dnsUNFILTERED: Aliese Alter, DNSFilter

[00:00:00] Aliese Alter: My name's Aliese Alter, and I'm the Director of Business Operations.

[00:00:03] Mikey Pruitt: So a little bit of background on the what I know about Aliese is that we were looking for a product manager, and Aliese had developed a very in depth product and a. Kind of unconventional role where you would see like a software product, and now she's I don't wanna say a bad word, but Yeah.

The chief of staff per se at DNSFilter. So how did that pressure, yeah, no pressure. How did that all come to be like that journey? Tell me a little bit about it.

[00:00:36] Aliese Alter: Yeah, so I have a non-traditional background. A lot of times when you think about people and their their career progression, a lot of times people, you grow up, I think thinking about a ladder.

Like you start here and you climb your way. Mine's been, I saw this analogy one time and it stuck with me. It's been a little bit of a jungle jam. So I haven't always gone up, but I may have gone like side to side or like completely on the other side. So I have a really diverse background.

But the core of all of those different positions has been the need for standard process. And I think people think that sounds. Really regimented and scary, but like we do process every day. We go into the grocery store, we know we have to get in line, we have to pay. Just like little things in your household with whoever you're living with, you have a process of like, how do I know when I need to add something to the grocery list?

Or do I not have a grocery list? There are just things, and for me that's been instrumental. I think it does come a little bit natural to me because I can be a creature of routine. So process feels really good to me. Personally and professionally, because I know what to expect. I can find areas that aren't working or there's an opportunity to improve it, and I can just look at data, and it tells me where those gaps are.

So I think being able to, number one, have a diverse background. Has allowed me to be a bit of a generalist and embrace being a generalist. Being able to tap into different places and then also just having a, just a knack for process and enjoying it because it's like an immediate reward, like you can find something a bit chaotic, you can put a little process on top of it, and then it's not chaotic anymore.

You can keep doing that throughout the business and that's really gonna posture you to scale up.

[00:02:21] Mikey Pruitt: That is a great explanation and I love that you touched on process. So let's go into that Elisa's really instrumental in making sure the processes throughout DNSFilters, teams are like working smoothly, oiled, and they're serving the, their proper goals.

So let's talk about what are some of the processes that are the easiest to. Create in the first place. What are some of the areas where people should be looking to add a process?

[00:02:49] Aliese Alter: Yeah, no, that's a great question. People are like, where do I start? And again, it always seems so scary because when you think of process, you, I think people inherently think of this very regimented thing, do this like almost robotic.

That's really the opposite of what it is. It's more so becoming a behavior, like a repetitive behavior that you're creating. And so the easiest way to start is think about these activities that you do routinely in your business unit or your organization. And a lot of times that comes down to how do you receive internal and external stakeholder requests.

That's a very common one. And that's something really easy to implement process on. Because it will give you immediate results. Like you'll have, you'll find that you have improved productivity, better time management because you're able to organize the now, but also the later. You can have better agility, especially being in a startup or a business that's scaling up really quickly, your agility.

So things are gonna change very rapidly and if you have a standardized routine process in place, you can respond better to those changes. So really the short answer is just look at these common activities. Would it be, would it improve your life or others to have a process and expectations around it, then that's pretty much where you should start.

[00:04:10] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. Where to start. That's the perfect segue. And I would dive deeper in that, but I think you covered it pretty well. Like where do you start? It's, it seems like it's almost obvious where to start. Like the things that are just appear chaotic to you. You're like, oh my goodness. Like I do not wanna have to do that thing.

That's the type of things that need some type of structure around them so that they operate smoothly without you manually intervening all the time.

[00:04:34] Aliese Alter: Exactly. Yeah. Don't over complicate. Trying to figure out where process goes. Like it should just speak to you really and be like, oh yeah, that's where I should start.

[00:04:42] Mikey Pruitt: Process speaks to me. I think you should have that on the wall behind you.

[00:04:45] Aliese Alter: Yes. Maybe get a t-shirt for that one.

[00:04:49] Mikey Pruitt: So that's where to look for process. Let's talk about why to look for process. And you touched on this a little bit, but let's dive a little deeper on why process matters.

[00:04:59] Aliese Alter: Yeah. Yep.

I did touch on like the productivity, the agility. Better time management. But then there's that's if we get a little bit more deeper into that, it's, you can have outputs with that process that tells you things. So data. We'll dive into that a little bit later. But also just increase transparency, right?

Because a lot of it is going to be process and typically you're gonna find involves more than you, right? You are receiving something from somebody. There's some type of activities, that has to flow through before it comes back full circle to that initial person. And so when you have a process that's standardized, it increases that transparency because say that I am the person that's submitting this request.

I can theoretically and hopefully understand where that activity is or that task is at all times. So I have a visibility into what's happening. So that makes it really easy 'cause I'm not like reaching out, Hey Mikey, what's up with this? That's interfering with your work. And then it just, it's an extra burden, it's more time resources used up because I can just go look. I can say, oh, it's here, in the cycle, and I can communicate that to whoever I need. So I would say that's the biggest thing is having a shared understanding and alignment about the process really.

[00:06:15] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, I think that's another good call out about where process needs to exist when it involves two or more people, because people may learn and think and output in different ways.

And if you can have a, a centralized place where the. The task lists and the description of those tasks is exists. People can take that and then, go off and do their work and come back to that to report back. So that's really good. So we talked about where we talked about why, but let's talk about the how.

This is like where the rubber meets the road as they say. Like how do you implement processes around things you've identified that are chaotic?

[00:06:54] Aliese Alter: Yeah, so this can be simple too. I find that sometimes people get like analysis paralysis when it comes to this, but I would say take a deep breath and just think about it really high level you wanna think about and identify those activities that we talked about.

And then you want to do some mapping or some flow charts, so it's, if we use the example of Aliese goes to Mikey, Aliese is the person putting in the requester. It's mapping out, mapping out that process that activity is gonna go through, receives by this department, goes to this part department for execution, and so on, so that you understand and also get alignment with everybody that's involved in that process.

That yes, this is what happens, because you may find as you're creating it, that actually needs to be mapped out a little bit more on what the flow should be. And then you want to execute this ideally via software like Jira or Asana. You wanna harness tools because they can, they're made to do this so you're not recreating the wheel.

And then they also have data that they can output to help you optimize your process. Then you you get your process in place, you're gonna monitor its effectiveness. You want to understand change management. If there are things in that process that affect other departments, you wanna figure out how you communicate that.

So again, process is all about like alignment, not just those people involved in that direct flow, but there's other stakeholders that are gonna be impacted. So you wanna analyze that and figure out how you can approve that alignment throughout your business. And then you're gonna get to optimizing.

So you're gonna wanna look at problems that are consistently happening opportunities for improvement. And that's like a repeating cycle, because the process that's there today, those activities that you complete today are gonna change probably in six months, a year, so on and so on. As that process or those activities become more mature and as your business needs change.

So you wanna make sure that you're continually assessing it and making sure that you're meeting stakeholders needs.

[00:08:55] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. And I was thinking the, there's a multi-billion dollar industry that creates tools that help with this process. So seek those out and evaluate which ones are best for you and use them.

Definitely. And then you also touched on the next segment we wanted, I wanted to talk to you about, which is measurement. Metrics. So you were talking about change management and monitoring, which results and an improvement of said process that you've already created. So let's talk about what is important for a business to measure?

[00:09:28] Aliese Alter: Yeah, so you want to look you and your business unit in the mirror. 'Cause like you should know what the business expects to be measured. And that could be something simple, like if you have. To produce X number of things a month. Are you producing those, that kind of data.

But then you may also want to improve things like your efficiency or you want to understand like where your requests are coming from. So it's what is, what are the answers? What are the answers that your business is looking for generally when you talk about this process? Can you answer those now or can you not?

And what needs to go into that data collection? Like that form that you receive, or the brief that you receive, whatever you're using to collect the data to support this task through its activities. But I would say you can really start basic, if you don't, if nobody's asking you those questions yet.

Or you're just not sure, do not overcomplicate it. Don't fill it with so much data because you wanna start basic and then you want to be able to build on top of it. 'cause your data should serve the business, right? You only wanna produce data that's going to be used, otherwise it's just sitting there.

So I would say look at where your requests are coming from. If this process you're gonna build out first is something for internal or external stakeholders. What are their personas? What are, what departments are they in? Understand who it is that you're serving with this process.

If you don't know yet, how long does it take someone to complete this task or these tasks and this process, that tells you like what your cycle time is. Things like that. Just starting very basic. And then you can start to understand what your team or your org's capacity is, once you get that data built out.

You can get a bit more robust and understanding like future, looking at the future and how your process and what can you do in a given month or quarter.

[00:11:22] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, so you're like really the immediate goal is to get a baseline of productivity and from there you can expand, but what are some key metrics that you look at like on a daily basis?

[00:11:36] Aliese Alter: For us, so business operations is a really unique organization in the sense that we have almost a piece of every major function in business operations. So we serve marketing, sales, finance customer success general business. And so we are always wanting to understand who we're serving month by month.

So marketing and sales continue to be some of our largest requesters and organizations that we support. But we also look at data that we provide. So we create reports, for example, for different organizations to utilize, to monitor the success. Or behaviors of their organization. And so we look at those, because those are indicators of the overall business.

And so I'm speaking very broadly because you want to look at metrics that either you're measuring for your organization or that are driving your business. So business, since we do dabble in all of these different business units and organizations and support them, we're looking at. Sales, marketing, financial data reports that we build.

And then we also have this is when I talk about process getting more mature is once we got our process in place, we've realized that sometimes there was some key attribute data missing. So for example, your billing system and Chargebee, or excuse me, your billing system and Salesforce, for example, syncing up or things that are connected.

We built a report that shows us when something may be broken so that we can be on top of it before someone comes to us. And so that's something that you think about when as you get more mature and being being more proactive instead of reactive.

[00:13:21] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, I think that's one of the points is to have, and I believe you mentioned this when you were talking to the marketing team, is to have that asynchronous feedback loop where it doesn't require someone's time to, manually talk to, we're like, we're not robots, but there is, there's information there that I will see that informs me on something. And that's the kind of data that Aliese was alluding to and. One of the biggest thoughts that I had after you spoke with the marketing team is that, and like I mentioned about being robots. We're not robots, we're humans, but this process and this measurement feedback loop and continually improving that.

It really frees up that creative side on what is, what are some things that we haven't thought about? So if you think about your sprocket business and you've got all these gears turning and you're tweaking the gears, you're changing the metals, you're changing the diameters, and you're making it as most efficient as it can be.

That's one thing to do. And that's like working in the business. And this is really big in the MSP community. It's like working in the business versus working on the business. When all those gears are turning well oiled, everything is very efficient and doesn't require your manual attention.

You are now free to explore other revenue streams, other business avenues, things that maybe you didn't think about, and not only you as like the business owner or whoever, but others in the business can get their work done succinctly, efficiently, and potentially have a four day work week. But I don't know about you Aliese, but when I'm off on my Friday, like I'm having these crazy thoughts that are just, I'm like, oh gosh, I gotta write this down.

And I used to bombard Aliese with Saturday driving thought. She's oh my God. But some of them are really good. So it's like having all those things, all those processes in place, measuring and that kind of machine running frees up your human power. To tap into the creative side that becomes available when all this stuff is in place.

[00:15:25] Aliese Alter: Yeah, I couldn't have said that any better. I do actually miss your Saturday driving spot and it's, I don't know. It made me think of it in a different way because you are here because you have a very powerful, like you said, your human power, our brain, the way that we can think. And tra really transform a business.

Sure. Data and process can certainly transform it and make us more efficient. It can identify potential issues or opportunities. It could tell us where there's a gap, but as far as telling us about, something that Mikey's gonna think of while he's driving on Saturday process isn't gonna do that.

So you really honed in on the point that it can make us more productive in the areas that the business needs us to be productive. And so those Saturday driving thoughts have believe it or not, people like it has actually resulted in in improving the way we do our business in more creative ways.

But I can't share those because they're secret

[00:16:21] Mikey Pruitt: secret, super secret. Dina filter tricks. Exactly. This has been great, Aliese. Do you have any other advice or, musings on process and measurement, things that you've kinda stood out in your mind as highlights, things that you've learned on this journey?

[00:16:36] Aliese Alter: I think the one thing we didn't cover is or I didn't really put the emphasis on as much as I should have is. The need for alignment. So the last thing you wanna do is if you see a process is go implement it without talking to any of those people that are involved in it because they're stakeholders, they deserve a seat at the table.

If you implement a process where everyone's behind it, it'll obviously go so much smoother. And I also say a good piece of advice is involve people who aren't involved in that process. Because having a. Outsider perspective of, oh yeah, I can follow what to do, or, ah, I got lost when you were talking here.

I, I wouldn't know what happens next. Allowing that process of poking holes through it just such you and your team up for success because you have confidence that once you roll that out, that number one, people are gonna be on board. And number two, it's not gonna confuse people. So it's just, it's, you don't want to, decrease productivity by people, being so confused on what to do,

[00:17:36] Mikey Pruitt: right? You're not here to pave a path. There's a lot of voices that need to be heard and make sure that this process is efficient. Because if you just enforce something, chances are it's not gonna work the way you had, dreamed about.

And another thing you mentioned when you were discussing this with the marketing team is you need to think this out. If you're watching this and you're like, this is a this really makes sense to me, and you've already thought about the pieces of your business that are chaotic, and you're like, I'm gonna jump in and I'm gonna go do this.

I'm gonna send emails to these people and I'm gonna, try out this tool. Slow down. Don't go jump into that and Aliese mention this specifically I'm, you guys are probably pretty psyched right now. And we were like, this is great Aliese. And then but she's don't go out today or tomorrow and just start implementing a process.

Take a step back, converse with your stakeholders and map this out. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Like your business is a marathon. And the. The more efficient you can get those processes, great. That's gonna take time and just be aware of that.

[00:18:38] Aliese Alter: Exactly. Yeah. No, I'm glad you covered that because it can be exciting.

But yes, you wanna make sure that you've gone through that due diligence before just rolling it out.

[00:18:47] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. Thank you Aliese, for your time. I really appreciate it and I hope the audience did as well.

[00:18:52] Aliese Alter: All right. Thanks for having me, Mikey.