Amanda Lewis

Nathen, what do you have?

Nathen Harvey

Look at this. Amanda, the DORA Continuous Improvement Trophy.

Amanda Lewis

My goodness. Did you win that?

Nathen Harvey

I did. My team won it, yes.

Amanda Lewis

Let's hear it for Amanda and her team. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Nathen Harvey

So our story today will be portrayed by Amanda Lewis, a software engineer on the employee productivity team, and Nathen Harvey, an employee whose father chose to spell his name in a nontraditional way that leads to opportunities for collaboration and continuous improvement.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, indeed.

I'm so excited for my team because we've been celebrating the success. We've learned a lot. We've made improvements. But to see that our organization has noticed and they're celebrating it, it's unbelievable.

But I think most importantly, Nathen, we want to thank you.

Nathen Harvey

Yes.

Amanda Lewis

You made it possible. You showed us that things could improve, things could get better.

Nathen Harvey

But you're the one that did the work. I don't know why you would give the award to me, Amanda. Maybe we should flash back four years.

Amanda Lewis

Before 2020.

Nathen Harvey

Yes. I know it's hard sometimes to think back that far.

Amanda Lewis

Okay.

Nathen Harvey

It's been four years since you started at Fun Shirts.

Amanda Lewis

It's true. It has been four years.

Nathen Harvey

Yes. And if everyone can picture this, four years ago, Nathen was excited to begin his next journey as the director of avocado shirt sales.

Amanda Lewis

Yes.

Nathen Harvey

This had been his dream, and he was ready to provide avocado shirts for everyone. I hope you all have avocado shirts.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, indeed.

Nathen Harvey

Things were going great when I started as well. But I was meeting all these new people in the cafe and in the break room and in the hallway, and we'd talk, and then we'd have great ideas, and I'd say, "All right, follow up with me. You can find me in the employee directory."

And I noticed that no one ever followed up. I didn't know if it was because they didn't actually want to follow up or what. So I went one day and I looked at our employee directory, only to find I wasn't there.

Amanda Lewis

Oh, this was very sad.

Nathen Harvey

Although I did find that there's another Harvey. That's super. So that was cool.

I didn't know what to do. I was there, and every day when I would come into work, the first thing I would do is check the employee directory. It's kind of like when you Google search for yourself. I'd check the employee directory, and every day, not there, not there, not there.

And after four weeks, I'm still not in the employee directory. I was getting rather frustrated. So I figured, what am I going to do? That fifth week I came in, I refreshed the page, and I'm in the employee directory.

Amanda Lewis

Awesome.

Nathen Harvey

It's awesome. There I am. Look at that. Yay.

But, oh, damn, my father struck again. Sometimes I think of him as a brilliant futurist who knew that one day all of his children would need a unique way to identify themselves on a globally connected network of computers. And other days I just curse him. I love you, Dad.

So what did I do? I did the thing that anyone does when you find a problem with an IT system. I opened up a bug. So I launched the bug system, opened up a bug, and said, "Hey, my name is misspelled in the employee directory. Don't worry. It happens all the time. It's my father's fault, not yours. And also, blameless. So if you could, I would really like it if you would fix it, because every time I run into people in the hallway, they never follow up with me, and I think it might be because of this."

I gave it a bit of time, and it kind of felt like back when I wasn't listed in the directory. I would check the ticket every morning and no response. I wasn't even sure how bugs worked here. I didn't know if there was going to be a comment, if I would get an email, or what. So I was just waiting and waiting and waiting and refreshing.

And so finally I reached out. I was like, "Amanda, someone gave me your name. This is really bad. Can you help?"

Amanda Lewis

And I have to say, Nathen, that this email I sent to you was probably the most valuable email I've ever sent in my life. First of all, you didn't respond in anger, which was unusual for my experience. And then you reached out to help us.

Speaking of help, are you going to hold that statue the whole time?

Nathen Harvey

Let me see if I can help you here. Hang on one second, Amanda.

Amanda Lewis

It is getting a little heavy, actually.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah, well, I got something for you. That's some servant leadership right there.

Amanda Lewis

Thank you, Nathen.

Nathen Harvey

Servant leadership manifest. Yes, absolutely. All right, why don't you put it right there?

Amanda Lewis

That's better.

Nathen Harvey

Right on its marks.

Amanda Lewis

It's much better, if anyone wants to take a photo.

All right. So yeah, I appreciated your fast response, and I was glad that you were interested in sharing with me, because I was really curious to know, why does it take so long for you to update your systems?

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. You reached out, we had that meeting, and what I remember walking away from that meeting was you gave me a lot of homework.

Amanda Lewis

Yeah. It was great, right? I needed to read the Accelerate book, all of the State of DevOps reports, then I should get with my team and take the quick check.

And I have to admit, while I was super pumped when I left that meeting, I was also super overwhelmed. But because you were giving me those weekly check-ins to see what I thought about the research, it definitely helped me prioritize digging in.

Nathen Harvey

Well, I mean, there is a lot of research and a lot of things to read, of course. But you've got to start somewhere, Amanda. And I think that the best place to start is on page one, and I gave you 17 page ones to read.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, yes. This was so true.

And so at our next regular team meeting, I introduced DORA to the team, and we went through that quick check, and we received a 30.

Nathen Harvey

Oh, well, don't be sad. You know where you are now.

Amanda Lewis

It's true. It's true.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time to do the prioritize-me exercise. But we all were in agreement that we were definitely going to do that at our next meeting because none of us wanted to have low performance.

Upon further discussion with you after that outcome, I realized we had this huge discrepancy. If we were adding new people or updating them, that took us about six weeks. But interesting enough, when someone left the company, we could get that done in usually less than a day.

Nathen Harvey

Wait, wait.

Amanda Lewis

And so you kind of opened my eyes that things could go faster.

Nathen Harvey

It's weird. So if a new person comes on board, it takes six weeks. But when someone leaves, they're gone.

Amanda Lewis

Yes.

Nathen Harvey

This kind of makes me think about security vulnerabilities. When they happen, we fix them really, really fast.

Amanda Lewis

Right.

Nathen Harvey

So how and why are you able to get people out much faster than you're able to get people in?

Amanda Lewis

So our team had that same question. We started to explore what is the difference, and what we found out was, as everybody probably can imagine, there was a different approval process for when we were adding or changing versus when someone had left the company.

Nathen Harvey

Aha. So you had kind of an emergency change process and a regular change process. Has anyone experienced that before?

So what could you do maybe to make that emergency change process the regular change process? When I work with teams a lot, here's what I often find, that those changes typically have to go to some external body. That lovely change approval board.

Actually, I think we heard about this yesterday in the Wendy's talk about DevOps and the change approval board being, what was the word?

Amanda Lewis

Frenemies, I think it was.

Nathen Harvey

Yes.

Amanda Lewis

And so that's where we started to dig in, looking at this change approval process. It started, again, because you gave us so much good homework we could use, with reading the capability documentation. And at the bottom of that, there's this area that talks about how you could measure change approvals.

So the team and I, we went through these questions. That first one: can changes be promoted to production without manual change approvals?

Nathen Harvey

How'd that go?

Amanda Lewis

No.

Nathen Harvey

How about, do production changes need to be approved by an external body?

Amanda Lewis

Yes.

Nathen Harvey

Do you rely on peer review to manage changes?

Amanda Lewis

No.

Nathen Harvey

No. Not peer review.

Amanda Lewis

No, not yet.

Nathen Harvey

And do team members have a clear understanding of the process to get changes approved for implementation?

Amanda Lewis

Yeah.

Nathen Harvey

Do they?

Amanda Lewis

I think it was pretty clear we did not.

Nathen Harvey

You had no idea. Oh, that's tough. When you don't have a clear understanding of a process, that can also lead to more burnout.

Amanda Lewis

This is so true.

And so what we realized here is that if I was going to do anything about this, probably the first thing to do was some research and put it all together so that when I went to my manager and to our leadership, I could actually make a case for this.

And I thought it was really interesting that if we look back all the way in 2014, even then, those teams that were held accountable for the quality of their code, interesting enough, performance increased.

Nathen Harvey

But that's 2014. Why are you looking at 2014? It's 2023.

Amanda Lewis

I know. But if it was possible in 2014, it's probably even more possible now.

Nathen Harvey

Oh. All right. Well, you do make a good point. In fact, in 2017, we found that automation really drove this. And with automation in place, teams were much better at innovation and getting feedback much faster. And that fast feedback helps a lot of teams understand, just like yours, is this change good, bad, how's it going to go?

Amanda Lewis

Absolutely. And as I got started, we looked in the research, we're gathering it, we're having these conversations. Honestly, this is really daunting.

But I thought it was really great in 2017 where they talked about where do you get started? And one of those ways you could get started was with peer reviews and then some automated testing. And we felt as a team that could be achievable.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah, it is really interesting as you think about that, Amanda. Maybe you can't control that change approval body, but you can make small changes on your team locally.

And in fact, continuing on that 2017 research, we found a lot of great insights there as well. Such as the teams with high performance have automated more than 20% of their change approval process.

Amanda Lewis

Which is really impressive.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah, in 2017.

Amanda Lewis

And then you see it keeps continuing, right?

In 2019, I thought this was the easiest thing that I could bring to our leadership. Clearly, if we don't make a change, we're already negatively impacting our speed and stability. So at least exploring if we could improve this would be beneficial for the organization.

Nathen Harvey

Absolutely.

Amanda Lewis

Through this process, we're on the employee productivity team. Our job is to help make our employees be more productive. So the whole reason for the directory is that you can easily email and chat and connect.

But before you came to us, we really didn't think there was anything wrong with the process. We had no idea the impact that it had on you, that it made it harder for you to get started at our organization.

Nathen Harvey

It really did.

Amanda Lewis

And so it really helped us focus on the user.

Nathen Harvey

Oh, that focus on the user. It's easy for us to forget why we have these systems in place. And like you said, eventually things just become the way things work, and we don't even question them anymore. In fact, sometimes we forget about who the user is.

This year, in the report that just came out this morning, have y'all had a chance to read it yet? The 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report is out.

Jason up front just gave me a thumbs-up that he has read it, and I think he's lying because I don't think it's been out long enough for you to have fully read the report yet. But I believe in you. Thank you for that.

So we saw really dramatic improvements when you do focus on the user: 40% higher organizational performance. That's wild.

Amanda Lewis

Yeah.

Nathen Harvey

And that user focus also predicts a lot of other really great outcomes for your team. You have better team performance, better organizational performance, like we covered. It helps with reducing burnout. So when you care about the work that you're doing, you're less likely to get burnout, and lots of other areas that it really helps out with.

I think it's one of the most interesting findings this year.

Amanda Lewis

Well, and I completely agree for our team. It got us really excited because I could think of you. How do I help you? How can I make this better?

So how did we get started? It was a little bit overwhelming. We dug into the change approval process. That seemed a little bit scary. But we had decided that probably the first thing to do was to make sure that we could regularly look at those four key metrics, measure our software delivery performance.

So we set up a system so that we could have the four key metrics.

Nathen Harvey

Right. You started that with a quick check, right? You were able to measure those four metrics.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, we did, in that very first meeting.

Nathen Harvey

Perfect.

Amanda Lewis

So then after reading...

Nathen Harvey

Wait. Sorry, Amanda. What happened to the metrics?

Amanda Lewis

Oh, you go back. Well, they're just kind of fading into the background. Now it's there. We can check back on it, but it's really not what we were driving towards.

Nathen Harvey

No, no, no. DORA is about the four key metrics.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, and measuring our software delivery performance was a key part of our journey, but it wasn't how we were going to get better.

Nathen Harvey

Oh, right. You make a good point.

Amanda Lewis

Thank you. Thank you. Did everybody note that? He just said I made a good point.

All right. So we knew that the change approval process was kind of blocking us, but what could we do?

So we decided that maybe we can focus on improving our code reviews and our code quality, and start doing peer reviews and seeing how that affects our team. And I have to say, like you saw on the last slide, I was much happier with my job.

So we started implementing code reviews, and at first, it actually was overwhelming. So we talked about those J curves, because we were getting large reviews. And so what we decided after we discussed this was that it probably would be better for all of us to work in smaller batches, because then it would be a much more enjoyable process as we work together to transition to this new process.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. And this is another great finding that we had this year. The teams that are focused on those faster code reviews saw 50% improvement in software delivery performance. Fifty percent. So those four metrics get better when you focus on code reviews sometimes.

Amanda Lewis

So you're telling me we were right a second time.

Nathen Harvey

What's that?

Amanda Lewis

You're saying we were right.

Nathen Harvey

You were right a second time, yes. But the only reason you were right, let's just be very clear about this, Amanda, is because your code reviews were slow. If your code reviews had been fast, and then you made them faster and fastest, they were already fast to begin with. It might not have had any impact.

Amanda Lewis

That makes sense.

So then going through this process, we've got the four keys and we're keeping an eye on how we're progressing there. And we noticed that through our reviews, oftentimes the people that needed to review our code were outside of our team.

And so the team started looking at loosely coupled architecture, and we quickly realized we were definitely not a loosely coupled team. But we agreed that we should learn more about it and see if this was the place that we could improve.

So again, taking all that homework you gave me...

Nathen Harvey

You're welcome.

Amanda Lewis

I went back and I looked through the reports. And as you see here, in 2015, teams that were high performing, they were using loosely coupled architecture. And I think really importantly, because I definitely have heard people talk about the mainframe all week, was that it was regardless of the type of system.

Nathen Harvey

That's awesome. And getting started with loosely coupled architecture, like you said, it can happen on any type of system. And I think you said something about teams too. It's really about loose coupling of the teams.

And what we've seen for many years in the research is that those teams that have loosely coupled systems and are able to make changes on their own without a lot of coordination costs, and I think we've heard about that this week as well, those teams are really driving that high performance.

These architectural approaches really help with that. Again, loosely coupled architecture, we don't measure it by asking, "How many microservices do you have?" Because as that number goes up, you must be more loosely coupled, right? No, that's not always the lived experience.

What we have to look at is that independence across teams. Are we actually able to control the thing that we are responsible for without having to coordinate with you?

And those teams are able to quickly deliver value. Why are they able to quickly deliver value? Because they can independently test their changes, they can publish them, they can deploy their changes without that coordination. It's really, really important that those teams focus on loosely coupled teams, and then they can quickly deliver value.

And it's not been restricted to any one type of architectural framework either. Like you said, it can happen on the mainframe. Microservices can, in fact, be loosely coupled. They can also be tightly coupled, where if you have a set of microservices, maybe you have to deploy six or eight microservices together as one chunk. I think you've missed the opportunity to really embrace loosely coupled architecture in that case.

Amanda Lewis

And the other thing that's nice about that is it allows individual teams to really make good progress. And I think the maybe best point that I was able to bring to leadership was this statement: we were all trying to make it a better place to work, and we were trying to hire, and we wanted to be able to recommend our workplace. And by moving to a loosely coupled architecture, we were going to be more likely to do so.

Nathen Harvey

Oh, that's awesome.

So what we've seen is high performers who regularly meet their reliability targets are 40% more likely to have systems based on a loosely coupled architecture. It really does drive that performance, and as you just said, employee well-being, which is also so important.

Amanda Lewis

So through this research and these discussions, probably doesn't come as a surprise, we quickly realized that we were going to need leadership support, because these types of changes, to move in that direction, were going to be outside of our team, and we were going to need to collaborate with others.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. And it is about trust. How do we trust one another? And really, we want to open up those communication lines. If we're going to separate out our systems, if we're going to work independently, trust becomes really important.

And think about that control board that you had, that change approval board. You're going to need leadership support to help fix that or change how that policy works. And building up that open communication is also going to help, back to that employee well-being, reduce some of the stress that you might have.

Amanda Lewis

And so we took your advice, and our team started meeting with other teams and giving presentations at different cross-functional group meetings, and really trying to listen and learn, for different teams and different roles. How were they incentivized? What was important to them, and how could we better work with them?

Nathen Harvey

Incentives. That's interesting.

Amanda Lewis

And through that process, we were definitely always kind of bringing through what the benefits of a loosely coupled architecture were, stated through the research, and how that would improve our organization.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. And one of the things that we all know because we live it every day, go back to that well-being, it's the culture. It's the culture that matters.

And what we see is that improving all of these technical capabilities, process capabilities, it's not actually going to help if you're working in a place where there is not a healthy culture. Healthy culture is absolutely fundamental and key to driving that improvement.

Amanda Lewis

Culture. I've also heard culture a lot this week. Tell me more, Nathen. What is culture? How do we...

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. So we look at a bunch of different things. We look to Dr. Ron Westrum. He's a sociologist. You may have heard of him. He's done a ton of work into what does a good culture look like, and what sort of cultures do we have across different types of organizations.

But we go beyond that, and we look at things like flexibility. Where do you work? How do you work? When do you work? All of this really helps drive that culture. And like you already said, you're doing lunch and learns and so forth. So how is that knowledge shared across different teams?

There were a couple of other things that we looked at, like how focused are you on the user? What is the stability of your job? Do you believe that the job that you're working in today is going to be the job that you'll have next week? If you don't believe that, it's hard to really show up and give your best.

But then there's some other really interesting things that we saw. You have to be careful on your team about how work is distributed. You want to make sure that you've done equitable work distribution, so that everyone has an opportunity to shine and everyone has work to do that is really meaningful to them and to our users.

And culture really helps individuals get where they want to be. We're lowering burnout, we're increasing job satisfaction, increasing productivity. This really matters. It matters to me. It matters to you. It matters to all of us. But it goes beyond just helping the people. It also drives those key outcomes that we care about.

Amanda Lewis

Yeah, it's really interesting, because I see all of these things, and it's funny how by us starting to do peer code reviews, we ended up doing more knowledge sharing. We got to know each other more. We talked about the user more. And I like my job a heck of a lot more.

Nathen Harvey

Wait. So you're saying that you sort of changed how you worked, and that helped impact your culture?

Amanda Lewis

Yes.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. There's this lovely quote that I love about culture, and every time I look on the internet, no one knows who said this quote first. So when you go home today, you can remember that you heard it here first, so you can attribute it to me.

But the quote is that it's easier to work your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of working. And that's pretty deep, right? So as we change how we work, that's going to change how we think. So what's really important to be able to have a good culture?

Amanda Lewis

In 2017, I thought this was just liquid gold: transformational leadership. Because I used this, I shared it with my manager, she was able to share it upwards, because that stuff is really, really hard.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah, absolutely. It's our leaders also that set those incentive programs, and that's really what helps shape the culture as well.

Amanda Lewis

So I don't know about anybody here, but we're constantly in demand to deliver more value to the business, and at times it's features, features, features, features. But I loved this, and I kept highlighting this, is that we cannot forget about future value creation. It's so important.

And that really, if we worked on these capabilities, if we improved them, the value to the business was going to continue for years to come.

Nathen Harvey

Absolutely. And we often have to remember that, yes, we are focused on the user and bringing them great value, but we do this oftentimes as a commercial enterprise, right? We want to make money off of this. This is how we get this done.

And these questions come up all the time. How do I know that this is cost-effective? How do I know that we're actually driving the right performance? And what we've seen through our ROI of DevOps study, we see that this is really about helping your technical workforce do the most important work and keeping them happy with the work that they're doing.

It's about the value that they deliver to their customers. That's really important. And by having an understanding of who those customers are, I also take more pride in the work that I do.

Amanda Lewis

That's hard to see.

Nathen Harvey

I can't read that even from here. But what this does do, this is a page from that ROI report. Here's the most important takeaway of this page. It says it doesn't matter how you're performing today. Making any improvement work, any investment in improvement, is going to have a positive ROI. So it's definitely worth it.

Amanda Lewis

And so we worked over months, collaborating with partner teams, enabling our leadership, and most importantly, being patient with the teams that were making this plan to move us in a loosely coupled architecture direction.

So while there were teams and leaders focused on that, our team didn't want to just sit back and do nothing. And so we decided the next place we were going to focus on was documentation.

Nathen Harvey

Everybody loves documentation.

Amanda Lewis

Well, they should, because look what happens, right? Great outcomes. It has a significant impact.

And so the first thing we had to start with was going to the 2021 report: what is quality documentation? So when we were thinking about it, we knew we wanted it to help us accomplish our goals, making sure it was accurate, up to date, and comprehensive, and it was findable, well organized, and clear.

Nathen Harvey

Right. Those docs that you write that you can't access, they're not helping anyone, are they?

Amanda Lewis

Yeah, we found that out. It was strange.

But what was really wonderful is we absolutely saw this in practice, as they found in the 2021 report, is that the more we focused on our documentation and the better it got, the easier it was for all of us to implement and improve these capabilities. And we all were engaged better at work. We saw this outcome, we saw it in the findings of 2022, but we were living it.

Nathen Harvey

That's amazing. And we continue to see those great impacts. Quality documentation helps technical practices work better, and your teams build up those capabilities. But it's more important than that. With good documentation in place, those technical practices matter more to the eventual outcome. They have an even greater impact on organizational performance, team performance, and all of those things.

Amanda Lewis

It's a really great place where any team can get started with that, even when there's a larger organization initiative going on.

Nathen Harvey

Absolutely.

Amanda Lewis

And we want to be productive and happy, right?

Nathen Harvey

Yes.

Amanda Lewis

So I imagine everybody's along this ride with me as well, is that our organization was really starting to feel that push to move to cloud. And that made me think about all of the great content over the years in the report. And I made sure to share that with the teams that were working on our new internal developer platforms.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah. And going to the cloud is not enough. What really matters is how you use the cloud. We've seen year in and year out that it's how you use the cloud that is more important than that you use the cloud.

In fact, when you think about it, if you take your data center processes and move them to the cloud, all you've really done is change from a capital expense to an operating expense. If your developers and your teams don't feel that benefit, it probably wasn't worth it.

But as we've seen, those teams that actually adopt it in that way, in 2018, several years ago, they were 23 times more likely to have higher performance.

Amanda Lewis

That's right. And so we know that cloud, when you use it right, it provides this flexible infrastructure where I can scale up, I can scale down. I have on-demand self-service. That flexible infrastructure is really what's driving organizational performance.

Awesome. So let's talk about the new DORA Core. I was pumped when we saw this, because as we're meeting with new teams, we're introducing DORA to them. Sometimes it can be kind of overwhelming, like do you remember that first meeting I walked out of with you?

Nathen Harvey

Yeah.

Amanda Lewis

And so now I'm able to use this to kind of easily walk them through and explain how it works.

Nathen Harvey

Yeah, I mean, there's still a ton of nuance and really important findings from all of those homeworks that I gave you. You should read them all.

But this DORA Core model is a good way to sort of jump ahead, if you will, and start to really map out which capabilities might my team benefit from improving.

Amanda Lewis

Yes. It's really easy for all of us to get caught up in those tools and technology. And I love this point from the 2015 report: we have to focus on all the factors, culture, architecture, and practices.

Nathen Harvey

And like we saw last year, these technical capabilities all build upon each other, right? We should start with a focus on one. But the truth is it's kind of a web where they're all impacting and interacting with one another. And I think that interaction is really fascinating.

Look, we found great results again this year. We're starting to see that teams that are really focused on software delivery performance have tremendously better performance than those of their peers.

Amanda Lewis

So obviously, when we started this journey, my team, we were all in agreement we were going to be an elite team.

Nathen Harvey

No, no, no, Amanda. Elite is not what you're looking for.

Amanda Lewis

I do remember you sharing that with us, that we shouldn't be focused on elite. And you walked us through how we should be improving our capabilities, and that would improve our performance, and then we'd get to the outcome we really wanted.

Nathen Harvey

And what was that outcome?

Amanda Lewis

We wanted our employees to trust that the directory was accurate, and it could support them in getting started. Especially as new members joined our team, we wanted them to be able to hit the ground running.

Nathen Harvey

Absolutely. I want you to have elite improvement.

Amanda Lewis

Speaking of elite improvement, as you see here, that first time we started with a 30, which we kind of had the wah-wah. But as we started making those little improvements, you can see the things that we were just doing within our team. We got a little bit of boost. We were moving in that direction. And then as the organization was able to implement some of these larger changes, now we're kind of on our way.

Before we started this journey, things were chaos. It was fire. There were fire drills, stressful bug tickets. Thank you again for not yelling at me.

And I'm not saying that now we don't have moments of stress. But what we have is this way to communicate internally with our team and cross-functionally. And because we're targeting our outcomes on our users, whenever we start to have some conflicting discussions, we can bring those back to focus on what's going to be best for the user.

Nathen Harvey

I love that focus. And this improvement work is never done. You're going to just keep on this journey.

Amanda Lewis

Yes.

Nathen Harvey

So what are you working on now?

Amanda Lewis

Well, it's going to be no surprise, because if you've got that bingo card out, we've focused back on that code maintainability. Because with all of these new AI tools, with code completion and helping us write tests, we're going to do some experiments with those and really see how it helps us, and if it's helping us with our code review.

Nathen Harvey

I love it. We looked a little bit at AI this year in the report.

Oh, you're going to take that back. All right.

Here's some of the great news that we found. Lots of teams are starting to take on AI for some of their practices. We see good impacts on well-being. We don't yet see those impacts on organizational performance, but I know it's coming. I know it's coming.

Amanda Lewis

Yes, which I can feel it, right? We're all excited to play around with it, looking forward to see how it's going to help us, and watching those four key metrics to see what the impact is.

Nathen Harvey

Absolutely. So our quick key insights from this year's report: healthy culture, that's where you've got to start. If you don't have that, none of this other stuff matters.

Then focus on your users. Look at quality documentation, flexible infrastructure, and make sure that you're paying attention to people who identify as underrepresented on your team. Are you giving them fair and equitable work assignments so that everyone has a chance to succeed and we can all learn from each other?

Amanda Lewis

Yes. I am so excited that our team won this award, but honestly, it wouldn't have been possible without the small incremental changes that happened across the organization over the last few years.

And so really, we all won this award. Our team got started, but we couldn't have done it without you, if you wouldn't have reached out to me that first day, and with all of the support in our leadership.

Nathen Harvey

Well, thank you so much, Amanda, and congratulations.

And for all of you, if you've not yet had a chance, you can grab this QR code. Head over to bit.ly/DORA-2023 to grab this year's report. And then after you've read the report, I encourage you to come join us at the DORA Community of Practice so we can talk about it. What did you find surprising? What do you maybe not agree with? All of your thoughts. Would love for you to come join us there.

Amanda Lewis

And speaking of community members, Nathen, it was so great this week to have people stop by and see us.

Nathen Harvey

Come by the DORA Community Summit.

Amanda Lewis

Yes. We had that on Monday. That was incredible.

And one of the teams that stopped by our booth, they were so excited. They saw the trophy. They wanted to carry on this tradition. And so I think the best thing, I love this trophy, I'm going to be sad to part with it, but I know I can earn it again, is I actually want to pass this on to the engineering shared services team from Northwestern Mutual.

And with that, thank you.