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In this second episode of ASUG Talks: Candid Career Conversations, season 2, we talk with Chris Pelchat, Corporate Technology Applications Manager with the Nebraska Public Power District. A full transcript follows:
ASUG Talks host Laurel Nelson-Rowe:
Hello, everyone. Today, I am joined by Chris Pelchat, who is Corporate Technology Applications Manager with the Nebraska Public Power District. Hello, Chris, and welcome to ASUG Talks: Candid Career Conversation.
Chris Pelchat:
Good morning. Thank you.
Nelson-Rowe:
Thank you for joining us. Before we get into that deep, candid career conversation, I want to have you take a step back. What kind of values and principles from your childhood have contributed to your career and the professional that you are today?
Pelchat:
I guess going way back to childhood, I grew up in Nebraska, born and raised, and one of my first professions was a paper route. And delivering the Sunday and Wednesday papers as a little kid, trudging through the snow in the middle of winter, was a significant challenge. But it taught you different work ethic, and not knowing how heavy the papers were and just getting through there and being able to know that you had something that needed to be done. I think that instilled a little bit of the work ethic. And you have that with a lot of Midwesterners, just on day-to-day, livestock needs to be taken care of. They don't take holidays. So, I guess that really instilled longstanding work ethic with me coming from the Midwest.
Nelson-Rowe:
That persistence that carries through today and even to public service, which is what your organization stands for. Did you always want a career in information technology? Did you always seek that out?
Pelchat:
I did not. It pretty much happened by accident. So, my career, it started off with a military service out of high school. I was active duty Air Force and got a job when I got out of the Air Force, in California, at the Nevada test site. Had an opportunity to work on the last nuclear test shop we did north of Las Vegas, with the Department of Energy.
Nelson-Rowe:
And you weren't in information technology at the time?
Pelchat:
No, no. I was in mainly test equipment, measurement and test equipment. And my wife and I, we moved to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. I did the same career field, test and measurement equipment. Moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and worked at the national labs there. And as our kids started school years, I noticed that there was something closer to home and Nebraska had a nuclear power plant and ended up getting a job there. Got into project management.
I missed the military, so I got back in the Army National Guard at the time. I led projects at our nuclear plant for 10 years and had a job to move to the fossil side. So, I was doing large piping replacements, things like that, big physical things, and was asked by my boss to help with the backup data center.
It was close to done, let's just push that project over the edge. I said, "Well, sure, I'll look into it." Gathered a team together and learned a lot, but not all IT is people that are fixing your computer. There's wires, there's networks, there's infrastructure, there's applications. It was an eye-opening thing to me, but the project sponsor was our CIO, and she liked the way that I put the project together.
And our previous corporate applications manager was retiring, and I had the opportunity to apply for a knowledge retention position, working alongside him while I was managing the S4 project. That's how I ended up in IT and haven't looked back since. The other thing from the military side is the military always looks at their IT resources as a very strategic asset. And now sitting on the civilian side, I realize the impact that IT can make to the business. And that's the exciting piece of it. That's really exciting, just based off the trajectory of where we're going.
Nelson-Rowe:
So, you carried that influence from your military background into the accidental application manager role, I guess?
Pelchat:
Exactly. Yep.
Nelson-Rowe:
Kind of an accidental tourist. So, the project management was truly your first role working with IT and with SAP, is that correct?
Pelchat:
I'd done financials in SAP at the nuclear power plant, but that was my first introduction to using SAP. And so now coming from the power plant, the end-user side, to corporate applications manager and seeing the possibilities, when we transition to S/4, all the different interactions, all the different pieces, all the different functional managers that you work with and see how it can provide a positive impact from an enterprise solution. That's what I learned through the S4 project as that program manager implementing that.
Nelson-Rowe:
Would you say that you're an active career path planner, responsive career opportunist, or a hybrid?
Pelchat:
I'm a planner by trade. That's what I really like, long-range plans and everything else. So, even with the staff that I work with, you're always trying to train yourself for your next position, make sure that you're becoming an expert in the position you're in, but what's the next aspiration? Where are you trying to go, so I can help support that move, I can support that development?
With the accidental move to IT, it changed the different possibilities moving forward, but I had one track in mind to where I was going, based off of this new opportunity. Now, I have to redefine where that track's going, but I'm still looking at, "Okay, what are the next steps? And what do I need to do to develop myself to get there?"
Nelson-Rowe:
As you manage other people, do you apply that mindset as well, in helping them in their careers?
Pelchat:
Yes. What I've found in IT is you have people that become critical to your success and you don't have three subject matter experts in that particular area. A lot of times you have a single-point vulnerability of this skillset, but it's still your responsibility as a manager to make sure that if their aspirations are to go somewhere else, what are their goals? What are their career aspirations? Where do they want to go? How do you alleviate that single point vulnerability, so you open up the option for them to achieve where they want to go?
Nelson-Rowe:
Great. Thank you for that. Now, I'm going to offer a lightning round opportunity. At ASUG Talks we like to challenge our guests. So, from an IT perspective, since you entered the halls of IT and SAP, recap in two minutes or less, what have been your career highlights?
Pelchat:
My career highlights would be the S/4HANA project. It's because I got introduced to the enterprise business solution. It was drinking from a fire hose. I didn't realize that NPPD, this small Midwestern utility, was one of the first to really make the leap to implement S/4, until we presented out at SAP4U. And there was so much interest in, "How do you do this in such a short period of time?"
For our folks, they rolled up their sleeves and just got after it. And seeing the response, it was one of those things to where I wish the entire team, because we probably had 200-plus folks that touched that project in some way, shape, or form, the accomplishment of going live, going live on time, the implementation of S4, SAC planning, BW on HANA, and a lot of other pieces of that project, I didn't really appreciate until after the fact, what that team had accomplished. So, that would definitely be my biggest point of pride for what that team accomplished.
Nelson-Rowe:
Is that your favorite job role, responsibility, or is there something else that's up on the favorites list?
Pelchat:
I guess that would be my favorite and then the next is really seeing some of our staff that have been with SAP since '99--since we implemented in '99--seeing the new excitement with the new tools and learning new things, because the mindset shift, you used to be able to install a system, become an expert in it, and it didn't change. With technology changing rapidly nowadays, you have to shift that mindset to where you constantly have to be learning and you constantly have to be evolving and seeing what the possibilities are.
Thinking through the possibilities, "How can we change the way we do business to help our functional areas operate more efficiently, more effectively? How do we leverage the technology to become that force multiplier that we really should be from the business side?" So, seeing that excitement in some of my staff that have been with SAP since '99.
Nelson-Rowe:
Wow, that is a long duration in and of itself. As you reflect back, what's been most challenging in terms of your role or set of responsibilities to-date and why? And how have those challenges shaped you?
Pelchat:
I think being new to the IT world and also being with an organization that we implemented ECC back in '99, so a lot of that technology didn't change. So, there was a rapid shift, a rapid change with when I stepped into it, as far as the movement to S4, things changing. On the nuclear side, we benchmark very well, because if somebody has a bad day, it's bad for the entire nuclear industry.
Understanding and finding, "How do I network with people? How do I find my peers that are struggling with some of the same issues that I'm having?" And establishing those touch points or people that I can reach out to, so that we're not going through trial and error to figure out how to do things. There's been somebody who's gone down this path before. And just compare and contrast on, "Okay, what is the approach that we want?" Because there's always safety in numbers. You never really want to be that guinea pig of, "Yep, I'm going to try and figure it out and let's hope that everything works out."
Nelson-Rowe:
You don't want to be out on an island?
Pelchat:
No. No. That's not a good place to be.
Nelson-Rowe:
What's been your best career decision or your best career movement, and why was that the best?
Pelchat:
I think this goes back to accidental, and it pretty much opened my mind to how things were. On the military side, I was happy teaching. I was in an officer candidate program to where I was instructing leaders how to become commissioned officers, and I loved it. It was developing others for leadership opportunities. You could be recommended by your leadership to serve as the aide-de-camp for the state's adjutant general. And my supervisor said, "Hey, Chris, we think you'd be a good fit for this. You got a deployment under your belt, you've been a company commander. We think this would be a good development opportunity." I'm like, "Nope, I'm good. I want to stay here. I'm comfortable. I like what I'm doing."
And I thought that was the last I heard of it, until I got a phone call from our two-star general that said, "Hey, Chris, I'd like you to be my aide-de-camp." So, I keep his schedule, ran security, and we would make visits to our congressional delegation in DC and go to the Pentagon. And I thought, "Okay, I didn't really want this." But working under that individual who--he was an Air Force two-star general, and he had a mindset of servant leadership. And he told me, "The higher you move in an organization, the more people you have to serve. And there are opportunities that present themselves, that you may not expect, but always take on those challenging opportunities."
And he had one other quote, I have it on my whiteboard here. It says, "Excellence is never an accident." And just the things I learned from him over the three years I served with him, have served me very well on the civilian side and it applies over and over and over again with how you approach serving the people that you work with. And that's a mind shift that I had versus just climbing a career ladder before. So, I would say that was probably the best decision that I didn't make, but I did make, that helped me with my career path.
Nelson-Rowe:
Would you consider that individual a mentor, an advocate? In addition to the servant leadership, was he quite inspirational?
Pelchat:
He is very inspirational, because I always got to travel with him to see the different soldiers training, the different airmen training. I got to see how he interacted with our congressional delegation. I saw how he approached meetings, how he approached preparation for meetings. And he would always take the time when we were traveling together, to get my opinion. Because I had been on the flip side before, I felt weird just supporting him. And he said, "This is for your development. This is for me to help develop you on how I process information, how I scan information, how I interact, some of the stuff that we do up front."
So absolutely, he was a mentor and to this day he still is a mentor to me. And probably one of the biggest compliments I've ever gotten was, he came and spoke when I worked at the nuclear power plant, to our leadership. And one of my direct reports sat in that meeting and he told me, he said, "I see exactly a lot of him in you." And so for me, there couldn't have been a bigger compliment to me.
Nelson-Rowe:
Proud moment.
Pelchat:
Yeah.
Nelson-Rowe:
Is there anything in your career or in any of the roles that you've had, that you'd like to do over?
Pelchat:
Yes, and it's taking the time to acknowledge the positive things. You're always trying to find gaps, you're always looking for how to improve. You're always pushing yourself or, "Hey, that didn't go exactly as we had planned." And even the ‘aha’ moment when I saw all the interest out at SAP4U on the work that we did with S/4HANA. As we were going through that project, I didn't acknowledge the team enough on the accomplishments along the way.
That's a skill that I need to work on, is you can have very high standards, you can strive for excellence, but you also have to realize the progress that you're making along the way and celebrate those successes throughout the project. Because if you don't take the time to acknowledge the work that your team is doing, sooner or later they'll get into fatigue and you have to continue motivating them. And it's a skill that I wish I was better at, and I'm actually learning quite a bit from our CIO, who's very good at that, helping develop that skill within me.
Nelson-Rowe:
Just taking the time to listen and learn and appreciate, either from those team members that are at your peer set, on your project teams, etc. Great lesson to apply every day. As you reflect on a career and experience, what education and training experiences have been most essential to your success?
Pelchat:
I would say, information gathering, whether it's benchmarking, using some of the different benchmarking organizations that are out there. There's multiple, but finding those and going through data, looking through examples. Because you can sit in classrooms and you can only learn so much, but I'm a visual type person, I like to see templates. I like to see, how did somebody else approach this problem? How did somebody else dissect this problem?
Getting a team together to really solve, "Hey, we've got this issue, how do we solve that issue as a team?" Because you really, you don't have to solve issues on your own, and somebody's gone down that road before, and really trying to get as many data points as possible, being able to look at as many documents as possible. How many people have tried to solve this problem? These people did this, these people did this, this company did this, this company did this. And come up with the best solution that works for the situation that you're in.
Nelson-Rowe:
And you find those resources both within the utility community as well as within the SAP professionals’ community, correct?
Pelchat:
Yes, it's in the utilities committee, it's in the SAP, ASUG, your different chapters and things like that. But it can also be outside utility, because a lot of the work processes, the processes that we do, it doesn't have to be, "Well, we can't use this because it's not a public utility that has generation, distribution, and transmission." We always think we're so special, we're not.
Nelson-Rowe:
It doesn't have to be a complete parallel to your organization?
Pelchat:
Yeah. There are so many things that you can learn from any type of organization on how they manage data, how they look at this, how they look at that. Those processes can transition across a lot of different organizations. And a lot of how we managed on the military side of the house, that transitioned very well on how you manage people on the civilian side of the house. It's just terminology changes, but the processes are the same. So it's, what can we learn from this? What can we take away, and what can we apply? And how can we apply it in our situation?
Nelson-Rowe
What are the three things that you've learned from being in this field of IT and using SAP systems and solutions, that people should know for their own career success?
Pelchat:
They should learn, they don't have to solve everything on their own. There's a community out there that can help you with almost anything you're struggling with. Second piece, if you touch one thing in an enterprise business solution, it's probably going to touch multiple areas of that solution. So, making a simple change in one place, you have to be careful of second and third order effects.
And the last piece, SAP is not just an IT project, product. You have to have your functional or business managers along for the ride. Make sure that they're bought into what it can do. Make sure that you're working with them, you're educating them. That they're a piece of your collective team.
That's probably something that I think it falls through the cracks, from where I've seen is, you spend so much time thinking about the technology that you forget about the user experience and the functional area manager that can really help you come up with a much better solution. You're just so zoned in on the technical piece of it that you forget that there's a much bigger opportunity there for you. And if you're working with those folks, it's going to be multiple times a better return on investment on how they use the technology and how you work together going forward.
Nelson-Rowe:
The results are better, the outcomes are better, and the embrace of the system and the application is stronger?
Pelchat:
We had an SAP Nebraska day and I did a lot of arm twisting with our finance managers. And I said, "Oh, you've done phenomenal things with the S/4 project and SAC planning. I think you guys should go to this SAP workshop in Nebraska with the other utilities." And their first thought or response was, "Well, that's IT." And I'm like, "No. It's something phenomenal that you've done, that they've done, to be able to use the tool and actually push us forward. How they've adopted Fiori and some of the opportunities that they have there."
And now we have other utilities reaching out to them from their finance managers going, "How did you do this? How did you learn this?" And to me, that's awesome. That's amazing that we have folks that embrace that and want to do that and want to move the organization forward.
Nelson-Rowe:
So, that dynamic is strong but not necessarily shared by the finance team and those who are actually daily users outside the four walls. That's the next step?
Pelchat:
Exactly.
Nelson-Rowe:
You've kind of hinted at this, but I want to ask very directly, why are you so passionate about what you do today?
Pelchat:
I think it goes back to that servant leadership. I see an opportunity here, and the unique thing about Nebraska is we're an all-public-power state. We're rate payers, we're responsible for our electricity rates, we're responsible about the service that we have, and our coworkers are our customers. And so, really seeing the opportunity of what we have right now with the move to S4 and how can we leverage it, how can we help improve how that technology helps the people we work with, helps our customers, helps our bottom line? How do we get the most out of the investments that we've spent, that we're responsible to our rate payers?
And so, it's that servant leadership. It's that drive. How do we get more out of it? How do we work smarter, not harder? How do we leverage the technology and learn it? That's the other piece of it. There's a lot of things that it can do, that we never really knew before or didn't take the time to fully grasp what that capability is.
And so, it's an exciting time for our team, for our company, and ultimately, I hope, for our rate payers. IT can be become that strategic asset, that force multiplier for the organization to continue to do great things. As a servant leader, I look at my retail folks or my finance folks: if I'm not making their life better through technology this year, then I'm probably not meeting the mark we've set for ourselves.
Nelson-Rowe:
I wanted to ask you, in terms of resources, professional resources, what are the most helpful resources, including anything that you've utilized from ASUG, that are most important in your career to-date and your career going forward?
Pelchat:
I'm a chapter member for the Midwest Central chapter of ASUG. Being able to meet other SAP users, being able to tap into a lot of the different material that's out on the ASUG website, being able to go to the SAP4U conference out in San Diego and meet some of those other utilities, have some of those discussions on, "Hey, how did you solve this problem?" Share information with them. Mark Rosson from Snohomish has been a huge help to me, as far as when I can reach out, going, "Hey, Mark, have you run into this problem before?"
Northwestern Energy, they went to S/4 probably two weeks before we did. We've reached out to them just based off of that personal connection, when we connected out at SAP4U. But being able to talk to one another on, "Hey, how did your end-of-year updates go? Did you run into any problems? We ran into this problem, but make sure that you have this note from SAP."
Being able to work with SAP, some of their customer success representatives on different tools that you're looking to adopt or use, whether it's your Business Technology Platform or Fiori, how you set up the governance around some of those launchpads. It's the network and the community and being a part of ASUG, being a part of SAP, and being a demanding customer to your SAP account representative, going, "I need to talk to somebody about this. I need to talk to somebody who's like me, about this, this, and this." Don't be afraid to do that. You absolutely have the right to be a demanding customer because it is a very complex tool. But it can do a lot of things for you and we should want to be able to get the most out of our investments.
Nelson-Rowe:
Great. Now, this has been a great conversation, but I have one final question and it's a little bit creative, a little bit off the beaten path. If you could have had, at the start of your career and throughout your career, one superpower to be better at your job, better at the SAP use and implementations and projects, what would that superpower have been, or what do you need today?
Pelchat:
I can tell you without a doubt, if I could process information faster. If I could go through information and learn it faster and have that knowledge retention, because technology is changing so fast. We are inundated with so much information and something new is right around the corner every quarter, as far as an update or, "What about moving to the cloud? What about RISE? What about that module?"
And being able to digest all the information that's coming at you, day after day, after day, and to be able to make sense of it. My superpower would be how to process and make sense of all that information and put it into a strategy going forward. Being able to make sense of that data would be phenomenal.
Nelson-Rowe:
Process accelerator and retention base. All right. Anything else that you'd like to share with the ASUG audience before we close out?
Pelchat:
I would just say, expect the most out of the investments that you get and squeeze the most out of what you purchase, and be that demanding customer. And if you don't know the answer, there are people out there that absolutely have gone through what you've gone through and want to help you. That's the key, is there are people out there that absolutely want to help you. So, don't feel alone if you're struggling with something, try and reach out and somebody will be out there to help you.
Nelson-Rowe:
Don't shy away, speak up. And what's on that whiteboard again?
Pelchat:
"Excellence is never an accident."
Nelson-Rowe:
All right. Thank you for the excellent conversation and for sharing your candid career conversation, your ups and downs, and your accidental entry into IT.
Pelchat:
You're welcome. Thank you.