Melissa Rummel

All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to go ahead and get started here. Thank you all for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk a little bit about the USPTO, the Patent and Trademark Office, digital transformation and our virtual dojo.

Just a quick introduction: my name is Melissa Rummel. I am the Transformation Delivery Director. I also have Susan Rody in the crowd here. That's my partner in crime for our dojo.

The USPTO is the Patent and Trademark Office. We are a federal agency responsible for issuing patents and registering trademarks for the United States, and also any of the legalese that comes with that.

Here I have noted some of our guiding principles. These are guiding principles on our team and also that we try to instill throughout the culture of the Patent and Trademark Office. I'll just highlight the top one. We did come and start from a place as an Agile Center of Excellence that was very heavily compliance oriented, so a lot of rules and regulations and policy procedures. Really, we try to, as Jason was saying this morning, flip that to really help the culture, help the organization grow in our transformation.

The plan for today: I'm going to share a little bit about our transformation overall, provide some context to what we're going through, immerse you, so a little bit of audience participation - hopefully you're all up for that this morning - and run through a dojo with you, and then close with some lessons learned.

Our outcomes for today in this presentation: first, really make a distinction between the advantages of a dojo and traditional training; participate, so I would like to have some audience engagement and run a little bit of a dojo with you all; appreciate some of the complexities of standing up a dojo from scratch and then evolving that as the organization matures; and then finally, hopefully you'll leave with some thoughts of your own on how you might be able to apply some of this to your own transformation and your own organization.

First, to level set: what is a dojo? A dojo is a hall or a place for immersion. It's often associated with karate, where people come in and learn by doing and learn by practicing new skills. We have seen this also being applied more recently to software product transformations. You all saw Target today present. Target is most famous for their dojo and product dojo. It literally means place of the way in Japanese.

I will also make a note: somewhere in the slides I do have some acronyms, and NWoW stands for New Ways of Working, which is a common term or lingo at the USPTO.

Again, just to talk a little bit about some of the advantages of a dojo versus classic training. Unfortunately, every once in a while dojo does get lumped into training, but it's not. There are some very distinct differences and advantages to a dojo.

First, you're applying new concepts to your own work. Again, learning by doing. This really helps with the retention of those new skills, versus in classic training you really have the concept and then have to figure out how to apply that concept on your own and your own time, if possible.

In a dojo, we really try to meet the teams where they are. We have a wide variety of skill sets and levels of maturation across our product teams, and it's really important that we meet them where they are in order to best support them in their own journey or challenge. Traditional training is a lot more structured, where the content is pretty canned or baked, so it's not very adaptive to the team needs.

It's a safe place to learn new skills. Again, we're trying to meet the teams where they are and help them with their own unique challenge. With that, we have to make sure that it's a safe space for them to be transparent about that challenge and feel that they can communicate that so that we're able to pull in the right people to help.

It's a shared team experience. With a dojo, the intent is that the team comes in together as a team, so there's team building and collaboration that happens as they're all going through that shared experience. With training, it's open to anyone, so individuals across multiple teams come in, and you don't really get that team building experience with traditional training.

Lastly, during the dojo, we do a retrospective at the end of each iteration. We're constantly having those frequent feedback loops to continue to adjust and adapt our dojo to meet the team.

I'm going to go through just a couple of slides here to tell your journey. This is our burning platform slide. If some of you have read Kotter before, one of the key successes in a change effort is a sense of urgency or burning platform. For us, in 2018, we had a critical system go down. The Patent and Trademark Office is a fee-funded organization, and so when that system went down we lost millions in revenue. That really spurred the agency at the highest level to undergo a transformation.

Again, just to set some of the landscape for the Patent and Trademark Office and our challenge: this sounds similar to some of the presentations this morning. We really wanted to modernize, stabilize, and change the way we were working in order to improve product quality, accelerate our value delivery, and reduce costs.

We have over 400 systems. We used to have a very lengthy and arduous approval stage-gate process with people approving deployments that weren't necessarily closest to the work. Teams weren't deploying frequently, so six-plus months for teams to deploy, and then we had thousands of staff spread across thousands of projects.

What did we do? We made a transformation to shift from projects to products. This also included an Agile and DevSecOps culture change and transformation. We have aligned around four product lines and 32 products. We have 32 lead product owners that come from the business, and they're the ones driving our backlogs and the prioritization. We have been going about with DevSecOps pipelines and trying to introduce automation and mature our automation. As I said on the last slide, we had hundreds of projects. We have shifted to product teams. We now fund teams instead of funding work.

Here's just a snapshot. We have aligned around value streams. One note that I will make here is that this is an enterprise-wide transformation, not just for our software development teams, but also our shared services or supporting teams. There at the bottom, the Enterprise Infrastructure product line is also part of our transformation, which I think is key to some of our successes.

Just a bit of a timeline for our journey thus far: we did start our project-to-product transformation back in May of 2019. We started and stood up our dojo in July of 2020. We evolved and matured our dojo in July of 2021. We continue to help mature the organization in all focused transformation areas.

This is where we're going to ask for a little audience participation. Welcome to the dojo.

First, I will say that one of the challenges I faced was that I was asked back in 2019 to move over a thousand people, over a hundred teams, into a product model in less than a year. I knew that with the handful of Agile coaches that I had, we wouldn't be able to support that type of transformation at the speed that the agency was asking me to go. Our response was to stand up a dojo and be able to use the dojo to accelerate our transformation.

Real quick, just setting some context here for our dojo. These are our internal dojo processes. We have four different stages. I'm going to focus quickly for the next couple of slides on phase one, which is really where we are focused on the fundamental transition from projects to products.

Our nomination phase was pretty standard. The content, the goal was the same for everyone: projects to products. I worked with our product leadership to schedule in those teams.

Preparation, when we first started, we didn't really have teams. Some of the preparation here was getting people actually identified on teams, which sounds easy, but it was not. We also had some coaching preparation that needed to be done there.

For immersion, again in the first phase, this was a standard six weeks. Then transition, reach-back coaching support: we got feedback from the team and really tailored this to what they needed. It lasted anywhere from a couple of weeks to 12 weeks.

Here's where I'm going to ask for a little bit of audience participation. We're now welcoming you into our dojo, inviting you in. I'm going to go through the nomination stage with you. Can I get a show of hands? What is your organizational challenge? Who is starting a transformation?

All right. Yeah, don't be shy. Who is expanding an existing transformation? All right, a lot of those. That's great. How about maturing an enterprise transformation? Woohoo. Great, awesome.

One more question. How many teams do you expect in your dojo in the next year? Less than 10? Okay. Less than 100? Okay. More than 100? Awesome.

Based on those answers that you just gave, think about how you might stand up a dojo and think through some of these next slides.

We're going to go into preparation. During preparation, we were very focused on what content we wanted to deliver. Again, we had a six-week time box, and so we focused on some of those key fundamental areas: project to product, waterfall to Agile, and manual change to DevSecOps. If you're starting or expanding your transformation, this is something that you might want to think about doing, getting really focused on what content you'll deliver in each week and how that's structured.

I'm going to head into immersion. Welcome to our dojo. We are thrilled you are here.

When you come into immersion, the teams are coming into the dojo with any of the technical expertise that they need. In phase one, this was where our Agile coaches, so my team, supported the product teams and tried to make that pivot from projects to products. Again, they were learning how to do their work in a new way with the help of the coaches.

Here's an example of how we laid out each week. You can see here we took what we put together in preparation and laid it out week by week. In the first three weeks we brought in the product leadership team. This is the product owner from the business, our technical lead, and the scrum master. This is really about them understanding servant leadership, the fundamentals, and getting them ready for their teams. The last three weeks was when we brought the team in to, again, learn by doing.

Week by week, here is an example of how we structured our dojo. Monday, we did a show and tell, a retrospective, and then planning for the upcoming week. Tuesdays and Thursdays were when we did our breakout sessions and workshops, so content sharing and then allowing the team to do their work in the new way. Wednesday was basically reach-back support or any additional breakout sessions as needed. Friday, one of our lessons learned after I think the first dojo offering we gave is that this Uber Scrum meeting was really helpful. We again brought in some of the leadership, and they really helped conquer and tackle any obstacles or challenges that the teams were facing in the dojo, removing blockers.

That's our dojo. We're going to go into our closing ceremony. I will say with the closing ceremony, it is a formal ceremony. We wanted to make sure that we did timebox our dojo so that the dojos don't just keep running. However many weeks that we had, we had a formal ceremony to get feedback. We did give a survey. In our survey, we asked some of these critical questions: did you learn something new? Open-ended response of what went well, what didn't go well, and what can we improve? Then a net promoter score: would you recommend this experience to others? We also made sure to ask if they did need any additional support after they left the dojo.

From phase one, we did end up in a year working with over 1,100 people across the organization, helping over 120 product teams. We had a 49% knowledge increase on average and a positive net promoter score.

Phase two: after we had worked with all of those teams, we realized that in order to make the dojo sustainable, we needed to evolve not only in our processes but in our content. Because we did have some of those successes, we were seeing more requests and more unique challenges with the teams at all different levels. Teams had particular different challenges. We say all teams are snowflakes, so everybody's a little bit different. We were also seeing some more executive challenges.

We did evolve and mature our dojo. We created new content to deliver. We got feedback from across the organization to help us inform what content might be needed to help teams continue their project-to-product transformation.

One of the key differences in phase two: more content, different kinds of services that we're providing, and also trying to build content that we can reuse easily. We have content on the shelf that we can deliver over and over again, depending on the team. I will also say that while we do have content on the shelf to pull off, we make sure that we adapt to the team's needs. For quarterly planning, we might work with one product team that needs a specific outcome of the offering, and another product team might need something a little bit different. Sometimes we can use these as Lego blocks and piece things together.

Another key difference is that in phase one the technical experts were Agile coaches. In phase two, we started to expand and collaborate across the organization with other partners. For Routine Ops for product teams, we collaborated with our infrastructure and operations teams to help with a very specific challenge that one of our product teams faced.

As we evolved, our internal processes also changed quite a bit. Again, we have the four stages. In phase two, our nomination stage changed quite a bit. In phase one, it was pretty standard, not too much to do. In phase two, we do have a lot of people nominating teams. Once they nominate teams, we take time to make sure that we have identified the challenge of the team and get really clear on the outcomes that they want to tackle.

Preparation also changed quite a bit. Because we were partnering with a lot of other shared services across the organization, we also have to make sure that our partners understand the intent of the dojo: learning by doing. They also need to be aligned around the challenge and outcome that the team wants to tackle. With working with partners and a broader group, we also have to make sure that we tackle any prep steps that need to be done that are more admin related.

Immersion is also quite different. In phase one, it was a structured six weeks, which is quite easy to schedule out. In phase two, all of the different offerings have different timings to them. Our offerings go from anywhere from a one-week offering all the way to a six-week offering, and so that does make some of our internal processes a bit more difficult in terms of understanding capacity and scheduling.

Transition does stay relatively the same in phase two, and being very crisp on our closing ceremony to end the dojo is more important in phase two.

Some lessons learned from phase one and two. The first one: the dojo must be a safe, non-judgmental place. As some of our challenges become more unique and specific, it's really important that the teams feel comfortable to tell us what those challenges are and where they are in their journey. That allows us to best pull in the right people across the agency to help, but it has to be a safe space in order to get that collaboration.

The next three are a bit more internal focused. The dojo processes are not insignificant. Shifting from phase one to phase two did take some time to work out, and it also took time for the coaches to understand that transition.

Dojo coaches also, I feel, have a different skill set needed. I do have coaches on the team that still provide one-on-one coaching support. Dojo coaches have a bit more collaboration and partnering and also shorter time boxes with the team. The skill sets and understanding there are a bit different.

As coaches, we must make sure that we're focused on what the team has identified as their challenge and not trying to solve something that they don't really want to solve. I could say the team really should do quarterly planning. They might not think that's their number one priority, and we have to make sure that we're helping them and meeting them where they are.

Finally, we have had some success. The dojo has kind of taken off throughout the agency, and you can see it in some of the language and our metrics. Instead of me having to go out and sell our dojo, we have been getting interest in people coming to us for help, which has been a great pivot.

I think this is my last slide, and I'm right on time. What's beyond the next phase of the USPTO dojo? We want to continue to evolve. One of my goals is to move into phase three. Instead of having content just off the shelf that we pull, it is tackling unique challenges across the organization, more like the Target dojo.

We also want to get really focused on our overall transformation maturity, really identifying areas to help lift the whole organization up. Lastly, it is the USPTO dojo, not the CIO dojo. We want the entire agency to partner with us to help again tackle next-generation problems.

That wraps me up. Thank you very much. And there we go.