BMK Lakshminarayanan, SECTION6 | DevOps Experience 2022

Hello all and welcome to devops experience virtual by text on group. I'm here to share on a topic which is very close to my heart how to overcome Enterprise disconnect with value stream and flow metrics. And thank you very much for everyone for joining us and supporting us and if you haven't registered so kindly go and register you in the website and then you can get to see some of the expert talks and some of the talk leaders and practitioners sharing their experience with in this platform.

And once again, thank you very much for text on for the opportunity. And by the way, my topic for today is how to overcome the Enterprise disconnect with value stream and flow metrics. now I would like to start with.

A question. There are three questions throughout this presentation in a different interval of time. What I want to do is I want you to just write down the answer for this question.

Okay, or think about the answer for this question. You don't need to share with anybody. I just just think about that if you'd like to share now, of course, you are more than welcome to share but just think about this.

What is your role in your organization or your developer tester engineer product manager architect Chief Architect solution Enterprise architect. Well a chief technology officer, whatever it is, like, you know, just think about what is your role in your organization? Right now before I for the proceed and here it is about me.

My name is BM kale actually Narayan. I'm a transformation not and devops Advocate with a company at the moment called section 6 and a section 6 is based out of New Zealand and I'm from originally from India, but are at the moment I live and work in New Zealand and Wellington, and these are my social handles. in said, what do I really care about?

I care about value Stream flow devops developer experience and well-being community and architecture. So you can see that I'm associated with the number of global institutions in a way. I'm a core organizer for the devops just New Zealand.

I'm a coach chat for the cloud native Summit New Zealand Australia, and I also run the meetups here and Wellington on cloud native Computing Foundation. I'm Ambassador for cloud native competing foundation cncf and also devops Institute continuous deliver. Foundation and I am bored advice for the value stream Consortium.

So this is me and feel free to reach out to me during this presentation or after the presentation to connect with me on LinkedIn Nora and Twitter. Thank you very much for coming along and listening this topic, which is again as I said close to my heart and also to so many of you know, who are who are working in big Enterprise and then going through this wave of devops momentum in your organization right now section 6 is actually a company which we build a mission critical applications for Mission critical organizations. So we help them we have we are a small engineering software engineering company and then we help our customers in building Mission critical software for the businesses and with that note now the agenda and flow for the day for my presentation is like this the science of Disconnect.

What do we mean by the disconnect and what kind of signs that you see in an Enterprise? And when I say disconnect and what happens what is the impact of those disconnect what it is doing to our organization and then the state of Enterprise disconnect as a result of that and finally I would like to share how to overcome the disconnect with value stream and flow metrics, and that's my flow for the day. No.

The science of the disconnect in an organization. You see that like, you know, this is particularly a topic focused on title called Enterprise devops. So when you see the business is and technology is divided always divided and for some reason right from the beginning.

I don't know and now there are some efforts made by some organizations to bring them together closer to the organization goals and objectives. But if you traditionally see most of the organizations they have this kind of a setup where you have a business and you have a technology now when I say the science of Disconnect, you will see one of these kind of actually a split in your organization are these are some of the clues that you might see and you can then resonate with that. Oh, these are actually signs of Disconnect in my Enterprise.

Now, the businesses are separate unit technology is a separate business unit business provides actually a budget for technology to run their operations, and there's an animal budget allocated for technology for the Beau for patching security and Of our there is a Project based initiatives and there are priorities given to the technology where the technology teams go and build the business features for for the customers and there are a number of kpis and metrics in this space. No, it's not just one or two and you are overloaded everywhere with number of metrics metrics of the business side metrics technology and within the technology you have metrics for agile. You have metrics for a devops and countries delivery.

You have metrics for flow and etc. Etc. And there's always actually yes strategy, but interestingly the strategy is not online to the organization core.

And when I say the picture depicts that the business often blames technology and Technology blames business, and probably there is a famous thing that you've heard quote and the strategy without execution is useless and Execution without strategy is aimless. So you will see one of these kind of a clue in your organization then what? The science of Disconnect continues now you have in your Enterprise number of documents number of templates that you need to fill in example, like you might be filling an architecture review board document you might be filling a document or template for your security for your audit or it could be for your design processes or operational governance requirements.

So you have certain number of documents and templates and of course, you know, they have varying degree of you know changes in this documents and you need to go through this documentation process to fill and satisfy certain committee. The second part is actually the committee approval. So you have a significant big what you call the Committees in your organization.

You have technology architecture review board. You have a technology governance board, you might have a design governance review committees and operational communities, like, you know, they get to meet and a significant timeline significant time lines what I mean is you might meet once and for tonight for example, like your architecture Lord are an operational governance once in a month or maybe your change Advisory Board. Ought to change assessment board as you call so you might meet once in a month and there is an annual budget which happens actually once in a year.

There is an investment Council which is actually looking at the initiatives and offering the budgets and allocating the budgets the existing budgets the initiatives that happens once in the month. So you have a significant time line even in your organization. number four use for information in an organization you always search for information like, you know, you will be searching for okay, who is this person supporting the system which team actually looks after particular system or an application and who's responsible for particular database and information and who's the person that I need to talk to when I am setting up my develop permission who is the person I need to ask permission to give a GitHub access or maybe service no access so you'll be keep on searching for information and interestingly actually in in my one of my role in the previous is you did some kind of a research on that and internally and to understand how much time do we spend typically in an editor prize for searching for information and for for a 1500 people in a technology unit.

And if you're saying one hour week everybody is touching information then that how come late to close to 10 to 12 million dollars in a year just spending time in searching for the information and even If you search and find some information, you might not be able to rely on the data or the information that you get from your system. You're searching could happen on Confluence or SharePoint or document repository or maybe some kind of a cmdb and you get all this information using searching and then you say oh, can I trust this data example? Now I want to understand who is the person supporting maybe a credit decisioning system in a financial institution or maybe a person who supporting the CRM the customer relationship management system in an organization and you find out that okay Bill is the person who's supporting the system and you say who no, I can go on talk to people and when you reach out and try to reach out to build and you get to know that bill lift your organization two years before so by the way, some of the documents that you get some of the information that you get are really outdated.

It doesn't have right information. It doesn't have correct, you know the status updated after that. So these document becomes actually Darkman and then you know, the history is build up using that right.

Now what happened what this results into on your team is actually your teams cognitive load shoots up. Okay, because the team is searching constantly for right information, but my favorite example is setting up a developer permission setting up a developer Mission as typically in an Enterprise is actually Year a long process right? Because you need to get access to the laptop.

Then your account has to be provisioned. Then you need to give an permission to access the tools and the need to install those tools and configure your IDE and your laptop to be a developer workstation. So this is actually a really big process in most of the Enterprises and some of the studies that I mean I'm doing at the moment.

I'm getting to interview some of the cios and ctOS and some of the Architects and some developers and an organization where we tend to see a degree that anybody between four to six weeks. It takes time to onboard developers in an Enterprise, which is a non-pick company. I'm not talking about tech companies, but I'm talking about non technology organizations like Enterprises.

It could be Banks or financial institutions government agencies retail and Etc. Now when I say teams cognitive load shoots up and you need to other than your work to fit into the enterprise system example, you want to find out how do I configure my Mac for your Dot and development environment or a Java development and you go through documents and you found there are 72 documents, you know on detailing how to configure that and what you will do and none of this documents providing the complete. On details that I'm missing with some pieces here and there then you turn to create a 73rd version of the document and then it's document by bmk and is common explaining how to install the IDE and configure your laptop or Mac for Java development or Dot and development.

So that's that's how I'm saying, like a team cognitive load shoots up. So they need to learn a lot of processes about the Enterprises a lot of the Committees and timelines within this Enterprises and you hire a developer and they tend to fill a lot of documents for auditing and for compliance and governance and risk rather than actually spending more time on writing a quality code and helping your business to achieve the business goals, but delivering value to your customers. Now, your organization also has overloaded processes overloaded processes.

Like, you know, your operational governance is actually an example or an architecture review board is an example you might turn to fill in like maybe 300 Pages document of design to get through The process to an architecture review board and your architecture review board reviews the document and then give you an endorsement saying yeah good to go or maybe not you need more details to provide. It's Etc now and also the there is a ticket-based development. I don't know how many of your familiar with this.

Actually I call them as TBD. I introduced a few years before and you are familiar with tdd as a test driven development on a behavioral different development Etc. But this is a TBD so ticket this development is when you want to talk to your Cloud platform team in your organization or remember platform being or maybe you are security team or maybe a ux team like that.

You need to create a ticket to handshake with them. So we are fully adjoined and you work in an environment where everybody is collaborating with everybody but there is a ticket to handshake with them. So it means you create more and more tickets to talk to people instead of talking to the people directly.

Right and also that are too many metrics in the organization metrics. As I said, like, you know, you might have a measure for business you have measure for technology measure for projects and initiatives and measure for devops related like in a country's integration continues deployment Etc. Now what this is doing is actually there is an impact due to the science and the disconnect so you turn to see that.

Oh, there are okay. Bmk I can see that there are these are the signs in the organization. It's an infinite that our Enterprise it's just okay what it is doing and interestingly the expectation of our child and devops transformation is that delivery teams?

They go faster they expected to go faster, but interesting fact in most of the Enterprises that you have the risk are governance architecture. I'm funding and budgeting those kind of processes in your organization the turn to remain actually in old school way and they are still doing the same old processes like a maybe 15 years, maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years and interestingly, you know, one of my friend was sharing that the naming conventions of for their database schema was 20 years old. Okay, so they have a still following the same process and nobody has asked a question.

Even if you challenge you will always you know, get a an answer that this is how we we have done in the past. And this is we continue to do now and for also our future so the impact of the disconnect is that just expecting their very teams go faster. I am not sure when the rest of the processes the stuff the units in your organization is actually remaining in the old school of way and having What overloaded documentation processes example like you know, you hire?

Us get developer a software engineer. And instead of that person or she or he and going and solving the problem and what they get to do is actually the auditor is asking question and you need to go on for an Excel document and each of working on IDE. They turn to work on Excel sheet answering some of the compliance and governance and risk-related questions and also feeling a lot of documents and templates Now read a bit of a study on that aspect as well.

It's an internal one, you know with one of my customer when we found that the teams are spending only 26% of their time and building features and rest of the time 70, you know close 74% and their time is spread across different activities, which is not really adding much value to the organization. That's an interesting Factor, you know, I was surprised that with this study now what this what this impact is doing to your organization. So by the way, then when you get a business idea that you want to deliver something to your customer, then the Operate cycle it takes long time.

It's like amazed that you need to go through a lot of the huddles to get through, you know, get to the production environment and get to an environment where you can operate the software. By the way, your customers can then realize the value. That you deliver so given that it's taking a lot of time to get from idea to operate we turn to spend more money and these tend to spend more time and what happens because of that three things happens.

Number one, your business starts complaining technology is really slowing them down. They couldn't able to deliver the value as fast as they wanted to for their customers, right? That is number one.

Number two given the technology is slowing them down. Now the business comes and says that okay. We are going to change your priority and Technology also agrees that okay, we will change our priority.

So why the priorities are changed right now given that business is blaming technology and Technology investors collectively changing the priorities what technology should be doing and what that tends to do is given the third thing. It results in reorganization or restructuring. So by the way, then say somebody thinks that oh for probably we are not organized for delivering the value sooner safer happier.

So we need to go and restructure our organization and reorganization ourself, then probably then some of the rules are made redundant and then you hire some new people or you shift people from different unit to different units. It's right. So what this is going to do for the organization is going to further slow you down in your in this disconnect process now, The reflection on my personal view on what this all doing the state of Enterprise disconnects like this, right?

And this is one of the picture I think like, you know, the I put together the few years before when I did my, you know, very first time talk on this topic. Then I said like what the internal processes documents the checklist that you have and when you follow all this processes like all your the engineering and you're development team, they follow through all this process that feel all this documents and your internal stakeholders are happy. They're happy like it could be head of security governance and the head of risk and compliance or no head of your platforms or architecture.

So all this people are really happy because you're following the process feeling the top. But what is happening is you're developer productivity is now gone down and you're developers and happy because they are not really getting you know what they really want to deliver to their customer or your business and that then results in Things like your customers who supposed to get the value delivered, you know, they don't get it on time or they don't get it on the same quality that they expect and the business who allocate some budget for delivering the value. So two things happens.

We are spending more money and we are not delivering value on time. So that result. So now if you look at this picture internal stakeholders are happy because you're following the processes, you're following the documentation But ultimately your customers and business and your developers and Engineers who they are not happy.

Now, sometimes you turn to build what a lot of you know, world class things and Technology. Somebody says that okay. I want to build the world class kubernet is cluster right now when you say that no, we want to be a world class technology teams.

What do you mean by that? Having certain capabilities will help you to deliver the value faster. I agree.

But if you are not really using those capabilities to deliver the value faster to your customer to help your business to save money and do more with less than probably those capabilities are not useful as you think right if building a world-class kubernetes cluster, whether your customers happy and not sure because your customer they don't get to see whether you're running on a kubernetes on AWS you what they get to see is actually the product the service that you deliver. Can I afford the product and my happy with the product am I paying the right value for the product service? That's what they care about right now.

The second question that I want to ask you in this presentation is what is your organization purpose? So you need to think about that? Okay.

Now the first question that I asked you what is your role? What is the what is that you do in your organization? Right and number two is that what is your organization purpose?

So please write down your answer to this question. And as we progress through this presentation now what I want to talk about, is that how do we overcome this disconnect? Okay.

What is the way to come this the disconnected organizations because everybody is doing their own Silo things and there are metrics everywhere and this people are talking through the help of a decades not talking to each other. What we really need in our organization is actually a holistic view your view from start to finish and and also the number two is measure that into it, right. So the first thing is that can I create a visibility from start to finish how the work is coming in technology and how the work is getting delivered and to a production what happens in between all this processes who are the people working on this what kind of documents that we create right?

And the number two, is that how Measure that into them and how do we understand where the bottlenecks are how do we address them? Where are we going faster? Where are we slowing down and water slowing down.

Usually those kind of question. Now, let's dig into further on the holistic view. So when I say into when autistic view we need to also ask this question.

What type of the work do we do here? You know, are we developing features? Are we developing different?

I mean are we addressing defects are we paying back affected are we addressing some of the risk and compliance security related work? So we need to understand the type of thing do and also the team needs to have a consensus. How do we do that work?

Actually how the work is getting it done how it is executed within the team, you know, whether it's a cross-functional team or a product team or a technology team, whatever the term that you you're using an Enterprise. So we need to understand that how the work is being done and what activities really contribute to the goal and objective because we do a lot of activities in our thing. We need to ask this question.

What is a value add activity? What is a non value or activity? Can we get rid of those bad non value Iraq it can we make it more.

And efficient and improve the flow within the number of organization right now. You need to always understand the different people the role what they play in their contribution in their into when holistic and you need to also understand what kind of artifacts are being produced. So in a simple tame a simple term, what you need is actually your value stream to paint the picture.

Now, how do we overcome the disconnect number two is using the right measure right measures. How do we measure and what to measure here because measuring in Silo doesn't help you? Okay, sometimes you might say that I can deploy 200 times to production.

Excellent. But what does that toward a deployments doing to your customer? What is a 200 deployment is doing to your customer in your business?

You need to also mission that and why that's that measure matter for your business and how to measure it because you need to have a consistency in measuring that as well because different organization with an Enterprise. They have a different way to measure all those things, you know, you need to measure in a way that it's consistent. So by the way, you can then see that you are making some kind of progress.

You don't want to keep changing your measurement technique. So by the way that you don't know whether you're really progressing forward are you're going back? And what is impact of those measure on your business and outcome?

I think that is very critical because you you need to satisfy your business and your customers with that kind of a measure whether it's improving the developer experience or delivering the value faster to our customers. Are we developing and delivering more features? I'll be paying back.

That's how is it impacting our business. We need to really understand because as of today software's are covering the businesses and you need to show in evident that you know, these changes that you're making to your Technology Solutions after service is products are making actually a big business impact. So by the business can get that advantage of that.

No unit also understand what kind of artifacts are being produced. So by the way, then it's useful you need to measure about that as well the example like, you know, somebody might be creating a document of 400 pages, but that 400 Pages document is not useful and nobody in the downstream process is using the documentation. Now the question is that okay?

What is the purpose of this artifact somebody spending foreign? I mean good amount of time in producing this 400 Pages document but Downstream process nobody's using it. So you need to understand whether this artifacts are consuming more of time and are do we add value but this document or you don't need it.

Now you need to ask those kind of questions as well now. Though one of the thing that I really like about this court is that you know, if you cannot describe what you're doing as a value stream and we do not know what we're doing. So if you cannot relate back to your customer and if you cannot see that what exactly you're doing, whether it's an internal customer of external customer, so you are missing a point and this is another from micro author there whenever there's a product for customer.

There's always a values whether it's a product or service that you provide your customer the challenges that in seeing that part of it. Okay how to overcome this treatment disconnect of course is using value stream. And when I say value stream, then you have an idea and to operate or done an operate on production, right?

So that is what you have all that. This is an example there. I see this is the start of an idea and this is where we operate and these are the different activities that we do in between and some are organization might have more steps some more organization might have parallel steps and some might have very less number of things so you you can know take whatever you want but in That you need to understand is that on top you can see the product design and development.

Is where how the idea is coming into technology. The fundings are allocated. The product backlogs is developed and then it goes into development team.

Right and then there's a product delivery from the time that you commit your code and then applying to your production operating on that. So you need to really understand the entire activities in your value Stream. So by the way, you can get to see now make that work visible and also make how the work is getting it done visible.

So by the way, everybody can see that now this is an example of thinking from a value stream perspective and also from a platform point of view. So think about that the vertical bars that standing on this picture is actually like a mobile macking maybe a values team loyalty program or online indicating stuff for students. Those kind of things are actually values team where they are a self organized across functional teams owning the end to win product value Stream So the business hand over something to them and then the business is also part of that value stream thinking and that value stream team, they go on develop and deliver the feature or other person.

This team is responsible for doing anything and everything when it comes to values change. So they are the one who's patching their software. They are the one who's looking after their data.

They are the one who's developing features and delivering to the production and they are the one who are addressing detected and they are also the one who are back. I mean doing the self-service patching or maybe addressing compliance related security related audit cushions and everything. So they are the one who doing that right and if you see the platform team in the bottom and they become like their own value stream and what this platform team didn't do is actually they provide self-service capability by the way, the value stream team and again, I I code team topologists here and they take advantage of this platform team and self-service capabilities.

By the way, you are not racing a ticket to somebody to do something for you rather actually go to a portal you click a button provision your virtual Mission provision your cluster get your data Pipeline and then click here, you know ci/cd Pipeline and you get going and that's what I know. It does to you. So this is an example of how to look at from a balanced perspective.

No, when it comes to measure machine only one area of the value stream is like using only two inches of your 12 inch ruler and it doesn't help you. Right like, you know, you're using only measuring. Okay, I can build 200 times a day.

I can apply 200 times a day. Okay, that's great. But what exactly is doing to your business or time back is more important.

And this is where I'm great fan of Dr. Mix work called flow framework and flow Matrix and I see flowmetrics is actually one of the best way to measure the end to win holistic view or the value stream. Now now you are actually okay the same picture we go back to the product design and development product delivery on all the steps in more.

So what is actually the mission so you see that and this is your leave time. The lead time is from idea to operate the entire activities Compass that's from your production and that's from your business asking you to Develop something and then deploy an operate on production. So that's everything and your floor time could be from the time.

The business is asking you your clock starts when the business cases approved or the funding is given to you, right if that is what your organizations doing. So there is no hard and fast rule here. So your floor Time bar can be moved depends on when exactly the clock starts for you and the delivery time is actually from the time that you code commit and code deploy.

So these are the different way to look at the measures and then measure the capabilities and measure the flow within your organization. Now, there's a common question around the what is actually a feature defect and risk can take that the reason because that I pay this picture Most of the organizations they don't have consensus on even this definition what exactly is, you know a feature what we mean by Tech debt and there's a lot of gray area and most of the organizations. So what I would recommend is that as an organization we need to go and then sort out this definition be all are on the same picture so we can get a meaning out of it.

And the reason why this is important again, this is from Dr. Mick from his flow framework project to product book why this is important because then you can start measuring the impact of them how many features are delivering what is now how the tech tips are being addressed and how much you're paying back and actually can start measuring those things. The reason that you need to do.

These are our mutually exclusive. You cannot have a particular work items sitting in two buckets like oh it's also affected so you get right. So you need to have identify what is a primary value of that work that you're doing now the flow framework, you know, this is from one of my the early organization where Startup tool called task of this and this is what the benefit that I see in flow metric.

So you can measure the flow distribution where you can measure the flow distribution between your feature Tech debt and risk and incidents unplanned works and you can make a trade-off and you can also measure the productivity. So how much is the velocity the flow items completed for the given period you can measure how much is the active time? How much is actually a wait time and where people are waiting for something to be get done by somebody else or by some systems by some other kind of people waiting for a document.

Waiting for approval so you can measure the wait time as well the efficiency you can also measure the speed using how long it takes for us to close. Actually a flow item a flow item is actually it could be your defect. It could be a feature or something like that.

You can also understand the flow load between the capacity on demand that you have on your team. And how much is the capacity they had come that you have in your team to solve this the beauty of this particular flow metrics pictures that you also see on the on the top. Corner that, you know business outcomes and results so you get to see how is the team doing and what is the impact of that value stream what the revenue that we are generating on this product value stream.

What is the cost to Value ratio? Whether the team who's working on the values team are the really happy so you can measure like the ease the employee net promoter score. You can also understand from the quality.

So your tying back this flow back to the business results on which really makes you know, an impressive statement about technology doing the product value stream work with your business because the business get to see they don't understand a lot of the technology matrixes, but they get to see yeah metric which really close to them and the language that they use to measure right now the final question that I want to ask you is how is your work aligned with the purpose of your organization? So three questions that I asked you. What is your own number one number two, what is your organization purpose number three how the work that you do in your role is aligned with the purpose.

So just you know try to Connect all the dots together and then see how I'm adding value to my organization how my work is adding value to my organization Etc. Now my dear friends, I've given you two tools today one is how do we work in the Enterprise disconnect using value stream and using flowmetrics for measuring and also the three questions that you had and please answer this questions and reflect upon and then understand how your work is adding value and it's helping your organization to achieve their goal and purpose. I would like to leave you with one final thought here your code by adriennecocraft the most critical metric in your organization is how long it takes an innovate the idea to reach your customer.

So if your business comes with some it's brilliant idea and customer can get value out of it and how long it takes for us to get that value deliver. And of course in a disconnected Enterprise World, it could be two year three year project. But in a fully immersed High performing devops platform teams and value stream teams, it might be like, you know, three months to six months.

So you might have a different kind of a way to look at how you can overcome this disconnect with the help of value stream and also with flow metrics and with that note my dear friends, my name is Bmkalakshminarayanan and my topic today how to overcome the Enterprise disconnect with value stream and flow Matrix and with the note. I would like to thank you text on group for providing a great opportunity and platform for all of us to share this, you know from a practitioner perspective some of my experiences and thank you very much for all the sponsors and all the fellow speakers who have come along to share their experience as well and with the note. Thank you very much for that.