Carmen DeArdo

Hi, everyone. This is not the talk that was on your program, so if you're surprised about that, you're probably not as surprised as I am. But apparently, I'm a fill-in, so hopefully you get what you came for when it's a fill-in. So anyway, thank you very much.

That's me. I'm senior VSM strategist, don't ask me what that means, at Tasktop. But you heard Mik Kersten's talk, and Tasktop's really focused on helping his talk come to life. So, if you're interested in that, let us know.

So Dickens, right? _A Tale of Two Cities_. What does this have to do with DevOps? As I was going through a journey as a leader, for whatever reason, maybe because my daughter is a big Dickens fan, this would come up to me as it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. It's the age of wisdom, it's the age of foolishness. Because that's what it felt like, and I'm going to take you through some of those ebbs and flows in this presentation.

So first, I'm going to start with, well, what did Dickens know about DevOps? What did he know about BMWs, right? Because sometimes, I think as Seinfeld has said, or maybe it was Ray Barone, material just presents itself.

So here's a few days ago, and that's me if you can't see it, sitting in the BMW. Everything's great. How can it be better than this? And then a funny thing happens last night when we're trying to get the car out of the building. It has a single point of failure, which in this case is a freight elevator. In the freight elevator is a $100 chain probably, and it breaks, and here we have the most advanced car on the planet stuck next to the Froot Loops, right? We cannot get it down the freight elevator. Probably not quite the best of times, but that's okay. It turns out okay in the end.

So as you're going through a journey, it's kind of, look how wise we are. Incredible things are happening by our innovative teams. We're reducing times from a test suite from hours to minutes. We're going from deploying monthly to perhaps daily, and we can reduce the flow time of a feature from months to days. So it's like, yay, we're great. But look how foolish we are.

These challenges remain. We still have over-governance of change control requiring more manual escalations. Countless meetings. Dominica DeGrandis talks about this all the time. Estimating, and if that's not good enough, let's re-estimate. Infrastructure changes that are taking a long time because of manual processes. Or teams just feeling like they're not in control. They want to make a database change. It goes to a centralized team of DBAs. They have way too much work that they can manage, and so it goes on and on, and the team is stalled because of this.

So what are the specific challenges that you're going to have to deal with? So one is local optimizations. Teams, people have great ideas. A lot of teams, could be a tool, could be a process, but if everybody just optimizes within their own silo, you're really not going to achieve the first way of flow. You're not applying systems thinking. Oh, I guess it was on this slide. This is what happens when you never practice this before. Lack of flow, first way.

Teams are not really being empowered. I don't know if you saw Jon Smart's talk yesterday, but he talked about it's like, you're empowered. You can choose A or B, but yes, you're empowered. Teams really don't buy in and feel like they're empowered.

There's this view that we heard this week about the cost center model and the project center model. If IT is just looked at as a cost, then there's going to be pressure to reduce it. If IT's looked at as a profit, then you want to invest more in it.

The number one killer is cynicism. We're going to change. People say, "Well, I've heard this before. It's the flavor of the month. You're telling me? I'm not going to do that again. I won't get fooled again." And you can see it in their face. You don't need the metric. You can just sense it. It's in the air.

And of course, the hero culture. Brent from _The Phoenix Project_. And also one-time results which really aren't sustainable. So somebody does something good one time, and you try to react to that. It's a great thing, but you really haven't put in place a system to capture that success and repeat it. It's not repeatable. It's not sustainable. Or it could just be a happenstance, as Deming would call a red bead, that really is not something that's going to be systemic.

And of course, we all know that there's cultural impacts. Addressing cynicism is one of those. So when I would come in, and I worked at Bell Labs for a while, and then I went to a Fortune 100 company, and I learned very quickly to stop saying, "Well, we used to do that at Bell Labs," because nobody wanted to hear that. So I would get, "Well, that won't work." And I wanted to say, "What, do you pick up your phone, you get dial tone? I think this probably would work." But that won't work. Okay?

So how did I address this? Well, this is where the community that Gene has formed has just been invaluable, right? Because obviously me saying something isn't going to work, but if I bring in a video by Topo Pal at Capital One, who's like, "I think they're pretty highly regulated. I think they have a bank or something." Then it's like--and they aren't Netflix, right? They aren't Etsy. But then the next one was, "Yeah, but that won't work here," right? Because there's something here that's different.

Now, I showed this deck like 10 minutes... There's things that sound good. It's kind of like when you write code late at night and you wake up in the morning like, "Who wrote that?" This sounded really good at 6:00 AM, and then I showed it to somebody 10 minutes before the talk, and they looked at me. So I'm taking some risks from 1980 movie references, but Tracy's going to laugh anyway.

So when I would hear this, if you've ever seen _Mr. Mom_ and there's the scene where he's talking about how long it takes to make instant grits, right? And it's like he's saying it only took two minutes. And he goes, "Well, doesn't it take... Instant grits? Well, no instant grits. No Southerner is going to make instant grits. Well, grits takes 12 minutes." So then he says, "So, well, perhaps the law of physics ceased to exist on your stove," right? So that's what I wanted to say to people is, so it won't work here? Is there something different? Does Java run differently in this building than it does at Capital One? What are we saying here, right? So, you're going to get that, right? And I'll tell you potentially how to deal with that.

And then there's cultural impacts, right? Sometimes we would come up with ideas and they would be dismissed, and my team would feel like, well, that was a bad idea. And I'd say, "No, that's not a bad idea. That's a great idea, but it's not ripe. The environment is not ready for it yet." So if you have things that you think really will work, but they're not going to work now, don't throw them away. Keep them in your backlog, because at some point, when people are ready, when the culture is ready, then those ideas can be put into play.

I already talked a little bit about that. Cost. How do you get the C-level's focus away from cost? But then another talk I would have many times was, we'd be discussing an idea and someone would say, "We should be able to do better." Right? "We should be able to deploy faster. We should be able to do this more quickly." And I'd say, "Yes, it's not perfect, but don't make perfect be the enemy of good or better." Right? It's going to be baby steps. So we have to continue to just progress in those incremental improvements.

And you have to have a safety culture. We've heard a lot about that. We continue to hear a lot about that. Teams have to be able to be truthful, and they have to have cover to experiment.

So here's my example I used to use, another movie. I should have set this up. Oh, well. Anybody ever see _Mr. Mom_? I used to use this. Michael Keaton went to my high school. And it's like, hey, 220, 221, whatever it takes, right? We don't have to be perfect. Now on electricity, it probably wouldn't work, but it's like, let's just get better, right? Whatever it takes to get better.

So current state. Mark Schwartz gave a great talk in 2014. It was the first DevOps Enterprise Summit that just blew me away. And if you haven't watched it, go back. It's on YouTube. The topic was how DevOps will save the federal government. Right? Now, who's not going to go see that talk, right?

And what Mark stressed in it was, whatever your current state is, you can't be too critical, right? It got you to where you are, right? You're probably a successful company, right? It's paying a lot of people's bills, right? There are reasons that you got there, right? People had good intentions when they designed current state, right? So no matter how absurd some of the processes you're executing are, they were done with good intention based on what was the situation at time. So we can't be too critical.

But we also have to be truthful, right? Mirco talks about this, right? It won't keep you there, right? Yes, we may be a Fortune 500 company today, but Mik showed a slide that showed what? 50% projected of the Fortune 500 companies won't be Fortune 500 companies in five to 10 years. And again, there's a reason behind the current state.

So it really got down to this, right? Don't call my baby ugly, right? Nobody likes their baby to be called ugly, right? So yes, we have to be open to it. But if you're talking to somebody who's had a vested interest in a current state, we have to do it in a way, right, that doesn't feel like they're calling their baby ugly.

But we also can't be defensive, right? We have to balance this being critical with also we can't be defensive because we have to be open to continuous improvement, right? Going back to the Shewhart-Deming cycle, whatever you call it, wherever you work, this is the way you're going to change the culture. You're going to go through a journey over time.

You have to be open to experimenting, right? So, we've heard a lot about that, but I really believe, and we saw a lot of the work that I did with the Nationwide folks who were up here, it's running the experiment, right? Limiting the risk of running that experiment to executives so that you can show, I think, one example that works, and then that becomes the example that actually works here, right? It's no longer Etsy, or it's no longer even Capital One. It's Jane and Kathy and John and that team on the fifth floor. Well, now they can do it. Well, that makes it real to people, right?

And that, I think, ties into the idea of quality circles and what Deming talked about. I mean, a lot of transformations I've seen are imposed, and Jon Smart did a great job talking about that yesterday. People are not going to feel bought into things that are imposed upon them. Deming talked about the people doing the work know best about how the work's done. Your teams know how to get better. If you actually give them a safe environment and let them talk about it, they will give you ideas that'll blow your minds on how they can get better, right? Jared was a great example of that, how I was working with at Nationwide. The things that the leaders would have never thought about.

So you can't impose this. The teams need to be able to suggest ideas and experiment, again, safely. You have to give them that safe zone where they can run experiments, they have some buy-in in that area with the business, with their leader, that they can actually run the experiment.

But then what the leaders need to do is take those results and apply systems thinking. And I think this is one of the things that people really do not understand. If I was talented enough to teach a class to executives, it would be on systems thinking or leaders in general, right? You have people that can do the work. You pay them to do the work. Once you get those results, then you need to figure out, what am I going to do with this, right? So they may have something great that worked for that team, right? Now, how do I operationalize that across the enterprise, right? Does it even make sense to do it? That's what the leaders need to do.

And I think you need to avoid that lure of... I hate when I hear low-hanging fruit, right? Some of those things are really red beads that are just disguised as low-hanging fruit. They're one-time results that really aren't sustainable. And if you haven't ever know of or seen the videos on the red bead experiment, again, I would encourage you to do that. I think a lot of the non-value-added work that we do is really some idea of a red bead experiment, right? And I put one of my favorite estimation up there, right? But how many things are we doing that when you actually look at the results, they have no impact, right? Bezos talks about measuring proxy metrics, but it's really like measuring activities, right? If we just do these activities, somehow we'll get better. Well, will we? Is estimating five times really making us better? We have to start thinking about that and getting those things exposed because they are the things in our environment that aren't leading to successful results.

And again, I really believe _Out of the Crisis_, which is probably written in the '70s or the '80s, is a classic read on lean and continuous improvement. So I would encourage you to read that.

So what are some of the patterns for success as you're trying to go through the ebbs and flows of the Dickens novel, right? Model lines and experiments, which is what Nationwide did. Start small. I was talking to someone who's leading a DevOps transformation this morning. There's a lot of stuff you could do. There's a lot of tools you could do, although it's usually not around the tools. Whatever it is, start small. Just get one or two areas who are enthusiastic, who have support, who you can provide that safe experience for, and let them start to do the experiments.

Don't fall in love with a process or technology. Fall in love with getting better. That is what's going to get you going. It's not a tool. It's not the shiny object. It's the mindset of continuous improvement and getting better.

And in order to make that transition to where you are to where you want to go, sometimes you can draw the picture of where you are, and sometimes you can draw the picture of where you want to go, right? So in the BMW's case, the car's on the showroom and the car's here and where we want it is back in the dealer shop. How you get there, though, may not be a straight line, right? So you have to do things like strangler patterns, right? If you want to get rid of a tool or you want to get rid of a process, you probably just aren't going to say, "On Monday, we're going to start doing this new thing." How do you strangle that out of your environment?

And also, I would call it building scaffolding, right? There were things that we did that I knew I really didn't want to do, and I wanted it to last only as long as it needed to. But it was the only way to build that temporary bridge to the next step. Now, one of the catches is that if you call it scaffolding, probably you're not going to get much help building scaffolding, right? So you have to be able to sell it more as a journey. But you also have to be willing to say... I mean, we would talk to people about the fact that we had done something and now they would say, "Well, wait a second. You're telling me in six months or nine months, we're going to do something different?" Yeah. "Well, then why would I want to do this in the first place?" Well, it's a step on the journey, right? It's a necessary part of where we have to go. So building that scaffolding is necessary because the gap between current state and future state is going to be so big and so overwhelming that unless you have that scaffolding and can adopt those strangler patterns, it's going to be very hard to get there.

And then I think maybe the most important thing is from having a centralized team of experts take credit for results is not going to change the culture. It's that team in the corner, it's the Katie, the Peggy, the Jared, the Fred, Ed team, right? They need to tell the stories. Nobody wanted to hear me talk. You guys are tired already, and I still have 10 minutes to go, right? Me saying something to a bunch of executives, it's like Carmen says that all the time, right? Here comes another Capital One video. They don't want to hear that. When the executives came and heard those stories, I never saw... I would just sit there and watch, and you could see their face. They could see the excitement of the team. That sold them. That sold them better than any PowerPoint deck or set of metrics. They could feel the enthusiasm. Sometimes I had to beg the teams to tell their stories, like, "Please, tell your story." Okay? That's what's going to change because when a team sees that, they want their story. Well, if they have a story, why can't I have my story? And then it starts to become infectious.

And again, you have to look at what you've already accomplished, right? At times, I know on that journey from current to future state, it can just seem like we've been doing this for six months, a year, a year and a half, two years. Why aren't we further up the mountain? But then you have to pause and reflect and say, "Well, look how far we've come." Right? So let's celebrate how far we've come, not let's focus on it seems like there's a mountain we still have to get to.

And then another thing is you have to be truthful, especially with the business, right? When we did these experiments, we showed them. Dominica DeGrandis, make work visible. This work showed up on their Kanban with all the other work they were doing, right? It was on four-week iterations instead of two, had the show and tells. It wasn't hidden. Now sure, you had to manage it. You had to have WIP limits. We didn't want to put critical business deliveries at risk, but the team was so engaged and so excited. And I'm not saying excited like they're working 50, 60, 80 hours a week. That's not what you want. But they were so excited and bought in, and there were no business deliverables that were missed during this period of time.

And again, systems thinking.

So if I look back on this, the biggest reward personally that I got was not any metric that we reduced the flow time from 40 days to 20 days, or we implemented Docker, or this team could deploy more frequently, or even getting promoted, even though I didn't get promoted. That wasn't the biggest reward. The biggest reward is when you could look in those people's eyes before, right, and you saw despair, and you saw hope. When you see people start to go from cynics to being hopeful, then you know that you got something good going, right? Then you know that you're on the right path because now those people have changed their mindset. And if you can get people who are maybe the biggest cynics to become some of the biggest storytellers, well, then you can relax a little bit and let them go out and tell their stories because now you know you're on the right path.

So if you look at Dickens' hero's journey, right, what did he go through? His motives changed at one point, right? He was not a good guy at the beginning of the novel, and he became a very heroic figure, right? He faced the guillotine. Well, okay. Sometimes there are things that feel like the guillotine, but he faced the guillotine, and selflessness became his key leader characteristic as he was going through this journey.

And I used to say this a lot, right? Patience and perseverance. Right? You're going to have to be patient. You're going to have to persevere. You have to count those little victories to just keep going and keep going and making those incremental improvements.

You need a level of courage. Gene talks about the courage. I've heard talks about some of the great... I'm going to ask to make a question. Sorry. I forget her name. Target, the original--Heather Mickman. Heather Mickman. Heather Mickman, I have so much admiration for her. She didn't face the guillotine, but man, she put it out on the line. She had operations people, executives coming up to her and saying, "I hope you fail. We hope you fail." Okay? And she persevered with her team. Tremendous courage to make these transformations. But again, I wish you a better result than the guillotine, right? That's not what we want.

So coming back to the BMW story, right? But she got promoted. Yes, she did get promoted. I should let them make... Heather did get promoted, and she did go on. That's right, that's the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. She did get promoted. Her courage paid off. It paid off both for the company, and it paid off for her. But there was tremendous courage that was displayed there.

Courtney Kissler's another one who's displayed tremendous courage, because she's gone into situations where her message maybe wasn't so well-received, and now you see the amazing things she's doing at Nike. So, people like that are role models to me because the things that Topo's done, because they show how this can be done at large organizations if you have that patience, perseverance, and courage.

So getting back to the BMW, I think this is the next slide. I don't have my--and I forgot what I put. So here we are last night. We're at the freight elevator, and what are we going to do? And Laurel's here. She was doing all our coordination. I saw there was a roadside assistance. We open up the gull wing door, there's a roadside assistance. Say, "Well, maybe we should just call that 800 number." I don't know. But we took it in stride. People weren't panicking. People weren't worried about liability, except maybe the hotel folks. Laurel was keeping it all together, Neelan, everybody. Rene's there having a good time. And the kicker, Rene goes over, he goes, "That elevator's German." So I don't know what to say, Rene. I mean, yeah, German car, German elevator. Who knows where that chain was made, though? I don't know.

So let the journey begin. Again, start small, empower teams, experiment, show and tell with executives, celebrate success. Your teams are able to do this. You can do this. Your teams want to do this. Celebrate those successes and then continue to scale and sustain it up the mountain.

I need lots of help, as you can tell, but share your experiences. I'm sure you have. That's what makes this conference great. I was telling Gene this, I saw him for a millisecond because it's amazing all he does in this week, how much this has benefited me, other people, having this network. Because when you're doing this, it can be lonely. You may be one or two people at your company trying to do this. You may think you're that lonely voice in the wilderness. And I think maybe Jeff Gallimore said that. This is a place to re-energize. Make your contacts here, but don't just take that business card and never call that person again. Talk. Talk during the year. Share stories. Encourage each other. Without this community, really, there are days I don't know that I could've gotten through because it gets hard. But this community is just such a blessing. So that's what I would encourage you all to do.

So thank you very much.