version control and making sure devices are compliant, software versions are compliant is substantial. So, you're right, definitely the marketing team, it's okay if you want to screen share for your latest presentation. But for manufacturing, or devices, or whatever blueprints, architectural stuff that you might be doing, you want to keep secret or not exposed, it's good to have that visibility locked down and to find out are your machines all compliant in that regard. So, great example. Zoom is definitely one that I think they've come a long way in making sure things are where they need to be as we're using Zoom today in fact, for this call.

Rob Key:
Exactly. So, when we think about manufacturing, if manufacturing goes down, and not all of our customers are in the manufacturing space by any means, but any area of the business that goes down that costs the business money. Marketing, although beyond important, if marketing has some kind of hiccup where we have to address it, it's not necessarily hard dollars that we're facing. If manufacturing line goes down, it's costing no telling what. I mean, it could be thousands or millions of dollars in just a very short time, just from a bad change control.

Rob Key:
So, I brought up 1E Tachyon. And we're in the Guaranteed State, which is a rules-based policy engine that we're actually looking to create rules, make sure that things stay healthy, stay compliant to where we want them to be. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I've broke these down into two different baselines. So, I've got the marketing. If I click over to that, I can quickly see what's going on. Now, this is post-change. So, what I did is I pushed out an install of Zoom. We had the previous version four, now we're onto a later five version. And we actually see that we have a not applicable pop up. Now, that tells me right away something to look at.

Rob Key:
This was actually surprising to me. So, I was going through all my testing and demos. But this is just a fine example of what we need vision into. If we push this out without knowing that this would be not important or that Zoom changed the way they structure their software, then we may have concern later on. Or, we may have, how many GPOs do companies have out there that are just sitting that are not affecting anything any longer, but they may actually cause issues with other parts of the business. So, I want to show you just real quick, how we built this policy. And then, we can dig in a bit more.

Rob Key:
Let me just click on rules here. So, you can see that I've got just various things. I've got, making sure DNS is on. Making sure there's enough disc space. Making sure certain services that I want running from a 1E perspective, we want to make sure that Nomad is running, lots of Nomad customers out there, and the 1E client is running correctly. So, all of those things, it goes through and checks those. And then, makes sure to give us a report right back that we see what we need to see. Now, as an example, if we wanted to see something as a non-compliant, we'll discuss that maybe in just a second. But, if we want to see something as a non-complaint, I'm just going to go over here. I'm just going to kill one of these services manually.

Rob Key:
So, if we push something out and it makes a change, then we want to report that back to our Guaranteed State. So, if I go back to my overview, and I go back to manufacturing, we can see non-compliant right away. So, this instantaneous. So, if I push something out and something changes that's on my health or configuration baseline, it's going to come back and let us know right away. So, in the case of the Zoom, this tells us, "Hey, let's do a little more research, from an engineering standpoint, we're going to dig in, look and see what that means. And, it may mean nothing. Maybe, we disable that rule. Maybe there's new security protocols, as you mentioned earlier, Michael.

Alex:
So Rob, you said-

Michael:
Yeah. Oh, go ahead.

Alex:
Sorry. We are both too eager.

Michael:
Oh yeah.

Alex:
You said earlier, Rob, that this happens really quickly, but is this real-time? How quick is quick?

Rob Key:
So, this is real-time. And it really depends on what you're looking at. There are few things that we can't look at quite as fast. So if we're talking about disc space, this space is not something that necessarily has an identifier, so that's something that we might pull when we know there's a change going on. It may take us 30 seconds or a minute, depending on how you set it and how many machines you have in your organization, and so on. But when we're talking about registry changes, when we're talking about config file changes or services, that's all real-time. We're looking for a change in that. That's going to report back to the event viewer, and the 1E client sees that, brings it right into our console to let us know that, "Hey, something's changed."

Michael:
Cool. That was similar to my question. Well, it was more along the lines of, does the device have to be online for that-

Rob Key:
The device does-

Michael:
... to happen? Or, just pick it up the next time?

Rob Key:
So, it will pick it up if it has the policy in place already. So, we're talking about testing machines. Depending on how you have that structured, that could be real user machines. That could be test VMs, whatever that might be depending on the change. But, if we have that policy on there, these policies stay on the machine. So, think about it as-

Michael:
Gotcha.

Rob Key:
... just the low disk space. If you have a machine with low disk space, the only disconnect there would be when we see it back in the dashboard. So if I'm not on WiFi, not on the internet at all, I'm sitting there, which is really rare these days, if we're honest, then once it connects, it's going to tell me right away, "Hey, this machine is low on disc space." So, lots more we can do past this change control portion with the rules-based policy engine. Just tons of auto remediation and compliance type of thing.

Rob Key:
And actually, talking about auto remediation, if we wanted to, if we had a service that stopped, we want to see that in pre-change. But in the post-change, if we do an investigation and we say, "Hey, it doesn't matter that the Nomad service stopped," because we can just create what we call a fix. And we can actually, from there, go in and change the rule to make it automatically turn back on. So we know that, that's just part of the install, something with the installer turned something off, we can turn it right back on. And, that's just all through that validation process. But, the end result is just making sure that those users stay healthy, stay compliant. And the experience is heightened.

Alex:
For those in the audience who are not quite as Tachyon fluent as perhaps, you or I are Rob, can you talk to me about the anatomy of a rule? What makes up a rule? While I'm familiar, what can I do with a rule?

Rob Key:
Sure. Yeah, let me jump back over here real quick, Alex, and I will look at rules. So, if we wanted to-

Michael:
And, while you're actually... Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Rob Key:
No, you're fine. Go ahead, Michael.

Michael:
Yeah. No, it looks like in the queries of the comments that we have, Denise has mentioned that they're using a lot of query collections for doing things just like this. So, something like this would take a lot of the work out of monitoring or fixing many of these situations, because if you're not using something like this, then I take it you have to be doing a lot of query. And, is that simply what you have if this doesn't exist?

Rob Key:
That's one approach for sure. And like the question stated, or the comment stated, that's a lot of work while we're talking about a long list of things. I was discussing this with one person from our product team, and he said that his previous employer, they were leveraging Tachyon, one of our very good partners, that they had about a hundred rules or so in each policy. So, mine had a mere 20 rules, and that's just based on time and what I can do in my lab.

Rob Key:
But, when we're talking about real-life production environment, there's so many things that you could come up with. What happened last time? Let's mark that as one of the things we need to verify. So, when we have to change, and I assume through SCCM configuration manager, it's quite a job to just query to get the information. And then, you're stuck with that, right? There are other monitoring tools where you can sort of see some change. You can see what's going on, on the end point, but it doesn't give us that instant data back in that really comfortable feeling that, "Hey, I made this change and everything was good."

Alex:
It seems like-

Michael:
And it worked. Yeah.

Alex:
... you have someone who agrees with you in the Chat, Rob. David Sixsmith. He says that they use a lot of query collections for things like this Guaranteed State and Experience. We take a lot of work out of the monitoring and fixing of these situations, which I guess you just wrapped that up. Oh yeah. Excuse me. So, we've got two minutes left, Michael. We've got a prize winner. And Rob will let you finish up with the last minute you've got and then-

Rob Key:
Okay. Yeah, just to answer the question about the rule piece, right? So, there's even more we could go into from an Experience standpoint to talk about looking at it beforehand, looking at it after, just to make sure all of the health seems okay. And you might do that with patching or an OS deployment. But, when we're talking about a rule just to follow up on that question, it's really just based on what we want to look at. So, we've got preconditions. So, if we want to make sure this is a Windows machine, or we want to make sure a certain service is there, we don't want to come back as a non-compliant if the service is not even on the machine. So, we want to make sure what we're looking for even exists, or that it relates. Then we can go down and look at different things.

Rob Key:
In this case, I'm looking for a trigger. So, when a service changes, so if a service goes from running to stopped, then it's going to create an event and 1E will see that. And then, our check. We're actually looking to say, "Hey, let's make sure that this DNS cache is running." And the great thing is, then we can go into a fix and we could say, "Hey, let's make sure DNS cache, if it's not running, attempt to make it run." So, it's automatically going to turn that back on if it sees this service not running.

Michael:
Nice one. Yeah. No. Basically, none of these rules-

Rob Key:
I think David is one of my favorite customers, so...

Michael:
It definitely is. It's nice to see how that plays out. It's almost like those automation rules you can set up on an iOS device when you're trying to trigger things, if and then type statements. So yes, our prize winner today is David Sixsmith. So, thanks so much for getting involved there. We will reach out to you afterwards to sort you out to make sure you get the prize. And, if you are around in a months time, then join us for our next episode where we're having a bit of a break there so our American friends can celebrate their independence on the 4th of July.

Michael:
And the next session will be on Wednesday, the 14th of July. So, just under a month. Episode five, we're going to be talking about printer auditing. Is there even still a need if we're not back in offices? Well yeah, technically, some will be in offices and some may not. So, let's dig into that a bit deeper in a month's time. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Michael. And thanks to our guest Rob, and to my co-host Alex.

Alex:
It's been good to catch you all. Make sure you catch us on YouTube or on the 1E website. I'm looking forward to chat to you about printers and hybrid working in the next one. Catch you then. Until then, guys, thanks for coming.

Michael:
Sure.

Rob Key:
Cheers.

Michael:
Thanks.