Olivier Jacques

When was the last time that you went to a week-long training, got good contact with the instructor, got good information, and then on Monday went back to the office and it was just business as usual, with very little that you could apply?

And when was the last time that maybe you went through a virtual web-based training, and this time you just followed along with slides, speakers, maybe poor audio and bullet points, and again nothing really changed? It was just web-based training.

Training is really important. In our industry, software and DevOps are ruling the world, and we have a challenge because we cannot skill and reskill our people fast enough. It is a hard problem that we have to solve as an industry. It is not just us. If you are in this room, you probably also have questions and challenges about how you train your people and how you skill them. It is really maybe the biggest problem in our industry today.

Joan Watson

Hey, Olivier and Joan. I am Brenda. How is your DevOps Dojo presentation going?

Olivier Jacques

Oh, thank you, Brenda. Yes, actually, it is going quite well so far. But who are you?

Joan Watson

I am Brenda, and I am from the business representing Charlie's Pet Clinic. The better we take care of our customers' pets, the happier I get. The key to this is the availability and functionality of our PetClinic application. I work mainly with Paolo, our product owner. I get to explain what I want to Paolo, and he helps the team prioritize the work so that I can get what I want. He calls this a backlog. A recent foray into fair trade pet products was very encouraging, so I am working with Santosh, our Scrum Master, to get epics and stories created in the team's backlog. Nice to meet you.

Olivier Jacques

Yes, nice to meet you, Brenda. We will get to meet Brenda and others throughout the course of this talk.

Joan Watson

DXC Technology, interestingly enough, is one of the largest startups in the world. The company started as a spin-off from two other companies, but essentially, when we talk about what we do, it is about transforming companies in a digital way. When we think about the offerings that we have and the different parts of our business, we have about nine different offerings. We are dealing with everything from consulting to business services, analytics, cloud services, application services. It is a very broad company. We are looking at how we innovate and solve business problems. That is where our focus is.

When we talk about working at scale and looking at what we do, if you look at the timelines here: in 2016, we had about 120 people that had participated in some of our white belt training. The next year, we got about 3,600. What I neglected to say is that the size of our company is about 150,000 employees, with about 100,000 of those people in delivery. We have that many people as an opportunity to drive DevOps.

When we think about DevOps, we are looking at documentation as code, architecture as code, traditional infrastructure, and actual development. We are looking at enveloping everyone. We actually jumped to about 17,000-plus people who have been participating in our training. It is not something forced; it is something people are seeking out, those next-gen skills.

When we talk about where we are going as a corporation, and bringing companies together, we have different people that work in different ways. This is critical because we can talk about tools. You have been hearing about tools all day yesterday, you will hear more about them today, and you will certainly hear more about them on Wednesday. But the biggest part, as you have heard, is the culture.

What we find is that this is the hardest part of any of these transformations, because you can change the tools and find that you are doing the same things you did the other day with them, and you really have not done anything at that point. Culture is one of the biggest things that we do in an organization: try to drive that shift, make sure people can personalize these transformations and relate to them, allow people the freedom to work in an autonomous way, and make sure we do not focus on vanity metrics of how many people did this or that, but on what outcomes we get out of it.

Olivier Jacques

Really, I guess the elephant in the room is: how do we spread this culture? Tools are quite easy. You buy a tool, or you go to open source and you have another way to pay for it. But it is really scaling the culture throughout the company.

How do we learn? Forget DevOps for a second. As humans, how do we learn? When something new is put in front of me, like a new car or a super cool BMW electric car, I think, okay, it looks like a Mercedes. I am always going to relate something new to something I already know. I always take it from the place where I am, and when I look at something new, it is always going to be related to what I already know.

Also, when we learn, we have to understand what the path to success is. What are the learnings that I need to go through? Amazon and many other companies do that really well. They have certification programs. There is an industry challenge there, but the point is to have milestones and almost stamps and say, okay, you know about that much. You still need to practice it, but at least you understand the path to your success.

Also, as humans, and just talking from personal experience, we love stories. We love the way things are put in context in a story. We love to hear, for example, The Phoenix Project. Who has read The Phoenix Project? It is a story, and it is powerful because with stories, you have the characters, you have the names, you can have empathy with the people, and you relate to a place that you know. The story is extremely important. That is how we learn.

Joan Watson

When we talk about how we relate these things and what we are doing at DXC, as we drive DevOps enablement across our workforce, we have come up with a belting system. White belt focuses on the what, yellow belt focuses on the how, green belt focuses on the why, and black belt is what we do in practice.

As we do these things, we look at how we take them and apply them to how we work. We will literally do a hackathon session where we bring one of our business teams in. We do our requirements ahead of time. We know what outcomes we are looking for, and we try to enable our folks to go through a lot of this stuff in advance so that they can come away with the outcomes and take that back into production.

Olivier Jacques

One thing I wanted to mention is DevOps Dojo. I counted three talks about DevOps Dojos this week. Back in 2015, I was at DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco, and Russ Clayton and others were giving a talk about their DevOps Dojos. Earlier today in the general session, they were mentioning it. I just got so inspired by the word. A dojo is the place where you practice your art in martial arts. You practice your craft. That is super well adapted to DevOps because you want to learn DevOps, but there is nothing better than practicing to actually do the thing and make a change. We came up with this program. It is different from the Target program, but I checked with Russ that he knew about it. It is really a continuous learning experience.

Joan Watson

When we talk about the belts, at a high level, what you get out of these is what they focus on and what your takeaway will be. With the white belt, we want people to understand what we are talking about. It is high level: you dip your toes into it, do your first pull request, do your first Jenkins build, start to work with Ansible and create playbooks so that when we talk about these things, you understand the context.

The yellow belt is more of the how. We have to make that transformation from talking about it to being about it and enabling people. You can read about something and go through webinars, but sometimes it helps to get your hands into it right away and start to look at how you adapt that to your job.

The why is important because for this audience some people might say it is a no-brainer, but we have people who look at this and ask, why do I need to take time to learn about this? We are trying to open the eyes of our workforce to how it relates to them. I am not really a big governance fan, but if I have certain guardrails I need and can use a pipeline or copy someone else's to understand how this relates to my job, whether I am doing documentation, technical writing, or traditional development, I want to understand why it is relevant to our transformation and how we get personal value out of it.

The black belt is being in that session, coming in knowing what you need to transform before you get out of there, actually doing it, and walking out with that digital working style that you can put into production.

Olivier Jacques

One word about the black belt: all of the other three belts are training and skilling, mixing culture and practice. The black belt is a doing. You do not get black belt certified. It is just a doing.

We do a preparation phase where we do some value stream mapping with the team. We take three, four, five teams. We see where their constraints are. Then, using DevOps techniques and practices, we start to attack those constraints following lean principles. After that, it is followed by something we call the DevOps Kaizen. We put the teams on their continuous improvement cycles so that constantly, relentlessly, they improve and attack the constraints following DevOps practices.

Joan Watson

Exactly. When we do these, if we do a five-day one, we try to give you a sense of personal interaction and certainly a feedback system. Every time we do one of these build-a-thons, it is almost like this magical experience where people come in with requirements, PowerPoints, and the whole nine yards. We say, coming into this, this is not about PowerPoints and not a planning session. Do all that before you get here. It is about transforming the work you have. It is about coding, but it is also a safe environment.

If there are things you do not know, it is there where we are trying to lower the bar and allow you to make that transformation. You get people who come in and say, wow, I did not realize I could actually do this. It is almost like a little mini graduation. It is a full feedback system. We constantly look to evolve it. As people take on the role and get recognized as additional DevOps coaches, we expect those folks to enable others.

Olivier Jacques

We have the black belt format, and we also have this yellow belt. The yellow belt is also a one-week face-to-face training that we developed for ourselves and do with our customers and partners. But the challenge is how do we scale that? The face-to-face training is nice, but it requires a big investment in time, and it is hard to cover everybody we need. One hundred thousand employees, right? The challenge is how we take something like this for 100,000 employees.

Joan Watson

This is what we are going to show you. Our CTO challenged us and said, okay, good, you are making a difference, but it is not big enough of a difference. You need to reach further.

Olivier Jacques

We looked at it based on the understanding of how we learn as individuals and as technologists, and we used a SaaS platform called Katacoda. If you have been through Kubernetes trainings and other trainings, many people leverage that platform. We developed all of the modules that we deliver in the yellow belt DevOps Dojo face-to-face in a virtual format. That includes both cultural modules and practice, technical modules.

To do that, it is all about the story. It is all about understanding what is going to be in these training and learning sessions for you. We created a virtual team, a fictitious team. We have Charlie, the CEO; Chun, our DevOps coach; Brenda from the business, whom you met earlier; Dan, the developer. It is a full team. Each team member has a letter. For example, Adam, our system administrator, starts with an A. We have Hal, a hacker, and Santosh, our Scrum Master. We use those characters over and over across our modules and stories. Each character has a deep story and conflicts between them. It is kind of like a movie being developed.

A story, an application: what is better than the infamous PetClinic application? In addition to the application, it is the story of an IT team that operates this PetClinic application. We also created a full CI/CD pipeline with it. Not only is there a story and an application, but together with that we explain version control, continuous integration, continuous testing, shifting security left, DevOps Kaizen, cultural changes, Agile, all in this context.

There is nothing better than a demo, so I will ask Ron if you can launch the demo movie.

We have technical modules, as you have seen, and this is the environment. On the left side we have instructions, and on the right side we have an ephemeral lab environment. You start your browser and get an ephemeral environment that has everything you need to follow along. Here we are going through the people and the story. This is the module about version control. We explain the current situation when version control is not really done in the team, and how they are evolving to apply version control.

To do version control, we also relate what we do with the backlog and user stories. The environment is created automatically just for you. It is a sandbox just for you as a student, and you get the user stories there. Then you work on the user story. You have a safe environment to practice, and you can get out of the script. You do not have to follow the instructions one by one. You can explore, run different commands, do a git status, do something else, or do a git log.

When we teach something like pull requests, we also simulate interactions. We developed a bot that acts as the personas or characters of the story. We interact with Paolo, our product owner, and Tina, our tester. When we have continuous testing, we also have a self-contained environment with a full CI/CD pipeline where we can see the changes and the tests. It is not a video. It is interactive. It is a real live environment just for you.

We do not only do technical modules; we also do cultural modules. This is a module about DevOps Kaizen, where we take it from the value stream map that you heard earlier today and explain the team's situation and how we do continuous improvements. To do that, we simulate team dynamics and interaction. It was inspired by the 1980s and the games I was playing on my old Apple II: telling the story and the interactions between the people and characters.

We also have assessments along the way, so as students learn new things, we make sure those things are assessed. Everything we do is linked with actions. When we explain something about DevOps Kaizen and need to do an epic about continuous improvement, that gets created in your GitHub environment so that you have a full hands-on learning experience. It is a safe sandbox. Not only do you understand and have instructions, but you can practice and get out of the script, which is really key.

Joan Watson

One thing we have done with the learning is that we really believe in badges and gamification. We are working with our senior HR leader, our senior VP. For our workforce that is investing in next-gen tools, we have started doing badging. The badging is being done within our formal training systems, as well as linking it to external systems like OBA so people can put badges on their LinkedIn profiles.

As we have been doing these sessions with the workforce, we have started to get the attention of our senior CTO reporting to our CEO and our senior leaders. They realize the value because our biggest asset is our people. We want to make sure our workforce knows we are serious about investing in them, because if they are successful, then we are successful as a corporation.

The badges on the outer ring are more minor badges or tiers. If you go through the yellow belt, it has a first belt associated with it, and people get badges associated with the capabilities. Not only do you get a badge because you went through training, but we are also working on attestation where you say that you have done this training and are actually using it in your job. That is important.

As we go into the next belts, we will be releasing yellow belt two and three. We see this as a great way to inspire folks and have a sense of gamification. I was talking to someone from Walmart Labs, and he was telling me how they were looking at badging and use cases for understanding how we are moving the business forward and tying that into reward systems. It is being taken seriously.

Olivier Jacques

It is 2018, so learning and skilling do not have to be painful. The badges are one gamification aspect. We get people collecting badges like crazy. We have a ranking system and everything. But the point is that we want to create a continuous learning experience. If you want to know about leading change, or it is the time to implement test-driven development, you take the module at the best time for you, when you need it and when you can apply it. It is not something we force on you. It is something you take, and then you get the badge. Later on, you can take another module where it is most appropriate. It is all about pulling and taking the learnings when needed.

On the skills, looking again at the numbers, back in 2016 we started this DevOps Dojo program, and actually we started in 2015, but the numbers were even smaller and could not show on the graph. Then we started to see an uptake in people following those modules. One next step we want is not only that we push trainings and learnings, but how we verify in our source code management system, GitHub, and those tools, that what we preach and teach is actually getting applied. There is technology to do that in the tools.

Joan Watson

I think we will do more with machine learning around that, so we have a big opportunity there as well.

Olivier Jacques

We get feedback. What good are those learnings, and what are people saying about them? We get quite good feedback. I love this one: you should try it. It is a kind of good NPS. But we also get bad feedback sometimes. When we send a 100,000-person workforce training about how to do your first GitHub pull request, your first Jenkins job, your first Ansible playbook, some say, this does not apply to me. I do not want to do that. This is not my world.

For each and every bad feedback, we circle back and have conversations about why. Why do we do that? All of the reasons you have seen in the general sessions, why DevOps is so important and why software is ruling our world: maybe the people leaving bad feedback have just not understood the urgency of the change. So we have another conversation with them.

Joan Watson

It is also a clear message to us that we missed the mark, that we are not as inclusive. If you looked at the characters, we try to have a good sense of diversity because if we are going to hit 100,000 people, we have a lot of diversity in our workforce, in the types of jobs people have and the sectors they are in. At one point we said, should we exclude the folks from sales? Do we really think people are not doing development or documentation that is reusable in these different spaces? That would have been a shortcoming had we made that decision.

Olivier Jacques

This is the one cheat sheet you can take away. This is how we are developing our story. We created a story, we have an application, we have a pipeline, and we have basically a game. We gamified the entire thing.

Joan Watson

Let's talk about outcomes. With respect to outcomes, we constantly see breakthroughs. We see people who have that moment. When we think about how we are applying this, there are so many different opportunities. When we talk about increased velocity, if we are doing automation, you will go faster, and you can take those people and apply them to higher-value things. Maybe installing the app or running the app is not where you should be spending your time. Maybe you just get that going, and spend more time on features and capabilities.

As we talk about cycling changes, as we do that with greater frequency and speed, we get better and higher quality because we can iterate over and over again. It is not a work of art every time. When we deploy automated workflows, it falls into that same space. It allows us to be more agile. We can change on a dime, put something in, make a quick decision, and not wait until the end of the week to think about it.

Olivier Jacques

Joan, I think the transition is really challenging. We get people pushing back and saying, this is not my world. I even had a team that came to me and said, Joan, I think you need to just hire a bunch of DevOps people and put them around our developers because we do not have time for this.

I said, okay, well, sometimes people do that, but no. Are you speaking on behalf of the developer? Are you speaking more from a management perspective? I doubt you have very many developers that do not want to have this capability and skill.

What we do now is make it super clear to the entire workforce that this is the path forward. With HR support, with our CIO support and CEO, it is very clear for everybody that this is what good looks like.

Joan Watson

It is true. I am excited when I look at some of our town hall meetings and our CEO foot-stomping about the digital transformation. He is excited and motivated, the leadership is excited and motivated, and the workforce is as well. It is always a challenge working with people in the middle. But the excitement is there, and it is always nice when you are not doing something to someone, but they want to make this shift.

Our biggest challenge is probably that not a day goes by where somebody says, hey Joan, I need a DevOps person. They are asking me who it is going to be, and we kind of point back and take that finger back and say, actually, it is you. We really want to enable our workforce.

Olivier Jacques

Everyone. DevOps Dojos work for us. Tomorrow there is another session with John and Chris, who are going to share their own story. If you want to dive deeper in another context, tomorrow at 2:40 at Nolita 2, just here.

The help we are looking for is beyond initial success. We all have stories where we have a team that is doing awesome. They are there, on their way, they have their pipeline and everything. But how do you enlarge, and how do you coach the rest of your workforce? I would like to hear from you and how you do that, because we are going down one path, but is that the right path? How do we adjust ourselves?

As a closing word, nothing is possible without the team. This is the team that has worked on this program so far.

I will close out with this: untrained employees, gurus of a phased approach, people who love sharing code via email or SharePoint, and people who do blameful postmortems and try to fire the culprit of the latest database outage are everywhere. We as an industry need to up our game. We know things need to change, and we have examples, and we now even have a recipe for that. But how do we do that for ourselves? How do we up our game? Training is one thing. Continuous learning is another one. Trust is definitely a big thing. We think there is room for improvement there.

Thank you very much. I am Olivier, this is Joan, and we work for DXC Technology customers. Thank you.