Fork me on GitHub
#ask-the-speaker-track-2
<
2021-05-20
>
Ann Perry - IT Revolution11:05:23

📣 As we return from the break, please welcome @gabor.megyaszai!

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)12:05:13

Tool sprawl is something I see a lot. It’s tough to find the balance between autonomy in tool selection (what’s right for the team) and centralized management (but might suboptimize for the teams and be least common denominator)

Andy Hinton12:05:40

Any suggestions on finding that balance?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)12:05:41

@andy.hinton many thoughts… a lot of times, i think teams feel like it’s hard to use the “corporate standard”. so making “the right way the easy way” is helpful. another is taking a “platform teams” approach as described in the book Team Topologies is useful. Finally, take a look at this talk from Target about how to crowdsource decisions to create goodness and buy-in — particularly dan cundiff’s part: https://videolibrary.doesvirtual.com/?video=524020857

❤️ 1
Daniel Cahill - Engineer - Ontario Systems12:05:38

You said that was only 6 minutes downtime? I do some work on the telecom dialing side of my company. Its impressive you can stop relying on hardware that quickly. We have customers with really old hardware that its hard to imagine getting them off of, let alone that quickly

Gabor Megyaszai12:05:30

Of course the legacy cabinet solutions are tough, we were concentrating on virtualized solutions

Daniel Cahill - Engineer - Ontario Systems12:05:37

Sometimes fixing other problems makes me feel like I'm not working on the actual constraint, when I'm going to just get stuck waiting on that hardware to get better.

Gabor Megyaszai12:05:49

Luckily the old switch hw is fading away with 2G switch offs and the soon starting 3G switch offs

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)12:05:34

how do you plan on working toward the standardization of the approach and artifacts for consumption/distribution? what big challenges are you anticipating?

Gabor Megyaszai12:05:13

Probably will take it up with ETSI, and as always it will take years and heavy disagreements between various vendors

Gabor Megyaszai12:05:13

I know the feeling 😁 Other option is very heavy advocate work through CSPs

Ann Perry - IT Revolution12:05:19

Thank you so much, @gabor.megyaszai! 📣 Coming up, we're joined by @anders.lundsgard!

🎉 1
Anders Lundsgård12:05:52

Thank you Ann! Hello everyone 👋! I hope you will enjoy and bring some thoughts with you from this 30 min version of my story - The DevOps journey in an Enterprise

👍 1
Johan Tegler12:05:38

Thanks for the presentation! What kind of software did you develop? Software in the trucks, in the factories and/or for PLM/CAD etc in truck devopment?

Anders Lundsgård12:05:18

Hello Johan! We developed the whole stack. All the way to the embedded software in the truck. The CI practices was also true for the embeded software but the majority of those 30+ delployments were coming from the backend and frontend services.

Johan Tegler12:05:15

Hello Anders! Thanks for sharing the information, very interesting!

🙏 1
Chris Shuknecht12:05:40

deployments 12 a year to 30+ a day in a yr!

💪 2
Michael Bird - Senior Architect, UPMC12:05:39

@anders.lundsgard How long did it take to get QA on board with trusting that automated tests were enough to release a product to production?

Anders Lundsgård12:05:12

The key movement was to reduce the size of QA and distribute the testers to the teams. Also “rebrand” the QA-team to “Delivery Engineering” where I was present during 2014-2018.

Beat Buehler - Team Lead / Agile Coach - Helsana Health Insurance12:05:34

does autonomous teams also mean autonomous from a technical/architectural perspective?

Anders Lundsgård12:05:31

Technical - Yes. But the reality was that when there was an echosystem with languages, frameworks and tools that many teams already used, others tend to use the same. Version Control was standadized. Architecture - No, not fully. Common things like integration patterns, authentication, UX was “decided” on high level.

Anders Lundsgård12:05:01

Thank you Chris 🙏

Chris Shuknecht12:05:29

@anders.lundsgard Do you consider deployments successful if business stakeholders are a blocking action to 'release'? I feel that is a challenging situation that my company struggles with.

Anders Lundsgård12:05:35

From our definition of deployment (“move binaries to prod servers”) - Yes. There can be many reasons why business want to hold a release.

Rikard Ottosson - Psychological Safety (People Not Tech Ltd)12:05:49

Happy to see this level of progress at Scania.

Anders Lundsgård12:05:02

Tack Rikard 🙏!

Christian Kullmann, Eurowings Digital, Engineering Manager Cloud, (He/Him)12:05:46

Thank you @anders.lundsgard. That was very insghtful. I hope i will be able to share a similar story in the near future 🙂

🙏 1
🙌 1
🔥 1
Anders Lundsgård12:05:58

Hello Christian! Thank you so much 🙏. I assure the effort you make to share your story is worth the effort. 💪

Christian Kullmann, Eurowings Digital, Engineering Manager Cloud, (He/Him)13:05:11

I am afraid that the next story i can share will be one of “Yeah, we are stuck in the middle because of … ” or something like that 🙈

Anders Lundsgård13:05:29

I think that “stuck in the middle” would be awesome to share. And honestly, everyone (including us) almost always feels that they are stucked in the middle. Improvement work does never end.

Christian Kullmann, Eurowings Digital, Engineering Manager Cloud, (He/Him)13:05:26

You are right. I will take that thought and work on that a bit. Maybe DOES in autumn or ADDO or something will be my stage 😮

Anders Lundsgård13:05:11

:thumbsup: - I’m eager to hear that and will likely continue to have high interest in DOES content the coming years.

👍 1
Marcin Prączko13:05:22

@anders.lundsgard Could you explain how is working workflow with Git without any release / feature branches. How team is controlling what was released where (DEV, QA, UAT, PROD)?

Anders Lundsgård13:05:01

Since “pending code in git” always was very close to a few check-ins. The code in git was the code in production.

Anders Lundsgård13:05:31

Eventually this slide (that I had no time to show) cloud give some inspiration.

👍 1
Marcin Prączko13:05:34

Great - thank you.

Steve Smith13:05:54

A great answer @anders.lundsgard thank you. There's more to life than feature branching, if you want to deliver at pace 👏

Steve Smith13:05:17

John Lewis & Partners, HMRC, and other clients I've worked with all have a similar approach here

Ann Perry - IT Revolution13:05:28

📣 Coming up in a few minutes, @rradclif and @jen from IBM!

Rosalind13:05:56

Here and ready to answer your questions

🎉 2
Jennifer Velasquez13:05:50

As am I. Hello everyone!

1
Jennifer Velasquez13:05:00

Three workshops on the books and we quickly had to move to answer the question... how do we move forward

Rosalind13:05:44

We are looking for what others have done as well, is you have suggestions let us know

Rosalind13:05:00

I spent a lot of time playing with various app on my ipad to figure out what might be possible, but we have to deal with confidential company information we can’t share in a public way

Jennifer Velasquez13:05:26

Space was a requirement.... and why we moved from some of the ipad apps to Mural which gave us an unlimited canvas to draw on. But there is that personable factor that is missed.

Rosalind13:05:49

Did not think about the simple show a camera at a paper - but then you loose the facial expressions, which can be very helpful

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:07

It also resulted in standing desks...😃

Rosalind14:05:42

Yes, I forgot this and all the virtual events did lead to the need for a good standing deck

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:02

The standing desk I found also helps with my focus in the sessions. As the facilitator, it helped me feel more like the old face to face sessions. Helped get my mind focused on task.

👍 1
Rosalind14:05:41

This same format can work for internal teams, working through helping internal groups understand the move. This process has been shared to help other teams in IBM walk through their Value Stream, we can’t wait until we are back to the office and realistically many teams are spread across the world

Craig Cook - IBM14:05:17

Did it seem the interaction during virtual sessions was lower than in person?

Rosalind14:05:45

absolutely - it takes more work to get the people talking

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:26

In some cases, we had to really work for it. That's where the video played a huge role. We also would alternate our facilitator if needed to drive that engagement.

Rosalind14:05:36

As long as the group wants to change it’s possible to get the interaction. It is really hard if they don’t want to change

Craig Cook - IBM14:05:14

Oh, yes. Why am I sitting in this workshop? Good question.

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:37

Also, don't be afraid to call people out on the webex. Like when we were in a room, that direct dialog sometimes can spur the others

Rosalind14:05:17

I am very good at calling people out, so it did help

Fokko V.14:05:13

Can you give an example on how you managed the issue of people attending one session and not being able to attend the other?

Rosalind14:05:17

We had to do more recaps and updates to start the sessions between each one. We also kept the board so we could go back to it for the recap

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:36

Sell sponsor of the effort on the need for continuity. If a key person wasn't attending the second session, inquire on their availability or if they will be joining us.

Fokko V.14:05:24

Ah, so you just dealt with the fact that attendence differed from session to session. That requires keeping good overview. Well done 👍

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:38

And as Rosalind said, having that previous board proved huge!

👍 1
Rosalind14:05:07

One thing we tried as well, was providing value in each session so people would want to return as well

Fokko V.14:05:15

Yes, I can understand that, when it's about a key person. They need to be aware that it's important for that person to be there.

Fokko V.14:05:55

Yes, and people might "infect" eachother with positive stories I assume. Thanks a lot!

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:04

It's amazing when you inquire ... they too have their slack and will reach out.

Rosalind14:05:17

yes, we did get people coming because they missed something good the time before 🙂

Fokko V.14:05:53

Sounds good, it's constant learning for all of us...

Jennifer Velasquez14:05:00

We have had sessions where we didn't go as fast as we planned but if we get the client exploring and understanding their own, I consider it a success

👍 1
Rosalind14:05:56

Thank you for listening to the session, hopefully you got some value, and looking forward to additional input

Fokko V.14:05:10

Thanks a lot for the session! It provided great insights in the struggles and how you overcame them. Doing this type of work remotely is a challenge for sure!

Fokko V.14:05:07

What has helped me before is to ask people to really prepare for a session, by asking specific questions, or asking them to think about a certain statement. Hope this helps you. Thanks again!

👍 1
Ann Perry - IT Revolution14:05:10

Thank you so much, Rosalind and Jennifer!! 📣 Coming up, @chris552 and @jennifer.stockton2 from T-Mobile!

👋 1
Jennifer Stockton14:05:06

Good Morning!

👍 1
Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:26

evening for most of the audience 🙂

Ffion Jones (Partner, PeopleNotTech)14:05:58

Our teams are proud of our organisation - get your internal customers and culture right and the rest will follow

❤️ 1
👍 2
Chris14:05:52

Hard to be "customer centric/focused", if we're not able to deal with your internal customers, where you can get more feedback and communication is easier?

Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:05

internal customers can sometimes even be harder because there is bias

Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:46

but these are my favorite questions for internal service providers: • What is your product? • Who is your customer? • How do you know you're doing it right? There are other questions we ask, but those are our top 3 favs

Chris14:05:53

Good checklist, which is not a given sometime...

Chris14:05:35

And regarding customer experience, I like the "eat your own dog food" as well. If we're not comfortable with using for ourselves the service we provide, why should we inflict this to other teams and make them miserables

Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:22

I've also see dogfooding with "admin rights" or some custom experience for us but not for them

Bryan Kemp14:05:41

@chris552 We’re finding help keeping reasonable capacity for teams helps improve employee morale.  Are you seeing this?

👍 2
Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:21

100% allocation is always a recipe for getting none of it done IMHO 🙂

👍 1
Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:02

extra capacity can make for happier employees is my experience as well

Bryan Kemp14:05:27

Just by reducing capacity we're finding increased flow as well

Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:47

I guess I'll channel my inner Eliyahu in this, but thats the theory of constraints and small batches at play

Bryan Kemp14:05:50

makes sense! I was referring to teams way over capacity

Bryan Kemp14:05:22

we're seeing very high WIP

Tim B14:05:26

the 270, is that the same location or distributed teams globally?

Jennifer Stockton14:05:48

Distributed across the states mostly close to our office locations

👍 1
Tim B14:05:01

Thats awesome numbers then

Jennifer Stockton14:05:37

Thank you! It has been really cool to help to build this development team.

👏 1
Bryan Kemp14:05:13

Interesting on amount of tooling and flow, and flow metrics we're finding are key

Chris14:05:55

best of breed tool is not necessarily best of breed flow 👍 Best tool is the one we use best

👍 1
Chris14:05:47

@chris552 Same for the memory upgrade, maybe considering some neuralink with some cloud storage 🙂

🙂 1
Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:23

this comment will age well

Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him14:05:47

Love the recognition that flow and cognitive load are intrinsically linked. Dominica DeGrandis is big on this.

Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him14:05:11

Talks about it here. Very timely and relevant in increased remote world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3bDMtKDmr0

Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:47

@dominica is a big inspiration 🙂

☝️ 1
Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him14:05:50

@chris552 There's little she can't teach us about better working and living!

2
Chris Hill - T-Mobile14:05:28

he's inspiring in more way than one

Bryan Kemp14:05:59

“We had way too much work-in-progress going on, and anxiety from conflicting priorities and the other time thieves before this happened. Now that's a much higher degree.” - Dominica DeGrandis

🙌 3
Chris14:05:20

So true, we're always hearing about attracting talents and I like to question what about about retaining the existing ones (and arriving ones), else what's the point. Talents if miserables, won't probably stay long...

👀 1
👍 1
Jennifer Stockton14:05:57

Help an employee find purpose in the work they will consider meaningful, helping them continue to stretch their skills and they are willing to invest too

Chris14:05:19

Yes, reduce cognitive load so they can focus on what matters... I was speaking more generally, that attracting talents is sometime used as a buzzword, but without much substance behind in searching to effectively attract, develop, keep... talents. Glad to see the alliance of HR and tech in this talk!

Jennifer Stockton15:05:22

I agree! Attracting and developing talent requires strong program support and culture. Stepping up the training and giving creative license AND time to build skills and then the place to use it seems to be making a difference for us. I’m excited to see what’s next and have been really proud of what our team has built together. It’s frankly been one of the best partnerships with tech and I feel lucky to play a part in it.

thumbsup_all 1
Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him14:05:53

"Creating a change environment that developers WANT to enter" No easy task, hard to make change seem attractive, great to see your focus on that front 👏

👍 1
Jennifer Stockton14:05:41

It is really important in an organization that is changing to make sure you keep a pulse on what the developers want. It is certainly not an easy task but an important one

👍 1
Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him15:05:49

I like that quote "pulse on what the developers want". Will pass that on to our people ops teams. Great stuff again!

❤️ 1
Patrick Anderson - Tasktop - he/him14:05:36

Top stuff @chris552 and @jennifer.stockton2!

👍 2
Chris14:05:11

Thanks @jennifer.stockton2 and @chris552

Bryan Kemp14:05:22

Here's Flow Framework, in respect to measuring Flow: https://flowframework.org/

🙌 1
Bryan Kemp14:05:14

Thanks @jennifer.stockton2 and @chris552 and it was great to hear a recruiters perspective as well

Jennifer Stockton14:05:39

Thank you it was great to be here!

Siddharth, NatWest Group, DevOps CoE (he/him)20:05:17

Here is the collection of all the reference links that were shared / discussed during the #DOES21 event. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/devops-enterprise-summit-2021-reference-links-minus-books-pareek Enjoy Reading 🙂

1