Shaaron Alvares – Automation, Mastery & Purpose: The New New Transformation Paradigm Keynote

So I want to go ahead and continue and introduce our next speaker, because culture and cultural change is so important and changing large enterprises is such a challenge. I'm really excited to introduce Shaaron Alvarez. She's a thought leader and she's been an agile and DevOps transformation coach in many different organizations.

She's leads. She's part of the team that's leading the transformation at T-Mobile today. And so she has global experience, changing organizations and leading lean and DevOps transformations.

So I'm eager to introduce and turn the floor over to Shaaron. Welcome to this session and welcome to my home in Seattle, Washington. I'm very excited to be here and to have this opportunity to contribute to such a vibrant community.

We're going to talk about automation, mastery and purpose and how these three principles can enable you to transform better, faster and at scale. And as we go through the content, please post your feedback and questions in the chat window. I really want to hear about you.

First, we look first we look at transformation challenges from the trenches, then I'll cover what I mean by New New Transformation Paradigm and I will share practices that you can apply in your own organization. Before we start, I want you to give some credits to the GitLab team who helped me get ready. So Emily Chin, John Coghlan, John Jeremiah and Ray Paik.

And I also want to thank Andrew Aitken, who is the Wipro open source practice leader. My name is Sharon Alvarez. I work as an enterprise, agile, agile and DevOps transformation coach at T-Mobile.

In my role in the last 10 years, I was privileged to work with really large corporations where I was exposed to teamwork and to many scaling challenges. In fact, if we do the math, I. I probably run close to two hundred and fifty hours of team and organizational retrospectives.

The top three source of frustration during team retrospectives are constantly. First, the misalignment with the business. Then the developers don't want to apply bandaids.

They don't want to create technicals, that they want to create a sustainable and innovative solutions. Last, that they don't have visibility to the product and technology roadmap, but they want to be included in those conversations and at least have visibility to this. And when we look at organizational, a big room, a retrospective said the greatest challenges are often around dependencies, of course, and the business and leaders disconnect.

These challenges won't surprise you because they are largely publicized across various industries, we see legacy mindsets, we see silo thinking apply to enterprise. We don't know where to focus our technology investments and technology is a black box, not only for the business, but also for executives. In fact, only five percent of executives grasp their intertwined relationship between best in class tools and business performance.

This is confirmed by those numbers shared this year by Scott Williamson, at GitLab Commit in my experience, all transformation challenges can be boiled down to one major issue. We transform using the same mental models that led to creating the very same innovation and delivery challenges we have today. We're still working very siloed manners, we're all familiar with the Conaway law that was established in 1968, but I wanted to share Gary Hamel's code as well.

Right now your company has 21st century Internet enabled business processes. Mid 20th century management processes are built in 19th century management principles. So what that means is if we look at organizational transformation today, the silos we create are not just organizational.

We also use a different mental and management models that are not only siloed, but they are also moving at radically different bases. DevOps is moving really fast. Safety is lagging well behind everything else, and Agile often forgets to be agile.

The reality is that Agile hasn't delivered much on its promises at scale. It does produce a lot of frameworks that, but it hasn't looked at better ways to integrate with product management and DevOps all of these silos and management challenges that have led to creating what Dr. Westrom call pathological and bureaucratic cultures.

One of the painful consequences is that we all have our own criteria for success. Today, can we confidently say that we are measuring the right business outcome or that everyone across an organization of value stream or a platform is measuring the same business outcome? Probably not.

And often that we don't even have integrated systems to measure the top business outcomes at scale. So the question that we all have is, how can we change that? How can we build organizations that are fit for the future, but also how can we build organizations that are fit for human beings?

Instead of looking at new framework, I suggest focusing on a different model of engagement that gives people the freedom and safety to work in the most productive fashion and based on automation, mastery and purpose, based on the research and theories on the power of intrinsic motivation that were established in 2009 by Dan Pink. People centric approach to transformations are always going to win. Pink establish that autonomy, mastery and purpose are two key drivers of intrinsic motivation at work.

Today automation is a key driver of any transformation, and it very well supports autonomy, collaboration and culture change, then mastery and purpose because these have never been more important than today as we strive to create, engage communities. So I propose we review practices that apply to each of these key principles that will help you transform and innovate better at scale. Automation is eating the world, and automation is not a bad world.

We often look at automation in a very siloed manner, limited to the DevOps pipeline, but we will see how we can apply automation across various areas, even to agile and why it's becoming important to integrate automation across as many areas as we can. Developer tools and platform automation have never been more important. McKinsey reported that the number one driver for business performance is developer best in class tools, which includes automation, developer platform and developer platforms.

That's very interesting to note. What's interesting to note here is the relationship between tools and platform automation and developer satisfaction and retention. Companies that invest in tools and platforms experience the forty seven greater developer satisfaction and retention rate.

So this is clearly something that matters to them and it speaks to the Corps of Engineers. The most successful organization have in common that, they are invested in specific practices that can be grouped into full capabilities first that best in class tools at working hand-in-hand with a robust product capability, also well integrated and automated. And then we have culture and talent management.

But the most striking element in this study is not the areas and practices themselves, I think we knew that the research found out that these four capabilities are equally important and we have to invest in these in these equally. This is a huge opportunity for organizations and media to understand that we can no longer focus on DevOps in silos are automating DevOps in silos. And as long as we focus on automating DevOps on me, we won't get the full benefits of our technology investments.

So based on what we saw, the platform landscape needs to adjust to suit productive work across the end to end product value stream, not just the DevOps pipeline. In most cases, applications across a value stream are not well integrated, organizations generally have two different applications, one for managing the product backlog and one for the DevOps delivery and best case scenario. These two are well integrated and automated, allowing for a seamless flow of work and measurement as well.

But sometimes these are not well integrated. And some organizations have a product portfolio management application as well, also known as Enterprise Agile Planning Application that may be well integrated or not. Here, none of these three applications I mention are integrated and best case scenario, they are very well integrated and automated, allowing for a continuous flow of work and value from idea to customer feedback.

That's the ideal case. Most of the time, we see a combination of all of these scenarios, but independently of the applications we use, organization often created as many silos as they have teams. That's right.

And that's a huger challenge for large organizations. We can see that the way we choose and set up these applications and platform has a huge and direct impact on slow, but also on organizational culture. And it's a misconception to think that technology and culture are anti nomic.

I am firmly convinced that technology and automation are wonderful culture enablers. Here we have a best case scenario, what we call a value stream management platform, it includes enterprise product, portfolio planning, team product management and DevOps. Well, design, automated and implemented this year, both beautifully developer velocity.

At T-Mobile as an example, we use geek lab for DevOps delivery. We use Atlassian JIRA for teams, product and project management and JIRA Align for our portfolio and value stream management. We are also piloting we've tested up to support portfolio visualization and metrics.

This is a journey, a long journey, but well done, it allows executives and project teams to have a strategic view of their entire portfolio. This is great, but how do we get started with such an investment and enterprise initiative? The first thing to do is to identify your organizational value stream through an exercise called value stream mapping.

Value stream mapping consists of mapping, analyzing and measuring all step by step activities involved in delivering value to the end users with the purpose of removing a waste that bottlenecks and waste. We include all the stakeholders involved in a value stream, and we first map what I call the team's reality because we want to understand how they really interact with each others and and how they interact with all the systems that they touch. We analyze the waste and we design a future state and a transformation roadmap.

So value stream mapping is a great tool that helps organization identify and prioritize technology investments and develop their transformation roadmap. Let's look at how it works. We have a traditional organization with various verticals or domains.

A great quote from Max Schwartz that Mashaba said, Doing DevOps is not difficult, but to really get the full power of it, you need to make changes in how your structure, how you structure your organization, how you make the work flow through your organization. It's a great code that apply to a platforms, in fact, and a value stream and management and mapping. So now what happens when we have an idea?

How does the work that is going to deliver your idea flows to organ, to your organization all the way from ideation to customer feedback? We can see that the flow of activity is not linear, it follows organizational patterns and silos, and that's because organizations and systems to date are designed to optimize the work within silos. The team, so the next step is for the team to identify the wasteful activities here, I, I mark them in red with the objective of removing the steps.

They then identify any opportunities for better integration and automation based on business priorities and developer productivity. Here we removed all the waste we can, but they're still going to be some level of waste, and that's your future state and streamline value stream all the way from idea to feedback. We can see that the value stream mapping is a huge collaborative endeavor that includes all stakeholders involved in a value stream.

I believe, in fact, that it's the most important transformation and DevOps tool we have, we can leverage it to identify and prioritize technology investments and such as the platform, a road map. And we can also use it to identify to to fill all the gaps we have around developer velocity. But value stream mapping is also a human, collaborative and cultural and endeavor we are invited to move away from legacy waterfall behaviors that are very hard to eliminate and we are called to embrace new ways of thinking and working together as an example.

We are moving away from silos and what's best for me and for my team to the big picture and what's best for the business and for the organization. Automating psychological safety, that sounds funny, right, but even though we know that safety is paramount to innovation and culture, less than 20 percent of executives understand the relationship between psychological safety and innovation. Even if we have top down and bottom up transformation, we can see in safety that both don't intersect.

Well, executives want control, continuous stability and predictability, and they have an aversion for risks. Developers want experimentation and innovation, but we shouldn't have to choose between innovation at the speed and scale and safety. So we saw that companies with the highest developer velocity consistently invest in automating safety to the implementation of safeguards and artificial intelligence.

Automated Agile, when we think about the Agile Manifesto and the scrum guide, the perpetuated and mirrored organizational silos, they are, after all, both a product of the Conway culture and mindset. And that's fine for that time. But as far as I mentioned, often forgets to be agile and to disrupt itself.

In many ways, Agile contributes to slowing down the pace of agility and innovation. I said it Agile often feels like the new waterfall. So let's look at it.

Hear me out. First it's ingrained in sacred and dusty ceremonies. Then it focuses a lot more on these processes than on supporting the speed of DevOps delivery and innovation.

I have so many examples and opportunities I could share, but here are a few. When you look at the agile product artifacts that we know that project owners and teams have spent countless hours that managing using the tools. When we close out the task attached to a story, the story doesn't closer to a magic.

And that's valid for all the artifacts creating flow data inaccuracy, then that is when the developers enter the same task, they have to enter the same task multiple times and they recur to developing automated templates with Excel. That's that's real, actually. So we could talk about manual estimates as well and so on.

In fact, I'm developing a backlog of agilely integration and automation opportunities and I'd love to collaborate with the community on these. To summarize why automation is a critical part of our transformation journey today, tools and automation, our culture enables automation is not a bad word. And it's not just a technology thing.

It's without a doubt an organizational capability. The next thing I want to call out is establish value stream mapping as a means to manage your transformation and roadmap and to prioritize your tools and platform strategic investments. Mastery.

With mastery, we touch on what learning means to the DevOps community. Mastery's people's desire to get better and better at some things that matters to them so that they can fulfill their potential. In life, but definitely in DevOps, we learn at the speed of delivery, the faster we deliver, the faster we learn, and automation is an important skill to have.

In fact, based on the DevOps Institute enterprise report, automation is the number one skill to have in the must have skills category. So developers remain engaged with organizations and communities that are committed to DevOps and developer experience and that have upskilling programs. Yet over 38 percent of surveyed organization don't have any upskilling strategy.

So developers are looking to have a great experience with two aspects, best of breed tools into their company experience and engagement. They want to work on best in class tools, and that includes the tools, platform automation and artificial intelligence. They also look at open source and seeing as a huge opportunity to learn and grow within and outside of their organizations, then they want access to clear engineering career path and ongoing training opportunities, which includes transparency, knowledge sharing and experimentation.

Purpose, purpose is about developing purposeful organizations and communities and purposeful work objectives. Why is it important to create purposeful companies? A company's purpose and belonging are build when every single employee perceives their contribution as essential to the whole and beyond, beyond the company.

Governor said that without great employee experience, you can forget great customer experience, and here I replaced employee by developer experience. As far as developer experience, they want to be part of the big picture. We saw that developers strive when they work with the business and when they see directly the result that their work has on customers.

Here are a few things we can do to create purposeful technology organizations. First, include developers in end to end value stream mapping to give them full visibility to the value stream objectives and road map, not just a DevOps pipeline. Then enable teams to engage with end users and align teams that with business objectives, not just DevOps objectives and have their measurable business metrics that matters to the end users, not just DevOps metrics as well.

I interviewed Rick Sheridan last year. He's the author of Chief Joy Officer and my article is publishing the link provided on the slide. He confirmed that developers thrive when they see the impact of their work directly on customers.

And then one more thing, create open source and inner source projects within your organization, because, of course, that's a great way to develop software. But now we know that it's among the best ways to develop purposeful organizations and communities. I also wrote an article about the organizational benefits of open source based on Andrew Aitken's work in this area.

The reason why people join open source community developer communities is for the code for sure. But what keeps them coming back is the community belonging that provides them with transparency, empowerment and a great sense of purpose. Lastly, we create purpose and trust within an organization when we align roles within organization goals and we've organizational goals and transformation objectives as organizations adopt value streams and platforms.

It is critical to introduce scale roles across a value stream and across the value stream. But for you, in order to align on common practices and tools, it contributes to empowering people to lead and influence strategy and bring cohesion to that, to the initiative. And even when we don't do that, we run the risk of creating value stream technology or people silos.

So instead of having team silos, we run the risk of creating value streams, silos. The most valuable role is to consider our value stream architect, the process, lead and change lead to ensure that processes and technology are aligned and supported by organizational change management. For last, I share three key principles and practices for organizational and DevOps transformation transformations, I hope we can connect to discuss these.

I'm very interested in your experience. In the meantime, this is how you can support the movement. First, open space, your transformation.

Make it inclusive and collaborative across your value stream and across your organization. In fact, treat your Value Stream as the community. Then velocity is your currency investing developer velocity establish a value stream mapping at the heart of your transformation and technology investments and displays on the whole team's reality.

And finally, disrupt your organization DNA. The most successful organizations are the ones that tackle the most entrenched silos and dysfunctions. So commit to trust, because when we do the work we saw, we are bound to have painful and difficult conversations.

But these are these are the conversations that build trust, then commit to the future, not to the past, and commit to automation, mastery and purpose. Thank you very much. I hope to see you in person next year.

Stay safe and please reach out if you want to have a conversation with me.