Roger Servey

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. We are here to tell you a little bit about our Dojo community and how we're using Scenius to transform enterprises.

I'm Roger Servey with Verizon. I'm one of the organizers for the Dojo Consortium. With me is one of our founding members.

Stacie Peterson

I'm Stacie Peterson, formerly from Target, currently at US Bank.

Bryan Finster

And I'm Bryan Finster. I lead the DevOps Dojo for Walmart.

Roger Servey

By now you've all heard Gene talking about Scenius and what that is. Just a quick recap: it's the ability to generate genius-level intelligence out of a crowdsourced or pooled environment taken from a community. We're trying to do the same sort of thing Einstein did with the theory of relativity, by transforming enterprises with the same kind of breakthrough developed through an intelligence, a genius, a Scenius, if you will, from the result of all of our members inside the Dojo Consortium.

Stacie Peterson

This would be a really weird day at the office: a stork literally brought Ross Clanton into the Dojo at Target. No, not really. I was blessed to be one of the founding members of the first Dojo with Ross Clanton at Target. Now we have over 40 companies with Dojos, I'm proud to say. They call them all different things, but the concepts are the same.

Ross came to me one day and said his DevOps team was doing this place-of-the-way learning thing called the Dojo, and asked whether I would like to join them and bring the agile coaches and product coaching into the Dojo. Of course, I was like, "Yes, let's put the chocolate and the peanut butter together." We began a Dojo five, almost six years ago. It grew to three Dojos at Target, and each one honestly looked a little different. Even within the same company, your transformations and your Dojos might look different.

We started out the consortium with really three founding members: Target, Capital One, and Verizon. I loved the culture of sharing and transparency and being honest about our struggles and our learnings. I found from my colleagues that it could transcend competition. We even let Walmart in at a time when I was at Target, because we didn't care about that. We just cared about changing the world, changing the way we worked, and sharing our struggles and wins and the stuff that worked for us as a Scenius kind of community.

Bryan Finster

We just ignored each other on the phone.

Roger Servey

Currently we have practitioners from over 30 companies in the Fortune 200. We're always continuously sharing and learning from each other. We have calls and events just to work together. We also act as experts as a service. You hire a consultant to kind of sock puppet what you want to tell leadership. We just do that for each other. We open source it.

Bryan Finster

Yeah. It's actually pretty effective. It's really cheap. The way Walmart got into it was we had gamified Hygieia and came to show it, and I got introduced to Roger, found out about the consortium, and said, "Absolutely, we're in."

Roger Servey

Taking a look at some of the members, you'll see representative corporations. Stacie mentioned this too: we have competitors in retail and competitors in finance. But our membership looks beyond those things to find shared commonality: that one path, one way, one lesson we can share with one another to build the best practices and grow the Scenius of the organization. That effort transcends normal competitive relationships and makes Walmart and Target, or Walmart and US Bank and Capital One, fast friends working toward one common outcome. We're all on the same mission.

Rising tides lift all boats, as Ross Clanton, the godfather of the Dojos, is fond of saying, and no less so in our consortium. We think about things in the same way, back to the competition we were talking about, or the lack thereof.

We use a variety of methods in the consortium to build the community on a regular basis. All communities need regular things to be healthy and well. We use a video conference hosted once every two weeks. Members come in and out and talk about successes, failures, challenges they need help with, and things they've observed. It's a fantastic sharing.

We also have tours provided by our members. Target has done over 250 tours, most while Stacie was with them. Those tours are valuable to share the experience. Bryan came and spent a few days with us in Dallas. We've also held our first learning event: 665 people from the Dojo Consortium, when we were only about two dozen companies, came to Minneapolis to learn about the great things we are practicing as a group, building that Scenius in the immersive learning practice. We had people like Michael Nygard and Kent Beck. It was fantastic to get people from the DevOps community to come out and talk about what we're doing. Finally, we're doing meetups. Dallas has a healthy meetup group, Minneapolis has one, and we're hoping our friends in Atlanta will begin starting one soon.

Bryan Finster

I hope all of you have experienced what a sharing community the entire DevOps community is, and the Dojo Consortium is the same way. All of us are equal. We're all on a journey. There are no seniors or juniors. It doesn't matter how long we've been doing it. We're all mentors or mentees about something. It's a really special feeling.

This is what we do: we share what we've learned. We share successes and failures, like Roger said. Personally, I always ask everybody: what failed? Why did it fail? I want to know if it fails for me. Just because it failed for them doesn't mean it wouldn't succeed for me. We also work on brainstorming solutions for each other. I might be struggling with something, and with our shared mind, we can come up with a solution that might work for me.

Stacie Peterson

I found playbooks super useful at Target and at US Bank, and the Dojo Consortium is developing one that we're crowdsourcing. At US Bank, our playbook has become a coaching tool, but it's also a self-service way to go in as a PO, scrum master, or engineer, click on helpful templates, get started with good examples, and see the entire product lifecycle from discovery to delivery. You can see how to pass an audit in there. There's a lot of cool stuff that's been useful across companies. You'll be able to check ours out from the consortium on how to run a Dojo and how to coach on this stuff soon.

Roger Servey

Where would you be in the Dojo without the place? We come together, and you might be surprised how much time we spend talking about the importance of the Dojo itself: what goes into a Dojo, what the components are, what tools you use, who's in the Dojo, et cetera. We talk about the place regularly and are always interested in new examples. Stacie has one we're excited for her to talk about later, on how to utilize the space and activate it to make things different, because that difference helps amplify the lessons being learned by the teams.

We're out there spreading the word and trying to get more people roped in and showing what we're actually doing. Verizon, Delta, Walmart, and other members have talked about this on several stages this year, here, and last year. We're also at local meetups talking about it. Jennifer at DevOpsDays Dallas was energetic and fun to watch. DevOpsDays Columbus and other places will hear about what we're doing.

In addition to speaking, we're writing. You'll see Jacki Damiano and Ross Clanton, two members of the consortium, representing for the pamphlet they wrote for IT Revolution. It's a fantastic treatise that represents the Scenius of this organization and how you get started with your own Dojos. If you need to go further, Joel Tosi and Dion Stewart are publishing a full-length treatise on how to activate your own Dojo, how to run it at scale, and all the steps from soup to nuts and your evolution journey thereafter.

Stacie Peterson

At Target, we were an early adopter, so we found ourselves mentoring a lot of companies. Like Roger said, we did hundreds of tours, Q&A labs, workshops, and hosted teams and executives up and down the food chain. I learned more from them just by observing, over hundreds of companies, how we all share the same struggles, woes, waterfall scars, and battles. That was a fun opportunity.

Now, coming full circle at US Bank, I find myself starting over at a bank, which is a very different culture. I've been able to reach out to the members of the community and get mentoring as I began mentoring others. I can, like Bryan said, rope in some free consulting and say, "Go tell them that for me. Tell them a bank can do this, too."

Bryan Finster

Yeah, it is effective. In the same vein, I was the mentee. We were getting started, and I needed to know how to get it done. You go to conferences, you see the stuff, but there are no details. There's not enough time. A teammate and I spent two days at Verizon's Dojo deep diving, seeing all their artifacts, seeing the Dojo in action, talking to the coaches, and finding out what the reality is. We found many of the things we didn't know we didn't know. That massively accelerated us, so just a few weeks later we were able to start our first engagement with a team and start running without stumbling. It's a big part of our culture to pay it forward and continue to grow the Scenius by helping those who are getting started.

What we do is metrics-based coaching. It's not about process. It's not "you must do Scrum." That'll fail. It's: what are your current metrics, how do we improve those metrics, let's run experiments, and let's get it done with measurable outcomes. Ross Clanton talked at a webinar a few months ago that, across multiple countries, it's not uncommon to see cycle times drop by 50%. It's also been my experience that every single team we go into sees massive improvement. They bounce back a little bit, but they never drop as far as they were.

The way we focus on it is continuous integration as the driver of improvement, driving batch size down. Why can't we go to master today? Let's work as a team to solve the problem. That's how we move the teams and teach them how to improve so they can continue improving after we've left.

Roger Servey

Measurement is the cornerstone of demonstrating value. Even as we talk among ourselves about what to measure, we're always focused on knowing we have to demonstrate the value of what we're doing to the enterprises we're transforming.

Bryan Finster

Absolutely don't make the mistakes I made early on. Measure first so you have something to argue with.

Roger Servey

In the Dojo Consortium, we often say, "make more awesome." Let me share a couple examples about two members and what they have been able to see. These are not unusual; they are regular examples of things you find from most teams. At Verizon, we had a team called NetRobo. They delivered an enhancement in two months that saved the company $2 million annually and continues to perform at that rate. For the last two years, they've been delivering that $2 million in savings by implementing a major product enhancement for their installation product. Along that same eight-week journey, they lowered the number of defects. Every defect has a cost. Imagine you can cut your cost on defects by more than half, and while doing that, pick up velocity and deploy software more quickly, going from nine days to three days. That translates into more savings, over $220,000 per year. Great example.

Stacie Peterson

At US Bank, we started an Experience Studio, having done the Dojos before. If you could do it different, what would it look like? I'll share more about that in a minute. US Bank was one of the companies that came in and did a tour, a workshop, another tour, brought more people, and another workshop. I learned a lot about the company, got invited there, and was mentoring folks there. We're excited that now we've had teams produce from idea to customer feedback in the studio in less than four weeks: new mobile apps, distributed apps, modern apps. Those things used to be measured in years or months, and now we're talking about weeks.

Bryan Finster

It was cool to watch your presentation, where you see actual customers interacting with a paper wireframe for user-experience research. That's MVP. That's super cheap.

Stacie Peterson

One cool thing they did before I got there was they bought executives and all the teams in the studios red shoes. If you see people wearing red shoes and they might not know why, you can tell them: you're wearing red shoes because it's a reminder at US Bank to be bold and different because we're changing everything. That's been catching on. You don't have to wear them every day. It's cool to have them buy you red shoes.

Roger Servey

A couple of really good examples about the Dojo Consortium and what companies and teams are achieving through Dojos and the transformation that goes along with that practice. Let's dive more deeply into what three members are garnering from participation within the Dojo Consortium.

Bryan Finster

In 2017, when we came here to talk, we already had a unified delivery platform. I can't tell you how important that is, not only to training, but to security and compliance. We had a community of interest that my wife, who's sitting here, started as a way to learn more. She said, "I want to keep the conversation going," and we started a community of interest to meet all the time, just developer grassroots helping each other with continuous delivery.

We had gamified Hygieia. If I had to say one thing caused more passive improvement, it was gamifying Hygieia. Teams come to us: "How do I get my score up?" "Let me show you trunk-based development." But that was the problem: people still didn't know how. I came here in 2017 to solve that problem: how do we help teams learn how at scale? Because it's Walmart.

That's where I wanted to show Topo Pal what we'd done with Hygieia. "Look what we've done. Do you think this is useful?" Topo went nuts. He thought it was awesome. Then he introduced me to what Verizon was doing with other extensions to Hygieia to show executive metrics along with what those mean, which is the killer app. He roped us into the Dojo. I went back to my VP later that week and said, "I volunteered to get us into the Hygieia Consortium so we can contribute to that open source project, and I volunteered to get us into the Dojo Consortium, so please don't fire me." Key lesson: forgiveness, not permission. That's just what I do.

The outcome is we get to scale experiments horizontally. You have all these people you can talk to. As you talk to people: what's working, what's not working, why isn't it working, does it work for you for this reason, what have you tried, what haven't you tried, what do you think of this idea? Conversation is super cheap. Phone calls, email conversations, and one-on-ones are incredibly inexpensive. Execution experiments are very expensive. If we can clear the low-hanging fruit, we can save a ton of money, help everybody, and help developers live better lives.

Roger Servey

One thing Verizon gained was that we implemented the model we came to know from Target. We had Ross Clanton available to help, but over time we saw things as we implemented it that didn't work quite the way they had at Target. No surprise: Verizon and Target are different companies with different footprints. We leveraged the community to talk about common challenges we were finding, and friends at Target and Capital One came back and told us, "Yeah, that's totally normal. Expect it."

We came to know how to manage the pull model. Normally, Dojos don't function by mandate: "Go to the Dojo and get better." More often, teams seeking to get better approach you. That's a pull model, where we want to attract them into the Dojos. That was a real challenge for us at Verizon, and we had to learn to overcome it, get better at marketing, and get better at attracting people into the Dojos.

When we look at what we learned at Verizon, one key thing is that what is measured improves. Make sure you're looking at what your teams are doing so you can capture it and demonstrate it. You can even monetize it. Members of the consortium can help you achieve that standard as you're proving business cases or demonstrating the value of improvements.

Bring your leaders along on the journey. If they're not accompanying you, you can expect recidivism. There's strength in community. We've found others face the same challenges and problems, and there's solace in knowing you're not alone. More than that, activating the community to find and create solutions or to find out what not to try and avoid the cost of failing at it is hugely valuable and important. Each company is different, so do what works best for you. Over time, you'll iterate your own ideas, as we have at Verizon. New patterns and new ways address the ongoing challenge of how you allow the Dojo to grow and evolve into a new thing.

Stacie Peterson

Having a three-, four-, five-year-old Dojo, you can see what happens over time. We found all the teams wanted to come in one time, when we had six-week challenges. Even if they had to relocate for six weeks, it wasn't hard to get interest because it was exciting and a new way of working. But not a lot wanted to come in a second time, and even fewer a third time. You wonder: will it die, or will it always be a place of the way for learning the next new thing?

At the Experience Studio at US Bank, they took a different twist. It was not really a DevOps place-of-the-way for learning, but more of a business strategy-driven incubator where we happen to teach Agile, DevOps, and product, and have teams produce things with speed to market that the business loved. Something like we had experienced at Target, a Techstars type of incubator, exposed me to that business-driven approach while being agile and learning a new way of working.

Real customers walk in, and we can video them interacting with technologies. They can look at paper prototypes way before anything's been developed wrongly. We love making mistakes quickly because it happens in a fail-fast way. Paper's way cheaper. The teams can stay. There's no six weeks and no time limit. The reason was that we had horrible cube farms and needed new space. If you build a couple floors, call it an Experience Studio, and bring strategic teams in, they can stay. The coaching is there. The tools they need are taught to them. They learn while doing, which is way more effective than training or coaching. We didn't kick them out; they could stay. We took over the next floor of the building and the next floor. It's like the new bank is being built through the Experience Studio, so it feels like it will never die or run out of steam.

Finally, what really slows a bank down is risk and security, for good reason. We need them. I don't want to be in the news and have that be my fault. Instead of working against us, we said, "We're all on the same team. We're going to beat the competition together and win together." We embedded them on our teams in the Experience Studio, and you could see the acceleration when they felt like part of the team. They got to help the team be less risky and more secure, not do things to the team, but with them. The question kept coming up: "This will never scale." But it has. As we've grown the Experience Studio, more risk team members have joined. When they feel the team has it under control, much like coaching, we move on to the next thing. That's how we accelerated some of the slowness of governance at the bank.

I've learned over several companies, several years, and different iterations of the Dojo that transformation doesn't look the same, although a ton of stuff in the playbook is the same. There is the same mindset, values, and desire to change the world everywhere we go, but it might need to look different because of your culture and organization. Having a why story tailor-made for your company is important, so that when the grassroots fire is blazing, a top-down extinguisher doesn't come put it out. Finding top-down support and having the stars align with the grassroots fire was key. We had all new CIOs and CDOs, every C-level at the bank new, and within interviewing them in their first five minutes on the job, I thought, "Yes, they've done this before." They want product over project and want to change the way we're working. I'm blessed to have that top-down support.

Getting business buy-in up front is way better than trying to get it along the way. One pain point now is building an engineering culture, because the bank was more of an integrator or package configurer than an engineering organization. We're setting about that with metrics like how much of our workforce is engineering versus people who talk about or facilitate the work. How can we shift that, even as a baby step, to understand engineering is important because we're building software?

One other thing I learned: Dr. Forsgren earlier this week talked about how Dojos can turn into an anti-pattern. If the Dojo's existence is to grow the Dojo, it's an anti-pattern. You should be an enabling team. You should communicate information up and down every level of leadership and to the teams. The most effective thing I can do is go behind the scenes, talk to VPs, talk about common pain points we're seeing on every team, pull in good information, and blast it out in every method I can to the teams. Constantly being that channel of communication up and down and being utterly transparent in both directions is what I see as the role of the Dojo.

Bryan Finster

This is key: you only learn as fast as you contribute. If you have ideas and don't implement them, you don't have quality feedback on that idea. If you contribute those ideas back to the community, they can say, "If you tweaked this, it gets even better," and you can try that, or it sparks new ideas and you harvest those. That's what we're trying to do: form a community so it's a massive acceleration of learning and new ideas to help all of us build the developer experience we want and help everybody's bottom lines.

Like Roger said, a rising tide absolutely lifts all boats. But if you're in a pond, ponds don't have tides. So come join the ocean.

Roger Servey

I want to leave you with a parting question: how are you empowering your teams and incenting your organizations to change? Maybe through a consortium. Maybe through the Scenius that we can offer here in the Dojo. This is where we need your help. Right now it's been person to person: I know a person. I had someone from Fiat Chrysler reach out; we got them in. We've had people from Delta; we brought them in. It's who knows who, but we want to expand it broader than that. If you go to bit.ly/dojoconsortium, that's our LinkedIn group. Dojo Consortium on LinkedIn.

We're also trying to start open sourcing some of the playbooks and have a community like InnerSource Commons for what we do. If you go to dojoconsortium.org, it's light right now, but we also have day jobs, and we do accept pull requests. It will contain information about our upcoming training event for Dojo Consortium members to be held in Dallas, I believe, next year.

Bryan Finster

Please join us and contribute. People have asked me this week, "How can I get you to talk to me?" I said, "Ask me." They said, "No, no, I mean because your time is valuable." No, we pay it forward.

Stacie Peterson

It's because he's so intimidating looking.

Bryan Finster

True. Honestly, we do. We want to pay it forward. Thanks for your time.

Stacie Peterson

Thank you.

Roger Servey

Thanks, everybody. Thank you all.