00:00:15

Hey, good morning. Good afternoon. Welcome to this presentation. My name is Andrea sprints. I'm waiting for digital, the AI. And today I actually want to guide you through a story that goes beyond the first steps in the digital transformation with so much automation at our fingertips. How do we scale beyond the first week, beyond the first month and beyond the first year. And that is where we want to talk about today because we all know that setting, the first steps in the journey is not so difficult, but truly understanding where you want to go into longterm will. Everyone is already a few years in the digital transformation. I want to help you out with a lot of real life, examples and instruments that you can use tomorrow to move forward. So how do we design for scale? And ultimately we want to end up with four tips that get you started, that you can use and apply beyond your first year, because in the first year you will face difficulties and particular struggles, but your journey needs to continue also after this.

00:01:18

But before we go into the journey, I do want to share some really, really nice news. So today we're launching the fourth version of the periodic table. And at this point in time, I can imagine you're all familiar with the spirit of the table, but we're really excited to launch a new version with new segments, with new tools. And yeah, also some tools left the periodic table because there's so much going on in the space of automation, new areas of automation occur in particular in the cloud and in the container space, we see rapid rapid development, but also in the other segments, there are new tools coming up. So if you want to have a copy of this, please go to our booth and use it, get a download of it and start using it. And as soon as that's what we promise, as soon as there's a physical conference, again, you will absolutely get a real copy of it that you can use.

00:02:13

So with all the automation out there and all of us being familiar, at least with a few of them, the question sometimes come into my mind is how do I plan in a really, really structured way, the agile journey, and then where I want to talk about in the first place with so much automation out there, how do you plan and how do you know where you need to go? And what it wants to do is guide you through three instruments that you can start using tomorrow when you come together digitally or physically. And the purpose here is really to start tracking and measuring what matters to your organization. So the first one that I want to share with you is an Explorer map, and I've used it myself. So I'm totalling here from real experience. It has nothing to do yet with CICB or with any automation capabilities.

00:03:05

But the Explorer map is really a powerful instrument to understand where you want to go in the longer term, what is your goal? What is it that you want to achieve? And then start articulating smaller sub goals, derived from it, and ultimately to achieve a goal you need to articulate actions. What is it that I want to do to achieve my next goal? And then you start blending actions again, to go towards your next goal and ultimately achieving your big goal. And what I've learned from my own experience is that we can talk about the digital transformation and that we can start doing a lot of improvements, but if it's not clearly headed into one direction, you will notice that you as a team management team leadership team or a dev ops team are a little clueless. You don't know exactly what you want to achieve coming together as a team, again, development team management team, or leadership team for a day or two, really thinking through what is it that I want to achieve, putting it on the bowl, the many, many goals, and then starting to plan a journey of steps towards a goal is a really powerful instrument to start understanding each other.

00:04:13

And I've learned from our own experience, having the ability or the needs to guide a team of hundreds, 200 or 300 engineers, operation development engineers into that digital journey. It is important for you as a management team that you come together and that you have the conversation about what is it that I do want to achieve and by doing so you will come up with drawings that you can put on the wall a little later in time. And this is helpful because now all of a sudden, all of you will have a common understanding of it is what it is that you want to achieve. And I can recommend to start looking into it and the source is available. The source materials are available for you to use. Then the second instrument I want to share, and it's also based on my own experience is what is called the Obeya room or the visual room or a visual room where all the data is coming together.

00:05:11

And in this Obeya room, you as a team, a management team, a leadership team, or a DevOps team, or just a business line team can come together on a daily and a weekly basis to understand where you are and take actions and mitigations to go towards your goal. And an Obeya is an instrument that is originating in the lean practices. And what you will see in this Obeya is at the top left the long-term plan. You can use Explorer maps as I've just discussed to manage the long-term plan. And then all the actions that you need to take on a daily basis, you put them on the week board. And if you're another development team, you will notice that you will see a lot of managerial type of thoughts on this board. And this is important, I believe to be there at the daily basis, because if you believe that it transformation of all your teams only happen to continuous effort, you as a management team or a leadership team need to be out there two minutes impediments to solve problems and to take actions to help your teams going forward.

00:06:18

And the next at the right at the top are the impediments. What are the blockers? And this is not just budgeting or risk. This can also be in teams if a bad team, spirit, or atmosphere that you need to solve, or it can be in the application architecture, right? Because you have the desire to innovate. But if there are impediments from a technical perspective, that can hold you back. So is a really powerful instrument to, to manage day-to-day activities in alignment with the long-term plan. And then at the bottom, you'll see a lot of charts and measurements coming in. So you need to discover what are the metrics that matter to your organization that truly measure progress, quality change, and from organization to organization, I've learned from all of our customers. This truly depends on who you are and what you want to achieve and where you are in your journey.

00:07:12

But thinking about what are the metrics that express, if I'm progressing towards my goal, that is really important. And then last but not least at the left side, you can put on the board, what are the successes and affiliates? Because going through a digital transformation, it's also a continuous learning journey where you share the success that you've achieved and the failures and we're doing. So you will get a learning organization, which I believe is foundational to manage an organization at scale through the journey. So we've seen how we can go from big goals, next goals, that ex-cons towards a visual room to manage it. And by the way, you can perfectly do this in a digital way, with all the collaboration tools that are out there. And then the last layer is now go to the teams. What can they use to manage their digital transformation?

00:08:05

And personally, I do believe managing it from a visual board. What else it's physical? Right? So I'll weeks ago when we were still in the office or digitally, while we're all working remote, thinking about three elements for every dev ops team is important to again, improve during digital transformation. The first one is all about future work. What is it that we want to achieve? And that is why planning the future work and the direction at the higher level is so important because we need to align these two together, right? It can not happen that we express goals at an enterprise level or a business line level that are not aligned with the under lying teams that do the execution of the work. Then in the middle, you need to manage your current and to really think about how to visualize it, because having a clear visualization of the change that you want to make, and the issues that occur in the fields is important and what I've learned.

00:09:06

And that is a tip giveaway here. What I've learned by putting both the change, the new development at the same board as your incentive incidents, and it betterments that is helping you to improve. And why, because by having the incidents visible on your board, it hurts. It's funny, but it hurts. And what you want to do is lower the bar. And by lowering the bar, you're doing two things. The first thing that you're doing is you're making the space for incidents smaller and smaller, and by doing so, you need to focus on improvement. But then the beautiful side effect is you're freeing up more and more time and capacity to focus on new change and new additions and capabilities for your end users. And that is why understanding this human relation is important. And then last but not least the historic data, it is important to maintain data, to keep data and to learn also at the team level, from what has happened.

00:10:05

And I promise you start with the basic ones that you all know and that we all use, but then in retrospect, and other conversations learn what really matters to you and to drive your improvement, what is the historic data that shows you the insights on how to move forward? And then we have a feedback loop, right? Because the data from the boss is helping us to make decisions for the future. And that is important in the digital transformation. And you were probably expecting some concrete examples on, Hey, I did this and I did this. And another activity, what I've learned is setting up the infrastructure and almost the ecosystem to manage change is equally, or probably even more important than just focusing on the automation of steps and activities. And I do hope this first section, this first section has given you a really good insight on how to do that at a strategic level, a technical level, as well as at an operational level within the teams.

00:11:07

And then the next question that we see happening in our customers, and I originally had a really good conversation with one of our customers, um, in the UK is how do I design for scale? Right? Because starting the journey discovering the first steps is pretty easy. It's just all about automation and we improve a few steps. But then the question is, how do I roll out practices to all my teams? And on one hand rolling out practices is, is, is groups. But at the same time, I do want to give some freedom to my teams to operate within. So what we see happening at many of our customers and in particular, large customers, having thousands of engineers involved in that entire dev ops information or cloud a container transformation, they start thinking about dev ops as a service. And by saying dev ops as a service, they are articulating a fine balance, the on one hand standardization and at the same time, freedom for engineers and engineering teams to move forward and make their own decisions and what we believe and what we see at their customers is that customers who articulate a good balance saying, Hey, these are the main blocks that I do want to see in your pipelines, that how you do it, we'd walk those, you do it.

00:12:27

That's up to you. That is a really good balance between the two of them. So an example here from one of our customers, it is articulating at the higher level, the five phases where pipelines need to go through or where delivery needs to go through to be precise. It needs to see something on the planning side. So how you link your tickets, how you create a change request. That doesn't matter that much, but it's all about blending. The change and teams do have the ability to in whatever way, linker, epics the stories and have change requests altogether. Then there's the entire build the desks, the deployments, and the pre or the post deployment to production. And in each of them, you can imagine before miss testing and security testing are two mandatory activities. So that's a given you need to show, or you need to come back with the results in the entire pipeline, but what tools you choose to do performance testing or security testing, then doesn't matter that much.

00:13:31

And I'm a big fan. And I do believe that having this fine grain balance of saying, Hey, I do have these five phases. And in this, I need to see output that is a useful way to measure it. And dev ops is a service coming up with stand-up services that are ready to use and available to all teams can be a really good way to do so. I think predefined patterns, as I just spoke about is something to provide the knowledge of the experts, to all the teams. And at the same time, by articulating at the metal level, you can get the data back that is important for your quality or for other reporting purposes. And that is a good way to scale beyond the first few steps that you've made. Another one where you can then start thinking about is how do I position security and governance in these standardized pipelines?

00:14:22

And beyond saying, Hey, I just have these five faces. We also see many of our organizations saying, yeah, and for security and performance or compliance, I do have standard building blocks that every team simply needs to go through. So depending on your development, on the type of artifact, that's coming out, you go through a pipeline that includes check marks or showing our scanning these kinds of capabilities. So having these standardized building blocks that helps you to bake security into your pipeline and by doing so you get two things. The first thing is, it's not an afterthought that you say, oh yeah. And before I go to production, I do need to do security and performance. No, it's there. It's in the standard process. The second thing, what I do believe is if you want to scale beyond the first steps, you need to have all this auditing and compliance baked in, and it's helping you to renew and review all the rules and the checks and balances that you've put together and your risk framework.

00:15:27

So thinking about this upfront helps you to accelerate, and it is important if you are in your journey for a little while. And then the last one here I thought about it already is enforced the required and leave the space for the optional. It is important to understand how to scale from one expert to all of them in your organization. And I also do believe that organizations need to think about this from if I have particular practices, can I share this asphalt using GitHub practices to my entire organization? If I'm onboarding on the cloud journey, I cannot make every engineer, a Kubernetes expert. So how can I use his knowledge through standard building roles through blueprints to ESCO practices, to scale this out to many, many DevOps teams that are out there. And a little while ago, I had a really good conversation. Someone leading engineering teams in BD, and he told me this is important because in particular, these experts are often external consultants coming in for a few months and then leaving.

00:16:34

So how do you leverage or actually gain his knowledge and put it into blueprints and then share it through the tools that you have out there. So thinking about this, a problem I believe is important in your digital journey to accelerate. So we've seen how to plan a journey, how to think about scalability and standardization. And I do want to finish up with four tips that you can utilize beyond the first year. And again, they're probably not the most obvious ones, but I do believe thinking about these is important to accelerate and ultimately to make the next step in your digital transformation. The first one will be about extending your view. Post deployments, discuss the success of an initiative with your business partner. I believe that is important. The third one will be about taking the bull mags that you will have in your process very, very seriously and last but not least going back to where we started, how can you use Explorer maps to start planning your journey in a better way? Let's take a look at all. Four of them.

00:17:42

The first one was off layers while I was managing my dev ops themes. And what I've seen that many customers is we used to stop after the deployment to production. We often take a kind of a narrow view of the development value stream and what I've learned in the last few months, I must admit with our products, but also with our customers is how can you go beyond both deployments? Can you use, for example, observability tools that are often used to manage the technical health and understanding how the application use to feed data back into product management, or can you use your security vulnerability scanning to feed in your product manager to make better decisions on the capabilities that you need to add? So building the loop from deployment to monitoring back into the roadmap, I do believe is really important. And we're looking in these days because we have almost all of them monitoring out on all of our applications.

00:18:44

And here's my tip, do a little team exercise tomorrow or next week. Whenever this conference is over to start looking at the monitoring data and date that, and see what you can use to give as feedback to the product manager, where to optimize, where can we gain a better retention rate throughout the entire flow. That is really important. What I believe to start getting a much more complete view of the entire software development delivery and operations process. The second thing that I do want to discuss here is discussing with your business partner, the success of an initiative, what is the outcome that you want to achieve? Well, developing a new capability. And I've learned that this is so important because we've discussed in the beginning of this presentation, that you need to understand what the goals are that you're contributing to. But how do you know, as an engineer or a team or a product manager to the goals that you're contributing from an organizational perspective, because everyone from the CIO all the way to the engineer have a different lens on how they look at reality, but also on what is value creation.

00:20:00

So what I've learned is that understanding and having a conversation with your business line manager or with your product manager is super helpful to make better decisions. Why, because you understand the purpose, what is it that we want to achieve? And within that framework, you can make a better decision. And what I can propose is that together with your team, you start filling in this little table, how is work going down from product manager, or even from the line of business to engineering? What is the work that we're contributing? And then, and that's the interesting thing. How do we deliver value back up? Because for an engineer, from a pure engineering perspective, you can say my value delivery, if the merge into the master branch or from a team, as soon as I have a new artifact ready, my value delivery ants. But that doesn't mean that the objective from the organization is achieved, right?

00:20:55

Because before it's in the hands of the user and we've rolled out the entire offering, including the marketing campaigns on television, there's no value delivered. So understanding how your work contributes ultimately to the value delivery is a kind of eye-opening. And the thing I've taken out of this is I can make better decisions in the bigger picture. And that is what I believe really important. If you are beyond the first year of your digital transformation, the third long is probably a little funny long, but at the same time, it is super serious taking time to recognize waste or discovered. Bottlenecks is really important. And I can promise you these bottlenecks go beyond your bike lines, right? It's powerful to have a tool that visualize where are the bottlenecks? Where can you accelerate if you automate, or where can you accelerate if you take reruns out, right?

00:21:54

These are all kind of the basic efficiency improvements. But if you are beyond your first year of the digital transformation, and the majority of us is beyond that first year things series, you look at your agenda, right? Any particular, these days of all of us working from home, it's sometimes crazy, right? There's so much work scrambling to get one day. He said really needed all these meetings, or can you focus back on delivering the work that needs to be delivered? And another one I do want to highlight is that what I've called the delivery bumpiness. We all know that pushing out one pipeline is probably not so hard, but what I've learned is if you really, really want to accelerate is the simplification of your entire application stack is really important because many of us are still facing complex deliveries. And they are hard. If you need to align five or 10 pipelines altogether, that is really difficult.

00:22:54

And you can do so through automation. I know there's an offering also in our portfolio, but what is important I believe is to simplify the entire application stack, to make ultimately the delivery much more easy. Ultimately every CIO cycle that should be the ultimate goal can go and needs to go to production. So the focus on the simplification of this is a hard one. It's a long journey, but it is an important one ultimately to accelerate. And then last but not least, I cannot emphasize this enough. It is really important to understand what you want to achieve. And that sounds easy, but it is hard to get it on paper. It's hard to articulate it altogether and to align and collaborate around the same set of goals, the big ones or the, and the next goals that are achievable within a quarter or in months, and then lining what you want to achieve with the impact you want to make within an organization.

00:23:56

Identifying the outcomes is the second thing. However, if you're able to map out the goals in alignment with what you want to achieve as an organization, you can truly accelerate. And this is important. I believe if you want to move forward in your digital transformation, you simply need to understand where do I want to go? And what is it that I want to achieve? And these are instruments that are really good and really helpful to make that happen. It will take time. You need to go through it. You need to exercise it on a quarter by quarter basis. You need to follow the rules on a daily basis to execute upon the actions. But if you do so, you will know this, that you will go foster and foster in this digital transformation. And the beautiful thing is what you will also learn is that there's much more in the improvement cycle than just the automation.

00:24:49

There's a lot of stuff happening in the ecosystem, in the atmosphere of themes and in alignment, which our business partners, however, if you're able to do it, you will achieve whatever you need to be need to achieve. And that is what I do think powerful in a journey. I do wish you all the luck and remember, it's a journey. There's never a goal. It's always underway towards a new destination, and therefore just enjoyed it. Thank you for attending this session. Please go to our fertile booth. I will be there today as well, a couple of times. And if need is, I will come into the booth because there's always someone from us. Thank you.