foreign [Music] please tell me your name the company you're with and your current role I'm Adam Shelley I'm with glide fast Consulting and I'm a service delivery manager you're a service delivery manager tell me a little bit about the day-to-day work you do in that role so as a service delivery manager I have a team of six technical consultants so in that role I'm helping them manage their learning their development learning and growth personal development and helping them with you know any technical issues that they may run into on their projects and then in addition to that I am also staffed full-time as an architect tell me what are some of the biggest challenges you face as a service delivery manager and then we'll switch over to the architect but what are some of the biggest challenges or some of the biggest problems that you're solving for in managing technical consultants so I think some of the biggest problems that I help my team with or when they have a question about how to interact with a client or additionally some technical questions that come up you know how do I solve this issue that you know they might be less experienced so they haven't run into it before and I help them with you know how do I solve this problem how do I solve this personal problem I think that's an area that I really feel like I can bring a lot of experience to the table to help some people that haven't been in those situations before just solving that interpersonal relationship issue with their customers yeah so it sounds like you're striking a balance between helping them with both hard skills as well as soft skills am I understanding that correctly yeah I would say so I think I'll be honest I think I spend more time working with people on soft skills I think uh as a company we hire people who are really strong on the technical side uh especially people coming from the customer area if it's their first time Consulting they maybe haven't had to have the same relationship with their um you know it's a different relationship with an internal customer versus a customer that has a contract is you know paying us a lot of money here and everything so it's a very different relationship when you are coming in as a consultant versus oh I'm just an employee of this company and I you know do the work that's put in front of me versus being a lot more prescriptive you know we run into situations where a customer comes to us with a problem they think they know the solution and our job isn't necessarily to implement their solution it's to solve the root of the problem there's a Henry Ford quote that I share with my team a lot and I don't know if this is actually something he said but it's attributed to him and when I asked people what they wanted they told me they wanted a faster horse not a car and I think that's really important for us to remember in our space of what are what are we doing we are not building exactly what somebody asks us to do we come in and we understand the root cause of the issue and we say this is what we think is the best solution for the problem you're facing and so I think that's a really really different from how things can be when you're working customer side versus partner I like what you said because it sounds like you are coming from a customer-centric point of view that you're folks don't come to us because they want software they come to us because there's a pain they want a solution to their problems and I like the perspective and the way you kind of couched it and kind of described around that that Henry Ford quote I want to ask you now a little bit about your role and work as a technical architect can you share a little bit about that yeah um so as an architect I do a lot of a lot of what I do managing my team as well it's a lot of taking those problems understanding you know when somebody says you know another good example is a doctor you you know somebody says oh it hurts when I raise my arm does that necessarily mean that there's something wrong with their arm or could it be you know a nerve issue in their spine and it's our job to really understand and diagnose the root cause of the pain that our customers are feeling and come up with a treatment plan whether that's a new new process for them whether that's a new technical solution so as an architect it's a lot of balancing between you know where are you now where is your pain Point what's what's really going to fix that I think a lot of times what happens is customers will treat symptoms rather than treating the root cause of the issue so so it's my it's our job as an architect to find that root cause and really come up with a workable solution I like that Savvy detective work that you just described I'm noticing that the detective work is on both sides your role as a service delivery manager and now as you describe as a technical architect maybe you have something more you want to add yeah the detective work is really that's where we get into our customer workshops so the art as an architect I would work with at bpc a business process consultant and from there we really can talk to the customer of you know we spend a lot of time you know what where where are you now what what is the friction in your current process does our tasks getting forgotten because you don't have the right visibility is their situation where maybe there could be more automation there's a lot of manual work that gets forgotten and causes things to get missed um you know I think you know the Men in Black quote a person is smart people are stupid you know when you get so many people touching a process it's it's natural for errors to compound you know if one person is just doing something they can course correct as they go it's fine when you have 17 people involved in a complicated business process that touches you know 20 different I.T systems a single error early in the process is going to cause a lot of pain so what we do is we come in and we say okay where what's causing this is it because the team is overworked is it because they are unable to see their tasks in a timely manner what what's causing these things to get lost is the information not available to them so then we come up with a solution where we say Okay so the information isn't available to the team in a timely fashion is that because the information isn't on the task do we need to add more information do we need to carry things over from a previous task is there a lack of visibility on due dates do we need a dashboard that says hey you have pending tasks work on these before working on something else so that's a lot of the the technical side of what we're doing yeah love your story and final question Adam Celly what is your superpower um I think my superpower would be uh really being able to just listen and try to take in a the big picture and then from there kind of see all of the moving Parts at once and figure out what's what's not working as well as it could be you heard it here I'm Kinder we're at Glide Fest 2023 and I'm here with Adam Shelley technical architect and Service delivery manager as well as the big picture viewer let's go foreign