Innovation in Tech: From Idea to Impact

Ryan Purvis 22:40:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell, in the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field, Story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

Running over slightly with a new friend. So how you been?

Heather Bicknell 22:40:32
I've been pretty good. It's been a busy fall. I can't believe the years almost over. I don't really know where the time is going. But things have been pretty good. I went to Yosemite National Park in October. So that's a beautiful place. Have you seen the free solo documentary?

Ryan Purvis 22:40:54
No, I haven't.

Heather Bicknell 22:40:54
I think you would probably enjoy that wine. It's, there's a mountain or rock climbing guy who does the whole thing with no ropes, just his hands and some chalk. And so he's scaled some really impressive cliff faces that way. And there's a documentary free solo, it tracks him climbing one of the mountains of the park in Yosemite. It's like it's El Capitan. You may have heard of it. It's like the mecca of rock climbers. So it's cool. It brings people all over the world there to get their shot at it. But yeah, the documentary is a little bit terrifying. But he lives so that helps when you watch

Ryan Purvis 22:41:38
Yeah. Yeah, I remember seeing something. I don't think it was related about free climbing. It wasn't it wasn't a movie trailer or something. So I can visualise you talking about but I've never heard of the positive thing. So okay, cool. How you been otherwise?

Heather Bicknell 22:41:52
Yeah. Good. Just, you know, working and live in. Dream. Starting to get into some training for a half marathon this spring. So that'll be my first...

Ryan Purvis 22:42:05
Oh, wow.

Heather Bicknell 22:42:06
race of that lenght so? Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah, no, not much else going on? How about you?

Ryan Purvis 22:42:11
It's been an incredibly busy period. I don't think I can recall being this busy for a long time. Just yeah, I mean, we've obviously, we haven't caught up for a long time. So one aspect has been the ValuuExecs network, just, you know, a lot of people wanting to come on board, a few prospects customers to chat with. So that's going to become a good portion of my time. Then I joined a FinTech platform, or company called FinXOne where we build provide the ability to build your FinTech platform, basically, making API's beautiful would be a good way to explain it. Because we've taken all the hard work around the integration and leave the user just to build their own app. And when they drag things on, we've made sure it's compliant, and all that kind of stuff. So they don't have to worry about, you know, because if you if you do payments in different regions, there's different laws and regulations you got to comply with, within our API's and our logic we've that we've handled all that stuff, and we generate the code and all that stuff. So that's been quite quite exciting.

And then Valuu as a product has taken, we've had to, we had to make some architectural changes to it. But to make it more scalable. So that's been good. That's finishing up now. So we're going to launch that. We're going to do some fundraising now. So that will start in the next couple days. Because I want to, I want to build out the dev team more and do some more, put some more salespeople on it. You know, the big thing has been getting the product into that stage that now it's been through a few through pilots. It's been used by a few people, I've got a lot of feedback, we prioritise or work analysis to get it to go out. So that that's probably imminent as we talk because it's it's the plan was to have it done by today. So probably slipped to Monday, but it's there. I'd have just done two demos on it this week. And pretty good. I was pretty happy with it. So yeah, it's been a long year building it, but just just just over a year. But we've got there finally,

Heather Bicknell 22:44:13
Well that's super exciting. I'm not sure how you're doing all of that at once. But that is awesome. When you say fundraising, is that something like are you crowdsourcing anything? Like is there something listeners?

Ryan Purvis 22:44:26
Yeah. So we've got so we're gonna do that. We're gonna start out that way. So we've got, you know, through the various communities that I'm involved in. We've got a list of people on our mailing list that we're going to email out initially. And and we sign in with you know, from a very small number like turning a few pounds up to whatever people want to contribute really, but there's there's a couple packages to pick to get the shareholding in the company. And then, you know, as you go through that raise, we obviously, as much as we're sort of doing the friends and family thing. It's open to VCs, MPs and all that kind of stuff as well.

But ideally, I want to get people involved first, before we get into the bigger, big funds. Just because you know, when we do the return on that, I want the people that we know to benefit, not just the funds will benefit as well. But they're different drivers. But yeah, so we've I mean, I've self funded it to date, which has been worthwhile, I think, because it's meant, you know, not you know, who take money too early, then you can build nothing, you have a lot of stuff, but it doesn't really solve any problems. When you're bootstrapping itself. And you you watching what's been built, you've become very pedantic about what's actually the most important thing to build. And, and that was my mistake early on, if we had ever if you've ever asked me my mistake, in the beginning, was trying to build too much too quickly. And we will build the stuff that we built, the stuff we've built, we won't lose, it's still there. We just had to turn a lot of it off. Because it's, you know, the core, the product, actually the value proposition. We know what that is now. I mean, we knew it was valuable. We actually, in the demos I've done this week, I hadn't realised how valuable it was. Because when I showed you like, oh, geez, I wish I had that. And that's exactly the response that you want from the person that's going to buying is like, oh, that's exactly what I want. So I'm feeling pretty good about it going into Christmas. So, so yeah.

Heather Bicknell 22:46:21
Great.That's awesome. It's all about that first, killer use case. How are you positioning an hour? Would you want to share kind of what what part? You're seeing the Yeah, like the main main use case?

Ryan Purvis 22:46:34
Yeah, I think so. So I mean, let's go through what it is. So when I first conceived it, it was going to be a calculator, basically, a big glorified calculator return on value calculator. That was what that was kind of the in falaka. My original documents, that's what I should call it ROV calculator. And that was fine in the sense that we were taking numbers, and we were putting it through our formula, and coming up with a return number, you know, sort of black magic, you know, here's what's going to come out. And not really, it's not really easy to tell a story around that on its own, because the number in that sense is the number that in just a point in time. Because when you when you take the data, the inputs on a Friday, the you know, the first of the month, and then they do the next one, at the end of the month, the numbers will be different, because you're different inputs. But how did it go from one to the other? That's really the question.

So with that in mind, we built out the rest of the product, which is OKR based (Objective, Key Results), which you know, something I'm still mad about to the point that I don't even think about them as, I don't think any other way than thinking in OKRs, which is quite bizarre, because someone actually said to me, you do realise that you don't even call them OKRs. You just talk about them, like everyone understand they're OKRs? Like you just talked about objectives, and then how to get there. OKRs are part of your speech now. You don't even call them objectives, key results or your language. It's just how you think. And it's like, yeah, it's probably that's right, because I've always felt like it. What's the goal? How do we get there? What are the steps? And you know, big steps are the keys or key results in the small steps of the tasks? And that's what our product does.

But really, what's important about product is how it's the question, what do I do first? So if you have a list of objectives, or a list of key results, how do you prioritise that work? How do you decide what's the most important thing? And that's where some of our value comes in? Because we've got a framework that very the three simple questions, you can answer that thing. And then with the fourth question, you can understand the value of doing it. So if you think about our quadrant, the value quadrant, it's four blocks, Cartesian plane, the y axis is the value. And the x axis is the complexity, you basically want everything in the top left hand quadrant, because that is that is your easy to do, relatively easy to do within six months, because it's not the six months, and then that's your first quarter, the second quarter on the same line would be six to 24 months. So that's more strategic things to do. So it's important to do, but there's complexity to doing. And that complexity is normally a technical complexity, could be integrations, it could be whatever it is.

And then you have the bottom left hand corner, which is lower value, but easy to do. So you might want to go and replace 500 hard drives with solid state solid state drives, it's a low value thing in from a cost point of view and return to the user and the replacement. But it just keeps the value engine going across. Whereas a high value item could be rebooting your machines every two weeks, because by rebooting your machine every two weeks, you get back a certain amount of productivity because you have less memory leaks, you make sure that the security patches are installed. And users have a fresh experience every two weeks because a lot of users leave the machines open and running for years or months. And it doesn't have so much for the Mac as it doesn't windows but Windows you definitely see it in two weeks. Mac probably I'll probably give it that about a month. And then you can start seeing it and you'll know and the difference between Windows and Mac is Windows will degrade slowly, whereas a Mac will just basically degrade. Yeah, you just you have no rings true. And it's just one of those things.

But you know thhe point I'm trying to make is that that prioritisation matrix quadrant is a very important feature, because that that very clearly articulates your top things to do and what the return value is going to be, then you can take that into sequencing organising it, so you start ordering your OKRs. So what we've put in is a like a roadmap where you pick up the objectives that are important, you put them in order, do this one first, do this one second, do this one third. And then underneath that is your key results and your value proposition and your commentary. So that basically becomes a reporting tool. So if anybody wants to know how you're doing, you're like, here's my, here's my objectives. Now all of this is encompassed in a workspace. So the architecture thing we had to do was initially, what we thought is that everyone would use everything inside one workspace. And then we realised, actually, but I realised this and I looked at my notes, and I actually had forgotten to tell everybody, this was supposed to be able to have many workspaces from day one, because a workspace is actually a project. So we had to put that piece in, which was actually fairly quick to do. So it just made we had to make sure that it worked.

But the idea then is that you go and start initiatives, you've got your workspace, which is what everything inside it. Now, I've only mentioned OKRs, but we also do the risk and governance piece. So So identifying your risks, your assumptions, your issues, your dependencies. And then the other stuff that I know, it's important, like your evidence, evidence, assess your support stuff, your questions. So all these things inside your workspace, and that combination together if people are very interested in because you can have OKRs in a spreadsheet, you can have your risks in a spreadsheet, but to have them together with the value proposition, you get the business case in a spreadsheet. But it's inconsistent, because depending on who you're talking to, and how they're doing it, you'll have different spreadsheets. But the common thing is over the same priority, status, who's the owner, what it is, when did you buy, that's consistent.

So we you know, that OKRs is not the main selling point of the software. But it's the most important piece from a story point of view, because now we can do our benchmark in the beginning of the month. And I can tell you in the month, your values x, we go through the whole 30 days, get to the end of the month, and now you have your your values x plus y or x minus y. But now I can tell you what you guys did in between to change those values provided using the tool. Of course, if you don't use it all, then you know, we can't do that. But, but the idea is that you would, and part of that has been putting in. So the data we're collecting initially will be manual, but it's not difficult for us to integrate and pull that KPI. So what we're doing with one of the customers is we're going to take KPI from there certainly a product that they're using, and pull that every day at the same time. And then we're going to show that value across the period. And then we can show with an overlay of what the tasks were that they did before and after that what they could see the task linked to the KPI. And they can see how their tasks affect the KPI. And what they're hoping to see in this thing, which will know in the future is, is it the activity they're doing, it's affecting their KPI or something else affecting the KPI because if it's not if somebody else is affected KPI and the task actually isn't making any difference, then why are you doing the task? So it's a different productivity value proposition as opposed to a revenue one.

Heather Bicknell 22:53:04
So you're helping point out a little bit more scientifically, the actual business result and whether being yourself they can? Like course, correct?

Ryan Purvis 22:53:13
Yeah, there's a few things to it. One is that the often people know there's a problem with economy, the economy articulate what the problem is. So So We answered that question, or help answer that question. I mean, depending what the problem is, you know, you may think it's the answer, but it might be something else. But at least we started to, we started to crystallise, where to look for the problem. And then the other thing is, when you start to crystallise, what you're looking for and what and what it is you start to understand the size and the impact of that problem. So if I use a very basic analogy, so we have a ticketing, analysis, incident ticket, and as part of the product, and you are doing, we're doing ticket analysis, so we take 30,000 tickets from you, we process them with them through and we map them to our scenarios. Now, identify talked about scenarios. Remember now, I've spoken so much about the product this week.

Heather Bicknell 22:53:54
I don't think you've mentioned them on this recording.

Ryan Purvis 22:53:56
So part of the part of the important part of this product is it's an it's an expert system, we capturing knowledge problem solution, that's a scenario. So if we're if we do a ticket analysis, and we come through 30,000 tickets, let's say of that 30,000 tickets, we can identify 10,000 just noise, which I'll come back to a second and 20,000 have actually got some interesting things so that we can group them and we use some machine learning and some NLP into categorizations and say, Okay, well out of your 20,000 left over, there's these 50 scenarios that you should look at. And from a very basic, the most to the least, ranking, these are the ones you should be looking at in order to address now, let's say out of your 20,000, a 1000 of those are disk space issues. So go for easy ones. These machines, these guys keep logging issues for for running out disk space. Now, if you've got the telemetry, so let's say you got a lakeside a controller and one of those guys and they've got the data you can now marry the 1000 tickets with potentially so let's say just for argument's sake, it's a one to one relationship you got to sell wasn't machines. You can go marry that data now, with the telemetry that you've got, too. So yes, out of the 1000 machines, we can see 500 of these actually are running out of storage, like they just don't have enough space, they're in 126 gig or a comment with the smaller one is 128 gig hard drive, That's madness, that should be on a one terabyte hard drive, let's just go replace those drives and migrate them. And it might cost you you know, $150 for the drive, and it might cost you another $100 for the labour. But the tickets that have been loved the 500 tickets at it's just us easy, easy math $50 A ticket that's 25 grand, that number is almost balancing itself out. It's probably not.

But the point is, you've avoided tickets in the future. But also what's happening is you might have only addressed the disk space issue the 500 tickets for those users. But those tickets are probably those users are probably logging other tickets for other things that are going on that are related to diskspace, because if your disk space is full up, none of your apps work, they're probably a lot of tickets for Outlook, they're probably locked tickets for network, for whatever, whatever. So you probably will knock out another three times as many tickets. So let's say 15, another 1000 tickets. So there's $50,000 that you've saved. So the combination really is $75,000. And all you've done is no or we've all we've helped the customer to understand because what the problem is how to scale it, and then what to do about it. And that's it. That's our scenario action plan.

So if we see that another scenario come up, we have an action plan that says, You should go and do a comparison of these users and their devices against what the available storage is. And you have two choices, one choice is to immediately replace the drive with a double the capacity or an X factor the capacity. Or if that's not the problem, you can run a script that cleans up the disk to remove unused files or whatever it is. Or your third option is to go look at what they're actually doing from a behavioural point of view, and educate them about what they're doing and move some of the stuff off where it is, like, for example, a lot of a lot of people will have, like their whole dropbox folder sitting on the machine, but they never use it, they just keep it there. But the whole point of having something like Dropbox, or OneDrive, or whatever is a box is to have it in the cloud. So your machine is clean. So it's just it's just give people the option. So what we're doing there is now we're telling you (in inverted commas), the customer what to do. So you're an end user centric company, you want to solve it, we've got a whole bunch of scenarios to solve that problem, you want to do ESG got a whole bunch of scenarios to work on that area you're in, you're doing information security, a whole bunch of scenarios for that. And it's literally here are the things to do now, why I say this is an expert system is you as a customer, or you might have a partner can create your own scenarios. So you can expand your knowledge. Now you're gonna go and onboard a new team, like, here you go, I started a guy now but by doing shops, you want everyone when they go bold in your shop, to follow a set of things, you can go put the scenarios there as things that they have to follow, or make sure of when they get there. And if they run into these issues, this is how you solve the issue. So if you're putting in a new shop, the shop fittings, and you run out of power or something like that, here's what you need to do, you need to log this call with this person, you need to raise this invoice, whatever it is, I mean, you know, the flexibilities that do give you like, it basically comes a checklist mechanism in some respects. But, you know, some of the tools that I work with that were, you know, good connections will integrate directly. So on the automation front, we could trigger the automation, or check that the automation is triggered.

Because that's often the problem with a lot of these things is consolidating information, not just into a report, but consolidating information into a report in context of the other information you had. So you're running your objectives. You're the sort of roadmap I said three in a row, we stopped bubbling in the information saying, okay, objective one was to achieve this goal, here are the real time KPIs that have been presented today. And here's the trend of where we thought you would be in this is where you are right now based on actual data. And it just makes it so easy to make decisions. Because then you can either stop what you're doing or change what you're doing or leave it as it is. And that's, that's what people want to know, what do I need to do.

Heather Bicknell 22:59:11
To answer those tough questions. So if you were to boil it down and say, here's the value of Valuu, it's more successful projects to drive more meaningful outcomes, or how would you?

Ryan Purvis 22:59:23
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so you know, that I mean, that's the best way to to summarise it. But I would probably say one more thing. If you look at any business that has done digital transformation successfully, they're more profitable. Anyone who's done it barely, hasn't done it probably isn't here anymore. So that's, that's where we want to be. Now I'm not talking about grandiose, every big programme. I don't think it has to be those are fine too could do those. But I'm saying if you just do it, and that's probably one of the goals about it today. If you if you just let each team just be more successful in what they're doing, or giving them a workspace and having this ability to have this information to make right decisions that affect across the organisation will butterfly out. And then everyone will be successful. Because you'll have alignment, you'll have accountability, you'll have knowledge of your impact your decisions, stuff, that's very difficult to do. Because right now, if you work in the average corporate come from that background as well, everything's in Excel, and it's someone else's Excel. So even before you get involved in it, you have to have to educate yourself on the Excel spreadsheet that you've been given because someone else has built it. And that obviously doesn't always work. So, so yeah, I'm very excited for the new year I think, I think we're going to hit we're going to help. And for me, it's about, you know, scaling what I do, which is to go and help somebody be successful.

Heather Bicknell 23:00:37
Yeah. So if anyone's on the subscriber list, I guess they can look out for that opportunity. Then that email. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 23:00:44
we'll reach out to me directly. And we can we can chat. For sure.

Heather Bicknell 23:00:48
Awesome. That's all very exciting. Glad it's really starting to take off it sounds like so. That's great. Excited for you.

Ryan Purvis 23:00:55
Thank you. Yeah, well, you know, you've been part of the process to be part of this. I've been part of the podcast has been just talking about the stuff ages and now it's crystallised. So So yeah, we finally. I mean, it's quite funny, because I think we started in November 2020, something like that, or 2019.

Heather Bicknell 23:01:09
So it's like just before COVID.

Ryan Purvis 23:01:12
Yeah, it would be 2019. Yeah. So cool. I do need to run unfortunately, got to go and have one of those value conversations. But yeah, that's great. See ya. Bye. Bye.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Heather Bicknellis our producer and editor. Thank you, Heather, for your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on the iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DWW podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www.digitalworkspace.works. Please also visit our website www.digitalworkspace.works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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