Day Two Digital Transformation: We Fear Change

Changing how 10 people work is difficult, changing how 100 work is very difficult. And, barring Planck's principle, changing how 5,000 or more people work is, typically, impossible. When it comes to improving how large organisations build, release, and run software, scaling to thousands of people is the real challenge. If you're trying to move beyond your initial success at transforming how your organisation builds and runs software, you've experienced this scaling challenge. Thankfully, most of the problems in this challenge are common challenges. Though you may feel cursed and alone, in our experience talking with hundreds of organisations, most of the problems are the same. In this third, final, part of our Path to Production webinar series we'll look at several of these common challenges and give tactics to address them. Part of applying a tactic successfully is understanding why the challenge exists. We'll cover: Building confidence and trust in change by shifting how you build your developer-centric infrastructure from service delivery to product management. Platform advocacy and marketing. Do you have a t-shirt for your platform yet? If not, better get one! Engineering and managing the roll-out of changes to large organisations. Our goal is to give you practical, usable tactics and management tools that we've learned first-hand and from other large organisations.

Bryan Ross Tanzu VMware EMEA Value Advisor & Michael Coté Tanzu VMware Senior Senior Member of Technical Staff.

Transcript

1. © VMware, Inc. Day Two Digital Transformation: We Fear Change Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering, Episode 03 Bryan Ross & Coté Fall, 2023
2. © VMware, Inc. 2 Kotter Prosci ADKAR® Model Pictures: Bridges from Global Leadership Foundation, Kubler-Ross from ex-teachers.uk; PDCA from Wikipedia, KotterInc.com, ADKAR from Microsoft. Bridges Transition Model
3. © VMware, Inc. 3 https://newsletter.cote.io Coté Bryan Ross https://bryanross.me
4. © VMware, Inc. 4 Empathy for the unchangeling
5. © VMware, Inc. 5
6. © VMware, Inc. 6 Source: "‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours," Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi, Bill Schaninger, McKinsey, Sep 2021; "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, and Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey, August, 2023. See also further commentary from Coté.
7. © VMware, Inc. 7 A thriving organization focuses on satisfaction, not productivity Source: "Developer Thriving: The four factors that drive Software Developer Productivity across Industries," Cat Hicks, Carol S. Lee, Morgan Ramsey, March, 2023; “The SPACE of Developer Productivity,” Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, Jenna Butler, March, 2021. Causes of thriving Because a developer is… Agency 1) able to voice disagreement with team definitions of success 2) has a voice in how their contributions are measured Motivation & Self-Efficacy 1) motivated when working on code at work 2) can see tangible progress most of the time 3) is working on the type of code work they want to work on 4) is confident that even when working in code is unexpectedly difficult, they will solve their problems Learning Culture 1) learning new skills as a developer 2) able to share the things they learn at work Support & Belonging 1) supported to grow, learn, and make mistakes by their team 2) agrees they are accepted for who they are by their team
8. 8 “This is a 1 ½ CIO job.”
9. © VMware, Inc. 9 keep it small
10. © VMware, Inc. 10 Staff’s View Work the Same Transform! Compensation $ $ Risk LOW HIGH Outcome 👍 🤷 Exec View Work the Same Transform! Compensation $ $$$$ Risk HIGH HIGH Outcome 💣 👍
11. © VMware, Inc. 11 Staff’s View Work the Same Transform! Compensation $ $ Risk LOW HIGH Outcome 👍 🤷 Exec View Work the Same Transform! Compensation $ $$$$ Risk HIGH HIGH Outcome 💣 👍
12. © VMware, Inc. 12 Tools to start with
13. © VMware, Inc. 13 Make their work-life better, and show progress Find the Developer Toil, Confusion, Blockers • What are we making? • We have a strong vision for our product, and we're doing important work together every day to fulfill that vision. • I have the context I need to confidently make changes while I'm working. • I am proud of the work I have delivered so far for our product. • I am learning things that I look forward to applying to future products. • My workstation seems to disappear out from under me while I'm working. • It's easy to get my workstation into the state I need to develop our product. • What aspect of our workstation setup is painful? • It's easy to run our software on my workstation while I’m developing it. • I can boot our software up into the state I need with minimal effort. • What aspect of running our software locally is painful? What could we do to make it less painful? • It's easy to run our test suites and to author new ones. • Tests are a stable, reliable, seamless part of my workflow. • Test failures give me the feedback I need on the code I am writing. • What aspect of production support is painful? • We collaborate well with the teams whose software we integrate with. • When necessary, it is within my power to request timely changes from other teams. • I have the resources I need to test and code confidently against other teams' integration points. • What aspect of integrating with other teams is painful? • I'm rarely impacted by breaking changes from other tracks of work. • We almost always catch broken tests and code before they're merged in. • What aspect of committing changes is painful? • Our release process (CI/CD) from source control to our story acceptance environment is fully automated. • If the release process (CI/CD) fails, I'm confident something is truly wrong, and I know I'll be able to track down the problem. • What aspect of our release process (CI/CD) is painful? • Our team releases new versions of our software as often as the business needs us to. • We are meeting our service-level agreements with a minimum of unplanned work. • When something is wrong in production, we reproduce and solve the problem in a lower environment. Sources: "Developer Toil: The Hidden Tech Debt," Susie Forbath, Tyson McNulty, and Coté, August, 2022. See also Michael Galloway’s interview questions for platform product managers.
14. © VMware, Inc. 14 Sources: BT Canvas team; MB.io; Duke Energy; Allstate; "Take DevOps to 11 and Sprinkle Cloud on it with Rainbows and Unicorns," Matt Curry, s1p 2017. “Improve Developer Productivity with Platform as a Product,” VMware Explore, Nov. 2022.
15. © VMware, Inc. 15 Change Yourself!
16. © VMware, Inc. 16