Right Team, Right System, Right Infrastructure: How to Lead a Network Modernization Project

All right.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another Atlas webinar.

We are thrilled to have you here, and we are very thrilled to have our vendor partners at METER provide some great content.

METER team is joined by John Adams from the Rivers School.

And a shameless plug, the METER team is going to be at the Atlas Annual Conference.

They are a huge supporter of the work we do.

Really couldn't put together all of this programming without the support of our vendor partners.

So we're very grateful for METER.

Make sure if you have any questions and you're planning on attending the conference, take some notes and go find them at their booth.

But without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to John Adams to talk about Right Team, Right System, Right Infrastructure: How to Lead a Network Modernization Project.

Thanks so much, Kelsey.

I'm really pumped to be giving this presentation today.

Over the last couple of years, Atlas has just been such a great benefit to me and the rest of the school.

I've just felt like through the conference, the podcast, the webinars I've joined, and then the conversations I've had with people in between the conferences, folks I've met at the conference, I feel like there's just so much Atlas brings to the table.

The community's great, and I've really sort of been a taker over these last couple of years, and I really want to use this webinar as an opportunity to give back and sort of keep the spirit of Atlas, which I think of as folks sharing their stories and experiences, not as a means to saying, "You must do this," or "This is the only way to do it," or "These companies are the ones you should or shouldn't go with." But just as a way to continue the conversation around what it looks like to lead a technology team and in the spirit of sharing ideas.

So I really appreciate all the folks for hopping on today to watch, and those folks that are going to watch this recording, I appreciate you taking the time to do so.

So with that, I want to start off at a place that's a little bit different than networking or technology.

I started my teaching career at the Dublin School.

It's a wonderful small boarding school in southern New Hampshire.

Amazing place to start my career.

And I actually went to there after working in a sales organization at a best practice research and consulting firm.

But when I was at Dublin School, one of the things that you did as a faculty member was if you were on weekend duty, every third weekend, you were responsible for working with eight to 10 students in what they called work gang.

And my group was the Wood Gang, and what we were responsible for doing is chopping wood for two and a half hours throughout the whole year.

And why I'm bringing this up is because this was not a punishment.

This was not something just a small segment of the population did, both on the student and the adult side, but this was something that the whole community was involved with in different capacities.

So we were chopping wood while other people were cleaning the trails.

Other people were picking up things around campus, a whole host of things to really live by, as you see part of their mission there, that meaningful work, discipline, and not just doing that for yourself, but doing that for the whole community.

And so after we chopped the wood and stacked it up there, there were people later in the year that were making maple syrup, selling maple syrup to the whole community, outside of the Dublin community.

So one of the things that's going to be sort of themed throughout this, as the title suggests, is things that we do at schools are not in isolation, and this really gave me a good insight into that right at the early part of my career.

That something seemingly small where you're chopping wood and stacking it with a group of students actually is very connected to the overall mission of the school and things that are going on.

And so when I ended up doing a network upgrade, I'm able to look backward and make this connection, and certainly didn't expect to have this connection when I was there with the students chopping wood.

But just to step back a little bit, my name, as has been said, is John Adams.

I'm Director of Technology and Innovation at the Rivers School.

Rivers is a 6 through 12 independent day school, just about 25 minutes west of Boston, although I used to live in Cambridge, and sometimes the drive was like an hour.

So I started my career as just a teacher and coach.

So I've coached cross-country skiing and lacrosse.

I'm a math teacher.

I still actually teach one statistics course and a 10th grade STEM seminar in data science, and learning how to tell stories with data.

And then I'm a technology leader.

I started my technology work in 2019 as Director of Academic Technology, and then when the pandemic hit, that workload became a little bit more, as you may expect.

And then I started to work outside of just the academic space, but also with our operations of the school to make sure that we are really strategically incorporating technology in all that we do, not just on the academic side.

And then in 2024, which-- And I'll talk about this a little bit further.

In 2024, transitioned to being Director of Technology and Innovation, so actually being in the technology office.

So I really want to make sure that you go away from this webinar thinking critically about what you have to do in your department, and also just make it really clear what the takeaways are.

So I'll come back to this slide a few times.

But the first thing is, is to put people first.

And it's always worth remembering as we get into the weeds of all the things associated with the technology office and the things we have to do, is that we're here for the students, and we want to provide the best possible service to everyone in the community and really be strategic partners with the folks that go to school here and that work here.

And you may think people first in these realms only, but alsoLeading a department, you really need to make sure you have the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins would say in his famous book, "Good to Great." And you also need to make sure that the structure of that group is such that you're able to maximize everyone's talents and maximize the time that everyone puts in.

And then the second big piece is just keep learning.

It sounds a little bit cliché.

It's pretty easy.

But we are a learning institution, and no matter what school you work at.

And so it's really important that we model that learning process, and especially now with technology just evolving so quickly and so many different tools available to us, we just really have to always be focused on learning.

And hopefully, you see some of those stories to model this throughout.

But like I said before, I've learned so much from the Atlas community, so connecting with others is a huge way to do that.

And shout out to the Atlas conference coming up in a couple of weeks and leveraging all the resources that Atlas has available and just the breadth of resources that are out there.

And like I said before, the connection here, just got to keep swinging the axe.

It could seem overwhelming and daunting, but every little thing you do piles up, and you never know when you're going to use those different things that you're learning.

And AI is actually a really powerful tool when used effectively for leading a technology team and making sure we can accomplish all that we need to accomplish.

And then the other big thing is knowing your system.

So this presentation, like I said, is not necessarily just to say you have to do this because it happened within the context of Rivers.

I think there are definitely parallels that can be applied across different schools, but you really have to know your system well to think through various things that you're doing.

And at the very least, understand your school mission and core values, ah, and understand the strategic priorities of the school.

In some instances, that's really well laid out.

At Rivers right now, we have a brand-new strategic plan, so I really understand that.

But in other times in my career, that wasn't quite as well articulated.

And so you've got to make the effort to understand your school's strategic priorities.

And of course, consider what implications are for things that you're doing, because, as I'll talk through more in a bit, everything that we do is connected.

And so we really need to put in the effort to understand who's impacted by the various things that we do and be willing to adapt because things are constantly changing.

So to make sure that those key takeaways are driven home throughout the presentation, I'm going to first talk about the organizational reality that I faced when I came into the leadership position of the department.

And then talk through mainly the first year.

I've been in this role for now two years almost.

But mainly talk about the first year and some of the critical questions that we wanted to answer during that first year.

And then consider the technology department, not just as we're buying these tools or we're trying to make these upgrades to various systems, but really think through as an entire structure, and then drill down a little bit farther to walk through sort of how some of those things in the first three acts played out specifically for the network.

It certainly wasn't the only thing we did in that first year, but was obviously one of the larger things that we took on that year, and so going to talk through how those things apply to the network.

And again, revisit the things that we just talked about to leave you with something that you can apply right away and take question and answers.

With that said, I teach, and one of the things we talk about in the Math department here at Rivers is if we talk for more than 10 minutes, we jokingly say, or sometimes not such a joke, that the kids can just walk out, because we shouldn't be just lecturing at them the whole time.

So I really would welcome any questions that you have.

So feel free to interrupt me, whether that's through the chat or chiming in.

And I think others can help navigate some of those questions that come in throughout.

But want to start out with talking about the organizational reality for me at Rivers.

So like I said, I took over or I started in this position in July of '24.

And what I knew was coming ahead was that fall, we were going to finish our accreditation process or reaccreditation process.

The AZNE Visiting Committee was coming to campus.

So we were sort of finishing up a backwards-looking exploration of the school.

And then also during that year, taking a really diligent approach as a school to looking towards the future and figuring out how to redefine or make revisions to our mission, our core values, and then design a strategic plan.

Because the fall of '25, we would launch that strategic plan.

And so I really wanted to make sure that we were prepared to take action and be ready to dive in once those strategic priorities landed.

So obviously, I didn't know what those were going to be at the time, but I did know that this was the roadmap coming forward.

Our head of school and leadership had done a good job reminding us about this timeline.

And so I think it actually was a perfect time to join the technology department because we are sort of in that transition phase, and it allowed us to really make sure that we could hone our approach to the fundamentals.

So first and foremost, making sure we had a really strong team, making sure that we understood what our responsibilities are, understand the process that we want to go through, and making sure that we're organized in how we're going about things.

And then also make sure that our core infrastructure was in a place, again, to really attack the strategic plan and not be sort of cleaning up as we really want to take on other initiatives and other folks around campus want to take on those initiatives.

So to drill down a little bit further into each of those buckets, the first thing that I wanted to do on the team front was to make sure that we had standards for how we're going to operate.

So the school has a mission.

It's everyone's responsibility at the school to work towards fulfilling that mission.

I wanted in our department to have something a little bit more tangible without writing our own department mission, but something very tangible that was like, these are the things that we want to hold ourselves accountable to, whether we're answering a service ticket, delivering a new computer to someone as they started working at Rivers, or giving a presentation during a training session, and anything in between.

These are the things we want to hold ourselves accountable to.

And this list of thingsWas generated organically through a couple meetings with the group, and then we ran them by-- the group being our technology department and then ran them by our CFO, head of school, and also worked closely with our director of equity and engagement to make sure that there were through lines between these items and the mission of the school and what the school values.

So this has then allowed us to, right after that, launch a goal-setting structure, which is famous from John Doerr's, "Measure What Matters." He's written a book about it.

I think a lot of tech companies use this goal-setting structure.

John Doerr worked at Intel for a number of years.

So we didn't have a goal-setting structure.

So another like leadership thing that was pretty cool for me was like, I sort of have like an entrepreneurial spirit and can sort of launch this and see what it's like to try to launch a goal-setting structure with a team that really hadn't had that before.

So because we had these standards and now we had objectives that are sort of the big picture things we want to solve, and then those like don't change that much.

But then the key results are the things we need to do that are more measurable, that help us work towards those objectives.

So we do those quarterly.

We have one-on-one meetings, both at the beginning and the end of the quarters to sort of follow up on those.

Obviously, with a small team of five people, we're meeting individually pretty regularly on a more informal basis.

But these really allow us to start to get our processes in place to be a little bit more efficient as a team.

And then, like I said before, we just need to keep learning, learning, learning throughout that first year to attack these objectives.

But, like you folks know who are joining this call, there's a million different things that we could possibly do.

So, and especially, new in a role, you're kind of like maybe in hyper-focus on that.

You're like, oh, so excited, and there's like 1,000 things, but really we want to make sure like what change is truly needed, especially the context of that year, knowing that we were leading up to that strategic plan, like what change is truly needed, and how fast can that change be achieved.

Because we knew that this was coming down the road.

Obviously we didn't know what this picture was going to look like, but this is now what we have as our sort of launch for the mission, the core values and the strategic plan.

So, what I did as part of this, I used this, answering those questions or working toward answering those questions as a way to model the standards that we had built.

So I think leadership by example, the age-old phrase, is really, really important.

And so, to model some of those things that were on the previous slide, like I ask a ton of questions.

Even though I've been at Rivers for nine years, a change in title does not mean you know everything, and you know more than anyone on your team, especially my group has been here for quite a while, so, I just had to ask tons of questions.

And in fact, just a couple days ago, I had one of the guys on my team in here chatting with me, and he said, "You know, I didn't get along with you.

I didn't like you too much when you first started because you just asked so many darn questions.

But then I came to realize that you weren't trying to like, get on me.

You were just trying to really learn and understand what we were doing." And so that being just a couple of weeks ago actually was pretty awesome for me to hear because, one, it signaled that I had created a space where he recognized my genuine curiosity for what we're doing and trying to up my skills with what the department does, but also that he could feel comfortable telling me that.

I thought that was pretty great.

So, it's good to have some of these quick wins throughout your career, even if they're really small.

The other big piece is cross-functional learning.

So like I said before, like thinking about the whole system, it's really important that we're not just so hunkered down in the tech office, but really expanding out.

So having individual meetings with senior administrators across campus, making sure that we're-- at one point, even earlier on in my career, would station myself in the language office or in the science office for like a good week, two weeks to just see what's happening.

But that's really, really important to make sure you're getting out, having those conversations, maybe sitting at lunch a little bit longer.

Upping my skills when it came to constructive and firm negotiations, or as I like to think of just having difficult conversations.

I'm going to spend a little bit more time on that later.

And then taking a step back and understanding like, what are we actually trying to solve here? Because you can really start to get into the weeds.

And so trying to reframe problems as you have that, ask people a bunch of questions, start to learn about the whole organization, and then really try to synthesize that information, find connections, because we can't do it all, both from a people standpoint, money standpoint, time standpoint.

So where are those places that we can find connections? And I think most importantly, too, you have to show some humility.

I came from more of an education background into leading the technology team.

So like I said, I can't just come in and pretend like I know everything that's going on or-- and I think what my team really appreciates is my willingness to ask questions, my willingness to admit that I don't understand something, and that I can make mistakes and admit those and ask for constructive feedback and work through those mistakes.

Because again, the goal here is try to model our standards to not just build my own credibility with the team, but more importantly, make sure that our team is working the best we possibly can.

So that's sort of how I started to begin this process, and I knew this had to like go really fast, because at Rivers, in October, you need to submit to the CFO any major increases to the budget for the following year.

So a lot of the things that I just showed you on that slide were being done in the July, August, and September timeframe.

And what I found was very quickly learned, we had a lot of aging hardware, and some of you may be in the same boat or maybe you're not, but, we certainly were, especially on the network, the phones, and the printers.

And on top of that, we had very little to no documentation on any of those things.

So, if I were to sayWhere are the access points in the science building? There was no documentation.

We didn't have model numbers, anything.

And so, yeah, that was obviously a glaring issue.

The other thing I started to recognize is there was little redundancy in terms of the overlapping skills of people in the department.

And so with a team of five, on the one hand, we definitely do want people to own things, but we also have to make sure that there's shared skills so that if someone's gone or people are needing support in certain areas, that we're able to provide that, but with more than one person.

And that became particularly glaring when it came to the network, because we were being totally reactive when it came to issues with the network.

So we would rely on someone saying, "Oh, the network is down in this building." And then when we went to go investigate that, we had multiple dashboards that were hard to navigate.

Really only one person was accessing those dashboards and had no outside support unless we paid a bunch of money to have sort of consultants come in and help us.

So, that was sort of one example where I was like, "Wow, we definitely have some things that we need to improve upon." So before we dove into, or as we began to think through answering those critical questions or dealing with those issues that became apparent, I think it's really important to remember that, as I keep repeating and as in the title, that we are a part of the whole school.

And I visited or watched a webinar earlier this year from Dr.

Marquees Scott from Lawrenceville.

That one was titled "Leading Through Complexity: A System Thinking Approach for School Leaders." And one of the things he mentioned was talking about our schools as living organisms.

And so, of course, this is obviously built with AI, but my inputs here I think really help show that the messiness of the system.

I'm actually quite particular when it comes to slides and like them to be organized and not too much text so that you're listening and not just reading the slides.

But in this one, actually, the confusing nature of this image is actually intentional because our schools are confusing.

They're constantly changing.

There's a lot of things that are interconnected.

And so when we're bringing on new tools, small or large, we need to be thinking about this system, and we need to do our homework to make sure we understand where these lines are for each of those.

And obviously, as I'll talk about in a bit, the network is one that clearly relates to all these things in a pretty significant way.

So really understanding, doing the work to make sure you can understand this living organism that is your school is just so critical to evaluating tools.

And it goes not only as you see here, it relates to strategic goals, the teams, and then all those other things that you see on this picture.

But obviously, that webinar I watched was after this whole process and sort of-- But I think it really helped frame some of the things that we had been thinking about or how we are approaching that work throughout that year prior to our strategic plan.

So let's drill down a little bit farther here and just look specifically at modernizing our network.

So, as I mentioned before, one of the bigger buckets was the network, and these were also connected, though, because we weren't just looking at the network in this first one, but we were also looking at it across those other two as well.

And so we wanted to, instead of looking at the phones and printers first, we wanted to take on the biggest-- The thing that connected across campus the most.

Obviously, printers and phones do, but I would argue that the network has the biggest impact on the school.

Certainly, if there's any issues with that or the security around that, it's obviously, it goes without saying that that's a huge component of the school's technology footprint.

And so we really broke it down into four different stages.

Although the first one, we had to document what we had.

We didn't have any of that.

So the first order of business was like, "What do we have?" And I'll talk about more of that in a second.

But the second two are listed sort of as this visual shows, like that we did the research and then we pitched and negotiate.

But in actuality, I would like there to be like a circle there or like a wheel with arrows, where those things were just constantly going on throughout the whole process, all the way from the fall to when we eventually chose the company that we're going to go with, Meter, in, I believe it was late May.

So it was a pretty extensive process.

So I'm going to talk through each of these by themselves.

The first one is documenting the current stack and started just taking a tour.

So I'm new to the department.

I'm like, "Where are the components to the network?" And we walked around campus and started to-- During that, again, asking loads of questions.

Trying to familiarize myself, have as much knowledge as I possibly could to be able to continually ask better questions and continually dive deeper into what the current standing is and start to think through what are potential fixes to this and organize that and start to do so.

Organize all of what you see here.

Organize who are we working with, who are the different vendors at play right now, and put together a shared drive.

This shared drive also, outside of the network, was something that we had to set up.

There was, again, similar to the goals, there wasn't really a structured place where we were keeping information about the technology office.

So this combined with that effort as well.

So now we have a very clear structure for how we organize things within a shared drive.

And the network material at that point was living in the shared drive in Google Sheets.

But thenAs I began to think about the pitching and negotiation to our CFO and head of school who don't have as much of a technology background, had to make a visualization that explained the network, both what you see here in terms of what we had, how it was laid out, how things are connected, where the things that are end of life, what's going to be end of life down the road, where does the speed get sort of narrowed or lessened because of the hardware within the chain.

And so, a Google sheet was certainly not going to make that pitch for me.

So, this Lucidchart, as maybe rough as it was, there was very clear, like these red devices are at end of life and need to be replaced.

But that was really important part of the process.

And then throughout the process, and the Meter folks will certainly tell you this, but their research was just like you have to be relentlessly curious, particularly when it comes to something as large as the network.

You have to send loads of emails to all the vendors you're working with, set up calls, ask questions, do your homework when it comes to what things your community is saying about this.

In this case, the network, asking my advisory group, having meetings across campus, listening to what people want more out of the network, and more out of what they can do in different spaces and what they can't do.

And also make sure that I'm constantly with my team.

This was definitely not a one-person operation, but in the spirit of leveraging everyone's expertise, really trying to make sure that you're creating enough of an environment where people are sharing their ideas, bringing their different insights to the table so that you can really dive into all your potential options.

And also leverage the Atlas community.

In fact, when I was at the Atlas conference last year, after one of the presentations, I went up to Ally and Ty Campbell, and they were so gracious to spend even more time.

I think it might have even been the last day of the conference where sometimes folks are ready to get out of there.

And, I brought up how we were exploring network options, and they were like, "You definitely need to make sure Meter's another one you consider.

Don't end the process without checking them out." So, yeah, that continued research, and we had already been looking at options since the fall, like I said.

So, you just got to keep doing your homework.

And the Atlas community, and I really thank Ally and Ty for their help and guidance.

And then just outside of meeting with other people, you got to look at all the spec sheets, look at the costs, read articles, both about the devices, about the industry as a whole, that we are just sort of constantly doing that, I think.

Yeah, I might have even gone maybe a little bit overboard on that front.

Particularly, I'll admit with Meter, because they're a newer company, I've just really felt like such pressure to get this right.

New in my role, don't have a networking background.

And so this one I really, really leaned on heavily to make sure that I got to be able to defend my process.

And the way to do that is to make sure the research was really buttoned up and just continuous.

The next big piece that I think is just really important, not only for procuring something as large as a network, but just in general as a person working at a school and leading other folks, is understanding how to negotiate.

And oftentimes people think negotiation is just about getting the lowest price or hammering the guy at the car dealership to keep getting the price lower and lower and being super aggressive.

But really what it comes down to is more just about having difficult conversations.

And there's plenty of times where you're going to have those as a leader, whether that's trying to, in my case, convince the head of school and the CFO that we needed to have this increase in the budget, or having conversations with members of my team about potentially going away from a brand that we had used for a number of years, and they were really familiar with, and anything in between.

And so, some of the sort of general tips that I think about during these difficult conversations is, yes, you have place to talk and make it clear what you're looking to get.

But like I said before, the preparation is so important.

You have to do your preparation before you have a difficult conversation.

You can't just go in and wing these things, even if it's a small one.

Just a conversation with the team before I jump in.

My office is separate physically from the rest of the guys.

And so even before I go over there, I might just jot a few notes down or just take a second to think through what I want to say.

And then listening is key.

You want to try to extract as much information as people as possible, and you're going to do that by listening and empathizing and repeat listening.

Which is a bit awkward because now I'm talking for however long I've been going on for.

But in a negotiation, listening is key and really making sure that you're understanding the other person that you're negotiating with.

And then also, even beforehand, know the style of the person you're negotiating with.

So when I talk to the CFO, I know he is very analytical.

He likes working with his spreadsheets.

He likes, obviously, the numbers.

And so that definitely plays into how I'm going to pitch him, which is different than how I may pitch someone else.

So like I said before, when I was thinking about working with the initial pitch to get funding for a network upgrade, having a more clear visualization to explain the network.

But if I was pitching that to, say, someone with a major tech background, I would probably, not need to make it quite asVisually appealing potentially.

So those are sort of general tips that I think through.

And a lot of these come from this book, "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It" by Chris Voss.

And I make that voice because Chris Voss was a former lead hostage negotiator for the FBI, and you may think by the title, and by hearing that he worked for the FBI in hostage negotiating, that it's going to be like I said before, hard driving, just super aggressive.

But actually, he was one of the first people, and this is largely what the book outlines, is one of the first people at the FBI to start to incorporate teachings from psychology.

And so as part of that, he lays out a little bit of a cheat sheet that you can use as you prepare.

So these are more specific conversational tips than the one I just mentioned.

So I will have a little notepad or something.

If it's on my computer, depending on the situation, we'll have these things down and with some notes.

So the first one is knowing my goal.

So I write down what do I want to accomplish in this negotiation, and even jot down what's the worst thing that could happen.

And then the other thing you want to do in the conversation is review the facts and summarize the situation.

So in the instance of working with the head of school and pitching this, obviously the goal was to get funding for a network upgrade, and I had a certain dollar amount in mind.

Then when you review the facts, there's no opinions, there's no judgments on any of this.

It's just, here's the map of what our network looks like.

Here are the ones that are end of life.

Here are the ones that are going to be end of life down the road.

Here's how they're connected.

And you just lay that out very clearly.

And so my notes obviously have that.

The next thing is label and do an accusation audit.

So common phrases during this type of negotiation is like, "It seems like" or "It sounds like," and by using phrasing like that, one, it shows that you're listening to someone else, and it also sort of labels the things that you've seen there.

It seems like there's a lot of places in this network where we could have failures.

So that's an example of one.

The other thing that it does if you're doing it in response to something someone else says, is it allows you to provide some of those feelings about the situation without causing reactance.

You don't want people to get defensive.

You just want the conversation to continue.

You want to continue getting information out of people.

And so this is sort of a softer way to do that.

And then the next big part is asking calibrated questions.

So those questions, as Chris Voss outlines, is more of those how and what questions.

So, again, if you ask why or yes or no questions, they sort of have a little bit more of a bite and they have sort of a dead end potentially as well, and they, because of that, can cause people to get a little bit defensive and that's certainly not what you want.

So thinking through, in this case, if I say review the facts, as I said, about the organization of our network, it seems like there's a lot of places where there could be issues with the network.

What happens if we do nothing or we don't do anything? Or you could say, "How might this impact our ability to progress toward our strategic initiatives going down the road?" So asking those calibrated questions, and you can sort of go back and forth with these as the conversation continues, but that's sort of just my general framework that I use going into it.

And the other important piece here is the reason why I focus on this for an extended period of time is, particularly on the networking side, this is really hard and you have to get it right and they can be somewhat nerve-wracking, and they can also just take a lot of time, because if you're doing the networking, potentially you have to do this with your head of school, then you go to the vendor, then you come back and there's different dollar amounts, and then if you're looking through these spec sheets from some of these companies, they're super long, and then you've got to navigate those, and then you've got to have, "Oh, well, maybe we need four more APs or four more switches" or whatever.

So it took a lot of time.

I said that we started this process in September and ended in May.

I didn't want to keep doing that every year.

There's more important things, and going back to our strategic plan, I didn't want to be engaged in network negotiations internally or externally, for that matter, every year.

Because what we had originally planned for was a partial upgrade to the network.

And so as it became clear that we were going to transition to working with METER, this was really, really key for me because it opened up-- This negotiating stuff was really important internally because it opened up the opportunity to do other things in the future, because I knew that we would have the network settled, both from all the things we were looking to accomplish, and I wouldn't have to keep doing these negotiations around the network.

Obviously, there's still had on the phones, the printers, and all the other things, but at least the major one was out of the way for a couple years.

So, that process, like I said, was quite extensive here.

And, I'm not touching too much on the implementation piece at this point.

I will in just a second.

But the reason is, is that these things, like leaning on the process and doing these first three things really well, really sort of is like I would tell the athletes, the practice and the preparation, the games will take care of themselves.

So it makes the implementation just that much easier and that much better if you're really buttoned up on those first three.But yeah, when we finally did the implementation, now we have complete coverage over the entire school.

The quality of the network is better, the security we have, the visibility, more people have access to the dashboard.

We have a team now of engineers at Meter that can support our network engineer.

So, there's some collaboration amongst us, but as I consider the further construction and evolution of the structure of our team, the networking piece of that is taken care of, so I don't have to continue to think through, like, "Oh, we need to spend money on getting another network person here to make sure there's overlap." So that was really big for us, because it connects to some of the larger things that we're doing, and we have more improved security.

So, it's obviously anytime you transition a major system, it's not like all sunshine and roses.

There's certainly been some hiccups, but the process we went through was certainly one that helped us get to this point where, if I had jumped on this too quickly, once the implementation started, I was like, "Wow," if I had signed on with a company in January for how we were thinking about doing that with no support on the install, a partial upgrade, yeah, we would've been in a world of hurt.

And it would've been me sort of as a new leader jumping into something far too early.

So just another reminder to sort of really do your diligence.

And this again, is a big change, but I would say the same for any thing that you're doing.

So, been really pleased with that front.

But, so that's the story of the network to sort of drill down on some of the things I mentioned earlier.

But again, as the key takeaways, really want to make sure that it's very clear to put your people first, remember why we're here, what we're doing all this work for.

Remember that it's really important as the manager or the leader of a technology team to make sure your team is great.

I'm a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, and I know when they won the Super Bowl, they had amazing players.

They did have good coaches and good front office, but at the end of the day, they had really great players working together, for a common goal, and that's really, really important for us as leaders to remember too.

And like I said, and hopefully it was evident through this story that you just got to keep learning because it's really going to help you with your end outcomes, and understanding that we're not in a vacuum or we're not just tucked away in the tech office, but we're part of the whole system, and our work really matters to the whole school living out its mission and just functioning on a day-to-day basis, and so you got to do your part to understand how your work connects to that system.

So, yeah, again, I'm really thankful that all of you have signed on.

I'm really excited to hear any questions that you have or further the conversation when we get to the Meter conference coming up in a couple of weeks.

I'm also giving another presentation there.

This one's going to focus on navigating my career.

I mentioned briefly some stories about my career early on in this presentation, but we'll focus a little bit more on that when we're over in Ohio, Monday, April 27th at 4:15 PM in Barnes, fifth floor.

Looking forward to seeing that location.

And I know Atlas will be there, or excuse me.

Of course, Atlas will be there.

Meter will be there as well, hosting a kickoff event.

So, yeah, that's all I have for today.

I hope that was helpful for folks, and if you have questions, feel free to chime in.

I'm not sure if some came in during the presentation, but I was sort of focused on the slides, but yeah, happy to take some questions.

Thank you so much, John.

Incredible expertise.

We really appreciate you sharing all those details.

I know it'll help a lot of schools.

Michelle from Meter also dropped a link for their happy hour at conference, so go ahead and join them.

Did anyone have any other questions? Hey, John.

It's Arthur here.

I'm curious about the size of your project, the size of the school, number of buildings, and stuff like this that always kind of tells us more about the scale when we know those and about the challenges.

And also if you could mention some of the challenges during the implementation and timeframe, maybe.

Yeah.

So this is a picture here of the school.

There's 250,000 square feet and buildings ranging from, in the middle there, you can see a pretty large building that's an athletic center, which didn't have a lot of coverage.

Then across the way, there's a relatively new art and science building that's very modern and, yeah, has a lot of great things in there.

But then we also have a couple places on campus, one of which is the oldest house in the town of Weston, Massachusetts.

And as you can see, it's sprawled out.

We even have a camp on the other side of that pond, and there's no fiber connection across the pond.

So a lot of buildings, a lot of places where we needed to add access points, and a lot of different types of buildings.

So certainly one of the more complex installs, I would say.

And one of the things that I think is essential to doing these is making sure that any site survey that's done is done extremely carefully and thoughtfully and very diligently.

Because, the timeline of our implementation might have gone a little bit smoother if I had been aware of the importance of that initial survey, because then once the hardware arrives and the people come to wire everything, you don't have to use that time for learning.And I think what we did is we needed to spend a little bit more time learning about the different spaces, or the people that were doing the install had to learn and sort of make up a few gaps from the site survey.

So yeah.

Then once it got rolling, I think the total time was a month, I would say.

But again, that's because we went from 110 access points to, I think, almost close to 200.

We were increasing the number of switches.

And that wasn't just like METER was loading up spaces that already had access points.

We had a significant gap in coverage across the whole school, and so we were truly expanding.

And a lot of that gap, I sort of assumed that gap was going to continue because, as I was saying in the negotiation piece, if you have a gap, then you have to fight for, like, "Oh, well, we need these five more access points," or, "Maybe we could get away with two access points because each of them are going to be like $8,000, and then that means we need these other switches." And so they're like: Well, we're getting fine without it, so why do we need to add? But yeah.

So really big job, really diverse set of buildings that they were adding this to, and the site survey was the place where we could have improved.

Hi, Jeremy from Riverdale Country School.

We're currently looking into METER and just NAS in general.

Mm-hmm.

One of two questions that came up just right now when you talked about the one month to implement, was it one month to just install everything after the site survey, or was one month including the site survey, or from the time you signed to the time you were fully implemented? I believe we signed in the end of May.

Maybe the last day of May, 1st of June, somewhere around there.

And we were up and running by the start of the school year.

Okay.

Yeah.

And in the trans-- This is a question that I didn't ask METER yet, and we were planning to.

In the transition from your old hardware to your new hardware, was there a moment where you had both new and old running simultaneously? That way, there weren't times where you had no internet.

There were...

Sorry, my phone just rang.

We went building by building as we went out, but it wasn't the whole campus was out, if I remember correctly.

But what's great is they have a whole-- It's not just the people.

One, Sidarth was our project manager.

This guy's awesome.

Really became friends with the guys that were doing the install.

They were almost buddies by the end of it, so they were really helpful.

But outside of them, there was also the whole team of folks at METER that had different components of the project.

And so when we did the cut-over, it was very structured and very organized, and figuring out which buildings we want to take offline at which times and how we wanted to go about doing this.

And then, yeah, some of the other things were kind of on our end.

We had a lot of rogue-- I guess previously, if someone was at their desk and they're like: Oh, I have a printer and a phone and something else, they would just throw some little switch on their desk.

So we had a bunch of those.

Mm-hmm.

So we were going around trying to find those.

Then because we were improving security, it meant that we had to do some REIPing on the printers and the phones, and we didn't have any documentation on that.

So then on us to go make sure we did that, that's where I said if we didn't have the support from METER, we probably would have not found those.

That's why I said if I had signed on with someone in January, I would've been in a world of hurt because a new person didn't understand all that comes along with this.

And then the other big piece that was really important is the people that did the install were some of the hardest workers and committed workers that I've ever seen.

Because they're late nights, early mornings, working around people's schedules, and it's part of the membership.

And that's where I really was like: Oh, wow.

If we had signed up to just do this ourselves, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have gone smoothly because I totally underestimated, not having extensive background in this, what it would've taken.

And that would've not even been expanding.

That would've just replacing what we already have.

So, this was like full on upping the game in all senses.

Thank you.

Yep.

Well, thank you so much once again, John, for sharing your story, lessons learned, expertise, and thank you again to METER for your support.

John's contact info is right there on the screen.

John, you'll be in Columbus, right? Yep.

Yeah, you just said.

You're presenting.

Awesome.

That's right.

Yep.

Well, we'll see you there and hopefully see many of the rest of you.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, everyone.

All right.

Thanks so much for coming on, folks..