Suzette Johnson

All right, we're going to go ahead and get started so I can maximize my 30 minutes, because it's going to go pretty fast. First of all, thank you for being here. I am so happy to see you. So happy you chose to be here.

I am pretty sure that some of the things that I'll talk about you probably already have experience with, and maybe you'll leave with a few other ideas as well. And maybe you'll have some ideas for me as well when I get to the help that I'm looking for.

I think we can probably all resonate with the importance of managers and how important managers are in our work environments, where they are having to connect strategy to execution, to delivery. They have the pressures not only of delivering product and managing and leading people, but they also now have all these new ways of working that they're having to deal with and respond to.

A little bit of my background: I do work for Northrop Grumman. I am a fellow there. My areas of focus have been on lean, agile, and digital adoption. The whole people aspect of this actually started with my doctorate, of which I graduated in 2009, so it's been a while. I was really looking at the impact of leadership styles, that is, the combination of leadership behaviors of task versus care for people, and what was the impact on software product outcomes. I will say the research was enough for me to graduate, but not so statistically significant that I became famous. However, I have always stayed intrigued by the impact of managers and leaders on our people, and how it can really create environments that can enable us to deliver value.

A little bit of my background along this journey: I started agile adoption in 2005. Prior to that I actually worked for a tech startup around the dot-com era, and that was really impressionable because we had to deliver capabilities every three months. That was the requirement so that we could get revenue, because it was all about staying in business.

When I found, in 2005, working in a mission-driven area, agile just made sense that that was the direction that we would want to go so that we could deliver that value frequently. It wasn't as much about revenue as it was about meeting mission. Our mantra was, if we can continuously deliver value to our customer, the revenue stream will follow.

Along that journey we were scaling, and I was having some challenges back in 2005, like: how do I scale this across engineering, across these large systems? And what does systems engineering look like in this environment? So we started what we called a community of practice. That community of practice started in the year 2008, and along that journey we now have over 13,000 people from our company as part of that COP.

But that is not the story today. The story today I want to focus on is the next step of where we're going now. The agile community of practice is still running. It's great if you met Chris Williams while you were here. He's not here today, but he is continuing to lead that agile community of practice and doing a great job. Going back to that human-centric view of what our managers and leaders have in place specific to their needs, that is how I started this Lead in the Digital Age COP for managers.

Along this journey, one of the things I thought is, well, what's my change management strategy? I didn't really know much about change management in 2008, but along this journey I started recognizing the importance of change management: building awareness, building the desire, creating environments where people want or understand why we need to adopt these practices. How do we build their knowledge and ability, like through training, but then how do we start to implement it and then reinforce that implementation?

However, that's not the only change management approach that I looked at. I looked at three others as well. How many of you are familiar with the ADKAR model that I just explained by Prosci? Good. How about Leading Change by Kotter? Very good. Switch by the Heath brothers? Not as many. And Change the Culture, Change the Game? Very, yeah.

Switch was very insightful for me by the Heath brothers, because it actually connected the emotional side of change. I am a very logical thinker, so what that means is if you want me to adopt something or to change, talk to me logically and help me figure out the value. That's the better way to persuade me than focusing on the emotional side. People are different. So that book was really insightful because it focused on the emotional side of change management, or the emotional side that people endure as they're going through change and why they might be resistant to change.

I've always been the one to have this quote in my office that says, do not be afraid of change. We want to embrace change and continuously improve. It's kind of second nature for me. Change the Culture, Change the Game helped me understand about tying behavior, like culture. When people say culture, I'm always like, what does that mean to you? Really looking at the behavior that makes up the culture that is around a set of beliefs around, well, we've always gotten these good results, so why would I need to change? The interrelation of those variables together shape the culture. So I found them insightful. It's something that I think about and revisit as I continue this change journey and as we look at modern ways of working.

How many of you are familiar with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? Yes. Awesome. One of my favorite books when I was in my twenties. I listened to it every year for like 10 years. I just found so much value in that book by Stephen Covey. The first principle he talks about is seek first to understand.

I was thinking, why is change so hard? Where are we struggling with adoption? Because people know that we need to look at change in modern ways of working and change in our practices, but they're really struggling to actually get the results that we were looking for. So I thought, well, like Stephen Covey would tell me, go seek first to understand, and let's just start listening to managers and what their situations are.

Then I was like, how do I want to do this? What would make sense? I thought, well, this is kind of like delivering a product. It's a little different because it's a community of practice, but I think some of the same practices would still apply.

I started with a focus group. I started with some managers and some directors who I felt we had a trusting relationship with, so they would be painfully and truthfully honest with me. We started there and started collecting what is working well, what are the problems, what are the pain points, and from there, what are the opportunities? Some empathy mapping: how are they feeling about this? The feeling thing. Some personas. We would start thinking, what are the different manager personas that we have in place that we want, again, to put ourselves in their place so we could understand how all these different transformations that we're having are impacting them?

Then we created some journey maps, and I'll share that a little bit with you in just a minute. This is when I called in a user experience person. I understand journey maps, but I thought they would be much more effective in helping me through that part of the process, and they were amazing.

Then we did a workshop deep dive. That was 85 people who were responsible for program delivery and also for the technical management of those efforts. I wanted to understand again, what's working well and what are the pain points that we need to go forward? I still use that. That was a year ago, and I'm still regularly looking back at those pain points, not just for the COP but in some of the other work that we're doing to continuously address their needs as an organization, so that we can tie the work that we're doing, that's hopefully building enablers to improve value delivery, to the pain points that they have shared.

Periodically, every three months, I'll send that user group an email saying, hey, a year ago we had this meeting. You said these were the pain points. Here's what we've been doing to address those pain points, and here are the opportunities for you.

This is intentionally small, because that's the only way I can get things approved for release, but I will talk you through it. I went back to the ADKAR model when I was working with the UX person. She's like, well, this is a little different. It's not like an application or that kind of value stream that we would walk through. So we decided to leverage the change management process because the change management process was driving some of the products that we were releasing, or some of the activities we were doing, like training.

You can see here I also had to remove pictures. I do know personas usually have a picture representing the user group. Unfortunately, people that review my slides, because it looks so real, kept thinking they were real employees. So instead of teaching them about personas and journey maps, it was just easier to remove the photos.

We had two primary personas that we looked at. One was really focused on the managers of product, because there are new ways of working with product, but a lot of times they also have functional manager roles: making sure people are being trained, they have the resources that they need, and of course, if there are situations, HR kind of stuff. So we were looking at both of those situations.

As you can kind of see there in the black boxes, that's what each row represents. We were getting input on the communications that they're having, how they are feeling in terms of motivation, and what are actually some of the quotes. We would actually capture verbatim some of the feedback that we were getting from the focus groups and from the team that we were taking through this journey map.

Then, based on getting feedback through a set of questions, you can see where we started getting this scale, and the scale is intentionally aligned to the change management process. I wasn't really surprised to see this, because what we were seeing is, okay, we're pretty strong on the left-hand side, but when it gets to implementation and reinforcement, it's harder.

The thing is, early on in the agile practices, we trained 50,000-plus people. I used to have tracked the numbers. I haven't tracked the numbers for about seven years, but when I was tracking numbers, it was like 50,000 people. So we knew people were trained. A lot of churn. Just because you train that many people, they come and they go, but we were really good on the training side and some of the DevOps practices.

But then we run into, hey, we get that and all of that's great, but we're struggling with how do I take what we're learning and then actually go and do? These were verbatim, a little bit of tweaks, but they are quotes: I don't know how to get started. Great training, but what's my next step? What do I do when I go back to my program or back to my team? How can I get some quick wins? How can I have peer-to-peer conversations with other managers like me in other parts of the company? Can we have stronger communications with middle management and our integrated product team leads that is directly geared towards me and my community and my peers?

So we took all of that and said, okay, let's start a Lead in the Digital Age COP, because we already had the Agile COP. However, you can imagine when it gets so big and you have hundreds of people on a call, there's really not a lot of exchange. Actually, there's no exchange almost. Once in a while you might get a few people that will comment. A community should be about collaboration, should be about the opportunity to communicate, raise concerns, and exchange ideas.

We're like, let's focus one just on these specific needs so that we can talk about what is the learning that you've had, and what are the challenges you're facing in terms of implementation. We're going to zero in on your needs.

The other thing is, if you look back at that timeline, we also had a growth of agile lean coaches in our company. However, when you're scaling, Northrop Grumman has about 100,000 people. How many coaches would you actually need? I was like, we'd need a lot of coaches. But what if we thought about it differently, that we don't just keep growing more and more agile coaches? What if, based on my learning from a lean coach from Toyota, we worked with managers to be coaches? I think that is more scalable, and it's more connected to the people that are doing the work that are on their team. So let's invest and think about how we can give them more tools in their toolbox so that the managers are also the coaches and leading by example on their team.

We focus on three areas. We focus on leadership behaviors. When we were thinking about that, we're like, okay, leadership behaviors are defined in my company. I didn't have to define those. Let's take what's already existing in the organization and let's have conversations about how are these modern ways of working? How do we demonstrate our leadership behaviors in that context? For example, one of our leadership behaviors is about acting with speed. It's about accountability. It's about building high-performance teams. These are all things that you probably resonate with as well.

Our second one is focused on product delivery. We actually call that program excellence, but it's really about how we are actually building and delivering value to our customers. What are the bottlenecks that we're facing? How can we leverage the digital capabilities? Because we're also going, probably like most of us, through this whole digital transformation that's been going on for a while.

So we have this whole ecosystem of leadership behaviors that I need to demonstrate, I need to deliver product value to my customer, and oh, by the way, I've got all these digital capabilities. What is this thing? What is DevOps and why do I need it? Why do I need automation? Isn't Scrum enough? Like, no.

So really thinking about all these opportunities, because you have a lot of digital capabilities and a lot of practices in front of you, but it's not like you just take randomly which of those practices you want. It has to tie back to what problem are you trying to solve and where is the bottleneck in your value stream? And, oh, by the way, that bottleneck will continuously move.

Based on those needs and all the input that we gathered, we started focusing on different context areas. We focused on what is an MVP. A lot of confusion around an MVP: why would you want an MVP? How does it help buy down program risk? A lot of times we have to have an IMS, an integrated master schedule. What does that look like? How does an MVP tie into this project schedule that we have to have, because of suppliers and other reasons?

How do I, again, why do I care about DevSecOps? What does that look like? What tools do we have in the company? When you've got 100,000 people and you've got these managers that are focused every day on getting the job done, you can be communicating amazingly in the company, but they're still not hearing it. It's not that they're ignoring you; it's just they're so busy.

This is an opportunity for them to share: what are the tools that you're finding valuable that the organization is creating for you? The enablers? What's working well? Where are the gaps? What do you need help with? And, oh, by the way, if you need help with X, does another manager over here already have experience with it? You can tag up with them.

One thing I want to highlight, in case you're not familiar with the Digital Trinity, AOD is agile, open, digital. That's been a discussion about how do we integrate those things together? And of course now we are actually looking at leveraging AI, because there's a lot of discussions, not surprisingly, around the adoption of AI.

Now we are focusing on creating an AI agility playbook. It's just an informal thing. It's not going to be this formal document. Think of it more as fun: what would our playbook look like? What do your ways of working look like? What are some fun prompts that we can create? How are you creating different prompts in our LLM tool to get better insights into your forecast, let's say?

One thing we're showing is, how can you take your team data? Right now AI is not integrated into our team data. How can you take that team data, use the AI tools that we have that are approved, and gather insights? Let's start with what we have and learn how to use that. I kind of look at it as a time to experiment. We meet once a month and we're just experimenting. We're just exchanging ideas. That's what a community does.

We are virtual. This is Lucid, which I thought I would highlight. I wouldn't have except for the fact that they were actually here at the conference. So I feel the need to highlight that this is Lucid. We use a Lucid board for our digital collaboration. What I've done is I set up in Lucid a timeline for this year so that they can go back and see all the different learning opportunities that we've had every month as we go through the year. They can also see the tools and resources that we've shared. That way if you miss a meeting, you can go back. Or if you want to attend and you want to provide input but a meeting shows up, you can actually go in and add some information to the board.

We have about 200 right now in the community of practice. We have about 25; I'll show that in a minute. It varies in terms of participation. It varies according to holiday, varies according to topics. If I have a meeting the same week as a holiday, that does impact our numbers. I do track this.

Year one when we started this, I'm not sure Net Promoter Score is the best score, but it's what we were doing. I like data. I like to get an idea. It started at 33 and I was a little disheartened, to say the least. Not horrible, but not what I wanted. My first year I was like, well, can I just get it to 36?

Here's the thing: I don't really know these people. So where am I getting these people? We actually have some training for program leaders, and there's a certain class that at the end of that class they are then invited to the COP. That way I'm pulling the thread from some training that they're getting into now this community, if they want to continue those discussions.

Recently we're 63 to 70, which is okay, but then I had this thought at the last time we ran this. I'm like, yeah, these numbers are pretty good, but what if it's only my friends that are responding? I don't know, because it's anonymous. I can't really say. If somebody wasn't happy, would they say so? I'm not sure, to be quite frank. So we'll go with the data and we'll say everybody's happy because that just sounds good. But I do try to pay attention to that: just because that score looks good doesn't necessarily mean we're meeting the actual needs. That's where conversation comes back.

I was just saying before I walked in here, I just got an email literally during lunch about, hey, I heard you have this COP for managers and leaders and I want to come join. I'm like, okay. Awesome.

Then I thought, well, maybe the measure is, do people come back? Are people actually showing up? Because I have no charge number for them. It's on their own time or whatever. The other thing that I track is growth over time. That's the chart with the orange line. The blue line is participation. Like I said, it just kind of goes up and down according to topic.

Then I also look at by function, because we have a lot of manager titles, but they have actually different functional titles that I track. Then also by sector, because I actually report through our space sector. But I am inclusive, so I don't care where in the company you work. If you want to come and be part of this group, and you can get value and want to contribute, I love to have you. But I do track it just so I can kind of see where we are getting people's attention.

We are getting some positive feedback. We actually create a roadmap now. The first year, I didn't even know what we were going to talk about. It was every month just trying to figure out what they want to talk about and what their needs are. But now I think we're at a good point where I can actually start projecting their needs ahead of time. As a community, as I start to listen and we start to talk, you can start hearing their concerns.

They have more tools in their toolbox, and they have a better understanding of what it means to be a leader in the digital age and how they can leverage these different capabilities that our organization is providing them: how to use them, why they're valuable, and who to go to if they need additional information.

Some takeaways from the journey. One was really thinking about a change management strategy. I revisit that often just to think through, are there opportunities that I might not have thought of yet that I want to include in this seeking first to understand? That's kind of like with any product. You want to understand your customer and what their needs are before you start throwing solutions out there.

Identify the bottlenecks. Where are the bottlenecks in implementation? Because it's not always where we think it is. Some bottlenecks that came up that I was kind of surprised with was they have a need to do better forecasting. I was like, well, isn't it in the tool? But not really. So trying to figure out how can they get better forecasting of when a backlog would be done.

Continuously measure and improve. If you have ideas on that, that's one thing that I'm looking for. The one thing I like to ask, which I got from Christine Hudson when I've been talking with her, is always thinking about, what's one thing that you can take with you? What's the one thing you could do next? It doesn't have to be something huge, but one small step of improvement. Something that you can go and experiment with or explore, and then come back and share your experience with the group in a month when we meet again.

Some additional suggestions to improve engagement: I would welcome your ideas on that. I've tried different things, but I would love to hear ideas from you. Other ways of measuring success, because it's really hard to measure outcomes because they're not a team. I'm not just focused on one team. They're kind of sporadic. So how do I measure the success of this group other than, well, they keep showing up? That is one measure of success.

If you have success stories or lessons learned, or if you're working with middle managers, those leaders, I feel for them because they have a lot of pressure. They have the day-to-day execution of working with their teams, but at the same time they've got all this new stuff being pushed on them. How do they balance it all? Any ideas that you have to continue to help them so that they can be more successful, I would love that conversation with you.

All right. And I actually have three minutes left.