Roger Servey, Stacie Peterson, and Bryan Finster

Good day, everyone. Welcome to the presentation on the Dojo Consortium.

Roger Servey

Hello, everybody out there in the world. My name is Roger Servey. I am one of the founding members of the Dojo Consortium. With me today are two of our other founding members.

Stacie Peterson

Hi, I'm Stacie Peterson with US Bank.

Bryan Finster

And I'm Bryan Finster with Walmart.

Roger Servey

One of the principles that brought us together was to find a way to share new ideas and to grow a collective sense of intelligence around what we're doing. It's hard for Albert Einstein to be the only person to come up with the theory of relativity. But imagine that we could crowdsource that same effort and use the collective intelligence of many people to build that same level of intelligence. How many more problems could we solve, and how could we get there more quickly? That's what really drives our Dojo Consortium: the ability to share learnings, grow practices amongst each other, and develop a common intelligence, a common genius, around those particular practices around immersive learning.

Stacie Peterson

So what is this Dojo we speak of?

Over six years ago now, my friend and colleague Ross Clanton and team came up with the idea for an immersive learning environment called the Dojo to teach DevOps, Agile, product, UX, and engineering to teams at Target. What started with a conference room pilot turned into a large dedicated space, and eventually three spaces globally. We were focused on building and deploying technology solutions while learning, so real work deployed and built in matters of seconds instead of months.

And the success from that just grew Dojos around the globe from there. We made it our mission to share and give back to the community everything that we had learned in the Dojo. So we began doing tours and workshops and Q&A sessions, and hosted companies to pay back what we had learned from other companies that were ahead of us on the journey. So it was kind of a cyclical start of a scenius community.

Some of the companies that shared with us included Capital One, Verizon, Nordstrom, and Target. And leveraging those personal relationships was really beneficial at first as we were on this learning journey along with all of these other companies.

And here's our current state. We have more than 100 practitioners spread across more than 40 companies, and we're continuously working together, learning and sharing from each other.

Bryan Finster

The way that I joined the consortium was by comparing notes on the work we've been doing at Walmart to gamify Hygieia. I talked to Topo Pal and Ross Clanton about that, and they introduced me to Roger and got us engaged with the consortium.

And the other thing that we really do is we act as scenius as a service. When people are trying to figure out, they hear about Dojos or they hear about this method of training teams, they have the same questions: How do I start? What's the value proposition? How do I measure success? How do I scale? And by talking to us, we can work directly with them or with their leadership and have conversations: this is what's actually working for us, and it may work in your environment as well.

Roger Servey

So what's the secret sauce? It's really that collective learning that we engage in. As you can see here, this is a representation of some of the logos in our membership today. And you might notice that there are even competitors being shown there. We see people in the fintech area, multiple providers in that area. We see two key competitive retailers shown as well. You might wonder, how are they able to come together and actually learn?

Well, the answer is that learning transcends those normally competitive relationships and builds for a greater scenius amongst them. They are sharing the same types of challenges. Who better than your competitor who's sharing those challenges to help you solve for them and to learn those lessons, as opposed to having to continue to struggle with them on a daily basis?

As you look at this slide, I think the one thing I want to highlight to all of you is we know that there are other practitioners out there in the world. I think you need to ask: is your logo here missing? Should your logo be on this page? And would you be benefiting from joining us in the pursuit and the use of immersive learning through the Dojo model to help advance your particular business or company's strategic objectives?

Bryan Finster

And what Roger says is key. We may be in the same marketplace, but by working together, it lifts the tide for all of us.

Roger Servey

We talk about the consortium. Let's hear a little bit about what we do.

On a regular basis, we're meeting in the standard new normal format. We've always used the community video conferences to help advance the learning and sharings that we do. We do tours. We have events on site. We look forward to doing another event. We had our first one in Minneapolis, and unfortunately, our plans for this year were trumped by what happened with the COVID-19 situation and travel. But we look forward, as conditions improve, to bringing those forward again.

And in the future, establishing regional meetups outside of the area to help propel the sense of community. We operate regional meetups across the US at the moment, and we'd like to see those expand into Europe and Asia in the future.

Bryan Finster

And the thing that struck me when I joined the consortium is you have that same sort of culture that I see in DevOps in general: everybody is sharing as much as they can. It's core to DevOps. And everybody is ahead or behind at something. There are no junior partners in this journey. We're all learning together, and we're all sharing our strengths and getting our weaknesses helped by somebody else's strength. And I think it's awesome that we can all be mentors and mentees to each other.

Roger Servey

And as we look at how we go about things, sharing is a big part of what we do, and being able to provide lessons that are cumulative, that are based on experiments that are being run by other companies in the consortium so that we can learn from those and grow. You continue to hear us harping on sharing. Well, that's a big part of what we do: sharing both successes as well as failures is a key important component.

Bryan Finster

Yeah--

Roger Servey

We've developed-- Sorry, Bryan. Go ahead.

Bryan Finster

We've developed and discovered shared solutions that are available on our website. We'll cover that at the end. But those solutions are different plays or tools in our playbooks or toolkits, and they're not prescriptive. They're just things that we find across practices tend to work to get you started.

Roger Servey

Yeah, and with the current change in how people are working with the global pandemic that's occurring, working together to come up with shared solutions for a sudden change in how most teams are having to work has been really helpful. The place used to be where we were. Now it's where you are, and that's been a big change for everybody.

And in past years, several of us have given updates about what we've been doing at DevOps Enterprise Summit and at DevOpsDays Everywhere. But we never stop listening and learning. We're always trying to learn. And like last year, we learned about some of the work that was being done at Adidas. And hey, guys, Adidas, we'd love for you guys to come join and share. We'd love to learn what you're doing. I reference some of your stuff frequently.

Bryan Finster

Yes, please do.

Roger Servey

While we're listening to everyone else, we're also trying to share the best lessons that we have available, and we realize that not everyone can afford to participate regularly. One of the introductions we offer are some of the documentation of those best patterns and practices by our very own members. I thoroughly encourage all of you to check out some of these particularly helpful manuals and scripts. See if they resonate for you, and then come and join us to learn more.

Stacie Peterson

We were in a position at Target to mentor new practitioners and host workshops and Q&A sessions, give tours, answer questions. And now as I've moved to US Bank in the last two years, I've found myself in a position to be mentored as well.

Bryan Finster

And for us, as you can imagine, it's very difficult for us to be mentored by Target. However, we were fortunate enough to connect with Verizon and spend some time being mentored by them and rapidly find out some of the unknown unknowns we had for Dojos. And it allowed us to accelerate just super fast in standing up from nothing to running engagements in just a few months instead of iterating four quarters.

And now we're able to mentor others. It's really exciting to have people come and ask questions we're now able to answer for them. And also, again, with the current situation, each one of the Dojos operates in a different way. There's not the way to run a Dojo, and that diversity is a real strength, because now when we have organizations that are mostly running remote Dojos instead of having a place where they come to, those organizations are able to coach those of us doing embeds or the organizations that have a place on how to leverage those remote working ways of working.

It's not a monoculture.

Roger Servey

Not at all.

Bryan Finster

Mm-hmm.

Roger Servey

And what is it that we do? I said it's not a monoculture. We're not prescriptive. We're also not prescriptive about you must work this way. What we're trying to do is we're trying to remove waste from the flow. We're trying to help teams accelerate and live better lives. We're using a metrics-based approach of doing that. And it's very common to see a rapid improvement in delivery metrics, where change failure rate drops and the lead time to deliver change can drop significantly. 50% improvement is not uncommon.

Not at all. In fact, here's an example of a team that did some pretty amazing things relative to their improvement: actually, 150%. At Verizon, we're actually able to measure the performance of the teams and look at how their before and after pictures looked like when they came into the Dojo. Not only did they work on their particular product enhancement, which saved the company $2 million a year, we also delivered back productivity improvement that has saved another $280,000 per year in cost avoidance and operational improvement. Terrific story for the NetRobo team over at Verizon.

But I bet Stacie's got an even better story.

Stacie Peterson

Oh, yeah. Go first.

We've leveraged the experience studios at US Bank, and a little bit of a twist on the Dojo, to bring customers in to look at our actual experiences and give feedback. We have cool technologies in order to see them through two-way mirrors and study them on video. And we were able to, without the help of fintech consultants, develop our own customer-focused mobile app in less than a month. These are the types of projects that would previously take months just to build a project team, so product over project.

We also started a red shoes movement where we buy red shoes for our executives and leaders and teams in the studio as a reminder to change and be bold and don't do things the same old way. What do you call this again, Roger?

Roger Servey

So I tend to think those are your ruby slippers that let you make the magic where you're at.

Bryan Finster

Right on.

Roger Servey

So we're definitely not in Kansas anymore, and we want to share the journey that we've had amongst three of our members here. So you'll be hearing from myself, Bryan, and Stacie on the journeys of the companies shown here: Verizon, US Bank, and Walmart. Bryan, why don't you share Walmart?

Bryan Finster

Well, sure. So in 2017, this is before we set up a Dojo at Walmart, and we had a delivery platform that made it a lot easier to onboard people onto CD tooling and also easier to train them on that. We had a community of interest that actually my wife in security started to focus on: how do we learn from each other as developers?

And we also had gamified Hygieia to encourage improvement in some really interesting ways. And that's, by the way, on Capital One's master right now if you want to check it out. But we knew we needed a way to show teams how, because teams were still trying to make it up as they went along. And scaling that is important, especially where I work.

So by joining the Dojo Consortium and having conversations with other practitioners at other companies with other contexts, some matching mine and some not, I could rapidly answer those questions: How do I start? How does it work? What do I do next? What doesn't work? Why does it work? Why does it work in your context? Will it work in mine?

And also, hey, I have this idea. Has anybody tried this, and did that work, or did it fail? So I could have conversations instead of spending money on execution and wasting time and money on things that might not work, and double down and invest on things that absolutely have shown in other places to work that I believe will work in my context.

Roger Servey

Thanks, Bryan. At Verizon, we got our model, of course, directly from what Target was doing, interacting with them. And of course, Ross Clanton joined us at Verizon at that time, and he brought with him the model. Once we got the model, we started to apply it. We said, "It doesn't seem to be working quite the way it was at Target."

There were some new lessons for us that took into account the difference in the culture and the regionality, the actual physical footprint of the people that were working, et cetera, and how we were working in those environments. And so as we struggled with that, we went back to Target, we went back to others, and as the consortium grew, we continued to introduce those challenges back to everyone. And we started to evaluate changes and started to iterate our own model with a few differences: mostly the same template, but something a little bit different. And we learned some really significant things along the way I'd like to share with you today.

Dojos are all about transforming, and transforming is all about people: people learning new processes, new ways, new systems, if you will, in order to accomplish the work that they're going forward with. And of course, the goal here is to bring forward more efficient, better development, more engaged developers, et cetera. And part of that journey really comes from the immersive learning experience being the catalyst for that particular change, the Dojos in this case.

When we looked at what we've learned, I talk about community all the time, and there's a significant strength in that because we certainly would never have solved some of the challenges that we had without consulting with others. Among those challenges, of course, was how to engage with the leaders. We'd take teams through, they'd do these amazing transformations, and then they'd start to backslide, and we'd notice in the metrics. What we came to find out was that really we had an opportunity to bring the leadership along, and that way we avoided recidivism, which is a key component of any transformation: not falling back into old patterns. And that meant we had to include everybody in the journey, not just the team, not just the doers, but the leaders as well.

Measuring that has been a big component for us. I highly recommend as you go through your journeys, you develop the measures that are going to help you know what matters most, and so that you can report that back. And then, as I mentioned before, find out what works best for you. While what worked well at Target didn't always work well for us, so too some of the things we learned from Walmart worked better for us, et cetera. Borrow from others liberally, and build scenius by sharing back those successes and failures. Super key.

Going through that process for Verizon, we actually managed to mint recently our own Dojo 2.0 process, which we're now using to build our own developers directly in the process through the Aptina program. Encourage all of you to check out Jacki Damiano's presentation on that previously, but that's become part of our new Dojo platform, as well as bringing forward the teams. And I think there's just some great lessons there. I know Stacie's got a few lessons that she'd like to share as well. Stacie?

Stacie Peterson

Yes, I just could really echo all of yours, Roger. Being able to do a 2.0 experience studio on the Dojo was really fun. US Bank was one of those companies that toured the Dojo and then started their own.

The experience studio, like I said, combined the physical spaces, getting teams in a community together that didn't sit together previously. Sometimes all were virtual. And then having real customers walk in, having a business-driven strategy instead of the Dojo. Initially, we had had it focused on teaching to technology teams, Agile, product, and DevOps, but we were really looking at the experience studio from a business digital bank: how do we grow our capabilities in that regard instead of a technology-driven strategy?

The teams can stay in the experience studio, at least prior to COVID, and we would just add a floor, remodel it, create this awesome Agile space, and then teams would sit there, build digital investments, and stay in that space. And we would remodel a new floor or a new space. We grew to seven different cities and over 800 people building the new bank in the experience studio.

Finally, just my learning being at a highly regulated bank instead of a maybe faster-moving retailer, was that we needed to really embed risk and security right into those journey teams that were working on the value streams and working on the products. And wherever we were able to do that with dedicated people from the beginning, the build just went 10 times faster.

So just to recap what I learned, getting to talk to over 150 companies through the Target Dojos and the US Bank Studios, transformation absolutely does not look the same at any company or even teams within a company. You have to tailor it to why they would want to change or what the pain points are for that particular team, for that leader.

Having new leaders come in with experience really accelerated the movement. Every time I saw that happen, it was a great chance to actually listen to those leaders and understand their why, and then build upon their why with product over project, with business buy-in before, not after. It really is waste from a lean perspective to get far down a path with a product taxonomy or a new operating model without having business buy-in right from the beginning.

Culture and trust can be impediments or accelerants. And for us at US Bank, we've really focused on building an engineering culture instead of leveraging consultants and contractors for that.

And I can't stress this enough: we can only learn as fast as we contribute. The open sourcing of enterprise transformation has really helped all of us. Especially recently, like I said before, when all of us were sent home and suddenly we had to figure out how to help teams remotely, and be able to call on each other and run experiments with mob programming and different tools and ask, "Which collaboration tools do you find useful? Which ones are not?"

All of that has helped accelerate us all dramatically in the current environment. And sharing what you learn creates those feedback loops that you need for more learning. Part of DevOps is amplifying feedback, and having a community to help amplify that feedback is incredibly important.

Roger Servey

And key to that feedback is really sharing. We talk about sharing so much. That feedback is shared with others, that feedback amplifies, and it really produces, as Ross Clanton, one of the founders of the Dojo movement, is often fond of saying, "Rising tides really do lift all boats." We all gain together through that shared knowledge and pool. And today, especially in the world of COVID-19, we feel a little bit more isolated. The consortium makes us feel connected, and we feel that tide really lifting us together.

Bryan Finster

Because you get lifted if you're not sitting alone in a pond. There's no tides in ponds.

Roger Servey

Very true.

Bryan Finster

Mm-hmm.

Roger Servey

So learning over delivery and learning accelerating delivery, we should all ask ourselves: How are we empowering our teams and incenting our organizations to change?

Bryan Finster

And we need your help. You can join us. There's a website that Stacie mentioned earlier where we're starting to collect some of our playbooks and just some of our feedback of things that work and don't, at dojoconsortium.org. And there's a Bitly link here to bit.ly/dojoconsortium that takes you to the LinkedIn group we have, and we also have a Slack organization where you'll hear a lot of chatter from some of us who are incredibly passionate about accelerating delivery.

So please come join us, especially you guys at Adidas, we'd love to hear from you, and anybody else as well.

Roger Servey

Thanks, Rog.

Bryan Finster

Join us.

Roger Servey

Look forward to having you. Take care.

Stacie Peterson

Thank you. Bye.