Cross-Functional Collaboration

00;00;00;01 – 00;00;02;27
Nick Powers
You don’t look like you’re ready to, like, rage today.

00;00;02;29 – 00;00;04;22
Joel Ives
Oh, there’s some there’s some stuff.

00;00;04;22 – 00;00;06;16
Nick Powers
Oh it’s brewing

00;00;06;18 – 00;00;08;24
Joel Ives
There’s there’s always. There’s always stuff.

00;00;08;24 – 00;00;13;03
Nick Powers
There’s there’s always. There’s some tension and there’s always some friendly. It’s not laid back to me.

00;00;13;07 – 00;00;18;13
Joel Ives
It’s not really. It’s a good kind of tension. If I could say that. Yeah.

00;00;18;18 – 00;00;23;00
Nick Powers
Well, usually alludes that there’s a problem to be solved.

00;00;23;03 – 00;00;24;25
Joel Ives
A solution to be found.

00;00;24;26 – 00;00;25;28
Nick Powers
A solution to be found.

00;00;25;29 – 00;00;27;12
Joel Ives
Yeah, it’s a matter of perspective.

00;00;27;12 – 00;00;32;00
Nick Powers
So what is. So what’s what’s on the plate?

00;00;32;02 – 00;00;39;19
Joel Ives
Well, right now, I just, stepped into that CoP leadership position. Yeah, for an engineering.

00;00;39;26 – 00;00;43;03
Nick Powers
Yeah. Thankless job.

00;00;43;05 – 00;00;58;17
Joel Ives
I’m thankful for it. Believe it or not, I really am. I love people. I love customer service. I did 23 years in the Air Force. Spent 17 years of that in medical.

00;00;58;19 – 00;01;00;15
Nick Powers
Oh, I didn’t know you’re a medical guy.

00;01;00;18 – 00;01;03;25
Joel Ives
Prior to that, I was a maintainer on the B-52.

00;01;03;27 – 00;01;04;08
Nick Powers
Nice.

00;01;04;09 – 00;01;29;08
Joel Ives
So, third life, jumping into the IT sector. Reinventing. Trying to figure it all out. A lot of terms that got thrown, you know, that were way over my head. I had to pull a lot of folks aside on the project to be like, what does that mean? Yeah. Help me. And it was pretty cool the way that kind of happened, because,

00;01;29;10 – 00;01;42;25
Joel Ives
And I’ll get to the CoP (Community of Practice) stuff here in a minute. It was pretty cool how that happened, because, I think people learned the most when they teach others. I’ll.

00;01;42;25 – 00;01;47;26
Nick Powers
Agree with that. That is a very powerful statement, actually, Joel. Yeah, I agree with that.

00;01;48;02 – 00;02;14;18
Joel Ives
Because it creates that. It creates that accountability that you can’t blow smoke. You got to know what you’re talking about because you’re you’re accountable to that other person to then take what you’ve taught them and take it to maybe the next level or, you know, kind of like kids, kids with their parents, you know, you want to raise your kids and give them the things that you never had growing up and set them up for success.

00;02;14;20 – 00;02;16;19
Joel Ives
And hopefully they surpass what you did.

00;02;16;22 – 00;02;36;19
Nick Powers
Right, right, right. That’s the first place I went to was kids when you said that. Oh yeah, first place I wanted to, I was like, you’ve got these, moldable, you know, really, for I tell my kids this all the time. Ignorant, right? They don’t know what they don’t know. Right. And so what you tell them is what they’re going to go do.

00;02;36;20 – 00;02;42;21
Nick Powers
Absolutely. You better tell them the right things or else you’re going to create, you know, not a good citizen.

00;02;42;23 – 00;02;44;03
Joel Ives
Absolutely. Yeah.

00;02;44;11 – 00;02;50;19
Nick Powers
So same thing with people, right? Professional people, when you’re trying to develop them, you don’t want to put them on the wrong course.

00;02;50;24 – 00;03;18;27
Joel Ives
Yeah, and we’re all just big kids. We all came from that. And I think some of us still hold on to that, kid at heart, that curiosity. And that helps drive us, to, to do excellent things. And I really, truly believe that. And I think it’s in everybody’s, you know, interests to do to do. Well. Nobody ever walks into a situation and says, yeah, I want to do the worst I can at this, you know.

00;03;18;29 – 00;03;52;17
Joel Ives
So, yeah, that that ties into, two things that, that I would love to talk about a little bit. And first I heard you mentioned was the CoP stuff, and we’ll go to that first. But the second one is, is what I do here on this project with as being a Scrum Master. So the, the, the CoP stuff going into that, we’re all just a bunch of kids trying to learn some new tools, trying to make things, make our, our workplace better, make each other better.

00;03;52;19 – 00;04;12;16
Joel Ives
And, something I see and Vision for that going forward. That’s, that’s somewhat new that I actually heard rumblings of that was, going on when the CoPs (Communities of Practice) first kind of started with on common was more of an integrated approach where the CoPs (Communities of Practice) are more together.

00;04;12;19 – 00;04;13;12
Nick Powers
Right?

00;04;13;14 – 00;04;22;22
Joel Ives
Because we’ve got data, we’ve got enterprise, and we got engineering. Well, those three kind of make up that macro level of a project.

00;04;22;28 – 00;04;23;07
Nick Powers
Yep.

00;04;23;14 – 00;04;35;17
Joel Ives
So we’ve got these microlearning teams going on from those micro learning teams. We’re looking at setting up micro project teams to demonstrate to the company.

00;04;35;18 – 00;04;37;06
Nick Powers
Cross-functional across the CoPs.

00;04;37;06 – 00;05;04;14
Joel Ives
Exactly. That’s exactly where I was going. Right now we’re working with Terraform a little bit. And we got a micro learning team going on with that, and they got a, project kickoff happening this Friday for it. And I kind of heard the proposal of what they’re going to get after a little bit. And, as I’m sitting back listening to that, I say to our, lead facilitator, hey, Matt.

00;05;04;16 – 00;05;42;15
Joel Ives
One thing I’m hearing here, as you’re mentioning all this is you’re talking about, Visio, you’re talking about data architecture. You’re talking about, Jira and project management. I said, once we get this rolling a little bit, maybe, maybe our second or third session of this project, as we’re coming together, bring some of these young enterprise folks that maybe are on their first project to come in and help facilitate this, help teach what they know sure, and learn from what you guys are doing in that safe space, you know, to to grow.

00;05;42;15 – 00;05;46;04
Joel Ives
And same with data, you know, bring them in. Let’s let’s bring it together.

00;05;46;07 – 00;05;47;16
Nick Powers
You know, makes tons of.

00;05;47;16 – 00;05;50;27
Joel Ives
Sense and, just have a good time as a bunch of big kids.

00;05;50;29 – 00;06;16;06
Nick Powers
It was interesting, you know, as you kind of alluded to, when we first started spinning of the CoPs, we were probably maybe 100 people maybe. And so what you had was, everybody knew everybody. Right. And so as we’ve grown, you know, we’re over 200 now. It’s a little harder sometimes to really recognize, you know, like as a, which is I’m a, I’m a green guy, I’m an engineer.

00;06;16;06 – 00;06;36;18
Nick Powers
Right. And so who do I reach across the aisle to, to talk to about data or architecture. Sometimes that gets a little hard. As you get bigger. Whereas back in the day, you basically had the engineers in a meeting, and then the next meeting, you were in the meeting, and then the next meeting, you were the meeting because it was kind of the same people, and you’re all trying to learn off each other.

00;06;36;18 – 00;06;50;26
Nick Powers
And yes, let’s figure out at the end of the day, a lot of it was each CoP (Community of Practice) like a representative talking to the other CoPs (Communities of Practice) about what they do, because that’s really the first step, right? What does an architect even do? Why does it matter to me as a software guy?

00;06;50;29 – 00;06;57;25
Joel Ives
Right. Right. Yeah. And as a and as a software guy, do you want to do that stuff, baby?

00;06;57;25 – 00;06;58;13
Nick Powers
Maybe.

00;06;58;13 – 00;07;00;26
Joel Ives
But your first choice probably isn’t right.

00;07;01;00 – 00;07;02;19
Nick Powers
Right. I want to sling code.

00;07;02;21 – 00;07;04;05
Joel Ives
Yes. Right.

00;07;04;08 – 00;07;10;23
Nick Powers
But the funny thing is, and something you learn to appreciate later is if I had that architecture and I knew how to read it.

00;07;10;25 – 00;07;11;06
Joel Ives

00;07;11;06 – 00;07;23;08
Nick Powers
Because that’s a big part of it too. I could have wrote that software probably ten times faster, and it would have been a lot more, you know, in line with what the customer wanted. If I had somebody actually give me that blueprint.

00;07;23;10 – 00;07;42;24
Joel Ives
Exactly. Yeah. So we’re all big kids, and we’re all we’re all customers to one another because we’re all selling something, right? You know, and, if if we’re all buying it and we, we find that direction, where to go together and just awesome things happen.

00;07;43;00 – 00;07;43;26
Nick Powers
Yeah. For sure.

00;07;43;27 – 00;07;44;11
Joel Ives
Yeah.

00;07;44;12 – 00;07;46;05
Nick Powers
Alignment. The best thing ever.

00;07;46;08 – 00;07;47;04
Joel Ives
Absolutely.

00;07;47;05 – 00;07;53;01
Nick Powers
I mean, you know, this has been a, retired military guy. Is is, the mission aligns.

00;07;53;08 – 00;07;53;23
Joel Ives

00;07;53;24 – 00;08;10;09
Nick Powers
And you could come from a lot of different backgrounds, but you’re in alignment because you’re trying to achieve that thing. And I think we’ve kind of we’ve touched on today throughout some of these other conversations we’ve had today, which is, you know, one thing I’ve found working with the military is we’re all trying to get to the same place.

00;08;10;13 – 00;08;11;00
Joel Ives

00;08;11;03 – 00;08;29;08
Nick Powers
And you can’t say that about necessarily what those types of things happen in the commercial industry, because sometimes it’s what you’re in the commercial setting. It’s more about what you’re doing locally in your group or whatever. That group is trying to do this thing. Yeah, maybe it contributes to some bigger other things that the company is trying to do.

00;08;29;08 – 00;08;42;05
Nick Powers
But at the end of the day, what we’re doing here is about getting the warfighter what they need to do, what we need to do as a country. And it there’s nothing more powerful than that kind of mission.

00;08;42;09 – 00;08;58;25
Joel Ives
Yeah. It’s huge. And when true strategic alignment happens, it’s it’s really beautiful. And I’ve seen it happen. Truly happen. I would say from all the way to the top to the bottom, I only saw it happen one time in 23 years. Sure, force.

00;08;59;00 – 00;08;59;28
Nick Powers
But you’ll never forget it.

00;08;59;29 – 00;09;24;01
Joel Ives
No I won’t. Yeah, it was amazing time. It was in Aviano, Italy. Okay. Yeah. The, new, commander that took the stage for the wing, general was Sica. He he said one thing. He just said, I want to make this place so that you want to run to work. And everybody, everybody in the crowd was just kind of like.

00;09;24;01 – 00;09;40;17
Joel Ives
What? Yeah, right. You know, you heard snickers a little if you laugh. Everybody that stood there that day and was still at Aviano as he, fulfilled his tenure there, saw that take place.

00;09;40;20 – 00;09;41;27
Nick Powers
So in two years.

00;09;41;29 – 00;10;17;13
Joel Ives
Yeah, we saw that wing change and a big implementation, that helped kind of spur. And that was, yeah, strategic alignment, but, with a focus in a heartbeat on process improvement, improving those things around you, looking at everybody as a customer and looking at you know, just the order of things. You know, there was a common, statement said a lot of people when people came with problems, you know, the first question was, well, does everything, does every place everything, and does everything have a place?

00;10;17;15 – 00;10;42;26
Joel Ives
And it’s and if and if that’s not true, then then you’re going to find you’re going to find waste. So let’s let’s try to eliminate that. Understand the constraints that we have to adapt and have because you’re not going to eliminate them. All right. But the biggest thing wasn’t necessarily all the goodness that was happening in the improvements, but it was the feeling.

00;10;42;29 – 00;10;44;19
Joel Ives

00;10;44;21 – 00;10;46;18
Nick Powers
The morale. Yeah. The morale.

00;10;46;19 – 00;11;09;03
Joel Ives
You saw he saw countenance changing. I mean I distinctly remember walking down the hall at my unit and a captain from our resource management office was walking down captain House or her name and she says to me, Sergeant Ives, don’t you just feel it? She had this big smile on her face, and I didn’t even have to explain or ask her.

00;11;09;07 – 00;11;52;10
Joel Ives
I know exactly what she’s talking about. And. Yeah, and ever since that moment, every place I’ve been, every time I transfer to a new base and then coming out of the military, I’ve chased that to see that happen again. Yeah. So, like, organizational culture. I just I love the idea of it, like working, getting people to that, that place, you know, where they look across the aisle, they see others and they’re not just seeing themselves in their own problems, but they begin to embrace others, other people’s problems and, and find solutions, even for themselves out of doing that.

00;11;52;10 – 00;12;15;24
Nick Powers
Right, right. No, that’s I can I can tell you I’ve only felt total alignment a few times. It’s not it’s it’s like you said, it’s not. You know, as as hard as we work to make on common the best place we can, there’s it’s still out of alignment. You know, from time to time. And so you’re you’re not going to hit that all the time.

00;12;15;24 – 00;12;38;13
Nick Powers
But when you do, I know what you’re talking about. I know there’s I mean there’s stories in this company’s history that I still talk about, and people get tired of it because, you know, they hear it too many times. But, you know, there’s there’s a few instances like you said, where there’s just like at the right place at the right time with the right people, with the right leadership, it all comes together.

00;12;38;15 – 00;12;47;28
Nick Powers
And then and then it’s gone. You know. Yeah. But I know what you’re talking about. Absolutely. Yeah. So you’re going to do that with a CoP (Community of Practice) then, right.

00;12;48;02 – 00;12;48;07
Joel Ives
What.

00;12;48;10 – 00;12;50;06
Nick Powers
That’s three months you know.

00;12;50;08 – 00;13;22;15
Joel Ives
Yeah. I’m not going to, but we will I think we will. As as Team Uncommon, you know, begins the progress. And, you know, we’ve got a lot of new faces, a lot of new folks at the company. You know what? What a. And we just became a large organization, a large business. So what a great time to hit that reset button a little bit and see where we can go with it, see who can drive it next, you know.

00;13;22;17 – 00;13;44;07
Joel Ives
One thing, one project that kind of pops in my mind is those those, those strategic roadmaps that we have. Sure. Should those be visible to everybody in the company? And shouldn’t everybody be able to speak to them, you know? Absolutely. And I think that’s a good goal post for them. You know, as we look to the new year and start developing those again.

00;13;44;13 – 00;14;13;22
Nick Powers
Yeah, I think you’re going to see a lot more, you know, not only, transparency in some of that, but also, leaning it down can’t be everything to everybody, right. And so leaning it down and being more focused on a specific set of, of targets, that we can all rally behind. Absolutely. You know, I think you’re going to see that I’m pretty excited about some of the I’m stressed out, but I’m excited at the same time.

00;14;13;25 – 00;14;15;06
Nick Powers
Right.

00;14;15;09 – 00;14;15;28
Joel Ives
I know that feeling.

00;14;15;28 – 00;14;48;19
Nick Powers
One thing is, is pretty cool is. And hopefully you feel the same way, but you know, I’ve always felt and I’ve always espoused this is is if you have a have something you believe is the right thing to do, it’s my job to give you the resources to do it. And time and time again, as as I’ve stepped to the plate to say, hey, we need to go do this, the my other partners have said, okay, here’s, here’s the runway, go do it and deliver.

00;14;48;21 – 00;15;09;20
Nick Powers
And I can say, I mean, not every time have I hit it out of the park or other folks have hit things out of the park, but we’re we got a pretty high batting average. I’d say probably 900. If you’re going to talk about it. So, you know, as you think about, you know, the things that you need to get to, where you want to go with, how you want to do things or what your team needs and things like that.

00;15;09;20 – 00;15;14;28
Nick Powers
I think the resources are there. It’s just a matter of asking for them and, you know.

00;15;14;28 – 00;15;15;21
Joel Ives
Absolutely.

00;15;15;22 – 00;15;38;05
Nick Powers
Yeah, because we’ve always been there to give people what they need. With your with your kind of situation, the CoP (Community of Practice), you know, I think more than anything and, you know, this is it’s the talent that you have at the top to be able to lean on right. Yep. And you’ve got quite a cadre of senior guys coming together under you.

00;15;38;08 – 00;15;57;10
Nick Powers
I don’t know how you’ve been able to kind of circle the wagons with them. The Ryan Sue, there’s the Mike Debs, the Corey Sievers, the Josh Hurst. Yeah. Justin Rosas, yeah. You know, there’s there’s a you got a pretty interesting cast that has assimilated now over the last 6 to 8 months. Some of them have been here for a while.

00;15;57;12 – 00;16;05;11
Nick Powers
Some of them been here and come back. Some of them are brand new to the company, but, it’s an exciting time to be an engineering, I think.

00;16;05;14 – 00;16;44;22
Joel Ives
Yes, I think so, too. In front of us. Yeah, I’m familiar with each one of those names you mentioned. And, one thing that we’re doing is that we meet every Friday. All the fours, all the fives. In engineering, we meet every Friday. It’s just a 15 minute, huddle. And, we really round a question that, then the whole idea behind that, and I’ve, I’ve kind of looked to this, as, you know, the drum to be the pathway to kind of go, because I’ve seen it successful thus far is connection, collaboration and then capability.

00;16;44;24 – 00;17;12;11
Joel Ives
Because if you just look for capability, you’re you’re going to miss the collaboration. And it’s not going to become what it could have been. And if you look to collaborate before you connect, everybody is already disjointed. So kind of looking at it from a lens of mentorship, like, you know, in the 23 years I served in the military, I was never truly mentored by anybody I didn’t know I had to have a connection with.

00;17;12;11 – 00;17;42;19
Joel Ives
And I had to have some kind of relationship there. Right? I’ve never seen a program really work, you know, for long term, for mentorship. I’ve never seen assignments given for mentorship and that really work. But I’ve seen connections, even some of the weirdest connections, you know, work amazingly, you know, just through, you know, fun and, you know, name calling a little bit, you know, little trash talk here and there.

00;17;42;21 – 00;17;54;03
Joel Ives
It’s amazing what little things like that just kind of spark off into these, these, these things that we, you know, the business world the companies really want.

00;17;54;05 – 00;17;54;21
Nick Powers
Right.

00;17;54;24 – 00;18;05;12
Joel Ives
You know, and it’s going back to that, that statement to and just recognizing that we’re all just big kids. We want to have a good time and we want to see this thing move.

00;18;05;13 – 00;18;25;03
Nick Powers
Well, there’s there’s an element, though, of trust. Yes. You know, if I can, you know, have a witty banter with you about whatever that is, there’s a certain level of trust that you and I have built and established. And then when you and I go to work on a project together, I know what I can. I know what I can get out, Joel.

00;18;25;03 – 00;18;40;01
Nick Powers
And you know what you can get out of me. And if something goes sideways or I’m not producing the way I’m, I should be producing, you’re going to go at me and you know what? Because I trust you. I’m going to take that and know what it means and know what I need to do. And I think that’s a big part of.

00;18;40;01 – 00;19;02;27
Joel Ives
That, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Breaking those walls down. So you can get to the real conversation and get to those real, real things that are on your mind instead of, you know, living on that surface and you know, thinking we’re moving along when we’re not sure, you know, but just sitting with that objective truth, where are we and where do we want to go?

00;19;02;29 – 00;19;33;27
Joel Ives
I think it’s huge. A lofty goal I had coming out of the military was to, land a job. And. Yeah, at a company that I wanted to stay with throughout for a second retirement tour. Like, it’s a big commitment. Yeah, it was a big goal. Like, I mean, I really, I think, put myself out there and I was like, oh, I don’t know, you know, just looking at the landscape.

00;19;34;02 – 00;19;42;28
Joel Ives
But what drew me to uncommon was a, it was a, it was a YouTube video. I just YouTube and com and I saw the, the,

00;19;43;03 – 00;19;45;11
Nick Powers
Job posting on YouTube.

00;19;45;13 – 00;20;13;19
Joel Ives
I saw the job post on LinkedIn and, you know, there’s this guy played with the Rubik’s Cube. There’s people playing with Nerf guns in the office, you know, and then you see the screen with all this code and people are working hard. And then Jason comes on and he starts talking, you know, you know, just about people first and you know, loving the problem and getting after these things.

00;20;13;21 – 00;20;42;05
Joel Ives
And I was just like the I felt like I felt like he had listened to me or, or was like a fly on the wall in my last ten years in the military because everything he was saying, everything I saw, everybody doing, was the things that I loved. And I’m just like. And as a matter of fact, in my, onboarding, when I met with Jason, I told him that story, like you know, I feel like this could be the place.

00;20;42;05 – 00;20;45;16
Joel Ives
And I still feel like that now I really do.

00;25;22;27 – 00;25;48;09
Nick Powers
No, that’s awesome. So switching gears a little bit, you’re on a very interesting project. And I say that because a lot of people don’t understand the project you’re on. Yeah. Okay. The what? It’s for, you know, it’s congressionally mandated. You know, it’s about air safety. It’s about the fact that we don’t have enough airplanes in our military to do all the work.

00;25;48;09 – 00;26;17;26
Nick Powers
So we have to contract out, you know, work with, with, commercial industry partners. Right. And so the work that you guys do on that, on that contract is really important to make sure that we have safe air transportation controls. You know, it’s a result of a tragic accident, really, more than anything. Right. Without getting into, like, specifics or any sensitive things, I mean, you know, can you talk a little bit about the controls we have to put in place and the inspections and any of that kind of stuff.

00;26;17;26 – 00;26;21;29
Nick Powers
It all kind of give people a little bit of an idea of like one of the projects that we have going.

00;26;22;05 – 00;26;45;24
Joel Ives
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a Caz and that stands for Air carrier, air carrier analysis support. With the with and it’s a modernization effort and, cloud, you know, moving this DoD program to the cloud and the, the, U.S. Transcom cloud,

00;26;45;26 – 00;27;19;26
Joel Ives
With most, development projects and software, you know, we think of the end user as the person at the computer using this thing. But, where our team is kind of rallied around and, and put our minds in when we’re actually doing this work is, is that troop, that airman, that soldier, that seaman that’s going to get on that air carrier, from Delta or whoever and, go, go fight these wars for us and protect our nation.

00;27;19;29 – 00;27;52;22
Joel Ives
Keeping that Vision, that understanding at the heart of what we do really helps drive, you know, hey, you’re not just coding for this person sitting at a desk. You’re coding for that person in uniform. So that’s really big. So we’ve got maintenance, inspectors, we got operations inspectors that your more high level folks that are going out to these sites, on the temporary duty assignments to, evaluate these aircraft and make sure that they’re safe for our folks.

00;27;52;24 – 00;28;23;13
Joel Ives
So ACRs as a program, basically as a database that stores all that information, all those dates, all those types of visits and things that they need to do and, creates, you know, that safety checklist, so to speak, for them to say, hey, this one is good to go so that at a moment’s notice, when our, girls, guys and girls in uniform need to jump on a plane and go take care of business, they can.

00;28;23;16 – 00;28;29;07
Nick Powers
Right? Right. Which is incredibly important. And currently, I’m sure you had a ride on a few of those planes in your career.

00;28;29;10 – 00;28;30;15
Joel Ives
You did? Yeah, I did.

00;28;30;15 – 00;28;36;22
Nick Powers
You know firsthand how important it is. That’s the last thing you want to do is have to worry about whether or not the plane is flight worthy.

00;28;36;22 – 00;28;37;14
Joel Ives
Absolutely.

00;28;37;20 – 00;28;41;07
Nick Powers
You got other things on your mind. Down, down, down range, for sure.

00;28;41;07 – 00;28;43;02
Joel Ives
Longest flight was 33 hours.

00;28;43;02 – 00;28;44;16
Nick Powers
Oh.

00;28;44;18 – 00;28;46;27
Joel Ives
Oh to the farthest piece of land that you can get from the.

00;28;46;27 – 00;29;11;15
Nick Powers
United I. I was going to say it feels like you if you would have flown around the globe. Yeah. That’s crazy. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well we appreciate your service for sure. And I think that’s kind of one of the other great things about the company that I really love is being able to work with guys that have put on the uniform have been there, done that because I can then learn from you about the importance of the work that we’re doing.

00;29;11;16 – 00;29;34;23
Nick Powers
You know, I think that’s really critical for non military guys like myself is I love hearing the stories. I love hearing how the systems impact, you know, what you guys had to do in uniform. I think all that’s really important. I think that’s why we have this really neat meshed kind of grouping of people here where all of us are notary, but we yeah, we meshed really nicely with folks like you that are, that are bringing a lot of experience.

00;29;34;23 – 00;29;38;10
Joel Ives
And it feels good, to serve them that serve.

00;29;38;12 – 00;29;41;29
Nick Powers
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. For sure.

00;29;42;01 – 00;30;15;23
Joel Ives
So becoming a, I, I walked into the job as a Scrum Master and, where I kind of led off into that path was, I was a senior enlisted senior NCO in the Air Force. Towards the latter half of of of my my, service, I fell and fell in love with continuous process improvement. That fell in line with the whole story about Aviano, Italy, where we saw that strategic alignment.

00;30;15;25 – 00;30;44;13
Joel Ives
From there I continued on and, got a master’s degree in project management, studied, you know, the pinned back and whatnot, and saw the agile side of the house. And I saw that as more closely aligned and conducive with process improvement because it’s customer centric, where your traditional project management, you know, you’re there’s still the customer there, but you’re not delivering until you have that whole cake.

00;30;44;19 – 00;30;55;23
Nick Powers
Right? Right. Yeah. You’re you’re almost applying a one size fits all model to a project. And, if you don’t do it that way, it’s not efficient, right? Yeah. Whereas agile is not that way at all.

00;30;55;26 – 00;31;22;09
Joel Ives
Absolutely. Right. And as a Scrum Master, that really closely assigns or aligns with, being a senior NCO, because as a senior NCO, you you stop those impediments, you you cut those roadblocks, you kept that goodness flowing of of work. And, you’re working with that team. You’re building that team. There’s times you got to be a leader there.

00;31;22;09 – 00;31;55;05
Joel Ives
Sometimes you got to step in and manage a little bit or help manage at least. But when you got that good leadership behind that and, and people want to, people latch on to that Vision and want to help, you know, that it just comes together and you got that team rolling together. Right? So seeing that happen on on acres, you know, working with three different companies, you know, ours and two others, and bringing us together in a virtual space.

00;31;55;08 – 00;32;05;15
Joel Ives
I mean, it had its challenges, but I’ve seen it happen and I’ve seen those walls come down where we can banter and joke and trust each other and walk forward and drive this thing.

00;32;05;15 – 00;32;31;23
Nick Powers
Yeah, yeah. It’s incredible. You know, we’ve been on that contract for a while. And the difference between before and now, you know, like not saying things were bad before, but. Sure. But things are even better now. Right. Because of kind of some of the changes that have been made and, you know, continuity in some regard and bringing a lot of that expertise that those new guys, but they also have a ton of capability.

00;32;31;23 – 00;32;37;28
Nick Powers
They have a lot of upside capability that it’s made it a lot, a lot better. It’s exciting.

00;32;38;00 – 00;32;39;22
Joel Ives
It is. Yeah.

00;32;39;25 – 00;32;41;11
Nick Powers
What else do you need?

00;32;41;13 – 00;32;47;07
Joel Ives
Speaking of, to that curveball, what question do you have for Nick?

00;32;47;10 – 00;32;50;21
Nick Powers
Oh, here we go, Miles, to save that for 4:00.

00;32;50;21 – 00;32;55;14
Joel Ives
What?

00;32;55;16 – 00;33;01;07
Joel Ives
So I know a little bit about your background with it. Is that where you started out?

00;33;01;10 – 00;33;31;25
Nick Powers
No. You know, funny enough, I had a, Well. So I’ll say this. I’ve always loved data. Always loved it. And, so from a very early age, for whatever reason, I got, infatuated with the stock market. And so this is the stock market before what we know today, I actually would have to go buy the newspaper and read the tickers and figure out what was going on, and then track, you know, performances of stocks.

00;33;31;25 – 00;33;51;21
Nick Powers
I didn’t have the money to, you know, go get a broker or anything like that. And so but by the time I was 16 and I was, I was doing like a lot of odd jobs and mowing lawns and stuff. I bought my first shares of, publicly traded company. And so it was natural for me, you know, going into college, I wanted to be a stock, I wanted to work on the trading floor.

00;33;51;21 – 00;34;07;13
Nick Powers
I wanted to go to I. It’s funny, is of all the weird things. And I think it was mainly geography driven. You know, at that time, I could have said, I want to work on the New York Stock Exchange. Right. That would have been everybody’s dream, but mine was actually Chicago Board of Trade. I like the cbot.

00;34;07;13 – 00;34;47;25
Nick Powers
I like the commodities trading side of the house. I liked the fact that it was in Chicago. So a 4.5 hours away from where I lived, like I thought that was a achievable goal. Right. And so I went to school. I was a finance econ major, in the school business, that SIUE. And but the thing is, I found out very quickly, we had this very odd congruence of professors because we quite literally had the inventor of the arbitrage calculation for international finance was a professor and SIUE at that time, which is how does that happen?

00;34;47;25 – 00;35;18;26
Nick Powers
Like and the guy was from China, and he developed this whole arbitrage methodology that everybody adopted and, and trading currencies and things like that. And that was his baby. And somehow the guy ends up in Evansville, Illinois. Like, I don’t even understand that. We had a former, deputy, president or I can’t remember. He was a very high level at the Federal Reserve Bank in Saint Louis who, for whatever reason, resigned from the bank and became a professor.

00;35;18;29 – 00;35;44;11
Nick Powers
And so we at that time, we had a guy named Robert Phillips who was from Silicon Valley. We had another guy named, Barney that, he was so good at finance and economics that Enron hired him at Enron’s height, and they moved him to Texas to help them run a bunch of financial modeling. Short story there.

00;35;44;13 – 00;36;15;11
Nick Powers
He saw from the inside how bad things were at Enron when he got there. Stayed long enough, got his stock options, vested him, got out like a year before crashed, like, made his money and came back. So anyway, so here I am going SIUE with this crazy amount of unbelievable people, and I quickly realized I was way out of my league, that my ability to to follow through with this dream, I had about going to the Cbot was probably not a reality.

00;36;15;13 – 00;36;40;12
Nick Powers
But I still pushed forward. And so by the time I was getting ready to graduate with my degree, we had the stock market crash of the early 2000. And all the jobs dried up. And then you also had rapid market consolidation. So you had multiple trading markets all started folding into each other. And so jobs got more and more scarce.

00;36;40;15 – 00;37;01;23
Nick Powers
We had a great company here in Saint Louis called A.G. Edwards that I was kind of lined up to go work for. And they went out of business. They got bought out twice, laid off like a thousand people. It was incredible, like overnight. And so here I am getting ready to graduate. And I said, boy, prospects aren’t looking too great.

00;37;01;26 – 00;37;23;14
Nick Powers
What am I good at? Oh, my dad’s had me writing code since I was 13. Just messing around. Wow. Maybe I should write code for a living. And so I just stayed in an extra year and got a chemist degree, and I was. I was good enough at coding at the time. I got an internship with a friend of mine, and I was writing code that entire year.

00;37;23;14 – 00;37;38;18
Nick Powers
So I was as I was taking the courses to get that degree. I also was actively, professionally writing code for a living, which made things a lot easier because I kind of knew things that other kids didn’t know. And I graduated in five years with two degrees.

00;37;38;21 – 00;37;40;26
Joel Ives
Wow. And that’s pretty cool.

00;37;40;26 – 00;38;11;13
Nick Powers
Just became a programmer. Yeah. Weirdest thing. And then, of course, it you know, the other thing that you look at all the I still don’t fully get everything that happened to get me here today. I will say though, I think having a finance economics background is very unique for someone with a programing acumen, and so it helped me throughout my career, have conversations with executives that IT people don’t have.

00;38;11;16 – 00;38;35;28
Nick Powers
And so I’ve always worked with the C-suite. I’ve always worked with senior level leadership, even a has or Bush as a contractor. I was in, a lot of meetings with planning, meeting and stuff with the masters and things like that, of the brewery that really ran the show. And so, I’ve always been able to have those conversations with folks, you know, dumb down what I do, you know, and also tell them what value I can provide them.

00;38;35;28 – 00;38;51;07
Nick Powers
Right. Because that’s really important. But yeah, somehow, somehow, someway, I made my way here. But, you know, a long time ago, I wanted to be on the CBA floor trading, commodities. So it is what it is.

00;38;51;10 – 00;38;54;19
Joel Ives
So, of course, you you saw that 80s movie Wall Street, right?

00;38;54;20 – 00;38;55;10
Nick Powers
Absolutely.

00;38;55;10 – 00;38;55;26
Joel Ives
Yeah.

00;38;55;29 – 00;38;56;28
Nick Powers
Yeah.

00;38;57;00 – 00;38;59;19
Joel Ives
What was your favorite movie growing up?

00;38;59;21 – 00;39;13;11
Nick Powers
You know, as my kids know and really unfortunately, my wife knows too, because my kids inherited my sense of humor. My favorite movie growing up was UHF with Weird Al.

00;39;13;11 – 00;39;16;18
Joel Ives
Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s a good one.

00;39;16;20 – 00;39;30;29
Nick Powers
Which Weird Al always says. If, was an Indiana Jones, maybe it was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can’t remember which one hadn’t come out that summer. Then UHF would have been the number one movie in the country.

00;39;31;01 – 00;39;31;17
Joel Ives
Yeah.

00;39;31;19 – 00;39;48;17
Nick Powers
But, yeah. Glengarry Glen Ross. So I know that was a Broadway kind of, you know, it was a play before it became a movie. But the movie is epic. It’s an epic, epic movie. I actually got to reenact that scene my senior year with, Alec Baldwin.

00;39;48;20 – 00;39;54;22
Joel Ives
Wow. Finance to acting to engineering.

00;39;54;24 – 00;39;57;26
Nick Powers
It was just one of those things we had to fight. We had a business class.

00;39;57;28 – 00;39;58;12
Joel Ives
Okay?

00;39;58;12 – 00;40;07;22
Nick Powers
And the professor was trying to make a point, and she asked us to act out a scenario. Well, I decided to just go for Glengarry Glen Ross.

00;40;07;22 – 00;40;09;12
Joel Ives
Honor, and. Oh, that’s awesome.

00;40;09;14 – 00;40;15;27
Nick Powers
I took my shoe off and said, you see this shoe? It’s worth more than than your entire living that you make.

00;40;16;00 – 00;40;16;28
Joel Ives
Get into character.

00;40;16;28 – 00;40;20;26
Nick Powers
Let’s hear it. No, no. We’re good. It’s been too long.

00;40;20;28 – 00;40;21;26
Adam Pasch
We got to move to the next one.

00;40;21;29 – 00;40;34;25
Nick Powers
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, but this was fun. No, this was really fun. You know, we don’t get to hang out very often, right? This was cool. Like, I know a lot more about you now, and I’m looking forward to doing some big things with you.

00;40;34;27 – 00;40;35;17
Joel Ives
Thank you Nick.

00;40;35;17 – 00;40;37;22
Nick Powers
Yeah. Appreciate it man. Thank you.