Zen and the Art of Project Management: Infusing Spirituality for Scalable Digital Transformations at SKILup Days 2024

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you're logging in from across the world. My name is NDA Puri and today I'll be talking to you about Zen and the A of project management. And my take on that is infusing spirituality for scalable digital transformations.

So before I get into the weeds of it, let me give you a bit of my background. So I did my engineering way back in the year 2000. So I've been around for about 23, 24 years.

And around this time I've had the opportunity to work in large scale digital transformations, program, manage them, project manage them, uh, lead them from a DevOps evangelist standpoint across us, uk, Europe, and South Africa. So I've worked across all of these continents. Currently I work as a DevOps evangelist at a bank in Eastern Europe.

I'm based out of India and I'm also an ambassador at DevOps Institute slash people Cert with Continuous Delivery Foundation. I also run a YouTube channel where I mix DevOps and spirituality. You can guess that that's how this talk is also structured.

And I've also had the opportunity to write two books, one on how to build a career in DevOps, and the other one is around spirituality and success. So that's a little bit about my background. Now let's come to what the topic is here.

So very simple things. We'll talk about what is project management in digital transformation. Then we'll talk about why is scaling it so hard.

And then the third thing, how spirituality can help in all of this. So very simple three questions is what we are gonna talk about. And I will cover all that I have to say in these three contexts.

So this is one thing that you're hearing now almost every single day, every single week, your Twitter timelines, your LinkedIn threads, they are all filled with every organization that's ever been around is moving into an AI organization, which is backed by machine learning. Everybody's experimenting with LLM, open ai, Microsoft, Google, all of them. Every single day they're releasing new stuff.

It's so much that it's hard to even keep track of what's going on out there. But in summary, nowadays every organization is transforming themselves into an AI and ml, a deep learning organization, which is powered by of course elements of cloud DevOps, microservices and so on and so forth. We are all familiar with this, but what context does this have to project management?

Because after all, at the end of the day, all of these transformative threads, transformative initiatives, these are humongous project management or deals. If you cut away the technology, if you cut away the fluff, at the end of the day people have to get some stuff done. Whether it's a proof of concept, whether it's an implementation, whether it's an optimization, there is a project that has to be managed and it has to be managed very well.

And at the end of the day, it's a project management ordeal, which is further complicated by all the technology that we have landed ourselves in. And the impact of that project management today is across the tools, especially now in the last year or so, with all of this AI barrage coming in, all of this ML stuff coming in, people talking about large language models, various open source and proprietary implementations of large language models. During that, as these POCs get towards ification, and as some of this gets adopted by enterprise, we are looking at a fundamental shift in the way software is created across the entire SDLC in terms of processes.

And then all of this will intimately impact people and the way they have been working. So the impact of project management, of getting all of this stuff done is across the tools, the processes and the people. And across all three of these, no matter how complex the tools and the processes are aligning people is the toughest of them all.

And I'm sure all the project managers, product owners, they would agree with me on this that people are the toughest to align because when people align, then they can solve technology problems very easily. You've all seen this show, I believe everybody needs a TED less or project manager. That's how you get s**t delivered.

That's how works get done. When you can rally your troops around a certain goal, around a certain objective, positively reinforce them and have them work in spite of their differences in terms of technology, in terms of processes, in terms of what the outcomes are, that's when stuff gets delivered. Hopefully this makes sense.

Now let's look at why is scaling project management so hard in this era of AI and ML and continuous change? What difference has it made? So enterprises are becoming more and more complex.

This is a very common diagram. This is called the Star Death Microservice architecture at Amazon and Netflix. This picture is several years old, but it's a very popular picture on the internet.

The concept that I'm trying to put here is enterprises are becoming more and more complex as technology is becoming easier because as large enterprise embed those technologies, the legacy still remains. The mainframe is still working, the core banking is still working in its old fashion. We are just adding on layers of complexity over it.

The full rewrites, they are multi-year projects. They take a long, long time to implement. So enterprises are complex.

The tool stack is diverse and it is getting even more diverse. Now this is a DevOps um, periodic table which is developed by our friends at digital ai, this periodic table, why it's called periodic table because for all elements of the periodic table there are to today, today tool sets. Now we are color coded here.

So everything from AIOps to analytics to cloud collaboration containers, all of these things cover this periodic table. And this was developed pre AI era. This picture itself is, if I'm not wrong, about a year and a half, two years old today this tool stack is much more complex because of all the AI stuff that has come.

This doesn't even talk about that. And still you can get a size a preview of how complex our tool stacks of the enterprises are these days. This is a DevOps reference architecture which is created by our friends at Sonar type.

This is one view in which DevSecOps should be architected for a large enterprise. It talks about all the tooling, all the plumbing that needs to be in place for an end-to-end automated pipeline taking into account the security, the SEC part of DevOps as well. Now this is by no means, you know, implemented everywhere.

Each enterprise would have a variation of this, a subset of it. But I've put this slide to give you an idea of the complexity that there is in program managing, project managing these kind of implementations. This is another map developed by Atomic.

And of course for those of you who are from Europe or uk, you know this is model after the London Underground two, they call this their continuous delivery map. And this also talks about the tool sets that are there in each of these train lines. Another view of how complex stuff is today.

Now project management in digital transformation and scaling that is not just about tools and technologies, we've spoken about those. It's much beyond the architectures. It's about a bunch of other things as well.

It's about implementing agile at scale. Now whatever shape and form of agile that you are using in your enterprise, you have to implement that at scale. And as that happens, you might have to think about new roles and responsibilities.

For example, an environment manager, a person who manages production, non-production environments, morely, majorly non-production environments because that's where the majority of the pain point of development is. The new roles which have come in like a dev, a developer relation. Uh, so these are the people who layers with the development community and promote your development APIs or whatever services you expose and then encourage the development community to consume those services.

Community builders, these are the people who go out there and build communities around folks who are interested in consuming your products and your services. RES and community builders are the folks who go out there in conferences and represent you. So these are all new roles which have come up in the last couple of years.

And then another dimension to doing project management in digital transformation is deconstructing organizational structures. What I mean by that is as organizations move into the more DevOps way of thinking, the more agile way of delivering smaller packets, maybe there is a way to deconstruct how your structure is built. Specifically how the operations operate, how the development teams are structured, how the support team are structured, how the QA team is divided.

Because now you're talking about end-to-end responsibility from writing the code, to deploying it in lower environments, to deploying it in production, to maintaining it. All of this has to be done by one team and preferably the same guy who wrote the code. You build it, you run it, you maintain it kind of thing.

And then to do that, you're talking about institutionalizing new ways of working across the enterprise. And to do that, you obviously need to upskill the workforce through motivation. Preferably why I'm saying through motivation, because that's easier after that, it's then some tough calls that have to be made.

But the workforce has to be upskilled on the technology side, on the ways of working side as well. And then there is reworking the vendor relationship. Why that?

Because as your organization matures, as your projects become more nimble by doing all of this, the vendor also have to change their ways of working. And to measure that, you have to measure the right metrics. Metrics which are business led as well as technology led.

And to be able to do all of that, you need a lot of communication upstream and downstream as well from the senior management and from the grounds up as well, which leads to driving changes through a mix of consensus and directive. You need both because just consensus will not give you the results. Just directives will also not give you the results.

And then a lot more based on the current maturity of the enterprise. So these are nine or 10 dimensions of product management in digital transformation. These are the top ones in my uh, dimension.

They could be others as well depending upon where your enterprise is today. And then there are other software aspects, the aspect of an ownership mindset, right? For a developer to be able to say, I wrote this code, I'll make sure it goes to production, I'll make sure I maintain it as well for the InfoSec to say that I will make sure that security is embedded throughout the SDLC for all of these other roles to take an ownership mindset, which also has to be infused by the product management.

And as all of this transformation happens, then there are certain softer things that get triggered in the minds of certain individuals. Now this is beyond, this is more on the personal level, which is a perceived lack of control with hyper automation because now I do not specifically control what these five people are doing because it's done by a script. It's automated, nobody's asking me anything.

So it's a perceived lack of control, which goes back to training, which goes back to upskilling. And ultimately if you dig down deep enough, you are dealing with egos of people, egos on the personal front, on the personality front, egos on the territorial front. This is my team, this is my group, this is my domain.

Leave me alone and let me do what I want to do. That's territorial. It comes from the old age of marking your territory, which goes against the principles of collaboration and breaking down team silos and working together to release a product for your end customer, which I like to call the non glue people.

These are people who don't like to be a part of the overall glue, which creates the product or the service that you're trying to build together. So as a product manager, as a product owner, as a product person, when you are trying to move things faster, in today's age of AI and digital, there has to be a concentrated dealing with egos of people. And that's where the difficulty comes in.

I hope this makes sense and I hope you're getting an understanding of what I'm trying to convey here. Now, how can spirituality help in all of this? So I showed you this diagram earlier.

Now I'm gonna talk about what mental strength does it take to achieve all of this? If you are a product manager, if you are a product person whose enterprise is going through this change, what sort of mental strengths or mental techniques or mental acumen would you need to develop all of this to deploy all of this for implementing agile at scale, you need to be an influencer. What do I mean by that?

Because you have to talk to teams to influence their way of working. You have to tell them that hey, there is a better way of doing the things that you have been doing for the last 10 years. Tried it, tested it in this organization, here are the results, let's do it together.

That's influencing. You have to be a visionary to keep an eye of what's going on in the outside world and go back to your organization and say, guys, I think we need a dere. I think it's time to get a community builder role in the organization.

You need to give visionary for that. Be constructing organization structures. I spoke about dealing with very, very fragile egos of people out there, institutionalizing new ways of working across the enterprise that is telling people to move beyond their comfort zone, to use some new tools to adopt the new processes that have been laid out.

And that is the role of the product manager of the product owner upskilling workforce through motivation. It starts with acceptance of the situation. The tie was a web sphere admin for the past 15 years.

Now my enterprise is moving out of WebSphere. My application is already 60% broken down into microservices being deployed as um, a serverless architecture on the cloud. My job role will be irrelevant in the next one year.

I better upskill myself. So first you accept the situation, then you do something to make that change. Reworking the vendor relationship, encouraging the vendors to move to these modern ways of working, which could mean a short term loss because of automation.

Uh, their costs, their efficiency will go up, therefore their profits would reduce. But it's a long-term benefit. So making the vendors understand all of this as well.

Measuring the right metrics, spiritual metrics are straight lines and zoomed out. So look at Dora, look at Spotify, look at all the models out there, but then zoom out and figure out which one of these is relevant for your organization. And as you zoom out, all the metrics that you need to measure, that you need to monitor will suddenly start making sense to you as well.

A lot of upstream communication, downstream driving changes. All of this comes from a clarity of thought. Once you have clarity of thought on what and how and why it needs to be done, it's easier to communicate and a lot more.

So if there is one slide in this entire deck that you can take home it, this is that slide. I hope you understand this. Now I wanted to bring up this guy, Simon Sinek.

Probably a lot of you know him already. So he talks about this formula of success of an enterprise or success of an individual is energy into competence, race to the power of empathy. And that is what I really wanna hone on now.

So empathy comes from living in the present moment, not living in the past, not living in the future, but living in the now, living in the present moment. That's where empathy to yourself, to the enterprise, to people comes from. And I'll give you a very simple trick, which I like to call the snap your fingers technique.

What is that? Several times during the day, just take a break from whatever you're doing and just think for a second, am I in the future? Am I in the past or am I in the present?

And I can bet you 99% of the times you will either be in the future or in the past. And when you realize that, snap your finger and come back to reality, come back to the present moment. So try that.

And by being in the present moment, by snapping your fingers multiple times a day, you will get into that habit and that habit will drive empathy because you're not concerned about what mess up will happen in the future. You are not judging people on what they did in the past. You're only having a matter of fact conversation in the now.

And that can help solve a lot of those people issues that we spoke about earlier. So I'll give you some case studies, some real examples that I've seen. So there was a product, um, manager and he was very successful in his job.

He was leading a team, he was really happy. Um, and the client that he worked with was also very happy with him. And then something happened and this guy had to move out of that role into another role.

And then he was replaced by another person. Now the second person who came in, he took a good knowledge transfer, he was very proactive, he was technically very, very strong. All the right indicators, right?

And then after, you know, two, three months after this new guy moved in, we started getting some murmurs from the client that they were not very happy. And I then happened to be at the client location. I met one of the stakeholders and I asked them, Hey, what's the problem?

Is there a technical competency issue? They said, no. I said, I think the deliveries are also happening on time.

They said, yes, we are happy with the deliveries. I said, is quality an issue? No, no issues with the quality as well.

I said, is the team happy? He said, yeah, the team is also kind of happy. I said, then what's the issue?

Why are you guys not happy? What's going wrong? And I still remember what the other person said.

He said, there's nothing wrong with this guy. He's missing the warmth. What is that?

He was missing the empathy. And just that sheer factor was going against that person. And as a result of that, we had to take that person, give him the real feedback, do a bunch of coaching, and then that thing improved.

Another team that I worked with, one of the larger teams, they got an award of a top team in a transformation. And I was very curious on why this particular team got that award. What was so different with them and on digging deeper and doing several conversations.

The end result was that the leader of that team, everybody said she's a great listener, not she's a great problem solver, not she's a go-getter. She's a great listener. All she was exhibiting was empathy.

Did that solve all the problems? Not really, but people felt heard. And sometimes that's enough.

So how do you get to that point? How do you develop all this empathy and how do you deal with large scale transformations of this scale? And how do you, over a period of time, how do you build yourself up?

Is there a roadmap for doing this? I'll give you one along with the snap technique. Get started with meditation, not some mambo jumbo four R five R meditation.

Go on YouTube and look for 10 minute guided meditation. You get a bunch of them. Pick up the one you like and start doing it.

When you start doing this every single day, preferably at the same time, morning, afternoon, night, whatever works for you, just 10 minutes. You do that for two or three weeks, you'll see the difference. You'll see a little bit of mental peace coming in, you'll see a clarity of thought coming in.

You will see things start suddenly making a lot more sense. So start with that. And then once you get into the habit of it, maybe pick up a self meditation app, this calm there headspace there, 10% happier.

There are a bunch of them. I just put a couple of names. So you install one of these apps and then you can get certain moods, certain music, instrumental nature sounds, whatever, some white noises, all of that stuff.

But these start with guided meditation and then go to music or sound-based meditations. That's kind of the logical stepping. And then once you've done some, some of these sort, then try and do some sort of spiritual course.

Maybe a win of method, maybe an engineering, maybe an art of living, whatever is available in your local community, your city, not online. Do this in person. So every city in the world has a lot of these things happening.

So go online, check, do some research, do a bunch of these and see which ones you relate with, which one makes sense with you. Start going a little deeper within yourself. First doing empathy with yourself first, and then the outside world will automatically take care of yourself.

And then once you've done all of this stuff, when you are ready, your teacher will automatically appear to guide you from further from there on whatever your path is. So this is one simple roadmap that I have myself practice, and I share this roadmap with a lot of talks that I do across the world. And it has worked for a lot of people.

Hopefully it'll work for you as well. And it'll help you to develop empathy first for yourself, then for the people around you. Then for the world at large, which is very critical for doing large scale digital transformation and also delivering a product and a healthier word.

So like product management, uh, like project management, maturity, spirituality is also a continuous journey. So that's me, that's my time. And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Uh, I post there regularly and then I have a YouTube channel as well that you can check out. Thank you.