00:00:02

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. We are here to tell you a little bit about our dojo community and how we're using seniors to transform enterprises. I'm Roger servi with Verizon. I'm. One of the organizers for the dosha consortium with me is one of our founding members. I'm

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Stacy Peterson, formerly from target currently at,

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And I'm Brian Fenster. I lead the DevOps dojo for Walmart

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By now. You've all heard Jean talking about seniors and what that is just a quick recap on, on it, right? It's the ability to generate genius level intelligence out of a crowdsource story, a pooled environment, taken from a community we're trying to do the various same thoughts sort of thing that Einstein did with the theory of relativity and by transforming enterprises with the same kind of breakthrough developed through an intelligence, a genius, a seniors', if you will, from the result of all of our members inside the dojo consortium.

00:01:03

So this would be a really weird day at the office. Stork literally brought Ross Clanton into the dojo at target. No, not really. Um, I was blessed to be one of the founding members of the first dojo with Ross Clanton that target. Now we have over 40 companies with dojo's. I'm proud to say they call them all different things, but the concepts are the same. Um, and Ross came to me one day and said that his dev ops team was doing this place of the way learning thing called the dojo and what I like to join them and bring the agile coaches and the product coaching into the dojo. And of course I was like, yes, let's put the chocolate and the peanut butter together. And so we began a dojo, um, five, almost six years ago. It grew to three dojo's at target. Um, and each one honestly looked a little different. So even within the same company, um, your, your transformations, your dojo's might look different. We started out, um, the consortium with really three founding members, target capital one and Verizon. And, um, I just loved the culture of sharing and transparency and being honest about our struggles and our learnings. And I found from my colleagues that it could transcend competition. So even let Walmart in at a time when I was at target, because we didn't care about that, we just cared about changing the world, changing the way we worked and sharing our struggles and our wins and the stuff that worked for us as a, uh, senior kind of community.

00:02:34

We just ignored each other on the phone. So currently we have a practice here is from over 30 companies in the fortune 200, you know, we're always continuously sharing and learning from each other. We have, uh, calls and events, uh, just to work together. Uh, we also, uh, we act as experts as a service. You know, you, you hire a consultant to kind of sock puppet what you want to, uh, tell leadership. We just do that for each other. We open source it, uh, it's, it's actually pretty effective. It's really cheap. Uh, and the way Walmart got into it,

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It was a rollback. Yeah.

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The way that Walmart got into it was, you know, we had gamified hydrangea, uh, and came to show it and I get introduced to it to, uh, what's your name again? Roger. So I got introduced to Roger and found out about the consortium. I said, absolutely. We're in.

00:03:31

So taking a look at some of the members, uh, they're representative corporations, you'll see on there. Stacy mentioned this before, too, right? That we have two examples here, competitors in the retail space competitors in the finance space, but we find that our membership looks beyond those things to try and find that that shared commonality, that, that one path, that one way, that one lesson that we can share with one another to build the best practices and grow the seniors of the organization, that effort transcends the normal competitive relationships that you would find and makes Walmart and target or Walmart and U S U S bank and capital one, or what have you fast friends working towards one common outcome. Yeah, we're

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On the same mission.

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So rising tides, rising tides lift all boats as Ross Clanton is fond of saying the godfather, the dojo's and no less. So in our consortium, we think about things in the same way, again, back to other competition that we were talking about or the lack thereof and why. So, so we use a variety of methods in the consortium to help build the community on a regular basis. All communities need regular things to be able to be healthy and well on. And so we use a telecom teleconference. That's hosted, it's a video conference, actually, it's hosted once every two weeks members come in and out and talk about their successes, they talk about their failures. They talk about things that are, they're challenging them, that they need help with. And they talk about things that they've observed. It's a really fantastic sharing. Uh, we also have tours provided by our various members.

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We're pleased to share the target has done over 250 tours. Most of those while Stacy was with them. So no, not yet. Um, and those tours are really valuable to help share the experience. I know Brian came and spent a few days with us in Dallas, so fantastic stuff. We've also this year, uh, successfully held our first learning event, 665 people from the dojo consortium. And at that point we were only about two dozen companies worth, came to Minneapolis to learn about the great things that we are practicing as a group, a building that seniors in the immersive learning practice, we had people like Michael Nygaard, just fantastic, you know, to be able to get those kinds of people from the dev ops community to come out and talk about what we're doing. And then finally we're doing meetups right in Dallas. We've got a healthy meetup group that's going on. And we also have one in Minneapolis. And we're hoping very soon that our friends in Atlanta will begin starting one of those as,

00:05:55

And I hope that all of you have experienced what a sharing community and the entire DevOps community is. And this, the dojo consortium is the same way. You know, all of us are equal. We're all in a journey. There's no seniors or juniors. It doesn't matter how long we've been doing it. We're all mentors or mentees about something. And it's a really special kind of feeling. So, I mean, this is what we do, right. I mean, we share what we've learned. We share successes and failures. Like Roger said, personally, I always ask everybody what failed, why did it fail? Because I want to know if it fails for me, just because it failed for them. Doesn't mean it wouldn't succeed for me. You know, we also work on brainstorming solutions for each other. You know, I might be struggling with something and, you know, with our shared mind, we can come up with a solution that might work for me.

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I found playbooks super useful at target and at us bank. And the dojo consortium is developing one that we're crowdsourcing. Um, at us bank, our playbook has become a coaching tool, but it's also a self-service way to go in. And as a PO or a scrum master and engineer, um, you can click on helpful templates and get started with good examples and see the entire product life cycle from discovery to delivery. Um, you can see how to pass an audit in there. There's just a lot of cool stuff. That's been really useful across companies. So you'll be able to check ours out from the consortium on how to run a dojo and how to coach on this stuff soon.

00:07:23

Where would you be in the dojo without the place we come together? And you might be surprised how much time we spend here and there talking about the importance of the dojo itself, what goes into a dojo? What are the components? What are the tools that you use within it? Who's in the dojo, et cetera. We talk about the place on a regular basis, and we're always interested in new examples. And now Stacy's got one that we're really excited to refer to talk about later of new examples on how to utilize the space and how to activate that, to make things different because that difference helps amplify the lessons that are being learned by the teams.

00:07:56

So you were just out there spreading the word about this, who were trying to get more people roped in and showing what we're actually doing. You'll see that Verizon Delta, Walmart, other members, we've talked about this on several this year here last year. Uh, we're also at local meetups talking about it. Jennifer DevOp stays. Dallas was super energetic and super fun to watch, you know, dev op stays Columbus and other places you'll hear about what we're doing.

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Uh, in addition to speaking, we're also writing, as you can see, a few of our members are contributing their thoughts here today. You'll see Jackie Damiano and Ross Clanton, two of our members of the consortium talking, or rather representing for the book that they wrote for it revolution or the pamphlet, excuse me. They wrote a fantastic treatise that represents the seniors of this organization and how you get started with your own dojo's. If you need to go a little further, a couple of other members, Joel Tosi, and Deon Stewart, they're publishing a full length treatise on how to activate your own dojo, how to run it at scale, how to, and all of the steps that go in from, from soup to nuts and your evolution journey thereafter.

00:09:05

So at target, we were an early adopter. So we found ourselves mentoring. A lot of companies like Rogers side. We did hundreds of tours, Q and a labs workshops. We hosted teams, executives up and down the food chain. And I'd have to say, I learned more from them just by observing over hundreds of companies, how we all share the same struggles and the same woes and the same waterfall, um, scars and battles. So that was really a fun opportunity. Um, and now to come full circle at USBank, I find myself starting over at a bank, which was very different culture. So I've been able to reach out to the members of the community and get mentoring as I began mentoring others. And, and I can like, like Brian said, rope in some free consulting and say, go tell them that for me, tell them a bank can do this too. And, um, I know you've had similar.

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Yeah, it is effective. And you know, in the same vein, I was the mentee, you know, we were getting started and I needed to know how to get it done. You can go to the conferences, you see the stuff, but there's no details. There's not enough time. And I had the, uh, you know, me and a teammate spent two days, dojo, deep diving, seeing all of their artifacts, seeing the dojo and action, talking to the coaches, finding out what, what the reality of it is. And we found out all the things, or at least many of the things we didn't know, we didn't know, uh, which absolutely massively accelerated. So that just a few weeks later, we were able to start our first engagement with the team, uh, and start running without stumbling.

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It's a big part of our culture to pay it forward and to continue to grow the seniors by helping those who are getting started.

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And the thing about what we do, what we do is metrics based coaching. Okay. It's not about process. It's how you must do scrum. That's that'll fail. It's how, what are your current metrics? How do we improve those metrics? Let's run experiments, let's get it done with measurable outcomes. And Ross Clanton talked to the webinar a few months ago about he's seen across multiple countries of these that it's not uncommon to see cycle times dropped by 50%. It's also been my experience as well, that every single team we go into, we see massive improvement. Uh, and they do bounce back a little bit, but they never dropped as far as they were. Uh, and the way we focus on it is we focus on continuous integration as the driver of that improvement, driving that batch size down. Why can't we go to master today, let's work as a team to solve the problem. That's how we move the teams and teach them how to improve so they can continue improving after we've left.

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Yeah. And just adding measurements, really the cornerstone of being able to demonstrate value. And so even as we talk amongst ourselves about what to measure, we're always focused on knowing that we have to demonstrate the value of what we're, what we're doing to the enterprises we're transforming.

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Yeah. And absolutely don't make the mistakes I made early on measure first. So you argue with,

00:12:05

So in the dojo consortium, we often say make more awesome. Let me share with you a couple of examples about two of our members and what they were able to see. And these are not unusual in any way. They are actually regular and common examples of the things you find for most teams. Right? At Verizon, for example, we had a team called net robo, and yes, that was the name they chose for themselves. Big part of the seniors, make sure they label and brand themselves. Um, they delivered a enhancement in two months that saved the company $2 million annually and continues to perform at that rate now. So for the last two years, they've actually been delivering at that 2 million in savings by implementing a major product enhancement for their, their installation product. Right. So that sounds great. But even better than that, along that same eight week journey, they were able to lower the number of defects they were getting. Every defect is at a cost, right? So imagine you can cut your costs on defects by more than half. And while you're doing that, you can actually pick up velocity and start deploying your software that much more quickly, right. Going from three days to not from nine days to three days, that's incredible. And all of that achieved. And again, translates into more savings over 220,000 per annum per year. Right. Great example

00:13:13

At USBank we started, uh, an experience studio having done the dojo's before. So if you could do it different, what would it look like? And I'll share more about that in a minute, but they were one of the companies that came in and did a tour and a workshop and another tour bringing in more people and another workshop. And so I learned a lot about the company and got invited there and, um, was mentoring folks from there. And we're so excited that now we've had teams produced from idea to customer feedback in the studio in less than four weeks, um, new mobile apps, new, new, uh, distributed apps, new modern apps. And those things used to be measured in years or months. And now we're talking about weeks.

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Yeah. It actually, it was really cool to watch her presentation where you see actual customers interacting with a paper wire frame for user experience research that's MVP. That's super cheap,

00:14:03

Really cool thing they did before I got there was, uh, they bought executives and then all the teams in the studios, red shoes. And so if you see people wearing red shoes and they might not know why, but you can tell them you're wearing red shoes because it's a reminder at USBank to be bold and to be different because we're changing everything. And so, um, that's been really catching on a lot. You don't have to wear them every day. It's not weird like that, but it's cool to have them buy you red shoes and then point out, Hey, you know why you have red shoes on total strangers?

00:14:37

So a couple of really good examples we shared with you about the dojo consortium and the things that companies teams are achieving through dojo's and the transformation that goes along with that practice, let's dive a little more deeply into what three of our members are actually garnering from their participation within the dojo consortium.

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So like I said, in 2017, when we came here to talk, we already had a unified delivery platform. And I can't tell you how important that is. Not only the training, but security and compliance. We had a community of interest that my wife, who is sitting here actually started as a way to learn more. She was said, I want to keep the conversation going. And we started a community of interest to meet all the time with it's just developer, grassroots, helping each other with continuous deliveries. Um, and we had gamified hygiene. If I had to say one thing and that's caused more passive improvement was gamifying hygiene. And yeah. And th th it's amazing the teams come to us, Hey, how do I get my score up? Oh, well, let me show you how to do trunk based development. But that was the problem is that people still didn't know how.

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And I came here in 2017 to solve that problem. How do we help the teams learn how at scale, because it's Walmart, you know, and, and that's where, you know, I also wanted to show Topol what we've done with hygienists. Like, look what we've done. You know, do you think this is useful? And TOPA went nuts. He thought it was awesome. And then he introduced me to what Verizon was doing with other extensions idea to show, uh, uh, executive metrics along with what those mean, which is the killer app, by the way, and roped us into the dojo. And then I went back to my VP and I said, later that week, I said, Hey, I, uh, I volunteered to get us into the hygiene consortium so we can contribute to that open source project. And I, uh, you know, I volunteered to get us into the dojo consortium. So please don't fire me

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Key lesson there, forgiveness, not

00:16:33

Permission. Yeah. That's, that's just what I do. And the outcome of that though, you know, is we get to scale experiments, horizontally, all right, you have all these people you can talk to. And as you go through and talk to the people what's working, what's not working. Why isn't it working? Like I said, does it work for you for this reason? What have you tried? What haven't you tried? What do you think of this idea? Because conversation is super cheap. Having those phone calls, having the email conversations one-on-ones with people, incredibly inexpensive execution experiments, very expensive. So if we can clear the low hanging fruit, we can save a ton of money. We can help everybody help developers live better lives.

00:17:25

So one of the things that Verizon gained obviously was we went right away and implemented the model that we came to know of from target. Now we had Ross Clanton available to help us with that. But over time, even we started to see some things as we were implementing that didn't quite work the way they had at target, no surprises there, Verizon and target are very different companies with different footprints. And obviously we see a few wrinkles there that can, we were able to leverage the community to talk about some of the common challenges that we were finding and that our friends at target and capital one came back and told us, yeah, that's totally normal, man, that expected, right? So we came to know of how to, how to manage your pull model, right? Pull model, meaning we don't normally dojo's don't function by mandate, right.

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Go to the dojo and get better. That doesn't happen that often, sometimes, but not that often more often it's teams that are seeking to get better come and approach you. And so that's a pull model, which is where we want to attract them into the dojo. It was. And that was a real challenge for us at Verizon, that we had to learn how to overcome and actually get better at marketing and get better at attracting people into the dojo's. So when we look at overall in more depth, what we learned at Verizon, you know, one of the key things is, and we showed this earlier, right? That which is measured improves. So make sure that you're looking at what your teams are doing. That way. You can capture it and start demonstrating it. You can even monetize it. Members of the consortium will be there to help you achieve that same sort of standard as you're proving out your business cases, or as you're starting to demonstrate what you think the value is of your improvements that you're implementing across the board, bring your leaders along in the journey in the event that they're not accompanying you, you can expect that you're going to find recidivism, right?

00:19:00

This is no surprise to anybody in the room who's been on this journey. Certainly not to the folks up here with me. Now there's a strength in the community, right? We've found that others are facing the same kind of challenges and problems that we have. And there is great solace in finding out that, that you're not alone in that endeavor more than that, as you've heard up here, activating that community to help find and create solutions or to find out what not to try and avoid the cost of failing at it, hugely valuable and important, right? Ultimately, each company is different. So do what works best for you. And, uh, over time, you'll find that with you'll be iterating your own sorts of ideas as we have at Verizon. Now, as the journey continues on, uh, Jackie Damiano's is going to tell you about in another hour or my friend Bryce Calton here in the audience can tell you there they've come up with some new patterns and new ways to address that ongoing challenge of how you continue to allow the dojo to grow and evolve into a new thing.

00:19:57

Yeah. Having a three, four or five-year-old dojo, you could kind of see what happens over a span of time. And we found that, um, all the teams wanted to come in one time and that was only had six week challenges. And even if they had to relocate for that six weeks, it wasn't really that hard to get the interest in because it was sexy and it was a new way of working. Um, but not a lot of them wanted to come in a second time and even fewer a third time. So you would wonder, will it die or will it always be a place of the way for learning the next new thing? Um, so at the experience studio at USBank, they really took a different twist on it and had it not really be a DevOps place of the way for learning, but more of a business strategy driven incubator, where we happen to teach agile dev ops product and have teams produce things, um, with that speed to market that the business loved.

00:20:46

Um, so that something like we had experienced that target a Techstars type of incubator that kind of exposed me to that business driven while you're being agile and learning a new way of working. So that's kind of what the experience studio is doing today. I'm also real customers walk in and we can video them interacting with the technologies. Um, and they can look at paper prototypes if the team wants them to like way before anything's been developed wrong wrongly. Um, although we love making mistakes quickly because it happens in a fail fast kind of way. Um, thirdly, yeah, it is, um, third, uh, the teams can stay, there's no six weeks. There's no time limit. And the reason for that was we just had horrible cube farms, you know, and needed new space. So if you were to build a couple of floors and call it an experience studio and bring the strategic teams in, they can stay the coaching. Is there, um, the tools they need are taught to them, um, they learn while doing, which is way more effective than any training or coaching. And we didn't kick them out. They could stay, we just took over the next floor of the building and the next floor and so on. So it's like the new bank is being built through the experience studio. So it kind of feels like in that way it will never die or kind of run out of steam. Um, knock on.

00:22:05

Um, finally the thing that really slows a bank down is risk and security and, um, for good reason, you know, we need them, I don't want to be in the news and, and have that be my fault at all. So instead of working against us, we said, Hey, we're all on the same team. We're going to beat the competition together and went together. So we just embedded them on our teams and the experience studio. And you could really see the acceleration that, that felt like they were a part of the team. Now they got to help the team be, be, um, less risky and more secure and not do things to the team, but with them. Um, and the question that kept coming up was this will never scale, but it has like, as we've grown, the experience studio, more risk team members have joined.

00:22:46

Um, and when they feel like that, that team's got it under control, much like coaching, we can move on to the next thing. So that's kind of how we accelerated some of the slowness of governance at the bank. So I've learned over the course of several companies and several years in different iterations of the dojo, that transformation doesn't look the same. Um, although a ton of stuff in the playbook is definitely the same. So there's the same mindset and the same values and the same, um, desire to change the world and every place that we go, but it might have to look different just because of your culture in your organization. Um, even having that, why story really tailor made for your company is really important so that when the grassroots fire's really blazing, you don't have a top-down, you know, extinguisher come and put it out.

00:23:33

So finding that top down and, um, have the stars aligned with the grassroots fire, uh, was, was really key to have a why story. Also, we happen to have all new CEOs and CTOs and every C-level at the bank is new. And, um, within interviewing them in their first five minutes on the job, I was like, yes, they've done this before. Um, they want product over project. They want to change the way that we're working. So I'm really blessed to have that top-down support, um, and to get business buy-in upfront is way better than to try to get it along the way. So definitely learned, um, through this next iteration, how important that is. And, um, our one pain point right now, I would say is just in building that engineering culture because the bank was more of an integrator or a package configure than it was an engineering organization. So we're setting about that with metrics, like how much of our workforce is engineering versus people who talk about or facilitate the work. How can we shift that? Even just in our metric, as a baby step, to understanding that engineering is important because we're building software.

00:24:39

And it was one of the things I learned Dr. Forest green earlier this week talked about, oh, dojo's can turn into an anti-pattern that's a lot of its comes. Everybody says, dojo is a thing. Uh, really if the dojo's existence is to grow the dojo. Yeah. It's, it's an Andy pattern. Well, you should be an enabling team. You should be communicating information up and down every level of leadership and to the teams. You know, I learned that the most effective thing I can do is go behind the scenes and talk to VPs and talk about the common pain points we're seeing on every single team, you know, and pulling in good information and blasting it out. And every method I can come up with to get it out to the teams and constantly being that channel of communication up and down and be utterly transparent in both directions is really what I see as the role of the dojo.

00:25:29

And this is key. I mean, you only learn as fast as you contribute. You know, if you have all these ideas and you can implement them, uh, you don't have any way to get quality feedback of the idea, but if you contribute those ideas back to the community, it, it, you know, they can either say, Hey, have you tweaked this, it gets even better. And you can go and try that, or, uh, sparks new ideas. And then you get the harvest, those new ideas. And that's really what we're trying to do is, is form that community. So it's just a massive acceleration of, of learning and new ideas to help all of us build that developer experience who want to help everybody's bottom lines. And, you know, like Roger said, a rising tide absolutely lifts all boats, but if you're in a pond ponds, don't have tides, right? So come join the ocean.

00:26:17

I want to leave you with a parting question. How are you empowering your teams and incenting your organizations to change maybe through a consortium,

00:26:28

Maybe through the seniors that we can offer here,

00:26:29

The dojo, and this is where we need your help. Okay. You know, right now it's been person to person. I know a person, right. You know, I, I had someone reach out to me from Fiat Chrysler. We got them in, right. You know, we've had people from Delta, we brought them in. It's just, who knows who, but really we want to expand it broader than that. So if you go to Bitly dojo consortium, that's our face. I mean, Facebook, our LeanKit LinkedIn LinkedIn group, Joe consortium on LinkedIn. We're also trying to start open sourcing. Some of the playbooks have, uh, you know, and have a community, uh, kind of like InnerSource commons for what we do. And if you go to dojo, consortium.org, it's light right now. But you know, we're, we also have day jobs. Uh, and we do accept pull requests.

00:27:17

It will also contain the information about our upcoming training event for the dojo consortium members to be sponsored or to be held in Dallas, I believe

00:27:24

Next year. Yeah, absolutely. So please join us and contribute. And, and here's the other thing is people have asked me this week, how can I get you to talk to me? I said, ask me, no, no, no. I mean, because your time's valuable. I know we pay it so intimidating looking, right. Honestly,

00:27:43

We do. We want to pay it forward. So thanks for your time.

00:27:47

Thank you all.