00:00:05

So we are teal unicorn. Uh, it's a really good, well, I'll get to that. Um, it's a really, uh, good, uh, buzzword oriented logo, but we like that. So teal, because high culture. So for those of you who've read reinventing organizations, they'll lose book, uh, about the different color coding of culture. Teal is the aspirational, highest level of, uh, culture that we aspire, aspire to. Unicorn. You all know that one. Um, it's the aspirational model for how we work and the new way of working, because it is so, um, and we know it's brand for a fad. We know it uses these fad words, but we actually like fads. We think their engines have changed. We think that by anchoring yourself to some of these buzzwords, it helps drive things. So anyway, I hope so. 'cause that's our brand as a team. Um, we're, we're based in Wellington.

00:00:58

Uh, so for those of you, you can probably guess already that we, well, you can guess that Cherry's not a New Zealander, we'll get that in just a moment. But, um, uh, that we are, we are from New Zealand. So Wellington is 400,000 people. It's not a big city, but it's government. So most of our work is government. And, um, most of, uh, our work is consulting by the hour with, um, large clients around strategy and evangelizing some of these ideas and coaching and training. Um, and it's interesting that, uh, I worked in the service management world for many years. So I come from the dark side and uh, um, and did a lot of consulting in that space. And no one really wanted to talk about DevOps until three years ago. And suddenly our whole world is DevOps and, and all my work for the last few years has been DevOps.

00:01:48

Um, but now we are starting to pick up some work, uh, working in agile enterprise, uh, in Vietnam and helping transform large organizations in Vietnam at the enterprise level to new ways of working, which is pretty exciting. So we are, I'm Rob England, and, uh, I'm, some of you, a few of you will know me from my blogging and the IT skeptic and I have a bit of an online presence in this world. And, uh, with me is Dr. Cherry Vu, who, uh, has no IT background whatsoever. So it's, it's highly amusing, especially in the exhibit hall, walking around with Cherry, um, uh, listening to the vendors trying to explain technology is, is terrific. And <laugh>,

00:02:38

I often say that you guys have a three minutes to talk about whatever you are doing. You know, if you be able to get me to understand, then you can make everyone's understand. You can sell everyone to everyone, right?

00:02:52

Yeah. And it's been really interesting even to coach a few of them in, in that language. Um, so that, that's exciting. So, um, I I missed one slide, sorry. Our clients are, are, you know, are pretty small by your standards, but, but now that Cherry has introduced us into Vietnam, um, and, and, uh, her contacts there, we are working with organizations that are 10, 15,000 people and we're working at the enterprise level, not the IT level, which is, which is fascinating. Um, so I guess the last thing to say is that we are partners in life and work, which is fantastic. How

00:03:29

Horrible it would

00:03:30

Be. <laugh>, it seems to work so fast. So, um, fingers crossed on that one. So

00:03:38

<laugh>, um, by the way, I'm his boss.

00:03:44

Yeah,

00:03:45

<laugh>,

00:03:47

I, I, I always admit to mention that, but, um, if we had time, I would tell you about, uh, what it does to Vietnamese culture when, um, cherry gets up and does all the talking and I literally carry her handbag

00:04:04

<laugh>.

00:04:05

So, um, but anyway, I'll tell it's coming here in a bar about that story. 'cause it's fascinating taking feminism to Vietnam. Um, uh, but let's get on with the, with the show. So, um, DevOps has three AXS parents, right? It, it, it stands on the shoulders of ideas from Agile lean and service management. And Gene Kim's been, you know, really passionate about saying, don't throw the bar baby out with the bath water. ITSM has value. It's part of what we do. It is part of our body of knowledge. Uh, but, but, but somewhere along the way, we went tribal, right? And I was part of that in the early days. The it skeptic was, was chucking rocks at these crazy agile people and this crazy DevOps stuff. And it was people like John Willerson Gene who, uh, wore me down and convinced me. And eventually, um, it was a blog post by Jazz Humble, which was the breaking point where I saw the Light Brothers and sisters and <laugh> and, and came on board.

00:05:03

But, you know, I was part of that, that that sort of factionalism where, you know, if you've got the, the, you guys saying, ding dong Idol is dead, yay, we never have to do ITSM again. And you've got the ITSM people saying, these free range cowboys are dangerous people. And, and, you know, those stereotypes have, have created this fracture in the body of knowledge, which is a bit unfortunate. And there were really good reasons for it, right? So, um, IL had baggage and, and I worked for years as a consultant doing it, ITSM transformations and introducing IL and ITSM ways of working. And, you know, with mixed success, it's, there's a lot of stick and a lot of carrot. Um, and, and ILE has these inherent fundamental problems in it around, uh, the fact that it's siloed into processes. So I shouldn't say by the way that the, the, the ILE Illuminati, the Idol philosophers would foam at the mouth at some of the things I'm gonna say, because in theory in the books, it doesn't necessarily say this, but there's a difference between what the Idol Dictionary says and ILE as it is spoken in the streets, right?

00:06:11

And so I'm talking about how ILE ends up being implemented, not necessarily what the theory says, but so the, but the books are still structured. They drive us into thinking about processes, go and improve change management, go and improve incident management. We're gonna have an idle project, and we'll spend the first two months on incident and the next two months on problem, and that'll fix it. It's like, um, so the thinking drives into processes. And, and, and many of you should know that that creates local Optima, not systems Optima. And, and that's a real problem. Uh, it so I is not inherently bureaucratic, believe it or not, but boy does it empower bureaucrats, right? They love it. They suck it up. And so it empowers the bureaucracy within our organizations. And I've always thought with the idol books that they feel like one of those hospitals that's been built and they haven't yet opened it, or they don't have enough money to open it.

00:07:05

And, you know, there's, there's just these empty corridors. There's all this equipment and these beds and, and everything, but there's nobody there. And, and the books feel very sterile, very empty of people. Uh, so I've always felt that way. And, and then I used to say that Idol should have color coded pages, right? There should be the green pages and the blue pages and the ILE books. 'cause sometimes it's talking about orthodoxy. It's talking about generally accepted practice that's well established, and this is how it's done. And then sometimes it's trying to create thought leadership and establish new ideas. And it doesn't tell you when it's doing one or the other, which is very dangerous. To be fair, Ile, I mean, the thinking from ILE originates in the seventies and eighties and was codified in the nineties. So a lot of these ideas predate a lot of the bodies of knowledge or some of the bodies of knowledge that we stand on, you know, complex systems theory and, and the work of Cook and Decker.

00:08:04

And, and, and all of these things predate ile. So they don't, they're not completely off the hook. I mean, deeming doesn't predate ile. And so there's, and to, there are no excuses for the stuff that's not an ile, but there are some things that just weren't around. But at its heart, the inherent problem with ILE is the myth of the simple system. The myth of the define perfectly execute perfectly define once, execute once, and the, the, the waterfall myth. And, and that's baked into the books. I don't care what the philosophers say. So there were, there was this baggage, there were these issues, this, these historic issues. Then, um, you've got the whole project management thing, <laugh>. So, uh, this is the topic of a talk that I, I gave at New Zealand's largest computering conference. And I had a few people come up and talk to me afterwards, you know, <laugh>,

00:09:05

And also he got a lots of people who get angry.

00:09:08

Yeah, they, they were talking, they want to kill him.

00:09:13

But I, but I will argue this one in a pub for hours, right? That, um, this, this is, and I've written a lot about this on the blog, and, uh, so you can go to it skeptic.org pm and, and there's a number of, I'm not gonna go into this, but it's dysfunctional. Project management was introduced to try and get some control over those people down on the, on the third floor. And, and, and it's just, it's just been massively damaging to it. So my thoughts are written somewhere else, but this is a, just a quick sum summation of the, the, the dysfunctions that it drives in the ways that we work. So you've got, I, you've got project management, you know, prince two and all those sort of things, and PMI in this country, which is a little looser, but, um, uh, you know, there's this baggage.

00:10:02

So it's, there's good reasons why that tribalism happened, but it'll be so much better together. And so I've tried for years to try and find common ground and bring the, the communities together with no success whatsoever. But, um, but happily, we are seeing in the last year or so that this is starting to happen. And, and so, um, cherries come and join me just in the last couple of years and comes from a totally non-IT world and has been learning about, um, some things like agile thinking, which seem perfectly natural and common sense. And she's like, well, duh, why doesn't everybody do this? And, and, and that feels really natural. But then also starting to learn about the service management world. And I'm kind of coming in the opposite direction with all this service management, IT background and starting to learn more and more about business and strategy and culture and transformation and, and, and, and moving into the agile world.

00:10:57

So we've kind of had the same, um, coming together. And so, you know, it's really fascinating that we have this, um, personal perspective on what is also something we're seeing in the industry. So we wanna very quickly talk about, um, the, the, uh, the crossover that we're starting to see and at last, and it's wonderful. So, you know, from one side, you've got things like SRE coming out from Google, you're seeing, uh, the, the DevOps community understand that what, what you originally meant by ops is not what service management people mean by ops, right? There's DevOps ops or DevOps run, you know, there, there's all that stuff after it goes live, which in the early days of DevOps did not get a lot of attention. It's like, well, if it breaks, call me. You know, <laugh>. And, and now we are really seeing, aren't we much more focused on operations and, and on what happens once this thing's in production?

00:11:53

And how do we keep this going? So support's being deconstructed, it's being rethought and in some really fascinating ways. And, and we're getting all the insights into human error from Decker. And so we'll talk about those. But all this, the bodies of knowledge that, that DevOps people are really good at reaching out and drawing in, um, <inaudible> and, you know, and, and building, bringing in people like Snowden and, and Cook and Decker, and, and now, uh, maslak, you know, people who are completely outside the IT community and drawing that knowledge in are really good at that. Whereas traditionally it is being like, oh, no thanks, will invent it, you know, and has ignored even lean, which is just extraordinary. So, so, um, we see this stuff coming from this community and, and now the big thinking around resilience, that's great. And then from the other side, from the, uh, traditional service management side, we see the service management world embracing agile, I believe it or not, I'll talk about that, or no, no, cherry will talk about that.

00:12:50

And, um, and, and ideas of swarming and, uh, and, and seeing the service management community start to suck up some of these ideas and evolve in its own way and understand things like complex systems. So we're seeing the crossover at last. We're seeing the cross pollination, the ideas flow back and forward between the two communities. So, you know, from the, from the new ways of working side, there was the SRE, um, uh, I dunno how many people who's, who's actually read the book. Few people quite a lot. Yeah, it's a big book and it's really a collection of essays, right? But it's fascinating to see how the unicorns work. And there are ideas from that that are escaping out of the unicorn world into, into the horse world. You know, I'm an anti crypto chronologist, which, which means I don't care about unicorns. We work with horses, right?

00:13:43

So, uh, um, so these ideas are flowing down into the horses, and, and that's fabulous. But also, but at the same time, um, one of the essays in that book talks about how they did all this research at Google to try and establish what was the best possible metric to measure the quality of their systems. And eventually they came up with unplanned downtime, you know, and, and the service management world was like, you think, you know, <laugh>. So some of the naivety of it is as fascinating as some of the brilliance of it. But anyway, so you've got SRE, uh, now the, uh, the Stellar report. You, you should all have read the seller report. It's an amazing insight, and many of you will have been privileged to see this material presented, um, uh, by, uh, John spo or, or Richard Cook at, at some of these conferences.

00:14:34

Um, so these are, again, amazing ideas about instant management and problem management, which, um, uh, the service management world just never saw coming. It's like complete first principles rethink of, of service management and, and it's just amazing. Then, uh, the ideas of Richard Cook have been around longer. I, I read how complex systems fail a number of years ago, I think even before I'd drunk the DevOps Kool-Aid. And, um, and it just transformed my thinking about how support works and, and the reliability of systems and so on. And so that was an extraordinary seminal paper way back that just changed the world Rock the world. And then there's the Sydney Decker stuff, right? Um, is having a big impact on service management thinking with the, the, the understanding that if you're not designing your systems, uh, on the assumption of human error, then you're not designing resilient systems.

00:15:32

So there was the field Guide to Human Error investigations, and then the, the better known field guide to understanding human error, uh, and then, um, safety Differently, which is an extraordinary video to watch on YouTube if you just want to, uh, uh, first introduction to deca, and now he's put out, um, just culture as well. So these are people from completely outside IT who are bringing these ideas of complex systems in. And then, um, uh, I always talk about how DevOps has its own, um, fads. And so, you know, one of the latest fads and DevOps is resilience. So, um, rugged software's been around for a long time, and some of you will have seen Josh Corman present and seen the stuff on that, um, around, uh, the integrity of systems. And then more recently we had the privilege of going to the, um, deploy, yeah, the redeploy, the first ever redeploy conference in San Francisco that, um, Paul Reed put together.

00:16:26

You're here, Paul, probably not. He's heard all this. Um, but that was a really extraordinary conference and, and about resilience. And the big thing I took away from that was that half the presentations were about psychology and humanistic things, and half the presentations were about AWS and cloud and stuff that neither of us understood a word of, but, but, um, it was this interesting mix of super geek tech and deep, deep psychological thinking. It was a fascinating conference. So, uh, you've got all this stuff going on, um, from the, the, uh, the cool kids, right? From the new ways of working that is profoundly starting to influence the service management world. And then at the same time, you've got the service management world, which is going through its own transformation with the ideas leaking across from, from our community. So Cherry, who went on this journey of exploring all this stuff, um, uh, herself is gonna sort of talk about some of the key insights she saw in that journey.

00:17:34

Thank you, Rob. Uh, do you believe that he's the best assistant ever?

00:17:40

<laugh>,

00:17:42

I have to say, so in the IT service management, so we have a huge big picture, a huge picture in this, but so organization have, uh, it owns value streams and it, it contributes a lot of, uh, streams, value streams into the, uh, organization. So this single value stream from required to deploy that, uh, DevOps tend to focus mostly you realize that, um, once the, uh, software is put into the system, then is care less it, um, DevOps tend to care less on when it's already run. On the other hand, IT service management focus on the longer picture. I mean longer term from before the software is built is, uh, for, from the strategy portfolio programs level. So they could decide what software is to be built. And then not only that, when the software is built and it's running, the system is look after the software until it is retired. So it's running, supporting, and eventually they, IT service, service management get it retired, decided to ari. So I don't know what happened with my, maybe I'm too tall.

00:19:28

Yeah, you're too tall for

00:19:29

The moment. I'm just too tall for this. No, is that

00:19:33

It had a little bit further away from your mouth. Okay,

00:19:35

How's that? I said that's good. So not only that, oh, in space, um, ITSMs also take a bigger picture, bigger, bigger space in terms of, it's not out, it's go from the strategy portfolio to the detect to correct. So it's a whole thing that it, which go IT service. Um, I told make sure that the customer, the end user get what they want and it look after the whole life cycle of the software, where they often tend to focus mostly here. So can you see that how different it is between the old world and the new world? The new world tend to make the baby faster, but they don't care much about how to look after the baby taking care of the baby

00:20:30

As it grows up

00:20:31

As how it grow up. So they don't really care about it. I don't know whether because I'm a, I have no ID it background, but that's what I see how the war function, the IT war function. Um, so the point here is that, uh, Rob is an expert, I expert is it?

00:20:54

Oh yeah, yeah,

00:20:55

<laugh>, <laugh>. Uh, but what I learned from I practitioners that which Rob jokingly call IO 3.5 because it came after I three and the new Edisons make IO much more agile. Can you see how familiar you these nine principles to Agile and DevOps? So it's really interesting for me to discover the, IT transforming itself with the new ideas. So it's another book that COism and I think that it,

00:21:39

It, oh,

00:21:40

Sorry,

00:21:42

One more side.

00:21:42

Yeah, I'm sorry. So, uh, I, we are looking for forward to see the, um, new I book. It is called I four. It's coming next year. And it is also say the same thing. I'm not quite sure how they go into improve implant, but it is just the same thing like end-to-end life cycle and focus on holistic views. Not only the single, um, procedures or also talk, they say talking about, they, they're talking about flex, uh, flexibility, flexible value flows, and continual improvement. Just not releasing big banks or huge chunks of software at the same time or at once. So

00:22:31

I have to say though, sorry, just to yeah, read pop back if we can. The, they, they promised those first two or three in ILE three, right? The really, the only new promise is the moving to more granular continual improvement as an emphasis over major releases. So, we'll, we'll see how they deliver, but it didn't really deliver in ILE three. And, and, and so it'll be interesting. And I four,

00:22:58

Sorry. So sometimes it's so different between the book and the reality. You know, that's a, uh, so there's a new book. Have you ever read this one version?

00:23:10

Has anyone heard of it? Anyone

00:23:11

Heard of it? Oh, yes. So I'm so pleased that I know someone who's one of the lead author of the Warism <laugh>, and he's trying hard to explain how it worked to me, but I never get it. So

00:23:25

<laugh>,

00:23:28

I'm sorry, I just, you know, I never get it. I never get how the warism approach actually work. I need to understand and, and I actually need to spend some more time to study on it. So another interesting thing that I see that how it o evolving in the new way of working is called Agile service management. So yeah, there's a, there's a guy who come from the South Africa, is it, uh, he's talking about how to apply Agiles in the core service center. And it's really interesting to see if you guys have time, please go have a look on YouTube, uh, another new ideas. And I think that it all in the old world, in the old world that, uh, the workings based on a lesson based processing. So once the, every, once something's happened that they put the first level can't deal with it. So they put it in the second level and third level. So it's the multiple layers make the, the world go very, very slow. Um, the new idea, the new world in the new world f when whenever the problem occurs, um, they, we find new people, sorry, we fight the right people all together, swamp together and get things done. So that's how the world go faster.

00:25:20

So if you guys interested in these new models, please go to John Hall. He's going to talk about it tomorrow, right? So now get over to

00:25:32

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. So it's been fascinating to watch how, um, the two worlds are coming together. The two worlds are crossing ideas across and um, and, you know, some of the steam stuff seems really obvious to Cherry, but it's, it's not necessarily obvious to the service management world. And watching those ideas emerge, I think it's been interesting. So we are seeing them come back together. We are seeing the, the, the crossing over the synergy. And, and at long last, it's, it's long overdue. We've been going, what with 18 years of agile and 10 years of DevOps, it's, it's high time that we, we explored more of the synergies between the two groups. And that's come out in the presentations at this conference. You know, Damon's last one before and in a whole bunch of presentations are talking about how these two communities are meeting together more and more.

00:26:26

So, you know, I, someone asked me about, you know, how do you get these frameworks? We, we are the boundaries and how do you fit them together, like jigsaw pieces? And I don't think that's how you should think about it. I think they're, they're movements, they're different lenses on the same reality there, different ways of looking at the same reality. And they, so they have their own distortions. DevOps has its own distortions just as much as ILE has its own distortions. And so it's interesting to see the world in new ways, right? It's really interesting if you're an ITSM person to see the world through the eyes of, of the snafu catches and the stellar report. It's just mind blowing if you're a traditional ops person to read the c the SRE book is mind blowing, but it's equally as mind blowing for some people to come from a world which is, you know, is obsessed on deploy.

00:27:15

And, and to actually have to start, um, digging deeper into the, into the run world, um, and, and understand more about run and resilience. And so, um, this is an interesting example of that. There's this thing called true size where you can, uh, grab countries and move them around the planet and get rid of the, the, the, the mercato ADA map projection distortions and see what size countries really are. And, and suddenly you, you see the world through different eyes in different lenses. So this is, um, Vietnam, Thailand, and New Zealand, right? So I never realized that Vietnam is pretty much the same size as New Zealand. And Cherry never realized that New Zealand's pretty much the same size as Vietnam, and I bet none of you realize that they're that big compared to the good old US A

00:28:10

Right? So it, it's a, it's a, it's, it's fascinating to just have these opportunity to step outside your normal world and see things through different lenses. And I think that's what we want you to encourage you to do whichever side of that fracture you, you live on. So what do we need from you? Um, I've got this thing called Camu, which is the label I use for trying to find that commonality in the crossover in the shed thing. So any stories reach out and we can talk about, um, that, um, something that we're always fascinated about is what's the engine for the transformation? What is it that drives transformation that turns the handle, cranks the handle, keeps the energy going. And so we'd love to have some conversations for people about that stuff. And the other thing we need from you, as I said, is try and see the world through, through different eyes. There is all this powerful body of knowledge over there in the service management world, or if you are coming from the conventional world, then there's this powerful new reinvention of those ideas happening within DevOps. Thanks very much.