Tim Stiling and Soumya Menon, ConnectAll | DevOps Experience 2022

Hey everybody. I'm Tim styling from connectoll. Hi, I'm Sonya Madden from connector and Welcome to our session on devops cartography.

Why value stream mapping is key for agile software delivery. So before we begin just want to let you know that if you have any questions during the session, you put it in the chat box and we will answer them towards the end. So let's begin today's session with a short story.

So you would have heard versions of this story. It's called five monkey and a ladder story. A lot of Business Leaders management.

Gurus actually called the story to understand organizational behavior. But in this case, let's get Sorry, it's about five monkeys who are put. Ting a cake and there's a With some bananas on chocolate.

So one of the monkeys tries to climb up the ladder and tries to get to the bananas but it is immediately sprayed with icy water and it is shocked and the rest of the monkeys are shocked as well. But this continues and the next month he tries climbing up and it's also sprayed with icy water eventually. What happens is that the monkeys understand that there's a consequence to climbing up the ladders.

So they try not to do that and after some time researchers we place one of the monkeys with a new monkey who's not aware. What's happening Inside the Cage the other monkeys don't know that this is a new monkey this monkey tries to climb up again to get to the bananas and even before it climbs up the says the rest of the monkeys try and pull it down fight with it and try to basically block that kind of behavior. Now.

What is this mean does this sound very familiar it does. I'm sure it happens with all of us. This is basically brings.

To a blind spot which is a which is the follow the herd mentality. We all get into this pattern of doing things the way it is always done what this does is it gives us no space for Innovation you may fall into this routine the directly affects business. So within your teams within your devops teams as well think about it, when you follow a certain pattern, there is no visibility to process into Data into workflows into even root causes or even whether your work is adding value or not.

Right and you don't even look at your processes from an improvement perspective and you get blindsided by this routine. Now, what is this going to do with devops him? Yeah, so I think just to even provide some additional context and tie it back to what we're talking about here at the conference.

Let's take a look at some statistics. So this is from the 2021 state of devops report and some of the stats that you see here are very interesting. So 83% of folks that were surveyed said that their organizations are implementing devops, so they're currently doing it.

And of those 83% 78% of those folks said that their organizations are quote stuck in mid-level devops evolution. So what that says is that they're not just getting started and they may not be where they want to be quite yet, but they're kind of in the middle and one of the quotes that I got from this report is essentially saying that organizations that are in the process of doing devops a lot of the organizations that are currently implementing some of these practices. They're not really talking about it anymore.

It's just simply how they work. And some of the reasons for that as we think about it our very understandable, you know, we've been at this for over a decade now and so over the last 10 plus years what once was revolutionary and different and unique is now simply the way that we're doing things. It's mainstream.

It's just kind of the way that things are around here just like, you know, just like another process at work something that you know, if somebody new comes in that's just the way it's done and everyone encourages that behavior. And so what is what is the problem with that? You know, what?

What's the issue samya? When you tend to become complacent, isn't it? I mean you constantly do something the way there's always done like you said there's you don't even know whether it has a name at all and this unintentionally hinders the way you deliver software.

And what does this mean? It means that you might end up with a leaky devops pipeline. You have no visibility into the kind of activities that you're doing, you know, you automate all the time with our understanding why you're doing this there's limited transparency.

There's no governance or compliance in place their silos definitely and there's lot of ways that gets mounted because you know looking at the non value added activities that are probably causing your company time and money and when you're unable to, you know, connect your spirit tools because devops five line has so many tools there is a lack of and architecture and there's lack. Of interoperable operability between these tools and you're unable to capture the data or map the data that goes across these tools and this is a huge problem this pattern within the devops pipeline. So, how do you how do you break this pattern Tim?

Yes, so what we're not saying is that devops is terrible and needs to be thrown away. No, we don't want to do that devops is a great practice. It's a great way to look at your organization.

But what we are suggesting is that value stream management can be used alongside devops to take a look at our devops pipeline take a look at our software delivery processes and make sure that we're doing it in the right way constantly have an eye on things with the goal being a consistent Improvement. So continuously getting better and better and better so that we can get closer and closer to the continuous development that we want with our devops pipeline. So as we think about value stream management, we first have to lay the groundwork of what is a value stream and according to the gemba academy.

They classify a value stream as all of the value added and non-value added steps that are required to get from raw materials to delivering a product to a happy customer. Now note that there's nothing in this definition about software delivery or devops. This can be as applicable for any industry or even any activity that we do, you know, as an example when I got up to get my coffee this morning.

There was a value stream there were activities that I had to do in order to get to that point where I'm enjoying a delicious cup of coffee. Or as we look at something from a business in another industry. There are certain activities that are required to take a chunk of metal and a bit of rubber and walk it through the processes required to deliver a Ford F-150 to a happy driver.

Now as we think about managing the value stream, there are three critical steps. You have to see the value stream measure the value stream and automate the value stream so that you can effectively manage it. And the first step as we think about seeing the value stream is done best with value stream mapping.

Now what's value stream mapping also according to gemba Academy. It's a process we use to document analyze and improve flow. And so as we think about that example with the Ford F-150 and really any manufacturing example, it's very easy to see the flow, you know, you can take a walk on the factory floor check out how each of those pieces of material is moving through the process and whether worked on by a person or a machine.

They're very definite processes that we can see to take things from that raw material into an awesome looking truck. You can physically see the flow. And so a value stream map in that context may look something like this.

You have the supplier providing the raw materials and you have the customer enjoying the finished product and all of the steps in between and how long each of those take Now in software delivery things are a little different, you know, we can't just walk out into the office and see the flow of information because instead of being on an assembly line. It's in our tools. It's on the internet and it's today.

It's not even all in the same place, you know, if I'm creating a plan that Samia then has to develop we're not in the same building anymore, you know, we're in different parts of the world. So how do we start to do that? How do we start to see what that process looks like?

Was we think about a software delivery focused value stream map. It may look a little like this. You'll see the flow of information from the beginning of the process through development and into deployment and all of the steps that are required to get it from that initial ideation all the way through delivery to the Happy customer.

So, I mean this is something that it does require some effort to build. It does require looking into understanding your value stream. So why why bother with it Samuel what's what's in it for the audience?

Great question Tim. In fact, you may even ask why and how to use Valley Stream mapping or value streams within devops right to understand that so what is their devops is all about continuous delivery and continuous Improvement and value streams gives you that visibility into everything that you're putting in or taking out of the value Stream. So, when you combine these two courses together you basically get visibility into everything that you're doing from build deployment and managing workflows.

It begins from SCLC life cycle all the way through quality assurance and release and operations, right? So it helps you identify model nights and pain points manage errors and effects such as bugs. It gives you visibility and and traceability into your entire life cycle and more than anything you eliminate those redundant processes and wasteful activities.

In your pipeline and because you you're connecting all the tools and the people especially who are managing these tools who are behind this the humans that is you you understand the connection between all of this this improves cross-functional collaboration within your cicd pipeline. It gives you opportunities for automating meaningfully, right? And you also get data that you can use for metrics and analytics as well.

So it's a great way to start your lean practice. And anyway devops is a practice that has roots in agile and lean principles as well. So this is where you begin, but how do you get started Tim?

Yeah, great question. So as we think about once we have the value stream map. What do we do with it?

And what how do we use it to understand our work and start to optimize? Well as we take a look at our work each individual step falls into one of three categories. It's either value added.

So it's something that's directly delivering value to the customer. It's non-value added but essential so it's something that we have to do in our process, you know, something as an example if we have a step that is required for compliance customer doesn't care about that, but we have to do it. It's essential.

It's a necessary activity perhaps there's some reporting we have to provide. Well that's not value added but essential and then there's non-value added non-essential activity. This is the waste.

These are the things that are simply waste of time and money and don't deliver any value to the customer nor deliver any value to the process in general. So what do we think about and how do we how do we respond and use that classification to optimize? If it's a value-added activity, we can standardize things so that we can streamline it as best as possible.

If it's non-value added essential, let's seek to minimize some of those activities. So we're not spending as much time on them, but we're still making sure that we meet the quality standards that we have. And then finally for non-value added non-essential just cut them.

They're a waste of time and they don't deliver any value. So as we take a look at a hypothetical value stream map and we start to think about how we would address this. We could start by eliminating a non-value added activity this Central document that we've always been maintaining in Microsoft Word.

All the information is held elsewhere. So that updating of the centralized document is simply a waste of time that can be eliminated and we can gather the information from another source if needed. We can also start to minimize some of the manual security activities that we have in order to free up time for that team.

We can think about how to automate some of those manual activities with a tool like sonarcube as an example. We can also seek to empower and train our tier 2 support in order to be able to escalate tickets themselves from servicenow to jira, which then frees up our tier 3 support so that they can use their expertise in other parts of the value stream and to help, you know, work on some backlog items and possibly eliminate some bottlenecks that we're facing. And then finally, we can even consider adding a feedback loop for customer estimates.

And while this may even add an extra step to our development process the benefit that we get from keeping the customers happy and satisfied and in the loop is well worth it. So we talked about how value stream mapping can be used to see the value stream and actually here in the chat. We're going to share a URL for a free tool that you can use to do that.

But what about measuring and automating? Well just as the obligatory product plug here, that's something of value stream management platform like connectalk can help with so we have the value stream insights side of our product that allows you to harvest data directly from the value stream and then display it on a metrics dashboard. And then we also have the automation part of our platform which allows you to take action and connect your tools in a way that allows you to automate the flow of work.

So you want to land the plane for us here samya? Absolutely. I hope all of you understood how Valley Stream mapping is going to benefit all of you within devops and to create an agile working environment.

So mapping is the first step to when she management but it's it's the first step that anybody any team needs to take to implement lean practices, right? So identifying the people the tools the connection between them all of this improves collaboration you connect and and communicate with your teams better and ultimately add more value. And what is it that we're all looking for to improve right?

com. We would love for you to they just and to get you started. We also have a workshop that's coming up at the end of November.

The Tim is going to be conducting. Specifically for all you devops folks on Valley Stream mapping and we want you to get your hands dirty build your own value stream map and learn a lot about it during that Workshop as well. But yeah, I hope you all enjoyed this session, and if you do have questions to ask us and we will attend to them as well, or you can connect with us.

Our details are up on your screen. And yeah, I hope you all had a great session. Thank you so much.

Thanks everybody.