In today’s fast-paced business environment, determining how short-term projects fit into long-term organizational goals may seem daunting. A strategic portfolio management framework is critical for companies looking to align their projects, investments, and resources with their overall business strategy.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) can help organizations consolidate their most pressing business priorities on a single platform. Let’s explore four ways SPM can help streamline your path to success.
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Fred Reynolds
Co-host: Kristen McDonald
Co-host: Becky Whiten
Co-host: Derek Cassese
In today’s fast-paced business environment, determining how short-term projects fit into long-term organizational goals may seem daunting. A strategic portfolio management framework is critical for companies looking to align their projects, investments, and resources with their overall business strategy.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) can help organizations consolidate their most pressing business priorities on a single platform. Let’s explore four ways SPM can help streamline your path to success.
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Fred Reynolds
Co-host: Kristen McDonald
Co-host: Becky Whiten
Co-host: Derek Cassese
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Andy Whiteside: Oh, well, welcome to episode 21 of syncing with service now today is August fourteenth, 2023, and well, I guess guys. Our podcast. Is now legal.
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Andy Whiteside: Better laugh than that. Nothing.
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Andy Whiteside: It's like a dad. I got nothing except my son, my 14 year old son. He laughs at everything. I say
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Fred Reynolds: I can make. I can make milk come out of his nose every night at dinner if I want.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, got a got my group with me, Fred Reynolds. Running the modern apps practice, Fred. How's it going? Very well, how are you, Andy? I am doing well, being back from vacation? I kind of want to go back on vacation. But I do. I do enjoy working. So it's kinda okay.
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Andy Whiteside: I could tell you, do cause you text when you're on vacation, and we talk. So that's right. I've got Derek. Cassie's with the Derek. Derek is new to the modern apps practice. Derek, what's what's your role over there.
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Derek: Yeah.
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Derek: so officially I'm the Vp of modern apps under Fred just joined not too long ago, but like last week. or the week before. You know time is flying right now when you're having fun. Right? So
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Andy Whiteside: well, II set that up because I know you. You called me. Last week we taught someone I was on vacation, and so the first week in a long time, where the week just kind of flew by, and you didn't even know it happened.
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Derek: That is true. Yeah.
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Derek: yeah, I mean, you know. So I you know, I came over. I was at Salesforce for the past 5 years doing some pretty cool stuff but you know it was time for a time for a different
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Derek: approach, because III missed getting out. And you know, talking to humans and seeing customers and solving problems and whiteboarding. It was a little bit of a you know
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Derek: little bit of a change of scenery was required. Right? Well, glad to have you over here. You're gonna have your own podcast on the salesforce side pretty soon. Right? That's right. Yup.
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Fred Reynolds: yep, I gotta train. You say right after everything. Me me and Fred, we just say right after everything Kristin Mcdonalds with Kristen is one of our chief lead solutions. Architect does it all Kristen? How's it going?
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Kristin McDonald: Fantastic? Thank you. Always 50. Mark Twain has a famous bunch of Mark Twain podcast recently, and his comment was, coldest winter ever spent was a summer in San Francisco
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Kristin McDonald: that is accurate
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Kristin McDonald: No
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Kristin McDonald: to give it a shot if he likes it.
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Derek: Dob down.
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Derek: I probably won't be able to walk for like 2 weeks if I do that.
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Andy Whiteside: Alright. So, Becky whiten with us. I get it right.
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Andy Whiteside: I finally got it right, Derek. I've been struggling with Becky White side I keep thinking witten like Jason Witten, the you know the the horrible football player from that, whatever that team is. Yeah, I think we have fighting words when you bring up the cowboys on this one. Becky's on
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Andy Whiteside: Kristen Kristen, are you football fan?
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Kristin McDonald: Not really, although every place I move to the sports teams there wins the Atlanta falcons won the Super bowl when I moved there. The the Tampa Bay. What was it? Lightning one, the hockey Stanley Cup, when I lived there in Florida, of all places. So yeah, everywhere I go.
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Fred Reynolds: I don't want you at all.
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Andy Whiteside: North Carolina heartbeat. I want to see some kind of championship before I die.
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Kristin McDonald: So, Becky, how are you doing
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Becky Whiten: doing good, doing good? It's good born and bred Dallas, native or Texas native. So cowboys, fan
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Becky Whiten: cowboys fan through and through, that is coming
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Andy Whiteside: at least at some point was one or the other.
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Andy Whiteside: Derek, you grew up in the Connecticut area.
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Derek: Yes, I'm originally from Connecticut, and for some reason the growing up. I was an Oakland raiders fan for and I finally found out why is cause I liked? My mom told me I like the the logo. So. But then, when I moved down here, we actually had a football team. I've been a panthers fan. So
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Derek: yeah, I like the way to raiders, dress for the game, so I would go and dress up because they look pretty cool and scary looking, so I like so, and then, ironically. You know what you remember when the panthers were in the Super bowl when we played Peyton Manning when he was at Denver, that weekend was when
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Derek: we had the boys, so I was in the hospital with the the twins were being born during the Super Bowl, so the one time that they were in the super bowl was like with was very memorable.
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Fred Reynolds: So I'm a broncos fan, so that's good full circle for me. So that's when I was a bronco fan always had been. So I had a huge super bowl party with everybody who wanted to be a panthers fan come over for that.
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Fred Reynolds: my super bowl, and I had it obnoxious. Everybody was leaving by like halftime. I don't know why, but
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Derek: yeah, there you go.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, hopefully, Fred, you were a broncos fan back in the really old bad days before we got the one championship that way. You can say you lived the good times and the bad times. Well, we could set it as of last year, so I'm good. Yes. Well, do you remember those days when the Afc. Would play the Nfc. And you just wondered, would it be 30 or 40 or 50 points they would lose by absolutely Dan Marino, maybe the greatest quarterback ever to never win anything.
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Derek: Yeah. Yup.
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Andy Whiteside: alright. So the the blog for today that the team brought forward it's called 4 ways, a strategic portfolio management framework can streamline success. And this is from June 20 seventh of this year.
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Andy Whiteside: Fred, I'll let you speak now, basically about what this means. And then we're going to hand it over to the smart people to help us dive a little deeper. What do you think?
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Fred Reynolds: I think that's great. I think there may be a lot more justice as far as setting this up. But the spm. Application and service now is a lot of what the project space is out of, and the Tom, keep them projects to setups, and I'll just speak quickly, and we can dive into it, because I think all 4 of the points will make through this apply to
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Fred Reynolds: when we taught when we use this and implemented this where the company I was before. You know, we use this to kick off a lot of workflows and tasks associated with what we were trying to achieve in our project. So again, this is to track your time, to set it up, and again you can tie it into your finances, which we did not do. But you can tie into your finances how much time you have associated to all the tasks
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Fred Reynolds: and and spot off multiple tasks to help you get there, and all of it really to help you achieve your business goals. And as many as that can be.
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Andy Whiteside: Hey, Derek, any of your previous experiences, any experience with something like strategic platform management, which, by the way in the service. Now, world acronyms galore so you may hear them. Probably call it Sp on the entire time. So I call it out now as strategic platform management. They're getting experience with this type of platform.
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Derek: No, no, I mean, from a project management platform perspective. I'm kind of curious to learn a little bit about this, because most of most of what I'm used to is just, you know, task tracking, you know. And you know, if you're late, what does it mean? But it doesn't go into prioritizing. It doesn't go into impact of the business. Anything? Nothing like that. Okay. Kristen, I'll let you go first. Why is this important?
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Kristin McDonald: So a lot of people don't know about service nails, project management tool sets, but it it really covers all of the bases in terms of managing projects. Whether you're you're approaching it from a waterfall or an agile or hybrid approaches. We're gonna see here in a minute, but it also actually extends much further. So Fred mentioned the financial components.
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Kristin McDonald: But you can actually track your organizational goals, map those projects to your goals. You can track the actual benefit that was realized from your project. So you're tracking it front to tail head to toe, you know. However, you wanna phrase that and and really tracking the benefits all the way through as well as the costs all the way through.
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Kristin McDonald: It also comes with an ideas portal and demand management so that you can prioritize according to those benefits and get feedback from your employees. So it really is a very comprehensive project management tool set, and not a lot of people are aware of it.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, so so, Becky, I want your take on this, too, but also want to throw out there. First, as you answer this, how important is it that this is part of an overall platform that allows you to do all these other things, then tie it back to project management and financials that are associated with all of that
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Becky Whiten: that's to me. It's huge, in my opinion, because it's all underneath one umbrella. I guess you could say so. You're logged in. You're doing your work into the same instance, and can tie all of your tasks in your time against those particular items. So so it is really good. One other thing I was gonna mention, Kristen pointed it out. About demand id idea and demand. But
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Becky Whiten: what a lot of people don't realize is it allows employees a portal or way to be able to mention something. So whether or not it's
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Becky Whiten: a problem that they found, or something that they think would be good. Go in there they get raided, and then they may turn into projects. And that's a really good way to bring in more employees and more ideas that they may have, or things that might come down the line and be able to look at those overall for the company.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I'll use ourselves as an experience here. We we just moved to yet another product, not a platform, but a product. But even as we made that move, we expect sometime in the next 2 years to have to revisit this and eventually move to spm for Z integral internally, because as we grow as a company and need to have all these pieces touching each other, we know that a product's not gonna get it done. We're gonna need a platform.
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Andy Whiteside: So I'll walk through the the 4 things they have here, and I'll let Kristen and Becky kind of answer them, and then we'll bring it to you guys to kind of bring it up at the at the end Kristen. The first one on here is execute a hybrid approach from top to bottom. What are they covering here?
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Kristin McDonald: Yeah. So this really speaks to project management methodologies. So in order to be effective, you really need to be able to handle the different methodologies that different organizations are utilizing. I think, most individuals who who have been in project management recognize that while agile is a great methodology, it can be very difficult to go full agile at times. So that's why a lot of large organizations have adopted a hybrid approach
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Kristin McDonald: and service now really can handle all 3. It can handle straight waterfall, straight, agile, or that hybrid approach. And that's important, because you need a tool set that is going to work with the way that you work. You don't want to have to conform to the tool set. You want the tool set to to work with your processes
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Fred Reynolds: for that hybrid approach, cause a lot of organizations operate, and silos in that same way. So there's also organization says, Hey, we make our list of things we're going to do for that year. That's very much waterfall. We'll pick those off that list, and where they hits that bar we do it. The interesting thing is, I mean, we operate a lot that Chris, if you remember to pass where we take that list of what need to get done, then we really bring in the service. Now we break down into certain sprints and then build that into our agile method. So we still hit
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Fred Reynolds: the targets, and it still reported back in their waterfall that they might see if it start and done. But the truth is, we did it more an agile methodology. So I think I would approach this neat because you can actually, without complicating things, report back to the different organizations and business us in the format that they wish
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Andy Whiteside: and kristen. You just did a project for one of our customers did waterfall versus agile, and the need to be able to do both simultaneously. I guess it's kind of hard to say agile waterfalls. The ability to do all the above did. That was that part of their requirements. They actually utilize all 3 methodologies, so they have a portion of their portfolio that is waterfall. Strictly, they have a portion that is hybrid only.
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Andy Whiteside: and they also have a small portion that is strictly agile. So they actually needed all 3. Yeah. Interesting, Becky. Any any experiences that align with topic one here
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Becky Whiten: kind of the same thing as Kristen had mentioned there. So lots of people usually have more than just one approach. That's needed. So it is great that
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Becky Whiten: Service now does allow for all of those to be tracked
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Andy Whiteside: awesome.
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Andy Whiteside: Alright number 2 alignment with business objective. I think this might tie into the previous one. But Becky, you wanna jump on this one?
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Becky Whiten: Sure. So along with the the projects that are out there, there's the ability to list out what the business objectives are, and to try to make sure that you're aligning to what those objectives
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Andy Whiteside: are for that particular project. So on the actual project record, there is a lot of information that can be stored there and reviewed. And there's different approval processes that it could go through. If you would like to make sure that all of your team members are on board and making sure that you're following exactly what you need to do
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Andy Whiteside: if we have it in this platform using this workflow.
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Andy Whiteside: How easy is it to go back later and re review what happened? How we got to a decision?
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Kristin McDonald: Hmm!
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Becky Whiten: You can go right back and take a look at that and look at the approval process. Look at all of the different
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Becky Whiten: people that were involved, or the different departments as well, and be able to see all of that.
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Becky Whiten: So doing, a health.
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Becky Whiten: And and then they roll up as well so it could be multiple projects. That you're looking at as well.
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Fred Reynolds: I was just, I think this goes just as much as we have. We've talked about through all these podcasts, how much is really about the buy in and the leadership behind. Some of these things I mean the principle behind business objectives is, who's driving those objectives? And now you have a tool that can deliver and make sure that you meet those objectives and dashboards and things that can report all that it's really
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Fred Reynolds: getting that information. Make sure to follow the process sees to lead you to lead you to those business objectives. So I think that's an important thing to to to succeed in rolling out something like spm is. Understand what those business objectives are, and then measure into the success of those.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, Derek, I know it hadn't been that long since you came out of customer world. Do you guys have something like this? How valuable would it have been
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Derek: would have been
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Derek: extremely valuable to make sure that you're actually working on something that's, you know, beneficial and impactful. So
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Derek: yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: and along the way your management was seeing it and having to approve and sign off on things. So there was no recourse. If things didn't go
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Andy Whiteside: the right way. They were there all along through the platform.
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Derek: Yeah, I mean, that's really important.
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Andy Whiteside: Krista, anything else to cover on number 2 here?
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Kristin McDonald: Actually, yes, there's so much, it's hard to cover at all in one podcast but this going into the business objectives. You know, we talked about the ability of service now to track your organizational goals.
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Within those organizational goals. You can map those to your individual projects.
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Kristin McDonald: and then, after the project is completed, you can also continue tracking those metrics so that you can see if you actually got the expected Roi out of those individual projects, and then you can take that back and and look at your financials of the projects against the Roi and do analysis on that. I think actually, the next bullet point might actually get into some of that.
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Andy Whiteside: How much you got out of it. That's gotta be important. How does this tool help us do that?
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Kristin McDonald: Well, you can track both monetary and non monetary benefits against each of your projects and what you're expected to gain. You can tie those in with your overall organizational goals and specific goals.
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And in addition, if you're using service now as the platform for running your business, which it absolutely can. As we know.
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Kristin McDonald: you actually have the ability to automate the capture of those metrics to see if you're gaining the Roi benefit that you're actually expecting to see, and you don't have to go in and manually pull up information. You don't have to do manual calculations. You can actually automate the capture of those metrics to see if you're hitting your Roi targets. It's very powerful
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Fred Reynolds: as opposed to, I think the way most organizations run projects. I mean, you've heard of power sorry Microsoft projects and other tools like that is very niche. But it's it's really based on a particular project. And I think that's the neat thing about this is a platform is that you're you're analyzing this against everything you're doing. Maybe as a business unit, or as a group, or your project managers in general. How are you doing as a whole? And I think, get into the details as to
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Fred Reynolds: time spent. I guess a particular. I say story because I have a particular item that you're trying to address. And are you exceeding the hours you're supposed to spend that error expanding that exceeding the hours you're supposed to do for a project, you know, those days can be noted. And and made aware, a lot sooner in the process of the tool knows what you're going for.
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Andy Whiteside: It's it's real time.
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Andy Whiteside: It's real time. Right, Becky. Have you seen this in action before
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I have. So it is.
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Derek: as Chris mentioned, a very powerful tool again, not just one particular area, but it can go across and span, which is really nice. So that's kind of interesting, right? I mean, I've worked on projects before where
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Derek: you know it's really difficult. Sometimes you get so far away from the endgame, and it's really difficult to quantify the impact that, however many hours you spent on whatever it is you're building had.
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Derek: It's kind of interesting to see that. You know, this could be something that really helps correct that issue right where you can see your direct impact on the effort that you're putting forth to a project
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Becky Whiten: and unfortunately, not everybody really understands what all that it can do and so
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Becky Whiten: that's why we're doing these podcasts.
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Kristin McDonald: Eric, in your past experience, fair to say you did the best you could and where you could, where you had gaps, you just made stuff up what with business value?
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Derek: Yeah, I mean, I would. I would. I don't know about making stuff up, but I think that what you what we could say is that we say what we believe at the point that we're saying it right? And so. yeah, so
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Kristin McDonald: yeah, do you think it's fair to say some people make stuff up.
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Derek: That's probably fair. There's more value. And taking the data and the details and the actuals back to sea levels to show you. Hey, this is what we were doing, and I have proof and experience in that. Taking advantage of. Here's the reality. And, by the way, we got a little bit of project overrun. And here's what we can point it back to this particular area. And therefore you have a lot more intelligent conversations about how to move things forward when it's not on the positive side.
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Kristin McDonald: and it also really helps with continual improvement. You know, if if you're expecting to get this value from this project. And you look at the actuals and you're saying, oh, we didn't actually get that value. Well, what was the problem? Did the project go over. And why did it go over? Well, maybe this one particular area was overrun. Well, we can see that, and we can make adjustments for that in the estimates next time. Or maybe it was. It was
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Kristin McDonald: higher risk than what you initially thought. And again, you can take those metrics. Take that information after the fact in your post-mortem and apply that to the future, so that you're making better decisions, better estimates, better judgments going forward.
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Kristin McDonald: Yeah, that that old address. Time is money, and we need to get get better all the time, and it all applies here. No doubt, Becky, how does this empower the workforce bullet number 4.
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Becky Whiten: well, it helps to make sure that everybody is aligned. So all of the people that are working in the platform can go into there and
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Becky Whiten: put in their information. So it brings in whether it's different departments depending upon what the project is. Can all go in and
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Becky Whiten: fill in information or their information. And then you've got one spot to look at it. So it really helps everyone to come in and align onto that particular project or projects
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Andy Whiteside: to be able to see. Is it fair to say that if you own a project or you're managing a project, not having a tool like this would be almost impossible to do it right.
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Becky Whiten: I usually yes, so and I think service now is done really good at at bringing all the tools available. So not only just, you know about the project and your objectives, and all of your goals and
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Becky Whiten: and approvals, and the different people that will be involved in project managers and business managers and all of those types of things. But also once it goes into a project, you know.
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Becky Whiten: it can go into the story pieces. So then your development team is doing different things into their project. Managers are making sure that they're running and they're getting the data that is needed, and to go back to the customer, to, you know whatever department, and let them know whether it's an internal project or external project, and know how things are being ran and what's being done weekly, and where your hours were being spent and so forth. So everything is just basically there for you, which is really nice.
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Andy Whiteside: Kristen. How part of how big a part of the last project you did was this, was this for the customer.
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Kristin McDonald: It's incredibly important. One of the key areas for them or key pain points really is the fact that people working projects are not just working projects. These people are working requests. They're working incidents. They're working different task types across the platform. So to give them a central place where they can go and see all of their tasks, all of the things assigned to them. Work those things all in one central place
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Kristin McDonald: that was super important and just to add a bit more to that. One thing service now does really well is give a different viewpoint for different types of employees. So you've got the employees who are actually working the task, getting out there, doing the work, entering their time. But then for the project, managers, you've also got a central place where they can go to manage all of their projects. They can see all of their statuses, all of their risks, issues their rid act logs.
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Kristin McDonald: One place to enter status reports for the management team. You've got one place to go to see your dashboards to get an overview of how all of your Pmo is functioning, and where all of your projects stand. And then for the executive level, you've got your strategic planning, Workspace, where you can see how your projects are aligning to your organizational goals. Are you meeting those Roi's? Are you gaining the benefit from your project? So it really empowers all levels of the workforce.
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Andy Whiteside: Is it is it fair to say that this also encourages like uniformity between your projects and your people?
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Kristin McDonald: Hmm. Absolutely
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Andy Whiteside: sorry. 52. And
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Becky Whiten: I was just gonna add on to kind of what Kristen was saying sometimes as your development team and your project managers, and they'd be working more than one project. And so if you're looking, and that
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Becky Whiten: your personnel needs to work on a sprint and needs to spend 40 h, you can't really assign them on another project for 40 h. There's no way that it's gonna work. And so there's also a tool to be able to take a look at your people and be able to see kind of what all that they have and the hours that they might have available for that week for what they've already kind of committed to. And so it's it's really nice to help align that as well.
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Fred Reynolds: And we didn't touch on that skills, math and resource mapping and those type things was a big part of that as well. But look overall the empowered workforce. I wanna state this. I'm looking at Derek. And I look at Derek, I think salesforce, which is funny. I wanna service. Now, Podcast, the truth is empowered to workforce service. Now, can do a lot of things that a lot of other applications, and even salesforce, to do, and same to be said about others. But the truth is.
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Fred Reynolds: where I think about service down power in the workforce is that if we're doing projects out of service now, there's a lot of other tools and platforms that come into play with that, even from the sales motion Salesforce may have a sales motion to get it to a certain point, it kicks off a project within that project. It may mean somebody has to go do some some work. So it creates tasks. So it's that tying all the organizations together, even if they're in different systems through those integrations and making it work together and notifying.
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Fred Reynolds: And then we use some knowledge articles and notifications as a core platform and all that can be used, Andy, to make sure to everybody's brought up speed. It doesn't mean everybody has to be in that application or platform and others. It just means it's tied it together. Make sure everybody's aware.
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Andy Whiteside: but it's not a mist. It's not an accident that we have the service. Now platform. We have the salesforce platform. And in many, many cases we're gonna find the 2 platforms coming together to create the workflows that the customer needs to get the job done as things move from maybe a sales to a different type of project and back and forth. That's what we think makes us special, even though the rest of the world telling us you can't do both.
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Fred Reynolds: Well, if you have an onboarding project that you sold, someone is sold through sales, I mean from A, from, even from a managed services. Where we come from we sold a customer something. We go and create the project and service. Now we own board, then we do everything into the seeming to be. We build all this to to manage, and you go back into salesforce and tell them that is finished. And this is what the in State looks like. Then I know what the the customers landscape was like. Usually they're in 2 different places, but now you can tie them together to help the sales motion and continue support and delivery side.
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Andy Whiteside: So there's a good use case for salesforce and service. Now, Derek, any thoughts on this whole conversation around empowered workforce.
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Derek: No, I mean, it's almost like my comment before was very similar to that right? I mean.
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Derek: it's a there's a there's a change in the Psyche, in my opinion. And I'm speaking from experience. When you had, when you.
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Derek: when you really understand that what you're doing is impactful. And when you understand that you're in alignment with what the business is trying to accomplish and
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Derek: without that right, you can start to feel
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Derek: like you're hidden. Unseen. People don't know what you're doing and it can get frustrating. So I think that these tools, which is why I was interested to see what this was about are
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Derek: are really needed. II think, especially in a lot of the more complex projects and things that people are working on.
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Andy Whiteside: I mean you. You gotta be able to think and justify at least yourself. Maybe your management, maybe your company. You know what you're doing at this very moment
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Andy Whiteside: throughout the course of a week, a month, a day hour how it applies to the business, and this seems like a tool to kind of help justify that
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Andy Whiteside: Becky. Anything we left out.
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Becky Whiten: Oh, tense! But
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Becky Whiten: it would be like a whole demo or discussion. So there's just lots more to it. So it's what I would say I got is this part of the service. Now, core, is this extra like, what is this?
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Derek: It's extra. It's extra okay.
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Derek: and then I had another question, is there any AI inter woven in this tool
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Derek: yet? Or thoughts about that? I'm just curious.
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Kristin McDonald: So service now does have machine learning and AI interwoven into the overall platform. They're still rolling it out to some of the different tool sets right now. We see it mostly in itsm and Itom areas. But I fully expect to see more coming within. Spm, yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: So, Derek, you see, I've got the service now paid like if you just look through workflows, and then all the different products per workflow. I don't know if you've got a chance to do that yet or not. But that's kind of how I get my head around. Okay, what's the what's the you got the platform? And then the workflows, and then the sub components within the workflows.
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Derek: Yes.
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Kristin McDonald: there's a lot of similarities to what I've been living for the past 5 years. But yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: Kristen, Becky said, we didn't cover nearly enough. What do you think?
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Kristin McDonald: Oh, gosh! It would take a long time to cover. But I do think we hit the high points. Yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: Brad, was there anything you want to cover that we didn't cover?
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Fred Reynolds: No, I think I hit the main things I wanted to articulate. So I think we're good. But I did have one thing I'd like to share. Can I share something?
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Fred Reynolds: Make sure it's not disabled.
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Fred Reynolds: Sits in the overall scheme of service. Now, okay, another point.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, it's it's talk to us. And let us figure out what you're really trying to do, and where different pieces fit. And chances are
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Andy Whiteside: there's lots of pieces of the platform that you need. And it's another great example. I think Fred might have been last. Podcast maybe we're all. Maybe you weren't. But we were talking about the number of applications you were able to collapse down into the service. Now, Platform, I think they gave you 200, and you found 70 that could be eliminated through the platform, and customer was ecstatic. To find something they wanted really badly could be justified, paid for by reduction in other products. If you're if you're talking to a vendor these days about a product, not a platform
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Andy Whiteside: probably need to stop and figure out if there's a platform to do what you're trying to do.
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Kristin McDonald: then go back to your product discussion. If there's not
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Andy Whiteside: Derek, think about that comment.
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Derek: Oh, yeah, II agree wholeheartedly.
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Andy Whiteside: But you're probably not be surprised. Find a lot of our customers are still talking product after product after product. It's insane. But that's why we're here educating.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, guys, thank you. I appreciate you jumping on and having this discussion, and I'll look forward to doing again in 2 weeks.
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Kristin McDonald: Awesome. Thank you. I'm good. Thank you.