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2021-10-05
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I am here, but must appear sporadically, due to other commitments. Looking forward to interacting! Ron
12 minutes to kick off! Looking forward to it!
Hi all, looking forward to spend the coming three days with all of you! Have a great conference everyone!
"Experience Reports" is the concept that changed everything for me! Almost all of my talks now are only about my actual experiences, not a concept that I learned in a book or conference.
Morning! @genek been a fan for a long time, glad to finally have gotten to attend this conference. How often are consultants included in experience reports?
LOVED the interaction with speakers via slack last year!!!!
Looks like I'm not going to be getting any work done next week either as I catch up on the talks I miss the first time through 🙂
My favorite aspect of the virtual format - it is easily affordable compared to in-person conference costs + travel and expenses. So excited for the next three days!
Kudos to you and your staff, Gene - it was an amazing experience prepping and recording our session!
I guess less last minute anxiety for the speakers in this format too... @lucas.rettig, what do you think?
And take notes from your own speech 😉
Yeah. I think you'll do fine... there's already video evidence of thatn.
This conference has taught me so much about the differences between European and American room doors.
I used gather for another conference and it highlighted how my general lack of video game skill was limiting 😆
This time I'm customising my avatar to the max!!!!
A warm welcome to our opening keynote speakers, @brett.craig and @lucas.rettig presenting How a DevOps Mindset is Influencing Target's Culture.
Unfortunately, Brett had to step out last minute for an urgent business manner so y’all are stuck with me on the Slack thread for now.
That would ruin a conference presentation in the old normal 😄
Hello, all! Please welcome our first speakers from Target, with their amazing story! Thank you, @lucas.rettig and @brett.craig !
Fascinating look at where Merch Capabilities resides at Target —
How long has this journey been going on?
@ross.clanton508 and @heather.mickman what would you say? 2013/2014
@nicole.forsythe was part of that… what would you say?
Pre-2015 for sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-VbB1fG5o
We mapped it out once - it was a big beautiful hand-drawn visual that hung in the Dojo in City Center for a while.
From a product perspective, we started experimenting with operating in a product model as early as 2009 in what had been the first guest facing mobile teams. These were simple but significant changes like moving from requirements documents to backlogs, working with dedicated teams (even though at the time our engineering team was outsourced, it was still 100% dedicated to our app and mobile web work), and adopting basic Agile practices instead of waterfall plans. Our mobile team at that time had the ability to break from many of the standard practices and constraints that Target required at the time, because we were viewed as a potentially short lived experiment, assuming mobile was a fad. That did not turn out to be the case, and many of the roles we piloted on that team (Product Manager, Agile Coach...) would become the foundation for those roles would when they eventually were codified in Target Digital organization years later.
“because we didn’t build software ourselves, we didn’t retain the IP” — @brett.craig
Love that phrase: “we needed to delayer the organization”. 🙂
I remember your talk very well in 2018 @lucas.rettig ! We had just started using ADRs at Comcast as well and I could not believe how similar your approach was! It gave us confidence that we were not crazy (or alone)! 🙂
your talk was so awesome that year as well!
50 days of invest in yourself a year???? WOW.........
As a former manager in the Target Dojo - moved to Best Buy a couple years ago with @neil.fasen - curious how the formerly-named Dojo contributed to your success? How has the role of Dojo changed?
The Dojo has played a critical ‘hands-on’ role in helping many, many of our product and tech teams get over the hump and really jump start. In short - instrumental!
@brett.craig: “At Target, every engineer has 50 days of learning; that’s not weekend day, 50 days to explore, innovate, learn, collaborate across teams” So good!
@brett.craig / @lucas.rettig What were some ways you injected that throughout the organization? For example, specific events/activities? Injecting it into the daily work, etc? Especially if the organization was overfocused on outputs over learning?
I’d say its very frequently talked about by all leaders as learning being an expectation and each team members Goals and Objectives routines are designed to talk about learning and how each team member is investing in themselves
I am curious as to how your define IP within your organisation - especially in an industry with many standard processes and your own choices in software. Is it defined as your custom build applications throughout your organisation?
we custom build with Target Team Member Product teams anything that has the potential to differentiate us as a Retailer
there are things like HR and Accounting that we treat as more commodity and use package solutions, but for the most part we are a custom build shop and we use our Target Tech team members to do it
Thanks for the clarification, it's a hard choice to make sometimes and as you said, there are gaps which need to be found and plugged
What do the fifty days of learning look like? What kind of learning are people typically doing?
when I was there (previous role), it was very open in terms of what you wanted to do. Free trainings, paid trainings, youtube, pluralsight, conferences, hack projects, etc. The freedom to spend time on what you wanted to learn was there and highly encouraged
it honestly varies and each team member owns their own learning journey. these aren’t tops down driven
How do the team members preserve the time they've carved out to do this?
Are team members expected to share/bring back their learnings to their teammates? If so, what are some ways in which you've seen that accomplished?
Probably varies by team, but in both teams I was on our senior leader had a every Friday all day block on everyone's calendar.
do you have a way of tracking the impact of giving everyone 50 days training? i.e. what value has it added to target? new ideas/products build off the back of it?
I was there when it was first implemented and I recall spending 3 days just learning how this wacky new thing called Kubernetes worked. Another day we spent trying to rewrite one of our apps in Rust just to learn and see what the benefit was (pretty sure we never got it to compile because Rust is wicked hard)
Focus is a gift...........
“make decisions, not decks” - sign in my office
What is the difference between "Value Chain Mapping" and "Value Stream Mapping?" Or is it really the same thing?
i’ll leave that to the experts! @mik @bryan.finster486
yeah… they are the same thing in my mind
I’d hate to comment without something beyond a label. I get bit when I assume. :D
i just assume that i’m wrong in everything i say, eventually
At a very high level, I see value chains as the full set of activities that a company of set of companies does in the market, vs a value stream which is the flow of activities that creates value. Hence the Flow Framework’s focus on value streams. @cdeardo let’s consider adding a Flow Framework FAQ on that clarifies?
Maybe also consider adding in Value Fracture Planes (from Team Topologies) into the definition mix? I have...a friend... that might appreciate that. 😉
In my head Value Stream mapping is a technique for examining the steps in a recurring process e.g. order fulfilment. Value Chains are something you map out at the start of Wardley Mapping (which a strategy exercise). This is https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Value_Stream_Mapping_How_to_Visualize_Wo/ll7imAEACAAJ?hl=en and https://learnwardleymapping.com/
One thing I consider to be a very critical distinction is between Value Stream Mapping, which tends to be a one-time activity, and Value Stream Management, which acknowledges that value streams are a constantly changing dynamic system.
I see VSM as an org level extension of CD. An engineering problem. We should be continuously evaluating the pipeline for ways to improve the quality gates and efficiency to reduce toil.
Disciplined focus and obsession with delivering value to the end-user.
Value Stream Mapping should definitely be done at least once, but the only way you'd just need a single map is if nothing changed over time. Mapping every 3-6 months not only allows you to quickly measure your progress (along with things not captured by VSM platforms) but the primary bonus is ideal and future state mapping where you can reimagine whats possible and plan for the future.
Your Value Chain Map will change far less often than a Value Stream Map, and it covers much more than a single stream. An easy way to think about it is that your value chain is made of interconnected value streams.
Brett has been on the same slide for about 10 mins - he's truly telling a story,
And here’s the Fresh Foods story which blew me away when I first heard about it earlier this year, from @lucas.rettig!
Now that @lucas.rettig mentioned Food and Beverage... need to stock for happy hour...
"Not just say there's a better way but propose a better way"
When you look at the steady stream of full shopping trolleys rolling out of the supermarket, there must be an equal flow going in. It’s a challenge
me and 2 engineers + the Merchant teams accountable for these business units
50 days of learning, how do you measure that you reached the intended outcome? Any test, certificate, assessments, is there a tailored learning path aligned with each product, tech stack ...etc
Are your teams all typically colocated? Just curious how much of a challenge not being colocated would present...
our product teams (POs, UX, Engineering, Data Science) were typically colocated - what was different with this was our users were also colocated
was the team only IT, or cross functional with business folks/sales too?
the business people accountable for these categories + me and 2 engineers
did the pandemic have any impact on your ways of working?
I love how @brett.craig put a stop to the “put 50+ consultants on this project,” and instead have @lucas.rettig lead a small team of engineers to go solve problems. It’s such an inspirational and educational story!
And now they won't fire you for admitting 😉
I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with a scrappy team. 😄
This takes confidence from leaders and trust in your own internal expertise. I'm thinking of Brene brown's work on brave leadership.
Remind me to tell you the story of talking to @ross.clanton508 the first time after his 2015 talk.
I worked in a grocery store as a kid and was always amazed when my managers knew exactly how many facings most products in the store had on the shelf (it was a really small store)
Does that count as business outcome, or what? 🤯
So...... what exactly was changed to produce these results?
lots of things, but TL:DR is that we currated our assortment to the most important items and we got rid of the average things
It is things that do not have as much impact. Focus on what brings the most value short term
Some of the things I picked up: • changing order lot sizes • understanding what the sales rates were • segmenting stores better to drive product selection • less returns to suppliers How did I do, @lucas.rettig?
less choice, curated assortment to what matters most for our guests - led to less shrink
Brett's shirt feels James T. Kirk 🚀 - and I mean this is as the utmost compliment! 😃
Brett is one of the most authentic leader i’ve ever worked for. He brings his full self everyday
so... needed to shift to be more focused on what your customers wanted?
it buffered once for me, but a quick refresh it was back on track
The stream is stalling periodically for me
it stalled for me as well. I had to close the browser and go back in
FYI: these are Vimeo streams. Should be pretty solid, resilient…. I had to refresh once.
Fascinated on Merchants vs. Operations divide (with tech as a complete afterthought on sidelines)— so familiar to Dev vs. Ops. From @lucas.rettig
What memories — pictures from circa March 2020, could be any retailer in middle of COVID pandemic.
Especially pants. Shirts were flying off the racks at Walmart. Not pants for some reason.
This is great.. a long standing COVID joke, backed up by a bit of reality in retail sales. :)
@genek - I'm having an opposite challenge with Dev/engineering being super aggressive
Dev/Engineering trying to own everything and run everything. They had become blockers on several fronts. Their leadership effectively became bullies
So, moving from “we are also the business” to “we are the only business”?
they did not value the input from their customers in Infrastructure and SAP. Took minimal inputs, went with an 'Agile' Fail fast approach - but arrogantly
I’ve frequently reminded peers, “fall in love with the business problem, not the technical problem.” This sounds like they fell in love with the wrong problem.
that's a tough situation - hopefully you can get people aligned on the business problem and some shared outcomes
It's working, just need to build trust with the remaining team - which is harder remotely, but learning from smart people like the ones here
I’d love to chat more about this at the bar later.
Of course - ping me when you're free. I'm in the UK but happy to stay up late.
Can you talk a little more on P&T doing deliveries, and how did you change that ? @lucas.rettig
basically Product and Tech were being ’handed” specific timelines and scope to execute
some of these stories are how we are chipping away
This is one of the neatest parts of the story — @lucas.rettig describes how the ways of working pioneered in FreshOps put them on the vanguard of the routines needed to respond quickly to COVID. Did I get that right?
Huge Kudos to the Business Owners embracing these practices… we had some awesome leaders!
WAM and WOM vs. DAM Weekly Action Meeting & Weekly Operations Meetings ===> Daily Action Meeting
How did you manage the 50 day learning program for the employees and measure the outcome?
i’d say its less formal… continually learning is an expectation so leaders are deliberate in asking and goal setting around what the team member wants to learn about and we allocate time and budget to make it happen
do you think you would have ever got to this way of working if it wasn't for Covid?
great question… there were signs and progress, like with FreshOps, but this was the ultimate accelerator
“Stand-up at scale” - I’m real curious how you all managed to keep this organized to stay valuable. At scale I've seen these kinds of meetings creep away from the original intent.
I like that you speak of guests rather than customers. Has this always been this way or did it involve a cultural shift lately or some time ago?
thats been a core of Target for a long time!
Love it. It sadly has been some time since i made it to a Target.
Incidentally, the WAM/WOM => DAM sounds so similar to me to the Team of Teams story — the daily enterprise scale daily action meeting. @lucas.rettig You’ll hear Admiral John Richardson and me talk about your amazing story this afternoon.
Curious to understand how the org was manifest at the ground level - at a squad level, how was work getting done? Were the category managers also the product managers? where does product sit? is that part of tech?
Product rolls into the Business Units, Tech rolls into the CIO
choose progress over perfection - love it!
What kinds of feedback loops fed this journey? Was it the engineers? customers? leadership?...all?
It’s astonishing to me that this is the culture for not technology, but all of Target — can you confirm, @lucas.rettig?
yes… this is our Enterprise culture framework
Love hearing the continued Target journey
Lin Manuel Miranda (Hamilton, etc.): “Remembering why we’re on the journey fortifies the journey itself.”
Is anyone else seeing echos of the early James T Kirk, or is it just me?
Command colors, and is that a unicorn? (I must have missed something above)
SVP Digital: P&L responsibility for all digital channels, 20% of all revenue.
Progress over perfection is a game changer
as promised: There is a networking event today at 12:20pm Central time during the break. We have a host of Tech leaders across Target and a portal with all of our open positions. I will post the Zoom link and details into both the #hiring channel and the #target-networking channel leading into the break. Please go out and join the #target-networking channel and start a conversation with some Target folks!
Rapid Scale doesn't impress me much. What does impress me is that Target continues to play the long game in the transformation space. Great work as always.
👏 great talk from the Target 🎯 team!
Thank you! Amazing start to the conference! DAM, WAM, BAM to care, grow, win.. progress over perfection!
We now welcome @marc.brouillard and @denis.skinner presenting: Journey to Digitopia: The Government of Canada's Quest to Modernize Services
Oooooh, the stories I'm gonna get from DOES again.
"Person to Person rather than PowerPoint to PowerPoint"... well stated
Please welcome the amazing team of the Government of Canada: @denis.skinner and @2marcboudreau!!! (20K tech workers, nearly 300K civil servants!)
@brett.craig loved how your teams oriented around the value chain and business capabilities! How did your teams organize around that chain? What parts were they responsible for?
Our org structure wasnt changed per say. We made sure our entire MerchCapabilities org understood the Value Chain and where they had influence in it, if that makes sense
Thanks Luke. Even if it didn't change, how did you "locate" teams in that chain? Did they own a value stage or a set of business capabilities tied to them?
Curious too if they owned services and experiences or just one or the other
I love the empowerment of team ownership while still being aligned to outcomes, and super interested in how you organized and made decisions around that chain
Teams do own ‘all of their users’ meaning they own the services and experiences. Locating teams is honestly just a conversation between Product and Tech leaders (mainly Product Managers and Tech Leads)
Thanks for the additional context! So just to make sure I'm tracking - teams own and evolve both APIs and experiences, and they may evolve different parts of the value chain through conversation with leaders (setting objectives)?
Thanks! One last question if that's ok - do the tech assets (sites, services, etc.) that "realize" those capabilities / value stages change hands as objectives and focus areas change?
Oops, sorry, @marc.brouillard!!! Autocomplete of “Marc B” wasn’t sufficient! 😆
This is mindblowing. Can't wait... How often does Canada deploy? What's the CFR? 😉
I was talking about you with @rshoup - sharing the Dojo story and how amazing it was to watch you in action!
I got scheduled for an exec leadership course all week as well, so I'll have to watch all the videos in the evening. Can't wait for this one, though :-).
@rshoup - i’m always game for a personalized Slack thread discussion when you do!
“We’re dealing with rules that are over 150 years old… made during the age of weaving looms.” So good. @marc.brouillard
How do you over the challenges when dealing with legacy Vs latest systems? @marc.brouillard
“Enable every users to access every service they need, any time, from any device. Make it easy for Canadians to find and use government services; no more paper forms and faxes; no more hard to find services; no more hold times; no more complicated logins”. (What a vision!!) — @marc.brouillard
12 years ago, who would have thought Governments would be talking about DevOps!
You'd expect governments to be a lot more behind... thankfully no.
I wonder how strong resistance to change is in the gorvernment? How do you overcome it? @denis.skinner377
I wonder how strong resistance to change is in the gorvernment? How do you overcome it? @denis.skinner377
It's an interesting challenge. We have senior officials saying, why aren't my teams innovating? And we have grassroots teams saying, why is management in the way?
We've created an award system so we can highlight those are demonstrating alignment to our vision.
And it gets the leadership across departments (ministries) to have an opportunity to see what's bubbling up
@topo.pal we still have a long way to go! I've found that the first step is the biggest, and once ppl see the benefits, it starts to build momentum
@marc.brouillard how are you balancing delivery with security policies?
It's been very interesting seeing the use of DevOps principles in military and government
What an audacious and breathtaking North Star — this is such a beautiful and mind-expanding presentation, @marc.brouillard and @denis.skinner.
@topo.pal - it's interesting how many of these journeys relay on strong visionary leaders, I long for the day when these things just need good leaders because folks actually get it
Hmm... Phoenix Projects can only succeed?
we talk about customers/users all the time. still working on more inclusive language to get away from the us vs them mentality
Absolutely. Users: citizens, permanent residents, visitors, internal employees who use our systems, etc
Cool. Thanks. I guess the optionality is more ambiguous in the government context - users of a system in software typically have a choice in using that system or something else (generally speaking). Some recent feedback I gave to an engineer who was starting to use customer for communications: I'm a proponent that using customer instead of user implies more trust and value in the relationship.
@bryan.finster486 We're trying to do that with DevSecOps, critical that we incorporate Security, Privacy, Accessibility and Official Languages by design from the start, and on an ongoing basis...
Love to compare notes on this and see how Platform 1 compares.
@brian.m.smith something called sing-in Canada - Coming soon! (if interested, look up the Pan Canadian Trust Framework)
11 stars, man I would want to move Canada for that... working on renewing my kids passport now and it is a pain!
Check out our Government of Canada Digital Standards: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-government/government-canada-digital-standards.html
“What would an 11 star government service look like: imagine you’re booking travel on a site — what if that site could tell you your passport would expire, and all the relevant government agencies would contact you to help renew it.” — @marc.brouillard OMG. @mvk842 and I had this problem years ago, which led to forms, trips to post office, etc. What a beautiful vision!
Last year, someone recommended A Civic Technologists Practice Guide by Cyd Harrell and it has some similar learnings from the books and articles she referenced.
@marc.brouillard telling beautiful story of a military veteran being notified of a pension, which he was able to claim, which made a meaningful difference to his life. 🙏
It started with an interaction with @denis.skinner on Twitter, and I got to learn about their amazing work — I was so blown away that I told him and @marc.brouillard how honored I’d be if they could share their story. And I was so delighted and honored that they said yes!
@ramu_vemula we know we still have a lot of work to do to move to a digital culture, this is a great forum to exchange ideas!
Awesome !! Hearing DevOps from Government and participating in summit tells how passionate you are. Thank you !!
@marc.brouillard: “from DevOps Enterprise Summit: almost cliche now: what used to take months or years could now take weeks.” 😆
Watching Handmaids Tale has given me a new respect for Canada. Go Canada
Sounds like the crisis was an enabler for rapid digital transformation
Here's tthe well known joke: who was the key enabler of your digital tranformation: CEO, CTO, CDO, Covid, ... you know the answer
We should get the IRS to attend this conference lol
Another amazing story of how organizations mobilized in the face of the COVID pandemic.
You'll see aligned and misaligned behaviours. And check out the references... our favs.
Hopefully organizations won't need a crisis to innovate rapidly in the future
Fair, but a crisis has a way of uniting people to a common goal which is hard to replicate in the absence of a crisis.
Reminds me of UK HMRC story: “We went from one of most despised government agencies to the most loved. 🙂 Kudos to Canada team for pulling this off — in the US, this was handled by the banking system.
If you wanna take a look at one Canadian initiative, take a look at our Digital Dojo, modeled on Devops Dojos but adapted for the government of Canada: https://dts-stn.github.io/digital-dojo/home/ We are a very small crew of folks hoping to help other public servants with their learning journey 🙂 A few of us are hanging out in this chat if you feel like chatting!
We have a partnership slack workspace we are leveraging - GCDevOpsLeague (https://gcdevopsleague.slack.com/)
Yay! Thanks for sharing @brittany.hurley ! Feel free to message me about the dojo if you have questions 🙂 I'm the dojo manager.
@genek - I have to say their online experience is fabulous, although at the cost of their telephony experience. That has degraded horribly, still lovely people - once you get to them
Do you think transformation at this scale and pace would have been possible without the push from the pandemic @marc.brouillard... is there a way to keep the momentum without it?
They forked the UK GDS notifications system, to accommodate multilingual issues, etc. Running in Kubernetes, instead of Cloud Foundry.
Did you say you changed onboarding practices after Covid? What are things you changed that made some improvements?
“Notify is a resounding success; used by 150 services, main source of reliable information to Canadians about pandemic, including benefits.” — @denis.skinner 🙏
Ongoing. We're not done yet. And really, until we are fully a learning organization, impossible to be done...
CDS, which is the primary focus of discussion, is a unicorn that is able to work outside of some of the rules placed on the rest of the GC - so theres a lot of work to go to replicate that work throughout the rest of government. -Thoughts from inside a Dept 🙂
Remembering something close from the Agile Manifesto but this just packs lot more punch 😄
Assuming @genek has reviewed these previously, he could already have a GeneBot preloaded with the quotes he likes to deliver in a timely way, automatically....
There is lots of truth to this…. So many nuggets of wisdom that I’m so excited that people will get to hear!
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/arrivecan.html
“ArriveCAN: boasts 4.6 stars on App Store: 75K reviews…. Not bad for a government app, I might say!” 😆 — @denis.skinner
Much higher than other tech apps out there...way to go @denis.skinner377 @marc.brouillard
Would any government be willing to go that far? 😄
It's part of going discussions at the most senior levels (heads of ministries).
The Pointless Official Acronyms or the POAs
This has been a challenge as we move back to day-to-day, the legacy mindset is quickly returning
@marc.brouillard I work w/ Dwayne in ESDC trying to push DevOps. It would be super helpful to us if we could circulate this video or a similar message to the whole of ESDC...
“Traditional methods” == Artisanal Development. Good for soap at a craft fair. Not for product development.
I’m always in awe that the Team of Teams book seems so familiar and is so full of useful patterns for this community — was so great to have @david627 and @jessica.reif talk twice last year. The Lynchpin Liaison Officer seems like an important pattern, as noted by @marc.brouillard. What a neat example of it, sending them “deep into the bureaucracy!”
@marc.brouillard what is the boots on the ground version of the person for a gov't LNO?
Will this create endless lines of DevOps immigrants at the borders of Canada?
Everyone wants to live in a country where the government is actually trying.
Love the term...evokes so much curiosity
Basically, start with a blue ocean/blank slate mindset and then look at ways to get there. This is the journey.
ACCELERATE! I bought 250 copies to give out right before the pandemic! There is still about 75 sitting at my desk! Love the book!
Thanks Jordi ... I can't get to them!!! 🙂 At least not until 2022. I should have said they are "stuck" at my desk in the office!
the US government listens to all talks, this talk is currently in a Kafka queue waiting to be ingested!
"I seek asylum from ITIL"
CDS, which is the primary focus of discussion, is a unicorn area of the Government of Canada that is able to work outside of some of the rules placed on the rest of the GC - so there's a lot of work to go to replicate that work throughout the rest of government. -Thoughts from inside a Dept 🙂 ❤️
We're closer to the beginning than the end when we look across all gov organizations.
They say "Foreign policy is the best kind of domestic policy." So, I guess sharing the success stories externally will initiate change internally... even in governments 😄
100% - we're big supporters of CDS creating pathways, and evolving their role to advocating for change within Depts. The more we talk, the more leverage and content we have to reference in depts to help fight our causes
We love the work being done in CDS but have run into challenges when trying to replicate this work across larger departments
"rigorous challenges that require hacking away at" Did he just ask hackers to go after the Canadian government? Or just unfortunate phrasing
What's your thoughts on innovative whitespace time? @denis.skinner377 @marc.brouillard
That was the idea with the Digitopia work. More broadly, everyone needs learning time. 20% time is the dream.
“only possible when goals are clear and focused.” — @marc.brouillard Like @lucas.rettig talked about: “our goal was simple: improve gross margins, without sacrificing sales. then they said, go make it happen.”
So hard to move away from the traditional when money comes in with so many constraints
Other conferences - after 2 plenary talks - I need more coffee. This conference - after 2 plenary talks - whats the next talk going to be?? wow
True! But since it's a virtual conference, I can also take it with me to get more coffee :)
Full ownership, multi-disciplined teams ➕
@marc.brouillard and @denis.skinner377 one idea we had was to identify key resources internal to each department who can be given the trust and autonomy to innovate. There are too many blockers and barriers faced daily by the more innovative people and we need to empower them by giving them the freedom to succeed.
Trusted partners in each dept would go along way, especially with security challenges
Services that support IT teams like procurement, Human Resources need to mature at the same time as us if we are to succeed. Simple things like being enabled to experiment with tooling is a challenge. Trying to buy a 4 month subscription to a new tool is so complex and requires so much paperwork and gates people give up.
Full Stack Build It/Run it accountability
Thank you so much for that beautiful and inspiring presentation, @denis.skinner377 and @marc.brouillard!! ❤️
Next up, please welcome @christina_yakomin and @rdaitzman from Vanguard who will present on Iterative Enterprise SRE Transformation.
Thank you @marc.brouillard @denis.skinner377 and everyone whose here from government of canada
Up next from Vanguard: Please welcome @christina_yakomin and @rdaitzman
Awesome to see DevOps principles liberating such energy and talent in Canada
❤️ Vanguard. Thank you for low-cost high-performing index funds 🙂
great point at the end when thinking about the Tech Debt that would left when next generation replaces me... I would be leaving items behind that could stop innovation opportunity. never thought of it that way... only thought how it impacts me now...
PS: I loved the NPR Planet Money on Vanguard Founder John Bogle: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/01/23/688018907/episode-688-brilliant-vs-boring
“Observability… there’s wasn’t any… no positive affirmation that systems were running correctly. we only knew when alerts fire [when things went wrong]” “They were centrally owned — you had to open up a ticket.” So good, @christina_yakomin!!!
@christina_yakomin, @rdaitzman We want to start with a SRE team featuring a couple of value streams. Do you have some good ideas on who do I get a grip on how many people we might need in our SRE team?
I describe our SRE operating model later in the talk, but it really depends on how the organization is structured and how large it is. In general, I'd recommend keeping that SRE activity as close to the product teams as possible, embedded if you can. but you may need some centralization as a scalability play and to facilitate knowledge sharing and communication of standards.
I’d also add it depends on what base/culture you’re starting from. Even with the scenario @christina_yakomin is describing, I was our sole central SRE for several months a few years ago as we got started!
Are you up for a short direct call? That would be easier to describe it in length.
Connect with us on LinkedIn! We include our contact info on the last slide, and I'd be happy to co-ordinate some post-conference conversations on these topics.
Yeah, each team should on the Monitoring and alerts, not just for their on consumption, but to help other teams know your status .... we rolled out Datadog to solve that issue...
Loving the stories of at SCALE challenges for large organizations The Cloud journey and at scale DevOps principles need some structure as well. We started an SRE team as well as a result to engage in a Engineering Resiliency focus.
Excited for you amazing talk, also about massive scale, on Day 3!!
Thanks Gene and the conference seems to be going very well so congrats!!!
I loved going from 3 days to sub-second for a change control at WM. 😄
Lift and shift the private cloud... 🤯
@christina_yakomin how long do you estimate it took to "break down the monolith"?
I'll let you know when we finish! At least 7 years. This journey is a work in progress, but we're aiming for 90% cloud-native (non-monolith) by 2024.
“We made the interesting decision to lift/shift the PaaS into the cloud” — made life easier for the app teams, but…. “I was on that team that migrated this thing into the cloud that didn’t want to be in the cloud.” — @christina_yakomin 😆
yes!! We talk about this ALL the time internally. The teams working on our core trading systems in particular have been leveraging the strangler pattern
If I got a dollar every time strangler pattern comes up at DOES...
I’d like to see more stories about completing and the methodology they used.
This could definitely be its own talk! It was definitely a journey to create our “cloud business case”! And it evolved as our understanding evolved as well!
Factors such as ability to innovate, role in resilient architectures, and agility were major factors. I’d definitely be happy to elaborate more as well if you would like to connect!
Tag a reaction please if your seeing Cloud migrations drive up expense due to "Going the wrong way"
[when things catch on fire during a fire drill] “it’s always a great way to learn!” @christina_yakomin says with a big smile.
If I had a dollar for every time I used a quote from Peggy Carter’s eulogy scene with my teams…. Bonus points to anyone if you know what I’m talking about!
I’m dying to ask: what’s one of the quotes? I think I may have heard it, but didn’t make connection!!!
Compromise where you can. And where you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right, even if the whole world is telling you to move. It is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye and say, ‘No. You move.’
SO important as we’re working on building out a common technology platform that will work across our lines of business
It originally comes from a Captain America comic.. which knowledge of outs me as an enormous nerd lol
As soon as you pass that first elasticity test, it make the move to public cloud worth it!
“recurring instability during high traffic times in our internally run CI/CD service…. it wiped out all logs when it happened during peak dev teams.”
@christina_yakomin Can you clarify the difference between chaos game day vs chaos fire drill?
My notes: Chaos GameDay -> hypothesis that X problem is mitigated by our current resilience measures. Let's test that out. Chaos Fire Drill -> hypothesis that X problem is NOT mitigated, and we want to test our observability by letting engineers find the problem and solve it
Chaos Game Day - "If I inject this failure, then I expect that my system will be able to handle it, because of the resilience mechanisms I've built in to degrade gracefully, failover, or auto-heal" Chaos Fire Drill - "If I inject this failure, then the system will break in a client-impacting way, and my alerts will let me know, my observability tooling will help me troubleshoot, and my engineers will know what to do to fix the problem" Obviously, stick to non-prod for those fire drills. Game days test the technology. Fire Drills test the incident response!
Great breakdown of Chaos experiments - not only do you learn about system behavior, but also use it as an aid for creating run books, gauging response times - and in general, training and setting up a SRE org
yes, but you would be surprised at how many just shot and then aim, no method to the madness.
Wonder how you're solving tracing and granularity in observability using Lambda and Fargate
@christina_yakomin can you please clarify the variety of testing environments you guys are using in CI/CD? for example, the number of machines with different or same hardware/software configuration .
Our build/deploy agents are in the cloud and we can spin up additional build/deploy agents for CI/CD tasks as needed. Extremely scalable. At times, we have dozens or even hundreds with the same configuration. in terms of test environments, in the cloud we use a less stable "engineering," a more stable pre-prod "test" which is similar to staging, and then "production." Though teams may deploy multiple copies of their infrastructure/apps in the different environments. For example, a specific copy for performance testing.
I did a talk at the last DevOps Enterprise London about a dashboard we built, metrics used and why.
join our session on Thursday to get an overview of some of the metrics we have build into our BVSSH Dashboards
@bryan.finster486 its at 5:20pm BST on track 1
@bryan.finster486 I am just catching up on your session around DORA metrics from yesterday, some great overlaps with what we have seen at Nationwide which we will cover in our session too
Awesome! If we all yell the same thing, we can make everything better.
“devs didn’t have to submit tickets [to see what they were doing]” So good!
It’s like jazz, sometimes it’s about the space you DONT use!
@christina_yakomin Great info! Loving this talk. Great job. 💯
Yeah, signal to noise ratio is VERY important.
@christina_yakomin Alert fatigue very common! A lot of time necessary to tune, but the outcomes (less work on nights and weekends) is well worth it.
I so rarely see teams with not enough alerts. I see teams with too many alerts all the time. I was once on a team where I'd wake up in the morning and see that no alerts had come in and assume our alerts were broken. That's.. NOT GOOD.
We're working hard on caring culture at American. Feeling front-line versus technology pain is a big part of this, and it results in more caring toward this type of tuning as top priority.
It's a multi-year commitment and I think covid is really moving this forward with such a reduction in staff force.
Oh this is getting so good! Using truckloads of logs just to raise a silly alert! 🙂
Alert fatigue drives the caring people away.
Couldn’t agree more. Particularly where it’s false positives that they’re responding to.
Doesn't have to be false. If the alert is for a disk running out next week and you wake up to it... I call them distasteful positives.
@christina_yakomin curious to learn what toolset you used in your org to solve the problems
Our toolset is changing all the time, but I mention a few in this talk. AWS for compute, CloudWatch for metrics, Honeycomb for tracing. Our chaos engineering platform is homegrown, and I've given talks on this in the past. Search for "Cloudy with a chance of chaos" and my name on youtube!
there is a place for everything, and everything in it's place: logs, metrics, tracing 🙂
I ask the team to justify the need for monitors if they get muted for infinity... and say if they have it muted it is the same as not having alarm in the first place.
I'm guilty as charged used to autofile my alerts... (no not the deleted folder) :)
YES. The CASE methodology for alert construction is my alert review bible. Search for Cory Watson's talk on this for more info. It's amazing, and a core component of our SRE training curriculum.
Speaking of confessions: (I log a lot of things into a Slack channel. Surely, I’m not the only person who does this, right?). 😆
@genek we did have a general alert channel, then we saw that it was just getting overlooked and not used, we moved the alters to other channels like Account Owners for the Client delivery.. they care about every alert and will not let go if there is an alert firing...
Great point on putting where metrics, traces and logs belong. While being able to use any of these for other purposes can be useful, finding one tool for everything usually ends up with a suboptimal solution and almost always a high cost.
As the monitoring platform team, we turn off monitor configurations that have been down for 4w. If they can’t be bothered to respond (e.g. are already in ignore-mode), we just cleanup by reducing the monitoring load.
moving away from the up/down binary to other more useful views of availability is terrific. reminds me of richard cook’s paper from 20+ years ago: https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5
@christina_yakomin were your SLOs typically measured end-to-end, or did your group have several layers based on individual services?
Both. From a client experience perspective, we need to know the health end-to-end experience. But I also encourage product teams to have individualized SLOs for their own microservices. Even if you're a downstream API being consumed by others, those consumers ARE your clients, and you should know what level of service you are offering them!
1I am seeing a trend a the last few places that I have worked and rolled out SRE, it something that is done (formalized) after a foundation of DevOps is in place... Have others seen this pattern?
Did you find the negotiation of SLIs/SLOs difficult with customers and stakeholders? IME this has been challenging where folks historically think in the up/down manner. Any insight you can share on that?
It's always challenging to shift to a new mindset, but in general, our business product owners are extremely excited to start having conversations about how to compare work spent delivering features with work spent making systems more resilient in prioritization discussions.
I haven't found a way to approach it with customers, although that is as much a function of Account executives and Managed Services people not being on board or being able to articulate the value proposition
we've recently updated our product owner training program to include a 2-hour segment on SRE that heavily focuses on SLI/SLO methodology and error budgets
@christina_yakomin What role within your company handles on-call (24/7) alerts? Product team engineers or SREs?
product team engineers. if an SRE is dedicated within a team (only works on non-functional requirements, rather than features) they don't get stuck with the on-call by themselves, but they would be a part of the regular on-call rotation like the other members of the team. higher level SREs (leads and champions) wouldn't be on-call. they'd be in the escalation path, just like a SME or Architect might be.
"responsible for supporting Vanguard's _ Line Of Business" is so refreshing, compared to "responsible for supporting the IT systems for Vanguard's _ Line of Business"
It’s definitely been a transformation for us! We’re lucky to have some great business partners
I would even go as far as to say "responsible to make the business possible ..." (see my talk on unlocking cloud-based business opportunities with @klaus.baumgartner from Siemens Digital Buildings in track 3 right after the break). I think one of the biggest challenges is the mindset change to see IT not as a cost factor, but as an integral asset of the product / service!
@peter.fassbinder yes - it would be interesting to break that support down into components that focus on incubation vs sustainment
and to discuss whether or not those two buckets should be compartmentalized
@rdaitzman supports Vanguard Financial Advisor Services who help people with retirement; these represent 50% of Assets Under Management. Now that entire industry shifting to reducing fees, this is an increasingly important line of business – “the ball is in our court” to develop this business. So good!
“how we’re doing this represents the future of how we build software for our entire business”
Tooling and POC work is something I have DevOps (Automation) team and SRE teams review where I work, and we also think about not just what the tool does but how it can be operationalized.
I'm curious how folks have gotten engineering to be willing to make the jump from "no alerts, support will take care of that" to "alerts are good"
It's amazing how much better the alerts and runbooks get when you take away the safety net and make the product team engineers accountable for the on-call prod support
Yes - we have moved to this model over the past couple of years. Significant cultural shift across many teams.
Like I'm the PM, I want SLO alerts so that we know when the customer is impacted. But I find engineers are worried about adding alerts to their life as a thing that might put them off ballance or intrup their work/life ballance.
Throw carrots at them. Give them ownership and explain that ownership means owning the outcomes.
It's easier if you have a Product Team model, the matrixed model is a bit more difficult
It requires pride of ownership and caring about the customer to care about quality.
If you have a matrix model, that’s the first constraint.
We've seen the benefits from this sort of mindset shift already. When teams are empowered with ownership the response to incidents is so much better and the quality and maintainability of products improves as a part of the process.
Going to a matrix model was a huge disruptor (jn a bad way) at Walmart. We called it “Project Reaper”. It did a great job of infantilizing dev teams and removing operational experience. Took years to recover.
That’s expected. I even have a diagram to explain why. 😄
I'm starting from a decent place where we have teams that have engineers, test, product SMEs, and PMs working together. Still cracking long term ownership
that's great... having an operations/service enablement team helps to instill the observability knowledge
I'd be interested in more discussion of this topic during the networking time.
I love how @rdaitzman used Failure and Effects Analysis says: “with business colleagues, what are the things that go wrong? when it happens, what responses should happen?” What an amazing way to co-own all the outcomes. The catastrophic Phoenix Project failure scene would look very very different were this done!
“Sit this one out”… I do this to my team all the time. Makes them stronger.
It was easier said than done by members of our team to stay removed - including myself!
@cornelia — here’s an amazing reference to taking the Brents out of rotation during fire drills. cc @tapabrata.pal
Love that - get the senior engineers to sit it out
@kimberly_h_johnson @christopher_d_porter this is one of those talks that I want my peer Directors to see, going to have to share this out to wider audience ... Thank you for brining this to the community!
Loved this talk! Christina and Robbie did a great job!
So what is your training;delivery ratio?
Currently, we have a 35-hour training curriculum that we provide for Site Reliability Engineering, and we provide some recommendations for how to self-pace that material. Bang it out in a week, do it in 6 weeks, or maybe even 3 months, depending on how busy the team might be at the time.
In general, I'm a big fan of 20% time, using 20% of the week for personal, professional, and technical development. That should include things like networking, but also training!
Love the training first (left) and the balance attention… (hard to introduce that where it hasn’t been a practice previously…)
@christina_yakomin would love to dive more into how you balance standardization vs customization.
I love the use of "staffing" as opposed to "resourcing" as the latter can seem dehumanizing.
@me1342 ☝️ makes me think of you and your work!
Someone demoed a VSM tool to me this week that had “Human Resources” instead of “Actors” to track the number of people required for the step. I gave some direct feedback. 😄
How are people dealing with Fully Observable vs Alert Fatigue and Dashboard Clutter?
CASE-based alerting and SLI/SLOs are big factors here, make sure you’re alerting only when your customers are feeling pain!
Lots of human issues still remain... and the budgets, staffing and demonstrating impact.
Vanguard is hiring! If I remember @christina_yakomin correctly, they have over 500 openings!!! Thank you for that amazing talk, @rdaitzman and @christina_yakomin!!!
yes!! so much growth happening, especially in Malvern, PA, and Charlotte, NC, and our brand new location in Dallas, TX!
@rdaitzman & @christina_yakomin nice job representing Vanguard! Great to see fellow Crew at DOES.
Next up, @christopher_d_porter and @kimberly_h_johnson from Fannie Mae!
Up next: we learn from the amazing @kimberly_h_johnson (COO Fannie Mae) and @christopher_d_porter (CISO Fannie Mae)
($4 trillion balance sheet at Fannie Mae, comprised primarily of 30 year mortgages.)
Great talk @christina_yakomin and @rdaitzman, way to represent some of the great things going on here at Vanguard.
Thanks @christina_yakomin and @rdaitzman - This talk is on my re-watch list
I'm in awe of how much it seems Fannie Mae has done from a DevOps standpoint in such a short period of time! Love the presentation last year!
We still have quite a bit left on the journey, but we’ve made really great strides.
would be great to see various timelines from a few industries on their journey to date with key moments pinned for discussion
@christopher_d_porter: “when I bring something to our team that I want to share, almost every time, @kimberly_h_johnson has already read it / heard it / etc.” 😆
“CISOs in general don’t get to tell a lot of good news.” 🙂 — @christopher_d_porter
I'm embarrassed Gene ... who was the Security guy from Phoenix Project again??? What a deep character!
“I appreciate that @kimberly_h_johnson is tough, but fair” — @christopher_d_porter
Yes! Winning the business goals! Not Resume Driven Development
all of this ❤️ “can’t win without it”
“Psychological safety has to underpin everything; in business, it’s about winning, and that requires doing difficult things and things that are new; to do unique and innovative things, you have to be able to put yourself out there, take risks, not be afraid to fail. That’s why psychological safety is so important.” — @kimberly_h_johnson
Very supportive of this focus; it is amazing that it has taken us this long to change the narrative. I guess the impacts of Taylorism are harder to break through than we expected.
"psychological safety.. I don't think you can win without it." this vs perception that she's just "being nice."
In the Risk realm, it’s also hard for folks to raise their hand when they see/hear about a risk. For many teams, new risks means unplanned work. It takes a different culture to switch that perspective.
I loved this perspective and quote. On the surface this seems like such an easy thing to say, but in practice is incredibly difficult to consistently demonstrate as individuals, teams, or organizations. Seeing the top down commitment to building and maintaining psychological safety is inspiring! Great stuff - thanks for sharing! Also, big fan of Adam Grant’s work as well, appreciated the subtle hat tip there!
In my talk today I will talk about the "circle of faith" necessary for an organization to fulfill its commitments. Building trust on an organizational level is a powerful enterprise, but that trust can be broken by symbolic interactions that undercut collective efficacy. Actions can nullify trust necessary for great enterprises, by leaders who fail to understand what they are hurting.
"You have to learn something more than you do today!" --- I am always asking people who have been with the company for a long time... How did you stay up to date in order to dictate our next move?
“To put your team in a position in a place where they can win, you need to create space so they don’t worry about humiliation. “For years, our retrospectives didn’t feel like they were working; we worked to make it more blameless. No more people standing up in front of room, explaining how things didn’t go right; We’ve taken shame and humiliation out of the process, so they can tell stories and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” — @kimberly_h_johnson
When I "retire", I want to know I left the organization better than I found it.
New term: Incubation Culture • Be willing to experiment. A lot. • Psychological Safety also happens when we decouple ourselves from outcomes and focus on the team. It's not about me and what I do/n't know; it's about the team's ability to learn collectively. ◦ At Novell we used to talk about "changing our occurring" • s/failed/disproven/ • "You can get a lot more done if you don't care that much about who takes the credit." • "Work is a team sport" - KHJ No pride of authorship - just inspired by what @kimberly_h_johnson is saying
You getting any good outdoors time in? I remember you liked hiking & camping... do I have that right?
You remembered! I am an adventure junkie... even with the pandemic... just back from the beach followed by hiking in PA.
sleeping is a strength, by the new definition • I would do it all day at the exclusion of everything else • It brings me great joy
Always have but when I was with Deloitte Federal, I didn't truncate it. My fam and friends have always just called me Trac instead of the extra syllable... Tracy
She's fine, thanks! My son is well, too. She graduated Hollins U. in '20 and had her Year Of Nothing, and is starting a job next week. My son got his A.S. from NVCC and has transferred into GMU for their Computer Game Design program.
"psychological safety.. I don't think you can win without it." this vs perception that she's just "being nice."
“You can’t make good decisions if you don’t have good information; and you can’t get good information if people are afraid to share it with you.” — @christopher_d_porter
• build a good team • bring out the best in the team • create environment so that the sum of parts work as more than the whole
Psychological Safely, like, trust, is super hard to build and can easily be broken.... how do you operationally develop and protect PS?
“The five dysfunctions of a team” by Patrick Lencioni is a good read ;)
^^^ @ronwestrum will be talking about how great cultures are difficult to rebuild when broken tomorrow.
I’m a big believer of authentic leaders who talk more honestly about their challenges. If the leaders are always perfect, everyone else will also be pressured to appear flawless as well.
It starts with the understanding that it is more beneficial and courageous to be real. Brene Brown’s “Dare to Lead” is quite good. https://daretolead.brenebrown.com/
“having high expectations of someone is a gift” — @kimberly_h_johnson
There's a quote by Alan Cohen that @kimberly_h_johnson’s comments about continuous learning made me think of: “To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny.”
You hold others to a high standard when you hold yourself to even higher standards.
Psychological Safety is beyond the Carrot and Stick approach - it encouraging other to do the best with information they have.
“Just believing in people makes them better.” — @kimberly_h_johnson
Great callout from @kimberly_h_johnson to how people are perceived influences their capabilities https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform
Great callout from @kimberly_h_johnson to how people are perceived influences their capabilities https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform
“But just how do expectations influence IQ? As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers’ moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more. “It’s not magic, it’s not mental telepathy,” Rosenthal says. “It’s very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day.”
I’d love to discuss the scale issue @kimberly_h_johnson to share some of what we did at Walmart
I’d love to discuss the scale issue @kimberly_h_johnson to share some of what we did at Walmart
It is as simple as reaching every single one 😄
1. Have everyone understand the reasons 2. ??? 3. PROFIT
It’s already paying dividends and is getting great feedback from the Dev orgs
@kimberly_h_johnson any experience to share on gaining balance for team members that might have more psychological safety on a team other than the one they are currently on?
Not @kimberly_h_johnson. But from what I’ve seen and experienced so far is that team psych safety is better than cross-functional/matrixed psych safety. It’s the cross organizational work that’s more difficult to build.
I think @christopher_d_porter is also looking for people who have been grappling with successfully balancing “dev productivity and freedom” and security risks (e.g., ransomeware)
security that is done well so that it's there but doesn't impede productivity - that's tough!
Thank you, @kimberly_h_johnson and @christopher_d_porter for helping teach us about leadership!!
The Gather Bar is a great place to get started and hangout to meet other people in Gather!
oh, that background noise may have been coming from Gather. What does holding down Z do? How do I "Exit gather without closing it?
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@tbannon Wide, rapidly changing datasets and managing test data sets can be such a full-time job that it is easily passed over as too complex. Some companies even use what I'll call "data deployment trains" with a schedule for how the data will look at a certain time of day/week/month (yikes!). How do we make this easier to digest for all teams? For some this is too daunting to go about the challenge of coming up with a truly consistent data picture. Where should responsibility lie with fewer team members per team? Would be interested in your thoughts.
It depends on the size of the organization and the complexity of the data universe. For one of my largest clients, there is a test data management group much like you mention ... though we didn't call it a data train.
Some can be via self-service; allowing teams to create filters and save the description of data they need. Then allow them to provision/re-provision on demand.
@andrew.machen - I'd also say that you MUST understand your organization's data; test data is a view of that universe.
Similar to any software engineering or DevSecOps conversation, the answer in part, depends on the context.
Thanks for the feedback. We certainly have many, many very talented people who understand data well, and many very talented engineers, and a lot of those skillsets intersect. The challenge is removing the mundane but vital from the day-to-day work with accuracy, and setting an accurate "just good enough" point for whatever we would choose to automate. In my experience, getting consensus for rapidly changing datasets is a herculean task in some areas.
By emoji reaction, how has the day been treating you all so far? (6 minutes until our next amazing speaker!)
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⚓ To start our afternoon plenary sessions, it's an honor to welcome @jmrichardson1 here to talk about Leadership Development in the U.S. Navy! ⚓
I’m so honored and delighted that our first afternoon speaker is Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations for the US Navy! @jmrichardson1
Gene talks so slow when I'm not at 2x-3x speed on podcasts 🙂
“pushing the mission to the furthest possible capable edge”
…this is such an amazing story to me — until you shared this story, it never occurred to me that the majority of actions were taken by a junior officer, the officer of the deck, someone likely in their 20s… did I understand that correctly, @jmrichardson1?
I love Navy stories
not on purpose, mind you. just a fact of our generational differences
This lack of deliberate leadership development... yes, this is pushing some buttons.
(in every interaction I have with @jmrichardson1, I grow more and more convinced that there is such a gap in leader development in our profession. Dr. @mik and I were talking about this last night. You’ll hear me ask @jmrichardson1 more about this in the second part.)
aspects of leadership development 1. competence 2. character 3. connections
1Does not help on missions in military leadership. (Still, important within the team, in full honesty.)
And I’ll do an exciting workshop on leader development with my colleague, CAPT Emily Bassett, tomorrow!
This is such an exciting opportunity! I’ll be there!! Thank you for helping teach this community!
May be will know tomorrow, zoom link or so. Any thoughts how workshop is conducted @alex ?
@alex @jmrichardson1 - ADM Richardson rattled off ________@sharemyslides and I didn't catch it all. Can you provide the link please?
@nasello.scott <mailto:BrinyDeep@SendYourSlides.com|BrinyDeep@SendYourSlides.com> with the subject “leaders”
One reason why sending leaders to this conference is so key @genek!
re: Character and Integrity. I haven't really heard many companies talk about training that...they just look for it to occur naturally.
The word integrity was very commonly discussed at my Navy command... not a week went by without hearing it.
@jmrichardson1 are there some basic assumptions and expectations about what values need to be “baked in” for each leader? such that you could actually develop them and help the right behaviors come out?
So many people wonder if they possess these skills, in my leadership experience. Perhaps a good place to focus in my coaching.
I've never had as solid of an understanding of mission as I did when I was in the Navy many moons ago!
how do you develop the "connection" aspect, such that you are confident the leader will reach back out and not try to be a hero?
The notion of Connections seems so important in this new way of working — from Target culture slide from this morning from @lucas.rettig and @brett.craig — It came up again in @abd3721 talk — is there an easy answer for why this might be more important in our profession now than, say 20 years ago?
This talk makes me miss the submarine force. The Navy gives you a tremendous amount of responsibility at a very young age.
It is sad that the militaries of the world are the keenest investors into leadership. But since they are doing a lot of it, a lot to learn.
They have to... volunteer force... turnover is high.
We have a conscript army where I come from... still important.
Agreed!!! Even if you stay in past initial commitment, you rotate to another command/role…. So your shelf life in a role is often 2-3 years … so the lesson is: ramp folks up quickly!
I don't see that much difference between the business world but still there is significantly less leadership development.
the business world does not do as nearly good of a job of developing their people… they often look to hire people that already have experience vice training them. In the nuclear navy, took about two years of training before the enlisted and officers went to the fleet for the first time…. I don’t know if any business that would invest that much training time in their folks before getting useful delivery out of them
Sometimes, the first leadership position requires or provides no training and past experience is enough to get further on the leadership track until Peter Principle kicks in.
Learning from military leaders is more real, cause they deal with real-life/combat decisions under pressure. Thank you Sir @jmrichardson1
Jeff - I think that we’d agree that there are some fundamental character traits, and then there are some that may be specific to the organization!
(As you might imagine: one of the problems of talking with @jmrichardson1 – I end up with more and more questions, and I’m so grateful that you’ve been so generous with your time, helping me learn!)
@jmrichardson1 - NSA focuses on mentorship in addition to leadership training. What about USN?
(Each conversation reveals more the vast experience and insights he has, which I think is so relevant to this community!)
The difference in the leadership models between different countries is very interesting. The local approach here in Finland is based on Transformative Leadership. So the corner stones in the local lingo being: inspiration, trust, learning and respect.
Yeah, there's more to the model, naturally, but I was mapping those in the back of my mind fluently. A good model usually has 3-5 categories 😄
Really appreciate @genek’s insightful questions
Same! the Navy Leader Development Framework talks about mentorship and then also advocacy - which goes beyond mentorship…
This framework has giving me so many insights, including the power of explicit written narrative
@jmrichardson1, do you think that David Marquette's model in Turn the Ship around is continuing to have a positive impact on cultural change in the Navy?
A lot of people have read that book. David is a good friend - we commanded submarines in Pearl Harbor at the same time. His was almost as good as mine! 😉
I'm a big believer of healthy competition being a driver of Connection.
@brian.m.smith - Inspections aside, all I know is that @jmrichardson1 is the real deal and everyone at IT Revolution could not be more honored to have him as a speaker at DOES.
Both David and I grew to like the description “best ever…”! It’s a great inspirational goal! I have a terrific story about that I can share later!
“vast majority of promotions is just doing the last job, but a little bigger” 😆 “but there are 5 jobs that are vast, non-linear jumps from the previous jobs”
I would be interested in Gene talking about how he has learned to ask good questions and how we can improve our skills in that area.
I would be interested in Gene talking about how he has learned to ask good questions and how we can improve our skills in that area.
Interesting — send me an email at <mailto:genek@itrevolution.com|genek@itrevolution.com>, and let’s see what we can make happen! 🙂
@kboth_does Wanna meet up sometime tomorrow during break/networking and discuss?
“as a first time leader, for the first time you’re worrying about your team — when you’re hungry, well, so is your team, so get them fed first.” “if you’re frustrated, almost guaranteed your team is even MORE frustrated than you!”
David Marquette's book Turn the Ship around resonated with our Leadership team at Exelon. Our CIO asked that we all spend time reading and having joint discussions around that book. Many parallels to what Admiral Richardson describes.
1Gerard - David is a good friend. We commanded submarines at the same time in Pearl Harbor…he built and commanded a great team!
one of the interesting differences between marquet’s book and adm richardson’s talk is the differences in scale — a submarine, in one case, and the navy in the other. both are super valuable perspectives.
For insight into the competitive nature of submarine culture, see https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/archives/C015DQFEGMT/p1633469759196600?thread_ts=1633469668.187000&cid=C015DQFEGMT 😆
More non-linear jumps in career: • when you first take command, when there’s no one to go to for help • when you become a commander of commander: enabling your commanders to flourish (there are many ways to success, enable them to make it their solution); commanding at a distance (communicate intent, getting feedback)
@jmrichardson1 why do you think the DoD struggles to learn lessons we take from books like Turn the Ship Around, Team of Teams, Extreme Ownership, and others that come out of DoD?
I think the services do a pretty good job overall…always could be better, but better than most.
@bryan.finster486: on the face of it I’m reminded of traditional organization that have two cultures, one for the business and another for IT. Perhaps the difference between what you see and what @jmrichardson1 experienced?
I think you’re right. I was surprised to find the USAF didn’t have a career track for software engineering. It seems to be treated as a hobby where Airmen spend some time hacking on something and then go back to their “real” jobs.
I know some good officers who want to fix that, but “sheep dipping” some generals might help.
For non-linear jumps, how do you show that you are ready to make that jump if prior position doesn't ask for those skills?
Gitty, it’s a relationship that’s been developing for some time. By virtue of watching a person’s connections, character and competence, you can make a risk-based decision to move that person to a higher level of responsibility. And then, stay connected with them! Continue to help them as they grow into their new position!
• major command: when you own a major portion of the US Navy, and you own the mission, and need to square the two
@gitty.rosenfeld It is probably not an exact science
By show of emoji: who else feels envious of the depth of this training around leader development that @jmrichardson1 is sharing? Literally, at times, I feel almost anguish at all these things he’s talking about that I wish I understood better! Yes?
I don't have the depth but I spent my first 8 years of my career in the Army and sometimes I still feel surprised when I come into conversations with folks in technology and realize that most people didn't spend the better part of a decade thinking about leadership and team development.
This has been noted by many people — and I think this suggests a big gap that we need to fill! (The folks from USAF Kessel Run mentioned it to me last year, and this has been a constant topic of discussion with @mik lately.)
I think one thing that forces the services to that position is that I started as 2LT straight out of school leading NCOs who had been doing their job for 15-18 years. I wasn't going to be better at setting up a satellite dish than they were. But I was expected to understand mission, decompose it and set priorities for the unit. So we spent a lot of time in schools covering enough of the tactics and techniques and lots of how to organize and communicate what you needed to do.
@andy744 That 8 year run sounds intense. I find myself comparing to my personal story. I think I wasn't able to respect the leadership training fully that I received as a 20-something and now that I return to it at almost 40, I see it from a different angle and it binds the practical experience from work with the theory.
Well, sometimes wish I could arrange a mini DOES on leadership internally, with a lineup starting with Dr Vestrum on the types of organizations, then some crash course from @jmrichardson1, and for good mesure J. Willink, ending with Jon Smart for new ways of working and Manuel and Matthew from team topologies on how to organize from there. Hopefully having some impact on senior leadership. 😉
@christian.lefevre Send me an email on this — <mailto:genek@itrevolution.com|genek@itrevolution.com>. I’ve felt something very similar!
“two levels of supervision ==> now no one feels actually responsible for the proper execution” — diffusion of responsibility!
@genek In a country that has conscript military, there's a lot of leadership training available. So, no need to envy. I'm taking a voluntary course next weekend 😄
“The job of senior leaders is to pause, deeply study and understand the problem”
“Provide connections between senior leadership and junior leaders; middle managers will see it as inevitable.”
Tomorrow's workshop with @jmrichardson1 and @emily356 will be at 1:20p CT. Visit their channel #richardson-bassett-workshop for more information!
Ah - the capacity to thoroughly study a problem.
Hi @shaaron.alvares :hugging_face:
Doing well - meetup later in Gather?
Thank you so much for taking the time to teach us tomorrow, @jmrichardson1, with the amazing Captain Emily Bassett! She’s amazing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-bassett-capt-292362118/
Can that email instruction be posted in here too?
> I intend to continue to develop and sharpen the ideas I touched on to make them more useful to leaders in business. If you’d like to participate in that, it’s super easy and I’d be privileged to include you. Just send an email to “<mailto:BrinyDeep@SendYourSlides.com|BrinyDeep@SendYourSlides.com>” with the subject “Leaders” - you’ll get an automated response that will loop you in and give you access to a few products that I put together in the Navy.
2:sleuth_or_spy::skin-tone-3: Now, get ready to welcome today's closing speaker, @virginia.shook from the NSA, presenting Improving the Developer Experience at the National Security Agency
THANK YOU SO MUCH, @jmrichardson1! And catch you tomorrow!
Thank you for an inspiring talk, @jmrichardson1!
(Seriously, I can’t overstate my amazement that @vmshook is speaking here. For 20+ years, the idea of a talk from “No Such Agency” was absurd. 🙂
(Warning, memory may be faulty) The first year I met Virginia, her badge had no employer. The next year, US Gov. The next year, NSA. Now she’s a speaker. Pretty neat!
It said USG first year. Then DoD. Then NSA. I felt very exposed that first year
@emoshmosh must be awkward for the people they follow, getting a notification "The director of the NSA is following you"...
All official accounts. We're aware of the awkwardness of things like that
Speaking several languages is a :unicorn_face: skill
“we formed a large working group… to admire the problem” 😆
"DevOps practitioners taught me the language to describe the problems that I was seeing in my teams."
ah, yes. Some unique challenges: “I cannot fix the NSA complicated and completely disconnected systems.”
@vmshook I love the outsider perspective... and reminds me that one of the best product owners ever was a political history major... for her benefit.
thanks! the number of times I get "wait, you're a mathematician? what are you doing <insert non-math job here>?"
@mikayla.m.rettig is a math major and is such a gifted product manager and leads one Medtronic's core IoT and Security platforms. And she's just an awesome human.
“it took 3 years to go from idea to people benefitting from modern tools; but it was worth it; I still get thank notes!”
Failed to get senior leaders to read DevOps books, but junior folks read them and went elsewhere 🙂
lol. "you don't understand" postmortems. Did you also get "we are special snowflakes"?
oh, yeah. with a National Security Twist. See the slide on postmortem challenges towards the end
I am giving this talk at work, too, and felt these confessions might not go over as well there as here
Though I've never worked for them, it reminds me of Amazon's leadership principal of being OK with being misunderstood for long periods of time for the greater good.
“we went from ‘idea to funding’ in 18 months — by government terms, that’s basically instantaneous.” 🎉
that motto was all my own eloquence. It was deemed not so great for advancing our goals... 😉
“DevX speaks for the developers!” ha! Such incendiary language!!!
@vmshook I want an NSA sticker that says #ThereIsNoThey on my laptop!
not what you think of when you think Intelligence Community and totally what I wanted to share with you
we have to laugh. otherwise we'd go nuts with the Importance Of The Things
Looking forward to sharing this talk with Col. Viola.
The NSA agents in TV drama are so different from @vmshook
yup. I'm all of 5 feet tall and my desk is adorned with IT Revolution books and a hot pink unicorn. Most of us are totally approachable
Also nod to Agile Conversations @ds @jtf
“We modeled the communications that we needed” — overcoming Conway’s Law.
^^^ like, this is literally willing communication channels into being? @vmshook
HA! I'm going to say "civil service necessitates action" instead of "I'm more of a forgiveness than permissions person" next time.
Yes. An absence of a rule saying you can't do something means you can do it!
Okay... this mathematician and cryptography thing is beginning to seem logical: deciphering the NSA bureaucracy requires those skills.
I don't have to attribute any of these nuggets to the NSA, because NSA = No Such Anecdote. <ducking>
Reminder: Please submit your feedback for the talks you attended. It’s so valuable for us and the speakers. And after all, feedback is a gift and sharing is caring! Enter your feedback for those talks here: https://events.itrevolution.com/virtual-agenda/ https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/UATE4LJ94/F02GHSEB604/feedback-does21us.png
“Gene asked if I could share the nature of the service. I cannot. Gene asked if I can share the number. I can.” Woot!
USAF programs need to stop buying their own tools and start using the shared tools that Enterprise platforms like Platform 1 and DI2E bring to the table.
Eggs - dress - Morse code / jewelry (if visible - all math based)
was looking for english words, etc in the morse on the dress, but didn't see anything that made sense - maybe it's encrypted...
it reads "can you read morse code" https://svahausa.com/collections/adults-dresses/products/morse-code-katherine-dress
quickly browsing through the list, close to have read them all, just a few missing in second column. All IT Revolution between 2 and 5 times. Thanks for the refreshing talk! 👍
Great talk @vmshook. Will definitely be sharing it with P1 officers.
Great presentation! I loved hearing about your journey!!
Love that list of books! I especially like that some of those books are very empowering to women in tech / leadership.
That was excellent but I am disappointed you didn't close with "This Presentation will self destruct in 10 seconds"
Bring the croissants @jeff.gallimore!!
What a GREAT audience! I am so looking forward to our workshop tomorrow!
Hi, Captain Bassett – I’m so delighted to see you here, and that you’ll be doing the workshop tomorrow! You can catch the commentary on Admiral Richardson’s talk here: https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/archives/C015DQFEGMT/p1633468499143400 And please let @annp and me know if there’s anything we can do to help!