Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Thank you, Andrew and Caitlin.

So last year at this conference, one of my favorite talks was from Pieter Jordaan, Group CTO of TUI Group, the world's largest integrated travel company. Before the global pandemic, it was generating nearly 20 billion euros in revenue annually. Sir Winston Churchill is credited for saying, "Never waste a good crisis." And there are few industries that have experienced an existential crisis due to the global pandemic more than the travel and hospitality industries.

The TUI Group used the pandemic, when the entire industry was grinding to a halt, to unify and re-platform to the cloud the majority of their critical business applications. It is one of the most astounding technology talks I've ever seen. Last year, I had suggested that this case study would be studied for years to come.

I was so grateful that Pieter was willing to come back and give us an update on how they fared, whether the big bets they made paid off, and the lessons they've learned. Here's Pieter.

Pieter Jordaan

Thanks, Gene, for that great introduction, and I'm really thrilled to be back here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit to share our story. Like we shared last year, our transformation journey really started before COVID. We followed the traditional path of trying to start to migrate small workloads to the cloud and the traditional agile journey in local organizations, then moving to global.

As we started to recognize the need for us to start to focus on a project-based organization, COVID hit, and that's when all our revenue ground to a halt. We thought maybe three months, six months, opportunity for us to refocus. But that, of course, we all know, turned into a two-year, two-and-a-half-year opportunity. To be honest, I think that window for me was the opportunity for us to really accelerate on the global transformation.

I explained how we made that decision to use the window to consolidate the organization, to move to a product-based organization away from projects, to move to one platform, start the journey of building a single digital platform for all our holiday products, and also digitalizing our business processes. I'll talk a little bit later about what that success looked like in our in-destination experience.

Just to recap, our transformation goals are very much the same as everyone else's. Nothing special about our transformation goals. But I think what happened was our goals and the opportunity and COVID collided.

We had aspirations for a global product organization powered by a single digital platform. As I talk to the industry, most people have that goal. Most businesses, especially big enterprises, have dispersed, federated IT that needs to be consolidated and business capabilities that they want to exist once, and wanted to go to the cloud and DevOps, and want to understand flow of capabilities and value for the customers.

Very much similar, but just to bring it a little bit alive what we set ourselves to achieve, what were the milestones we wanted to achieve in COVID, and what did we achieve? It wasn't a small thing. Like I said in the previous slide, we are 15 countries. We're consolidating all of those into a single platform, single business, product-based organization.

Practically what I mean: we rewrote our whole platform for our aviation industry. We have 165 airplanes in all sorts of different countries. We took one of our most critical businesses, which is our aviation business in the Western region, and we completely rewrote their inventory platform, the routing of the planes, the pricing of the seats, the sales platform, how you select your seating, how you manage your seating, how you get your ticket, how fulfillment happens, and then, of course, how you operate your planes and how you tell your crew which airplane they need to be on. That whole platform is what we rebuilt in record time during COVID.

At the same time, we were also working on our next platform, which is our package platform. We are already on the second flight season on our flight platform. In other words, we are already beyond embedding it. We launched the second season, and now package is about to go live, which means your accommodation and flight combined.

One thing I didn't talk about a lot last time was the digitalization processes: our in-destination, our travel experiences. In other words, how you get real-time updates for your airplane and what bus you need to get on, and what happens when you're in resort, and all the complicated stuff that needs to happen when you start to have to comply to COVID rules.

All of that was also digitalized, and I think that was probably one of our biggest achievements because we had a lot of temporary staff and permanent staff in destination services making sure that when people land, they'll be greeted by a TUI person and being shown where the buses are. Now that whole process is digitalized and the whole experience is so much smoother.

All of us have probably tried to travel during COVID, and you know how difficult that is. Information is very powerful for our customers, and just being able to push information: flight cancellation, flight delays, baggage updates, all of those things happening now real time. That is a large part of your experience of your holiday, and that's really where things make or break your experience. That was also completely digitalized in this live. Later on, I'll share a little bit of people's experiences with a new digital travel experience.

I shared about the success factors, the patterns we use. Just to retouch on that leadership: you have to change to deep technical leadership, that cloud is oxygen. The shift from product and cloud, really that product enables agile and cloud enables DevOps. We talked about the change in your view of risk, and I think that is really important.

Managing risk in your BAU business, you probably manage risk all the time. What COVID helped us do is look at risk from a different perspective. Later on, I'll share a little bit about how that panned out. During COVID, of course, when you're not flying, when you don't send people on airplanes, it's easy to say, "Okay, I'm going to rebuild my aviation platform." When you start to fly and you still need to work on your aviation platform, that's a different story.

Now, of course, business came back, customers are flying, we're on the new platform, and that conflict between revenue that we need to recapture after COVID and driving for a better platform is really important. That's where flow comes in. This is where you really need to understand and mature in your product organization. I think that took us a good two years to manage ourselves into a place where we understood our risk and understood our flow.

But we tried to maintain that day-one mentality. I'll talk about that a little bit. Visibility, flow, and business value ended up being probably one of the most critical things for our business to make decisions. As we started to fly again, the question was: Do I focus on X? Do I focus on Y? What's going to impact my customer experience the most? What is going to bring the best revenue? Of course, as you launch a new platform, not everything is there on day one. That business value decision-making and having people and leaders that understood how to make those decisions was really one of our accelerators.

Some of our rules I talked about, I won't go over it again, but I think we definitely stuck to these rules that we set ourselves, and it stood us in good stead, especially breaking up things into smaller pieces.

I talked about some of this in the textbook rules that we broke, that we didn't really start small. We didn't have that luxury to start small. We had to go big. We had to do that in that one-year or two-year window that we perceived was in front of us. We couldn't do a lift and shift. We couldn't do small proof of concepts. We had to go after the beast, and we built that whole platform, the whole flight platform, the whole package platform, rebuilt that and made it live and got people to fly. If anyone's been on holiday in the last year, you flew on the new TUI platform.

Gene asked me, "Are you about to get fired or are you a hero?" I think I titled this Crash and Burn or Zero to Hero.

I like studying extreme sports athletes' mental capacity and how they view risk, because really I think in many cases what we're trying to do is change the way we view risk or manage risk. That's a dichotomy, really, in a sense. For those of you who know Alex Honnold, there's a movie about him on Netflix called Free Solo. He was one of the first people that climbed El Capitan's sheer rock face of 884 meters, and free solo means without ropes, which means if he falls, he will die. It's definitely not an easy climb. In the past, it took people three days to climb it, and he is doing it in two hours and a bit.

What he said was, in this discipline of free solo, he says, "If you fall and die, you're branded an idiot." People say, "Why do you take the risk?" But if you succeed, you're given a hero's welcome. But in reality, you are the same person.

What that means is that our perception of risk, many times we view it from our view of what success is. But really what it is about is the journey. What these athletes who are breaking these records and doing these disciplines have is just a different view of what success and risk is. In their pursuit of maybe an initial goal, what they are doing is setting a new bar, a new standard of what is possible.

The second person here, his name is Nims Purja. He's a prime example. He received an MBE. During COVID, actually just before COVID, he climbed the 14 highest peaks in the Himalayas. When you set out on this project, people say, "Don't want to have anything to do with you. You're crazy. You're going to die." Because the previous record holder took 14 years to climb one of these peaks, and you're talking about Everest and Lhotse and Annapurna. Annapurna, 50% of the people that attempt this mountain die. It's such a far-out goal that he set that no one wanted to be associated with him. No one even wanted to give him money, with the risk that this may result in a failure.

Nevertheless, what he ended up doing was he broke that record not with a few years; he broke it with six months and six days. He set six new world records in that space of six months. Just to give some context, most people take three months to climb Everest. You set a base camp, you climb a little bit to the top and you spend time there, and then you acclimatize, and then you climb a little higher, and you acclimatize. But he just didn't have that luxury. He climbed from the bottom all the way to the top in one day, came down, didn't sleep, and then climbed two other mountains in the space of 48 hours. Where most people spend three months to climb one mountain, he spent 48 hours climbing three.

Similar when you look at some of the achievements of Marc-Andre. You can view that in Alpinist movie. These guys didn't set a new milestone. What they are doing is they're breaking barriers, and they're setting a new mindset that makes it possible for the next person to achieve something different.

I think the big takeaway when you try to evaluate did you crash and did you burn, I think it's not in that you achieve that single milestone of making your flight platform live or digitalize your destination. It is that your journey set new barriers, made new mindset. I think TUI definitely, if I look back, our journey is the determining factor. The reality for us now is the new normal for us to work globally, remotely, in six-week increments, and deliver value in a business-driven organization, in a product-driven organization, tracking flow metrics. Two and a half years ago, it was a PowerPoint idea, and now it is reality.

The view of risk really depends on the point from where you look at it. If you ask Alex, "Why are you taking the risk? Why are you climbing this mountain?" I'm perfectly safe where I'm at. There are people in your enterprise that look at the world that way and say, "My system is perfectly fine. Why do I need to change?" But then there's the other part, the leaders that look at the opportunity and the possibility and the barrier that needs to be overcome, the mental mindset that needs to be changed, and have to pursue the higher goals. That journey is setting new mindsets, and it's also creating new opportunities and possibilities and inspiration for other people. I hope that our story, what we shared last year and shared today, is a little bit of inspiration for you.

Of course, in our business, you have people that say, "The system isn't what it used to be." But you also have people that say, "We're definitely not where we used to be as an organization."

Coming to the lessons we learned on our journey, it's definitely a journey where we made a big start during COVID. My first comment is really that everything is risky. Where you have an organization that views risk and manages risk, this is the most important thing to realize: doing nothing is the riskiest approach. Evaluating risk sometimes is a way for us to appease ourselves that we're doing something.

I talked about in my last talk that really the brave thing is to make a decision fast and start moving. I think that's the second point: not to be afraid to think big. Set big visions, break it down to small goals. Our vision is so big it doesn't fit into a COVID window, and it's not supposed to. But it is making that critical-mass flywheel change in the organization that enables us to now work in a new normal and to continue to transform our business and platforms and organization, and digitalize and build on the successes.

We view it like this. I keep telling the architects and the technical people, "Your design is wrong. How can you make it less wrong?" A different way to view it is saying, "Okay, what's the perfect design in order for me to move forward?" I think there's two very different views of the world. The one is realizing that you will make mistakes, and you probably are already making mistakes. But the worst mistake is to stay where you are.

We are trying to make the one-way-door decisions early, try to avoid one-way-door decisions. Why? Because we know we're wrong and we probably need to change stuff. Did we change stuff over time? Yes, of course we did. Do we need to make changes in the future? Yes. But that's the opportunity. I think that's the evolution of a real digital transformation.

I want to focus maybe on the fourth point where people say, "What is the magic? What is it exactly that is it? Cloud? Is it DevOps? What is it that really transformed your company?" I would say that the real magic is in small, motivated, focused teams. It really hit home for me when, after a whole year of very hard work and dedication, teams started to ship the product.

There is so much passion about their product in the different individual services. The collaboration, these teams were forced into a remote-working-first situation. All offices were closed. They had to figure out how to collaborate, had to figure out how to share, had to figure out how much time is spent on stand-ups versus teamwork. Really hard dynamics had to be figured out.

The dedication came to me in a very personal, emotional way when we have some fair amount of employees in Ukraine working on some of our platform development. We, as TUI, try to help as much as possible. Of course, we extended opportunity for them to take care of whatever personal situations they need to do. We were planning for downtime capacity. But despite the leverage we gave these guys to say, "Please take care of your personal situation," they keep showing up.

Even though they are in cities that are being bombed, these guys will log in and they will come to stand-ups. Not because they feel pressure to do it, but because they have such dedication and passion and camaraderie. This is the real magic. The people that find a love for their product, find a place to really hook onto that vision that you've set. That's what we need to foster in our organizations. That's the real treasure. The money isn't the real scarce commodity. This is the scarce commodity: the people and the skilled, organized, small, focused teams that really make things happen and bring the magic to the table.

This is a personal story from our organization. I'm sure a lot of other organizations experience similar things. But this is, for me, what makes a transformation journey possible, and this is such a key thing that we should always remember, to keep our eyes on the people that's helping us transform.

This is one testimony that came over my desk yesterday. It actually came from someone working for Google, and that's why I think, as passionate as I am about the platform, it meant something to me because it talks about the real customer experience. You're rebuilding a reservation system or an inventory system for an airplane or a crew management system. It's hard to see it, but a big part of our transformation was about making the experience for the customer better.

This guy just said, "I just want to let you know that true to my word, I used TUI to book my Easter family vacation in the Canary Islands. It's a beautiful place, but I was seriously impressed with the real-time travel updates we got during the whole journey through the TUI app and portal, right from the start at home to landing at the airport, baggage pickup, instructions to exit, bus numbers, et cetera. That during the return as well. As a technology professional, I really enjoyed it because I could clearly see how this good, smart use of technology was making life easier, especially with kids around. Not having to look for info is a boon. Sincerely, kudos to the whole team."

I want to also extend this to the team that worked so hard, that worked during COVID, that worked with limited staff, that worked under tremendous pressure. We did put a lot of pressure on our staff, and it takes a toll. But the fruit of our labors enabled us to be in a position after COVID where we could have a vision and operate in a way that is completely different than where we were as a business pre-COVID.

I want to really encourage everyone that the opportunities for the future are really bright if we can just envisage it and we can start to learn to see risk in a different way.

That's why I want to use this quote from Nims. When he started, everyone said he's crazy. But he ended up mountain after mountain after mountain, just knocking off his 14 goals in six months. He ended up doing what other people took 14 years to do. He started off with no money. He literally remortgaged his home, and that barely got him up the first mountain. He says everything in life is possible armed only with determined approach and a positive mindset. Of course, everything else follows, but what he's trying to say is the determined approach and positive mindset is the start. When we have that, our view of the world, our view of risk, climbing a mountain now seems to be an opportunity rather than something that we would never try to attempt because we're an idiot.

Where are we today? We, of course, are still building. Our package platform is going into user testing. We have our new accommodation, dynamic accommodation platform rolling out. I'm really excited about what the team has achieved. We are still hiring DevOps, cloud, especially SecOps engineers. I would be interested, again like I extended last time, to talk to other enterprise leaders who are on the same journey and learn from each other.

A large part of your success really depends on understanding that many of the problems we're solving, we're not alone. We're not the first people to solve it. I'm the first one to give credit to other people because really, I think my skill is to inspire and know that someone else has probably solved this problem. What hasn't happened is applying that solution to your current organization.

I want to thank Mick and everyone else for this opportunity, and I'm very open for questions. You can contact me on LinkedIn or my company email address as well. If you've got any questions, I'm always happy to try and help and maybe guide you through some of the mountains that we had to climb by ourselves. Thank you very much for this opportunity.