Melissa Rummel

All right, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. We're excited to share a little bit about the US Patent and Trademark transformation and how we've been leveraging our virtual Dojo to tackle big transformation challenges.

So quickly, we're going to do some introductions for today and then go over the plan. The US Patent and Trademark Office, we issue patents and register trademarks, and all of the legalese that goes along with that. We protect our intellectual property.

My name is Melissa Rummel, and I am the Transformation Delivery Division Director. I'm here with my colleague today, Susan Rohde, who is our principal consultant for our transformation.

So today we're going to share first about the USPTO transformation as a whole. Secondly, we're going to talk about the Transformation Delivery Division challenge and our response, then talk about the Dojo in particular and our evolution of how we've grown and adapted the Dojo to take on more complex challenges, and then the lessons we've learned along the way.

We hope you take away a few key messages from this presentation. First, the difference between Dojo immersive learning and traditional instructor-led training, and why we've chosen the Dojo for our approach. How we can use the Dojo process in really helping with complex challenges and transformations throughout the USPTO. And then we hope that you're able to take a little bit away from this today on how you might apply these concepts in your own organization to help with your own transformation or unique challenges.

A little bit about us and our guiding principles, and hopefully these themes will resonate throughout our presentation today. First, enablement over compliance. Enablement really means helping the teams, meeting the teams where they are to help them mature over time.

A growth mindset over a fixed mindset. So continuous learning, continuously adapting and changing.

Outcomes: making sure that we're always focused on the highest-value items.

Outcomes: breaking down silos and making sure that we're collaborating. So really pulling people together across the organization to collaborate in the Dojo to tackle these big transformation challenges.

And then my personal favorite: progress over perfection.

Now we're going to talk about USPTO challenge and response.

So with any change effort, it usually starts with a burning platform or a sense of urgency. For us, our transformation started when we had a critical system outage. The USPTO is a user fee-funded agency, and so this impacted our ability to collect fees, which had a big impact across the organization.

We were challenged with improving our product quality, accelerating value delivery, and reducing costs. Better, cheaper, faster. Stabilizing our IT systems and modernizing our IT systems.

A little bit about the lay of the land. We had over 400 IT systems. We had a very lengthy manual SDLC stage-gate process, which led to long deployment lifecycles. We had many, many projects with thousands of specialized staff spread across all of those projects.

So what did we do? We streamlined around a product environment, a product organization, which promotes Agile and DevSecOps, and we've aligned around product teams.

So what we look like today: we have four product lines, to include shared services, with 32 products. We've pulled the business in to make sure that we're delivering the right thing, focused on value and outcomes. We've also tried to increase our deployment frequency with over a hundred DevSecOps pipelines and increased automation. We have over 200 product teams that have the skills on the team to manage those products end to end.

Just a quick slide on our overall timeline. We did begin our transformation back in 2019. The key takeaway here is that we have been on the journey for a while. Some might say we're still new, and we continue to evolve, try new things, and lead the transformation across the USPTO.

Pivoting now to our Transformation Delivery Division challenge and how we responded. Our challenge is really in leading many transformations all at the same time. So you can see here we've really pulled out the Agile, DevSecOps, product, and cloud transformations and are getting ready to start our automated governance transformation.

So as we lead a lot of different transformations across the organization, it's really important to understand that transformation is all about skill acquisition. And we really have to learn, unlearn the old ways of doing things or the old things to give us space to learn the new things.

And with all of these various transformations going on at once, it's really important that we lead with quality and make sure that we're helping our teams retain the new information and skills that they're learning.

And with that, we're going to talk about how we are doing that and our response. Take it away, Susan.

Susan Rohde

Thank you, Melissa. Appreciate that.

So we're going to start just taking a second and talking about what is a Dojo. And a Dojo is really a term that has been borrowed from the martial arts, and it's meant to be a place where you can come and learn new skills. It's also a term that has been applied to a number of organizations that are using this approach to sort of turbocharge their transformations. And that is exactly what USPTO is doing.

Regardless of the many phases the Dojo's gone through, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, there are five guiding principles that we have really focused on.

It's imperative that the Dojo be viewed as a safe, non-judgmental place to learn new skills. As teams come in, they've got to feel safe in that place.

Teams really produce value. And so if teams can come in and have a shared team experience learning new skills in the Dojo, that's really powerful.

Next, you have to meet them where they are. And so teams will come in with challenges. They may or may not be the challenges that Melissa or I think they should take on, but we focus on meeting these teams exactly where they are and moving them as far forward as we and they think they can get in a fixed period of time.

Applying new concepts to their own work. This is the immersive part of the Dojo. So when teams come into the Dojo, they bring their challenge, we teach them new skills, and we apply those new skills to their work, their challenges.

Finally, we run the Dojo on a one-week iteration cycle. And every single week we have a focus. And every single week we retrospect and we say, "Are we on track? Are we going to hit the outcomes that this team is looking to hit while they're spending their time in the Dojo?"

So let's talk a little bit about immersion. Immersion is really fundamental. It's kind of the secret sauce of the Dojo, at least is how I think about it, because the Dojo is about learning by doing.

This learning pyramid is sort of interesting, and it shows the retention rates for different delivery models. So for a lecture delivery model, we shouldn't take this personally, 5% knowledge retention. For demonstration, it's 30%. For learn by doing, it's 75%. And as Melissa said, the key to transformation is learning new skills, unlearning skills. We have these folks for a very short period of time. It's really necessary that we immerse them and try to make sure that those retention rates are as high as they can be.

This slide really talks about the transformation journey of our Dojo. And so I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this. But where I'm going to start is on the bottom, where you see nomination, preparation, immersion, transition.

So we've gone through many phases in the Dojo, and it doesn't matter which phase we are in, we use the same process.

Nomination: we engage with whoever wants to come into the Dojo. We find out what are their challenges, what are their identified outcomes, so that we are clear on why they are coming into the Dojo. If they decide to go ahead, totally their choice, then we migrate into a preparation stage.

And preparation is where we really just get everything organized so that when they arrive at the Dojo, we are prepared. We hit the ground running.

Then we are in immersion. Immersion can be a couple of days to a couple of months. It varies based on the challenge the team is bringing in. And during immersion, it's really where, as I mentioned before, we have a fixed focus every week. We retro every week. We make adjustments every week.

At the end of immersion, we close out the Dojo with something we call the closing ceremony, and then the teams are transitioned back into their own team's business as usual. They take their skills with them and hopefully just are off to the races.

So let me talk a little bit about the phases, some of the phases on this chart. We started the Dojo in 2020 with a very quick pilot to prove out the concept. It seemed to work fine, so then we moved into phase one.

And in phase one, the challenge we had was we needed to move almost 200 teams through the Dojo, introduce them to the new ways of working, in about a year. So when we finished the new ways of working, then we really launched a couple of phases, phase two and three, which are the focus topics and the custom topics we're going to talk about a little bit on the next slide.

And then phase four started in late 2022. Phase five, just a sneak peek: we are just getting ready to start phase five. And with phase five, what we are hoping to do is apply some of the immersive learning approaches that we've had such success with in the Dojo to a more structured kind of course setting that we can then scale to a larger number of participants.

So here's a lot more detail about our phases two, three, and four.

Phase two is really that focused topic. So these are a set of kind of things we can pull off the shelf. Teams come in, they have a specific challenge, we pull something off the shelf that we think is a good start, and then we customize it to meet their outcomes, their desired outcomes. We've listed nine. We probably have a catalog of about 20 right now.

Phase three is really the customized Dojos. And this is where this is not something that's going to appear at our door often. So in this case, we totally customize the Dojo to the situation. One of the kind of major challenges we have addressed with this is the IT planning, which in our case happens every year. We actually run it as a Dojo over several months.

Finally, phase four is really leveraging the Dojo process to apply it to really large transformation challenges. And so it's almost like we pick up our process and we take it to the organizational challenge. One example of this is we used this last year when we introduced objectives and key results to the organization. And so we went through the same process, and we sort of scaled that to the organization without having them come into the Dojo. We took the process to them.

So now I think you're going to talk to us about numbers.

Melissa Rummel

Yes. So as you can see, we've evolved the Dojo and talked about why we're doing the Dojo, and here are some of the numbers to back it up.

So I'm going to just focus on two key boxes here. The one at the top is really the value, really speaks to our outcomes of why we're doing the Dojo. And that's around average knowledge gain. And so you can see year over year, the average knowledge gain of people that are coming into the Dojo is significant. So people are retaining and learning new skills by leveraging the Dojo and the Dojo process.

The lifetime totals I think are really exciting. We've had over 2,000 people coming through the Dojo, and we've run 65 Dojos thus far. And our average Net Promoter Score is 87%. So people are having a positive experience and recommending this to other people across the organization.

Some lessons learned. As Susan pointed out, we have had quite a journey over the years, and we've learned a lot.

First, the Dojo needs to be a safe, non-judgmental place. So psychological safety for teams to come in. They're bringing their challenges, and so they need to be able to talk to us so that we can identify the outcomes that they're looking to achieve.

The Dojo process is not insignificant, and it does take time to mature and evolve. And this also includes making sure that we have the right people on our team, so the right coaches to be able to lead the Dojo.

This immersive learning approach is different than traditional coaching, and so we want to make sure that the coaches understand the immersive piece of this.

And also helping our partners understand the immersive learning and the Dojo. So we try to work and collaborate with other technical experts across the agency to partner with us. And so they also need to make sure that they understand this approach.

The coaches also need to make sure that they focus on the team's outcome and not what they think is important. It's very easy to get caught up in the Agile and specific areas or challenges that the coaches think are important, but making sure that we're talking to the teams and really digging into their outcomes.

And then we have had some success. So as you can see by the numbers on the previous slide, we have had some good outcomes, and we want to continue to leverage our Dojo to drive transformation.

And the biggest one recently has been how important it is to continuously and constantly adapt our approach to address our organizational needs. So the organization continues to mature, our teams continue to mature, and we need to make sure that we're meeting them where they are, and also continuing to grow our processes in order to stay engaging and driving the various transformations that are currently going on.

So what's next for us? We are going to continue growing and evolving the Dojo. We would like to leverage our Dojo and the Dojo process to work with other business units across the US Patent and Trademark Office.

We would also like to leverage the Dojo process for our coaching services. So one-on-one coaching, really having them leverage our Dojo process to help increase our customer service and customer experience.

And then continuing to evolve the Dojo to make sure that we're tackling the next big transformation, the next generation of problems, in an immersive and collaborative manner.

All right, and here's what we're looking for. As I mentioned in a previous slide, we are getting ready to launch an automated governance transformation. And so we'd love to hear from you on what your experiences have been thus far in implementing automated governance.

And thank you very much for attending today. It's very exciting to have you all here listening to us. And if you have any questions or want to talk further, feel free to find me.