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Parallel

Parallel

Written by: Tim Flower
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 From Nexthink and the creators of The DEX Show, this is Parallel: One IT story told week by week. Because technology problems don’t happen in isolation. Or by themselves. They happen in parallel.

I’m Tim Flower. For the last 10 years, I’ve spent my career helping IT teams understand how productivity is stolen. Murdered even. Both from IT, and from the employees we support. It’s been a journey of seeing workdays gone wrong, systems gone haywire, and the lengths we in IT go to for answers.

This mission started out to answer one simple question: What’s been killing productivity at Zentech, a cutting-edge company known for its efficient operations and innovation? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? Over the course of 5 weeks, you’ll see that answering that question uncovered all sorts of other unanswered questions, and we ended up finding more mysteries - crashing systems, failed updates, unhappy employees, and a strange reference to something called “The Foundation”.Copyright Tim Flower Social Sciences
Episodes
  • S1E5 - The Forgotten

    S1E5 - The Forgotten
    Jul 21 2025
    Knowledge is power—until you forget.
    In the midst of troubleshooting performance and productivity issues, the team at Zentech found yet another problem – Employees struggling with constant change and not able to leverage the apps they need to get their job done. Across industries, employees are struggling with the relentless pace of technology changes, especially with AI. And I’ve seen it as I travel the world talking with executives and tech leaders – they’re all concerned not only with IT’s ability to transform quickly, without breakage, but also with their employee’s ability to keep up with the pace and volume of change. Training sessions forgotten, new systems replacing old ones overnight, and IT teams overwhelmed with employees who simply can’t keep up. At Zentech, the story is no different.
    Join us as we investigate the unseen breakdown of knowledge retention and the chaos it leaves behind - in Episode 5 - The Forgotten.
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    9 mins
  • S1E4 - The Virtual Murder

    S1E4 - The Virtual Murder
    Jul 7 2025
    The team at Zentech has been hard at work investigating a murder. This time it's actually time that's the victim, and everyone is a suspect - especially the VDI team. "The Foundation" makes another appearance, and the team gets closer to uncovering the source of many of their recurring IT issues, with the help of an AI assistant and a very persistent DEX team.
    Join us for episode 4, The Virtual Murder.
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    9 mins
  • S1E3 - The Reboot Resistance

    S1E3 - The Reboot Resistance
    May 30 2025
    From Nexthink and the creators of The DEX Show, this is Parallel, one IT story told week by week.
    Problems don’t happen in isolation. Or one at a time. They happen in parallel.

    Last week, we uncovered an invisible hand—a saboteur leaving undocumented changes and phantom scripts, wreaking havoc at Zentech. This week we’re shifting our focus to tell the story of something much quieter. Something… insidious even. It’s not a rogue script. It’s not a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s something much harder to pin down: Complacency. When people stop fighting back against the problems that plague them… what happens? For Zentech, it turned into a storm of security risks, failed patches, and crashing systems. And the trail led to a surprising culprit: the reboot button.

    Parallel is a fictional journey inspired by the popular murder mystery series Serial, which investigates the very real murder of a high school teenager who went missing after school one day. Parallel investigates the mystery of murdered enterprise productivity, now missing at the high tech firm.

    Hosted by Tim Flower, a 35-year career technologist who has spent the last 10 years helping IT teams understand how productivity is stolen, both from IT, and from the employees IT supports. It’s been a journey of seeing workdays gone wrong, systems gone haywire, and the lengths IT will go to for answers.

    This mission started out to answer one simple question: What’s been killing productivity at Zentech? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? And what mysteries lie in the darkness of a complex enterprise, waiting to be discovered and eliminated.

    Starring the Reality Bytes crew: Tim Flower, Tom McGrath, Meghan Brake, Oriana Ott, Sean Malvey, and Kathryn Shea.
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    8 mins
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