Escaping the Feature Factory - Our Journey Into Thinking Continuous Delivery End2end

Parcel delivery used to be a traditional business, with traditional understanding of collaboration and organization.


With the advent of ecommerce, parcel delivery has become one of the core pillars of customer experience. The customers’ requests for better and more service is accompanied with ever-growing our business, requiring faster, more scalable, more robust IT solutions.


Yesterday’s answers don’t work anymore.


Aligning business and tech was our solution. Working on mindsets, methods, processes and also our organization. We will introduce how we think continuous delivery end2end, making business people have tech options and tech restrictions in mind and tech people having business opportunities and options in mind. Working on an organization where each side values the other, growing together, we achieve better outcome and more suitable solutions, carefully balancing customers’ requirements and our own, non-functional requirements.

MP

Michael Palzer

Head of Digital Channels & Services, Hermes Germany GmbH

SS

Stephan Stapel

Head of Development, Hermes Germany GmbH

Transcript

00:00:08

Hello, everybody. Hello from Hamburg. Welcome to our session, escaping the feature factory, our journey into thinking continuous delivery end to end. My name is Micah and I'm responsible for the business part of our digital product. And my name is Stefan. I'm representing the tech side of digital product together. We share the same vision on how we want to work in the same spirit to move our company forward. We would like to inspire you for your way and spotlight. Some of our key factors. Let's have a look on the next 30 minutes. We will start with some facts to understand our starting position, then our view of it to impact. After that, we look at the new needed mindset in the organization. And finally, our learnings, the homeless group is the largest past independent positive company in Europe, focused on the large countries like UK, France and Germany.

00:01:15

Germany is located in Hamburg and we live a more than 400 million passengers per year, where we come from our companies and startup founded 72 and Hamburg almost 50 years ago. We have maybe I should say head our traditional understanding of organizations. And as a, as a logistic company, we are focused on process optimization. And of course it's necessary for a company like ours, especially if you want to deliver up to 2 million posits a day. But with logistics coming first customer definitely came second in our industry and for harvest as well for a long time, we are no right way, but still a way to go before going into details about our journey. Small side note, we learn a lot, a lot from books and conferences. Like probably all of you to here. You'll see some of the books and authors that inspired us. This is true. For example, for MVPs project to product push, to pull or lean management, we use most of these approaches in our organization, but we're not come at them in detail today. Instead, we want to give you a general introduction to our transformation, highlighting the fundamental ideas behind it. We want to share with you our experience digging our way through a large mature organization.

00:02:45

One important aspect of this implementation is how we optimize our value stream to make our customers happy. But you find stepping our current activities just to time walk back to 2011, for what we call the dark age of it. Like many companies Hermes try to optimize the it function for cost and planning reliability. So it was decided to organize it as a shared service provider within the company that resulted in odd ideas, like company, internal billing for it projects, and the end cost optimization might have succeeded. However, the drawbacks were far bigger. First of all, we, as it were clearly separated from the business, there was no alignment between and even worse. It had no idea about the customer. Fortunately, the idea of being a service provider died in 2015, since then we are re-engineering tech and the corporation optimizing for what we call idea to impact.

00:04:05

Oh, the organization looked like a walled garden in the dark age. Each step in the process siloed into a dedicated department. Usually every department had its own agenda. As a fun fact, Angela was introduced already 10 years ago. It turned me right in the middle of the dark age. They introduced the strong framework in the development teams, but everything else was left untouched. This is what the value stream looks like as a process. Each step is siloed. Clearly the good thing is that each step can get optimized. Unfortunately, all optimization is local. Only nobody takes the entire process into account. In the end, we have no enhancements in terms of innovation, speed, quality. So what is the best testing in the world worth? If you don't ship the right product, or if you don't ship things fast enough, we had what is called activity-based working, but even worse with the new agile approach in place in the development. We have no common understanding on the ways of working. So conflicts arose between development and the other areas in our value stream.

00:05:38

And when the shed service provider idea died, we took our chances. We move from local optimization for value stream optimization, and gradually got better and better since scrum was then already well-established and the development teams, we use the development as the epicenter and gradually expanded the agile principles into the other steps of our value stream. It was important for us to do this very carefully step-by-step to secure the success during progressing, by creating an understanding for each other, you closely aligned each step of the value stream. And all of a sudden, for the first time in our organization, we had flow. There was a great feeling, and then it encouraged us to go further.

00:06:36

So why edge all told us a lot about culture and it gave us a new understanding about work and collaboration, and it allowed us to cope with new levels of complexity, the dev ops principles. On the other hand, help us a lot to align the different disciplines with each other. Let's take a closer look. Dev ops is for us an important complimentary concept to agile, and it teaches us a lot. What outcomes of our value stream optimization very much stick to Jean's definition of the three ways, the first way to optimize for the whole system. What's the largest leap for us blending the steps of the value stream, which I showed you in the previous slide led to a consistent flow let's consider infrastructure as code as an example for this by applying development approaches to infrastructure, we revolutionized the way we do ops. We not only streamlined infrastructure provisioning, but we also made it impossible to distinguish dev ops in the end, mastering the first way. And as from slow, activity-based working, dating back from the dark age to delivering outputs fast and repeatable.

00:08:03

The understanding of the whole system allows us to constantly change and optimize it, which makes the second way and concerning the third way was now five years since the dark age, it wasn't even possible for us to establish a tech culture in our company. This in turn allows us to do frequently experiments and learn from them the most difficult part of the third way. However, is interpret failure as a gift. We are not there yet, but we are constantly progressing towards it getting rid of the word garden head or not. But our view still limited focusing on delivering only we did not want to stick with output. We aim for the outcome. Also, we ended our ideation bringing business and tick check people closer together. This allowed us not only to take time for lunch, you can limit when thinking about new products and services, but also to leverage technological possibilities, to make our products and services better.

00:09:15

We started the joint approach by not taking a look at what a deaf team delivers. We focused on what is live and available for the customers. Measure the usage, get feedback from the customer and iterative product to reach the outcomes. From this point, we have the flow for new products generated better for our customers to first flu ever between business and tech and to aim the entire value chain. One of the boost for our transformation, we did this transformation simultaneous is the most painlessly to dev ops transformation, which was tough. However, turned out that re that each approach only made sense with the other.

00:10:00

And when we end with entire, we really mean entire in the current step. Right now, we expanded our idea to the strategy, to have a consistent flow between the top corporate management and the entertainers of our product teams. Here, we use a variant of the three states flight level from class Leo pod. We are in the next iteration and still learn, improve our processes. And we have the next step in mind, did some basics already like methods, mindset, and language, and looking forward to Jews, a comprehensive, safe sport at another second level coordination board yesterday. We had silence today. Hopefully not again, but focusing teams on a particular product comes with a price. The stronger, the focus is particular on a particular product. The more difficult gets collaboration across product team boundaries and how to prioritize Abid or customer satisfaction, sender, or receiver business, or private customer. And you have really have to take care that you need, uh, actively recreation, a culture of collaboration, and also established new formats for coordination for the teams and collaboration across the teams.

00:11:28

The improvements we are hived had everyone to focus, to deliver more suitable products for our customers faster and better than ever before. So we revolutionized our ways of working. It was a huge step and it resulted in delivering more and better than ever before. This was only possible because of our people. We are so lucky to have such great teams. They are a big part of the success we have together. So optimizing processes clearly isn't everything together. We have to really develop ourselves a lot. We have to let loose of old habits and finding new ones. This is especially true for our understanding of roles and ways of collaboration.

00:12:23

So in traditional companies like ours, Taylor's organizational principles are still very well alive. They are the foundations of role definitions and collaboration within the company. Taylor's idea was to divide work in distinct units to make it more controllable. That probably worked great in environments with simple work, but it was necessary to optimize the working steps which were repeated and repeated all over. Unfortunately, these principles survive this era and are still present in today's knowledge worker environment. This is also true for our company. So we have large list of roles and responsibilities. And fortunately this type of dish definition tends to clearly define segregation between the roles, but leave out collaboration almost completely.

00:13:18

So when developing our organization, we really had to focus on the collaboration between the different roles and it was even important to blend the roads with each other. We started with the most common roles like developer and tester. There was still a big challenge since people were very trained for the respect of roles and the boundaries, but in the end, we succeeded people with different roles, started to understand each other. It's allowed us to start overcoming the walled garden principle and letting people with different expertise work together on the same topic. You'll see surprising results. Let's take the testing for a second example. Testing was a bottleneck in our value stream for a long time. Like it, this in probably most of the companies and bringing together developers and testers allowed us to innovate quickly on how we test one improvement was fostering test optimization, but also a more efficient interpretation of the test pyramid help us a lot implementing these and other measures. The bottleneck just vanished and even more testing became an attractive discipline.

00:14:50

When you're looking at general aspect, one of the key factors is to bring, take a business together, clothing, the chest, which were grown over the last years is one of the most important steps and balance them to yield the outcome of your address, et cetera. The base is this a general understanding of each other, the outcome, complexity, possibilities, and dependencies. And in specific you have to be a general understanding of processes, method, mindset, and have the same language. And together. The key is the relevant, the synergies, the trust and the need for future orientated adjuncts set up.

00:15:35

So we installed a Dew which was responsible for the entire digital product. One more business orientated, aligned as a customer and understand the technologies and the other were technical orientated, aligned with the tech and understand the customer. Both have to make a step towards each other and find a common way for processing for methods, for my, for the same mindset and for a common language to working together and both have to learn from each other, to have the same understanding of tech and the customer here, you have, have to take care to promote the cross-pollination, to reach a higher level. It's a way what you will see the benefits quickly on all levels, but the environment is still complex. Everyone will, you still need both roles

00:16:33

If you're looking at the, at the development of the entire organization yesterday, which you can see on the left side, take and business, very divided by the chisel and the higher management were part of the product development and dropped ideas and features and decided and distinct committees about the product that will be shipped in the concept set up that, which we can see in the middle, we connect tech and business. We will picture you connecting roles together and to enable the edge, our team, it's important that the management, they lose lots of product details and focus on strategy and outcome. And today the agile team has a full responsibility and unable to iterate the digital product for our customers. For tomorrow. We expect a further evolution of, of the roads and mindsets across all levels.

00:17:33

One part, which was really important is when you build up a part of the organization, which agile construct in January 1st outcomes, one issue, you have to care, protect the flow against the old ways of thinking. Sometime it's really hard would last for a while, maybe four years, but it's versus, and you have to think you have to manage two sides of the same coin. First, you're able to edge a team to general outcome in the agile framework. They're responsible focus on the customer outcome in mind and align with the strategy. And on the other hand, the other side of the coin, you have to manage your management, which is still in the old framework with an old mindset. You have to play these old game, but that's generate the time you need to learn, improve, and generate and generate success toys, which are seen by the management. And then reach a point. Maybe it's a tipping point for the transformation to explain the HR framework to other part of the organization expanded horizontal and vertical.

00:18:43

So we dug deep into our transformation of processes and roles. Also, we introduced you about how we handle the transformation, our organization. It does conclude with some general learnings we had on our journey. Some of these learnings about a new understanding of organizations we found while others highlight some aspects of change that are important for us leading the transformation. First of all, we learned a lot about organizations, organizations try to resist change. There's a racial behind each organization and why it was established. And so it tries to preserve its current state and ways of working, changing things does not only lead to resistance. We even observed envy and reluctance. In other part of the company, don't let that stop you.

00:19:43

And even for we are convinced about our approach. We don't hire to protect our success and not try to convince everyone in the company to follow on the same ideas and ideals. But what we found to be important is to facilitate between our approach and other approaches in our company in short live, in that live on the other hand, the playing agility or Def ops by the book is impossible. Also, even if you adopted these approaches to your organization, the implementation path may change. Nope, it will change and it will change constantly. It's good to have a vision. It's good to have a plan, make sure to remain flexible enough to change it to adopted and last but not least the change itself itself takes a lot of energy. Not only is it hard to imagine you ways of working, it's even harder to convince our people to follow and upper management to support us. Unfortunately, it also takes a long breath until the benefits become clear with impatience being a natural proud of every organization we need to frequent. Can you explain and even ring fence our work? That's the reason why it is important for us to do the change together with the collective vision. Joining forces gave us the necessary power with these words we would like to conclude. We hope you liked our presentation. We hope that we encourage you to drive change further in your own organizations. The effort is definitely worth it. Good luck and goodbye. Goodbye.