00:00:14

All right, welcome everybody. Uh, we are here to, uh, have a great conversation on, uh, a journey with Chuck Creek to improve customer onboarding. My name is Jim KA. Uh, I've been working with duck Creek as a technology consultant. A quick thing on my background. I've, uh, uh, been an industry practitioner either as head of engineering or operations or both building scale up SAS solutions for a while. Um, some of the companies I've worked at are Amazon Alexa, uh, endurance international, where we hosted over 5 million websites, constant contact, and a few others that I'll not go into here. Uh, we have joining us today, Trisha Burke and Josh Barry from duck Creek technologies. And the three of us are just gonna have a conversation on, uh, our journey going through improving a customer onboarding process. So Trish, I'll let you introduce yourself and then, uh, and then Josh.

00:01:07

Sure, thanks. So my name is Trisha Burke. I am the SVP of SaaS operations here at duck Creek technologies. I've been here for about 18 months. Uh, and before that I came from another, uh, SaaS company called diligent, which is in the governance space. So, um, lots of experience in the, in the SA world and, um, you know, looking to bring that to the insurance industry, which is where duck Creek lives.

00:01:34

Yeah. Josh. Yeah. Josh Berry. So I've been with duck Creek since 2004, currently I'm the senior director for our service management department focused on our on demand platform. And, uh, yeah, I've seen a lot of growth over the years in duck Creek and I've predominantly spent my time, um, in the customer facing roles. So I think since I've been at duck Creek, the longest I'll, I'll do a little intro on the company itself, but so duck Creek is, uh, has, was founded by insurance experts. Um, and we focus in the, the property and casualty market. And, um, our, our whole goal is to try to innovate and deliver, uh, tools that allow our customers to rapidly implement and deliver insurance solutions to their end users. And we've been doing that for a little over two decades and, and yes, seeing rapid growth and, and super excited for what's in our future.

00:02:33

Tr you wanna talk through some of the tech side of things with, uh, with the solution?

00:02:37

Sure. So like a lot of companies, duck Creek started out as an on-prem software company. Um, so we were selling, um, essentially a shrink wrapped product that would be implemented by, um, partners and, and, and integrators, um, lots of customizations and that were done to the system. And now we are only selling our product as a, as a SaaS solution. So as a service, um, you know, we have more than 50 customers running our application, uh, in our, uh, production Azure environment. Um, and you know, we have, um, offices in Europe, in the United Kingdom and in Spain. And so, uh, you know, Europe is a really emerging market for us. So we're really excited to be talking to you folks today.

00:03:27

So on the SA front Trisha, and I know you're gonna go into this a little bit more, but I think one thing that's super interesting is I learned more about duck Creek as we were working together, is that all you guys are on the, on demand, um, SAS journey. It was super interesting how you're also leading a lot of your customers along as well. So, um, I think that when we look at change within duck Creek, one of the things that was like an aha moment for me is someone that didn't appreciate fully what was going on is yeah. Customers would be like, yeah, I don't want too frequent or release. I would like a lower change rate. Um, but at the same time, if they wanted one thing, they would want it quickly. So it's sort of interesting to see that, that dynamic of speed and change rate and smaller, more frequent changes being something that, that you not only were improving at the Creek, but you were sort of bringing that message to your customers. I just thought that was super interesting.

00:04:22

Yeah, no, it is interesting. And, you know, it's, it's funny customers, so they want their things to be fixed immediately. Right. But they don't actually wanna absorb the change that's that's related with those releases. So, um, and, and as much as we are as an organization, really transitioning to assess, uh, you know, uh, delivery model, um, we are also trying to get our customers used to how to operate in that model as well.

00:04:48

Yeah. And, and Josh, I think for you, you're representing the business and then you're also interfacing with third party businesses. So it's really interesting to have you as part of this conversation sort of bridging that gap and sort of helping everybody along <laugh>

00:05:02

Right. Yeah. So, so one of the battles that that I've had is customers, the things they do want, as you've already said, they, they want them extremely fast. And, you know, as we, as we try to deliver this SaaS solution and customers with the expectations they have with the SaaS solution, what we run into is that while we do some things really well, we found out that we were struggling in certain departments where we were trying, trying to keep up with the demand. And quite frankly, the provisioning of our environments was not meeting the customer expectations, which put a pretty big burden on us from a service management standpoint of trying to live up to that expectation that was in the customer's head of, of just flipping a switch and having an environment ready. And so it was a real struggle for us.

00:05:52

Yeah. And I think that's what that, that, uh, paddling duck image is, is it may have looked real smooth on the surface, but, uh, underneath the, uh, water there's a lot of, uh, legs paddling, like crazy <laugh>.

00:06:04

Yeah. And it was really about scalability, right. So we, we could paddle our legs like crazy for a while. <laugh> but eventually, um, we knew we weren't gonna be able to keep up. Um, and so, um, you know, thinking about how we were gonna scale and grow the business, um, you know, these are high class problems that you wanna have. Um, but, but still things that you really need to deal with and think about how to, how to grow, uh, overall.

00:06:29

Yeah. So, so let's talk about where we started as we went through this process of looking to improve.

00:06:35

Sure. So on the plus side, right, we were keeping pace with our customers needs, right? We were, we were meeting our commitments. Um, but the reality was that there were our own internal objectives. We were not meeting. Um, and so we had sort of some, some service level objectives that we had set for how quickly we were gonna be able to, um, onboard customers and set up their, their operating environments. Um, so it was 30 days for a new customer and then 15 days for a customer that was sort of adding environments. Um, and what we realized when we looked at it was that we were hitting our SLO less than 30% of the time. And the success rate for our provisioning process itself was also, um, it was also successful less than 30% of the time. So, so these were, these were, these were sort of, that was sort of the root of problem for us.

00:07:29

And so, you know, we had a lot of good instincts about what needed to happen. We had a sense that, you know, we needed to reduce variation. We needed to automate more of it. We needed to create less, um, you know, sort of manual tasks, but people were really busy and they were paddling their legs like crazy. And so it was very difficult for us to actually make any long term, um, make the investment we needed to make some long term fixes, um, that were really gonna get us out of that, out of that, um, place

00:08:00

Josh, from the business standpoint, you're sort of in the middle there, um, empathizing with all the hard work and being the face of the customer as we started this, where were how'd that feel?

00:08:10

Yeah. So the demand for environments never slowed down. So if we could get these out at a certain rate of, of speed, uh, but the demand kept coming, whether that was an existing customer that needed extra environments for whatever reason or a new customer just came on board and they needed all of their environments up front, I was in a constant struggle of trying to balance all of these requests coming in and struggling with telling the customer when we can get that done. So if we have an SLO, but we're missing that SLO it's hard to tell a customer what we can hit. So we'd be a little bit conservative in our estimate to try to then make sure we do hit what we tell 'em knowing we're missing our SLOs. And then of course an emergency would come up or some need would come up where we'd have to have it right away. And so then that's where the paddling changed, the, the rate of speed of the paddling changes and other folks come in and, and the hero effect of coming in and trying to, to make it work. And so it was just a constant struggle to balance all of that with our customers and, and also our internal teams.

00:09:22

Yeah. One, one of things I observed is, is like there were so many people with a huge quote, give a crap factor like that cared a lot. Did what needed to be done. As you said, Josh would take those superhuman efforts. And I think as, as one talk, I forget who, who gave the talk up. So I can't attribute it to them, but there was a talk I, a DevOps talk, I heard around moving from hero to hero, and we had too many too much need for heroes to save the day versus repeatable processes. And as Trisha said, you know, reducing variation and variability as we went through things. So, um, you know, I think as, as we, we looked at what we did, we sort of started on this value stream mapping process. So Trisha, what was your thought? Cause you were like, I think we need to look at this differently. What was your, take us back to the start as like, what were you thinking?

00:10:09

Well, you know, the interesting thing was I started, you know, at the time I'd only worked here for maybe four months at the time. So I started going around and talking to people about the process itself. Why is this taking so long? Why is this so difficult for us to do? And I started asking a lot of questions. And what I realized was that there were PE there were a lot of people who knew their piece of the process really well. They were very deep in their particular area, but they actually didn't know as much about what led up to their piece of work and where their work went, where the work went after they did it. Right. And so this was a sort of, it's a multi-step process. There's a number of handoffs, um, and there, and so what I really realized was that we needed to really take a holistic view, right. It wasn't just your individual tasks or, or piece, but it was really, the whole process was, was, um, something that people needed to understand. And so that's when you, and I started talking about it a little bit and really sort of brainstorming about how we could create that, that, that view for our own folks.

00:11:15

Yeah. And, and, and Josh, when you think about, and, and I think maybe we'll, we'll jump to sort of like how we got to, um, getting started is, um, this didn't come in as a, this is a technology project. I think, you know, part of this track is, is business, you know, spanning the business technology divide. Um, you shared with me, uh, earlier that you were a little bit dubious as we were started, which by the way, I had no idea as we were going through this, because you were such a great partner as we worked through this, but like, as we started and as we looked at getting buy-in and changing and doing things differently, like, like what were you thinking like about there?

00:11:53

Yeah. So, so first of all, you have to put yourself back, uh, to when that pain was really fell. And so there was a lot of tension anyway, just because I'm trying to face the customer's, um, demands and, you know, all the while, internally trying to figure out what to put in front of another task. And so there was already that to deal with, but then, then this comes in and it just, my initial was thought was just more skeptical, like, okay, I'm, I'm not sure this is the solution. And I'll believe it when I see it kind of thing. And as we got through it a little bit more, I, I definitely started to see the value in this exercise. And, and of course, you know, where, where, where we are today, but, but yeah, early on I was, I was just, we were all in a struggle. Trisha, if you remember, this was a, a discussion we had every day, multiple times a day. And so there was, there was a constant, uh, tension there and yeah, I was, I was a little skeptical, Jim. Um,

00:12:57

Yeah. And, and the thing I'll say is I came in, is everybody cared a lot about solving the problem, but there was a little bit of the haven't. We tried this all before and there was also a little bit of a, I know my stuff, but I also don't know the big picture. And I, and I think I'll just share for, for, for, uh, the folks listening to this. I think the thing that, that really helped to get buy-in is that I think, I think Josh, yourself and Trisha were aligned on like, Hey, we're gonna, we're trying this, we're doing this. We're gonna look at this end to end. We're gonna allocate some time to do this. Um, and it really was a, a we project versus a, a meat project from technology. So I think that that helped a lot. Right. And, uh, and you know, and then as you start the conversations, right, people are super engaged. So I think, I think when we talk about the mechanics for buying, I think that's what I saw. Um, and Trisha, I think you did a great job of figuring out, like, where are the goals, right. So I think you set your goals beyond your department, which I thought was super interesting. I dunno if you wanna talk about <laugh>.

00:14:00

Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, our, our goal, the goal for me always was meeting our customer's expectations, right? Like that was always the goal. Um, but I also had a goal of like lessening some of the pressure on the, on my own teams, um, and really freeing them up to do other work. And so, you know, that was one of the things, one of the conversations that I had sort of internally with my own team, which was like, look, this isn't, I know this isn't what you wanna be doing, <laugh>, you know, in a year from now. And, and I really wanna get you doing some more fun and interesting work. And one of the ways that we can do that is to sort of work through some of these things and, and really make this process flow a little bit better.

00:14:41

Yeah. Yeah. And, and if we, if we jump into how we actually went through stuff and we could probably do a whole nother talk just on the actual process of doing remote gemba walks and going through the value stream mapping, um, I'll start a little bit on the high level. And then, and then, then Josh and Trisha, if you can jump in, is, is, um, right. So when we looked at the approach for the virtual, uh, gemba walk, um, duck Creek is a global company. Um, we had to figure out how to handle time zones. We had to figure out how people logistically not doing provisioning as a full-time job, um, and getting through that. And I, and I think, I think, um, just for the sake of time, I'll, I'll close this piece quickly, so we can get to the next section is, is one.

00:15:28

We use the tools that people were familiar with in terms of actually going through the value stream mapping exercise. Um, so, so believe it or not, like when we look at, um, how this worked, right, we had this notion of like, you can get this beautiful value stream map, it looks pristine. Um, we have sort of this, uh, rub Goldberg device type, uh, ending piece that we did in PowerPoint, but it totally worked for the crew that was in the value stream mapping exercise, because everybody in the organization was comfortable with PowerPoint. They were comfortable co-editing um, so whereas you might think, you know, why not use a Visio or a lucid chart or, or a mur or one of these? I think there was a piece around, um, let's use the tools that the organization is comfortable using and the value wasn't in having a beautiful value stream app at the end, it was the value was in the conversation as we went through it. So it's not Trisha. What, what's your thought in terms of like how the actual process went and, and what the sort of the takeaways for, for the, for those, um, watching this would be?

00:16:34

Yeah, I think, you know, I think the biggest thing I would say is don't get hung up on the tooling <laugh> and the technology, cuz that's not what it's really about. Um, and that's something that we kind of like, I think we even tried, we tried to use a whiteboard. Right. And that just, it just didn't, it just wasn't working. Um, and so we, and, and I think the other thing is, you know, be flexible, right. Be flexible about what's gonna work with your, with your teams and, and what kinds of things they're, they're, you know, familiar with doing. But, um, in our case, because we were using office 365, people were really used to co-editing and I think that being able to, to, for them to be able to sort of get in there and, and, uh, you know, add their own, add their own comments and stuff was, was really nice. And it really helped them to be engaged in the process.

00:17:23

Josh, what was your, what was your takeaway as, as you know, you started as a, like all in and committed, but a little bit skeptical as we went through the workshop where, uh, where did you end up <laugh>

00:17:33

Well, so I think, I think my eyes were opened, uh, like I think other teams were as well. So looking from the outside, in, in, in a way being from the service manager side, uh, I wasn't aware of all the working pieces that, that, that came with provisioning and environment. And so one of the things that this did for me is that it really made it clear just how big of a challenge that was ahead of us. And, and so when you start looking at all these in individual teams and they all had the very specific tasks, what this did to me, is it really laid it out front to back for the first time for me to where I could actually see, um, you know, what it took from the time that ticket went in to when it went out the door and ready for a customer to sign and to use it. Uh, yeah, my eyes were opened and, and I think it just gave me a, a much bigger appreciation of just what, what all these teams were doing. I knew they were working hard and I knew they, they had all the right intentions, but, um, I just didn't know how big it was until I saw this map.

00:18:42

Yeah. And, and I think when, when you sort of ground that into sort of like, and this, this is the DevOps enterprise summit. So, so the question is, uh, you know, how does this really get grounded in some of the DevOps pieces is, is I think that the <inaudible> you were talking about, and I think what everybody saw was, um, for, I think for some folks the first time, this notion of the full view of the system. Right. So, so moving beyond their process. Right. So, right. You know, before you're gonna improve a system, you've gotta have an appreciation for the system and what it actually is. So I think there was a lot of aha moments, um, that came up. Um,

00:19:23

Yeah. And I would add to that, Jim, I think that it was a really an opportunity for folks to think about, really think about how they were doing their work. Right. And really look at it from an improvement perspective, um, which I don't think folks had necessarily really had the time to sort of take a step back and do that. And so I think that was also another really good benefit.

00:19:44

Yeah. And, and, and, and I I'll move us along for time sake, but I think the other thing was, uh, we have these good instincts around self-improvement within functions, but I think we really gotta focusing around like, well, these are the biggest end to end problems to tackle first. Um, which I thought was super helpful. Um, so where we end up <laugh>

00:20:06

Yeah. So, um, you know, obviously, uh, we felt like we ended up in a good place, or we wouldn't be here talking to you all about it <laugh> but, um, but really what, what, what we realized was that, um, we needed to boil our, our whole process down to like a single piece of automation, a single methodology, right. Where we were doing things the same way, all the way up the stack. Um, and that was something that we realized wasn't happening. Um, and then we needed to, once we had sort of settled on that, we needed to think about the success rate. We needed to deal with some quality issues, right. Because the quality issues were just causing a ton of rework and troubleshooting and all of these things. Um, so, you know, we went from, you know, it taking us sometimes more than 20 or 25 or 30 days to just lay, to just lay down the, the base environment, to being able to do that in less than five days, which is enormous, right.

00:21:04

There's still some other pieces in this process that we're, we're working through and we're working through automating, but, um, but just getting to that point has been enormous for us. Um, and then, you know, we also, we started tracking, you know, what percentage of the requests that we have, we're using the new automation that we could create. And we found, we're finding now that we're at about 86%, which is great because we were at about 30% when we started. Um, and then the success rate for the automation that we do have, has gotten up to about 95%. So again, just avoiding rework, avoiding troubleshooting, avoiding having to like pull in a resource to find out, you know, to answer a question and then waiting for that person to be free. Like all of those, all of those things really, um, we really tighten those up. Um, and I think, you know, and Josh, maybe I'll let you talk about it a little bit from a customer's perspective, like how it, how it sort of looks and feels for you now.

00:21:59

Yeah. So, so those numbers are, are great on the screen, but I, I think the best way I can measure it is that Trisha, we don't talk about it anymore. As far as like, which environment are we gonna provision? And, and I didn't mention it earlier, but we had this spreadsheet that was several rows deep that had these priorities of which environments are we gonna provision first? And I was doing that multiple times a day every day, and I don't open the spreadsheet anymore because we now know we can hit confidently our SLOs with these environments. So we don't talk about it because it just happens. It gets done there's automation. And so I can set expectations with customers and know we're gonna hit them. And that has IM impacts on, you know, when we recognize revenue, it's just the, the customer experience is night and day different than what it was when we first started this exercise. What about the people side of things?

00:23:00

Well, so, so the people, the people side of things. So I, I, I mean, if you can imagine, uh, early on, if you have all of these teams and, and you you're on this boat, the boat's taking in water and everybody's just focused on, on, on their bucket trying to get water out of the boat, but the, the water's coming in as faster, faster than they can get the water out when, when that all changes and somebody, somebody gets in and actually fixes the leak on the boat, which is what we did, then everybody can just kind of stop and, and sort of appreciate what has happened. Teams, uh, have now gone through this together. So now they're better, better for it having worked together and gotten through this. And, and now they're actually Trisha able to focus on things that maybe they weren't able to focus on because they were so tied into a very manual process that we've now automated. So we're taking these all stars and actually utilizing them in the, the, the areas that we need 'em the most, because we've now fixed this problem.

00:24:06

Yeah. Great. And, and I think, I think one of the things we wanted to wrap on is, is like, as we're engaging with the community here is thinking about, uh, what the ask is and what the outreach, and, and I'll talk about the first one, just from my observation is, uh, as someone coming in new is, is I think duck Creek was an organization that already had good teamwork and then in the sense of working together, um, but the fact that that Trisha and Josh were accomplishes on this, like they were in it together on this process really helped make it succeed. Um, not just in terms of getting the engagement to, to get started, but also in terms of, um, carrying through in terms of outcomes. And, uh, you know, basically if Josh and Trisha think it's a good idea, like you should go along trust, just trust me. Right. So I think when we talk about the community, like, like when you look at your technology projects, look for your partners, like for look for the business problem, um, and look at where it goes. So I dunno, Trisha or Josh, if you have anything you wanna add on that point or the next one.

00:25:05

So I was just gonna go, you know, moving on to the next point, I think, you know, I'm really interested in hearing from other folks, um, or, or sort of getting other people's ideas about tools they've used for value stream maps specifically. Like I'm a big proponent of them. I I've used them in other, other businesses. And I feel like it really, you know, it, it, it helps you to understand where your constraints are and where you should be spending your time in order to get, you know, uh, the value out of your, out of your processes. And so I'm kind of interested, um, to hear from folks about what they've, how they've done these value stream maps when you don't have a whiteboard and a room full of people. <laugh>, um, just to see if there's anything out there that we haven't explored, that, that, that might be something that we should be thinking about next time.

00:25:54

Yeah. And, and I'll end on the piece of, uh, with, with, uh, if you're right, the instincts to, to optimize your part of the system is like, if you look at the notion of theory of constraints and look for the bottleneck and focus on that, there is also a piece that, that when you engage with the community, even if someone's not focusing on the biggest bottleneck, it's the right instinct, right? So encouraging culturally that notion of continual improvement super important. And I think as a community, sometimes we can have a echo chamber of, we need to elevate the constraint and let me go throw my gold rats book at you and, and go from there versus like, Hey, thanks for thinking about improvement. Let's, let's engage on whether this is the right thing to start with. So, um, I just, that'd be the last one I'd end on. And, and, um, as, as we go sort of, uh, we've got our contact info out there, I just, uh, really worked on this project. Josh Trish, any final thoughts as we, uh, as we wrap up here,

00:26:48

I mean, I was just, just to, to reiterate, uh, it was overall a wonderful experience skeptical at the, at the beginning, but at the end, uh, yeah. Uh, I was, I was convinced and, you know, the results speak for themselves. So it was, it was a, it was a pleasure to be a part of it.

00:27:09

Yeah. It really wasn't. It was great to see, it was great to apply sort of some, some, some fundamental tactics that I had used in other organizations at duck Creek and, and really see it in action. Um, so I, I highly recommend it for folks who are trying to nut through some of these hard problems, especially when it's cross team cross functional. I think it's really helpful.

00:27:29

Great. Thanks everybody.

00:27:31

Thanks.