In every organization, there’s a critical role that ensures all the moving parts work together seamlessly. At Diversified Technology, that role belongs to Krystal, our Integrator. We sat down with her to learn more about what she does and how she keeps our company running like a coordinated machine.
About the Role
What Does a Typical Day Look Like?
Krystal’s day centers around keeping all departments synchronized. She starts most mornings attending department huddle meetings, communicating important updates to all the teams. She spends significant time in cross-departmental meetings, ensuring everyone understands priorities and dependencies. Mid-day often involves problem-solving—removing roadblocks, clarifying ambiguous situations, and making decisions that keep projects moving forward. She also dedicates time to process improvement, whether that’s refining SOPs, updating KPI dashboards, or working on automation that reduces manual bottlenecks.
What Does an Integrator Actually Do?
Krystal has a great way of explaining it: “I translate big ideas into executable plans with clear owners, timelines, and measures of success. I ensure our departments—Sales, Managed Services, Development, Support, Implementation, Finance—all work in the same direction rather than working in silos.”
She describes herself as organizational “glue and grease.” She’s the glue that holds teams together through alignment and accountability, and the grease that removes friction so work flows smoothly. When things are working well, the company feels like a coordinated machine rather than a collection of independent parts.
What Drew Her to This Position?
Krystal has grown with Diversified Technology from an entry-level position in Managed Services through Client Support, Project Manager, and Support Manager to her current role. That journey gave her a unique perspective on how each department operates and how their work connects. What drew her to step into the integrator role was seeing talented managers in each department who needed help understanding how their work affected others and how they fit into larger company goals. The most rewarding part? Watching managers she’s worked alongside for years grow into strategic leaders who naturally think about cross-departmental impact.
Her Work & Impact
Major Projects and Initiatives
One of the most significant initiatives has been developing KPI dashboards for each department. This evolved in stages—starting with manual entry Excel sheets where managers would track their metrics weekly, then moving to automated reports pulling from systems, and finally building live dashboards that give real-time visibility. This progression has transformed how Diversified Technology makes decisions, moving from gut-feel to data-driven management.
Krystal also led the development of the project playbook for new client implementations. This wasn’t just documentation—it was capturing institutional knowledge and creating a repeatable, scalable process. The team documented every phase from kickoff through go-live, standardized communication templates, established clear handoff protocols between Sales, Implementation, and Support, and defined quality checkpoints throughout. This playbook has significantly reduced implementation cycle time and improved consistency across different project coordinators.
Currently, she’s heavily involved in assisting with the development of Diversified Billing Software. This represents the company’s evolution—moving beyond supporting legacy systems to building a modern solution. This project touches every part of the organization and requires the kind of cross-functional coordination that the integrator role is built for.
Prioritizing When Multiple Departments Need Attention
Krystal uses a framework that balances urgency, impact, and strategic alignment. First, she assesses immediate client impact. Anything that threatens a client relationship, a go-live date, or the company’s reputation gets immediate attention. These are the “protect the business” priorities.
Second, she evaluates organizational bottlenecks. If a decision or issue is blocking multiple teams from moving forward, that takes priority over department-specific concerns. The integrator role is about maximizing organizational throughput, not just individual team velocity.
Third, she considers strategic alignment with quarterly rocks. If something directly advances the most important commitments—whether that’s a product release, a process improvement initiative, or a revenue target—it gets weighted higher than routine operational matters.
A Streamlining Success Story
What Krystal is most proud of is when a vision goes from idea to a functioning process that makes a client’s or employee’s life easier, backed up by data showing efficiency gains. A perfect example has been working with Quality Assurance and Development teams over the last year to set up SOPs, clear communication channels, release schedules, and standardized release emails to clients.
Previously, releases were chaotic. Development would finish their work, but there wasn’t a clear handoff process. Support wouldn’t know what was coming, Implementation couldn’t explain changes to clients effectively, and there would be last-minute scrambles.
Over the past year, the team built a systematic framework with documented checkpoints before releases go live, clear SOPs that everyone follows, regular communication touchpoints between QA and Development, established release schedules so teams can plan ahead, training videos and documents built into the release timeline, and standardized release email templates. Teams aren’t scrambling at the last minute anymore. Support has the information and training they need upfront. Clients are getting better communication about changes. The friction between departments has decreased noticeably.
Collaboration & Team Dynamics
Working Across Departments
Krystal works daily with all major departments, but the most frequent interactions are between Support, Quality Assurance, and Development—where the most critical handoffs and dependencies exist. Support identifies bugs, feature requests, and usability issues from clients. She helps translate these into actionable product backlog items with appropriate priority. Conversely, when Development releases new features, she ensures Support is trained and prepared.
The Key to Effective Communication
The key is clarity with context, consistent communication delivered in multiple formats to ensure maximum absorption from the teams, and making sure the correct information is provided to the correct audiences.
Different departments speak different languages and need different information. Managed Services thinks in number of accurate client billings mailed. Development thinks in sprints and backlog items. Support thinks in ticket and call volume. Learning Management thinks in process documents and videos. Krystal’s job is to translate between these perspectives, so everyone understands not just what needs to happen, but why it matters to them specifically.
Consistency and repetition are also critical. Communicating something once, even clearly, doesn’t mean it sticks. People are busy and absorb information differently. So, she communicates important messages through multiple channels: discussed in meetings, followed up with email, documented, and appearing on dashboards. This repetition across formats ensures that whether someone is a verbal processor, visual learner, or needs to reference it later in writing, they can absorb the information in the way that works best for them.
Looking Forward
What Excites Her Most
What excites Krystal most is seeing the foundation being built start to pay off in two key areas. First, product evolution—as the company tightens release management processes and better aligns the roadmap to actual market needs, Diversified Technology is positioned to deliver features that genuinely differentiate it in the utility billing space. The company is moving from reactive development to strategic product planning that solves real problems for municipalities. Second, better utilization of the Learning Management Portal for both client education and employee onboarding. When clients have easy access to training on available features, they get more value from the software and rely less on support calls. And when new employees can onboard efficiently through structured training materials, they’re productive faster and the company isn’t dependent on one-on-one knowledge transfer.
Essential Skills for an Integrator
1. Calm, Steady Presence
When Tom is the spark—the visionary energy, the big ideas, sometimes the urgency—the integrator is the steady hand. You cannot get flustered when multiple crises hit simultaneously. You need to bring emotional stability, especially when others are stressed. People need to trust that you’ll thoughtfully solve problems rather than react emotionally.
2. Systems Thinking
You must see the organization as an interconnected machine. When you change something in Sales, you need to intuitively understand ripple effects on Implementation, Support, and Finance. You need to think in workflows, processes, dependencies, and feedback loops—not just isolated tasks.
3. Accountability with Follow-Through
An integrator who doesn’t consistently follow through destroys organizational trust. The entire role is about making sure commitments actually happen. If you say you’ll circle back on something, you must circle back. If you set a deadline, you must hold people to it or explicitly reset it.
Advice for Working More Efficiently
Define done.
Most inefficiency, most frustration, most rework comes from unclear expectations about what “finished” actually means.
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Krystal’s role as Integrator is essential to how Diversified Technology operates. Her ability to translate vision into execution, coordinate across departments, and continuously improve processes makes her invaluable to the team’s success.