The VSM Renaissance: Catalysed by DevOps | Helen Beal

Hi! Lovely to see you all. It's great to be here. A huge honour for me to take the spot. I'm really excited to talk to you about DevOps. We are at the DevOps conference after all. But specifically, why it's catalysing a renaissance - in this thing we call value stream management. So, my name is Helen. I have what I'm told is a portfolio career, - which means I've got a bunch of different jobs - and worked for a bunch of different people. I head up the Value Stream Management Consortium, - which is a not-for-profit intended to create space - for people that are interested about Value Stream Management - to come together and learn from each other. I've got a bunch of case stories that I'll share with you today. I've also worked with the DevOps Institute for many years now. In fact, since their inception. They were acquired about 18 months ago by a company called PeopleCert, - who also had acquired Axelos, who own ITIL, and also Prince2. So, quite a nice spread in that organisation now - between DevOps and ITSM and project management. I found the project management hard because I'm a DevOps person. So, I kind of believe in the project-to-product movement. But I'm learning that many people use project management, - and we'll probably touch on a couple of moments about that today as well. Prior to these strange, I guess, nearly five years of portfolio career, - I was doing about a decade of DevOps consultancy, - starting in release management - and then moving into a broader kind of helping people - on their DevOps journeys or their DevOps transformations. Working in the UK... you've probably gathered I am British. Working in the UK with people like Lloyds Banking Group, - Vanquis Bank, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, - which is a rather wonderful charity we have in the UK, Hiscox, - a whole bunch of different organisations, - mainly in financial services and insurance. Also, some German companies like Deutsche Telekom - and also some Middle Eastern companies like Elm, - who basically run the tech systems in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. So, I met quite a few different people, - helped quite a few people with their DevOps implementations, - and this is what led me down the VSM path, - and I'll explain more as we go along. So, what we're going to be talking about today - is a state of, if you like, where we're at today in terms of DevOps. We'll talk about your value streams. You might not think that you've got any, but I'm pretty sure you do. We'll align value streams to DevOps toolchains - and talk about what a value stream network is - and what that might look like for you, and then perhaps what you could do next. First of all, let's talk about where we're at with DevOps. It's been a while now since 2009, - that first event in Ghent with Patrick Debois, - the godfather of DevOps, as I like to call him. Actually, this chart here - is from the State of DevOps report from Puppet in 2021. And it really struck me when I saw this, - having followed this report since its inception. This news here, this blue band is saying - that this large swathe of companies is finding it really hard - to move up into the higher, mid-tier, the higher levels of capabilities. I'm sure you're all familiar with DORA metrics. Who uses DORA metrics? First, who's heard of DORA metrics? Hands up. Yeah. And who uses DORA metrics? Interesting. So, a very small fraction of those that have heard of them. My experiences is that DORA goes quite a way back, - because I used the DORA assessment alongside another assessment - that we created ourselves with these companies that I spoke about. And those metrics of which the main four, - the two throughput and the two stability metrics, - so our lead time, which we'll talk about more later, - and our deployment frequency on the throughput side, - and then the stability side, our MTTR and our change failure rate, - are kind of important. That's what we're looking at - when we're looking at these capabilities in terms of moving forward. Now, many of you will have read, I hope, Accelerate. I'll keep your hands up and down today. Who's read Accelerate? Again, quite a few of you. We'll talk probably about quite a few of the IT Revolution Press books today. That one is a really key one in my mind - and really helps us understand the correlations - between these metrics and practices and how they work together. But they are not the whole story for me, - and I will talk about why that is as well. So, where are we at with DevOps? Well, we're at this place where we're 15+ years in. People are seeing some benefits, - but it hasn't maybe delivered on its promise everywhere yet. The other beautiful thing in this report is Patrick actually came out and said - that he'd finally come up with a definition. That had frustrated some people in the DevOps industry for some time, - that we didn't really have a clear definition what DevOps was, - and you could walk around an organisation - and get different people saying it was different things. I used to have a slide, it's not in this deck, - but it was like a pair of scales. On one side, there was a cage, on the other – a bird flying free. And it was always intentional from people like Patrick - not to have a manifesto or a definition around DevOps - because they wanted to not cage it. They wanted to give it that freedom to evolve, which it has done over time. But Patrick did put a stake in the ground in 2021. He said that DevOps is whatever you do to bridge this friction - which is caused by these silos that we've created in our organisations. And those silos came about - because of the evolution of tech in our organisations. I worked with Lloyds Banking Group. They're over 250 years old. Tech is a really new concept in their organisation, - like 40, 50 years old. When they first got it, it was very back-office, - and it became bigger, - and the finance teams and the people running the organisation - needed to find a way to control the costs. So, they created departments, and that's where these silos came from. Now we live in the digital era, in the digital economy. And actually, our strategic enabler is what we do in technology. So, those silos are quite problematic. And this is part of why DevOps is helping us - and why VSM is experiencing this renaissance. So, following on on this theme of where we're at, - I was lucky enough a couple of years ago to get involved with a group of people - co-authoring this book called Investments Unlimited. I mentioned IT Revolution Press. This is another of their titles. I'm sure many of you have read The Phoenix Project as well. Of course, it's our Bible in DevOps, which was written by Gene Kim et al. Gene Kim obviously owns IT Revolution, the press behind these wonderful books. I also mentioned Project to Product, another one. We've got Steve in the front row here - that will be chatting later about his new book Flow Engineering. So, there's a lot out there. Anyway, Investments Unlimited is in the vein of the Phoenix Project. It's a novel about IT governance, - which I know can be not the most exciting of topics, - but we've made our best effort to bring it to life. And as the guys, Mark and Peter, just mentioned, - security and compliance are incredibly important for what we do in tech. So, Investments Unlimited is an attempt or an effort to shine some life on that. One of my favourite scenes that I didn't write, - I'm not even sure which of the authors wrote it, - but there's a scene where our main character, Bill, - walks past a room, and he sees his CEO, - his chair there, in with Jason Colbert, - who is this SVP of digital transformation. And on the screen, he sees a slide. It says, "DevOps has failed you". And it's quite a significant pivotal moment in the book - where they realise that they've made all this investment in DevOps - with all these great hopes and dreams, - and actually it hasn't quite done what it's done. But the point that Jason makes - is it wasn't actually DevOps that has failed them. It's their implementation. They haven't done some of the cultural things that they needed to do, - and they haven't paid attention to the details, - the collaboration, and some of the automation. So, the rest of the book really is a journey - on the way back to DevOps' true calling. That can be a bit of a sentiment, a bit of a painful poll to try, - but does anyone in the audience feel that DevOps is not maybe failing you, - but DevOps has still got some way to live up to its promise? Hands up if we've got a way to go. So, a few of you are saying that. Anyone feel that they've done everything that they want to do with DevOps? I can't imagine why you would be in this room if that would be the case. So, we've all got work to do, right? So, this is my first bit of my story, this kind of acknowledgement - that perhaps we've got some things to do. And I'm not alone: Patrick said it, my other authors of the book, - and now here's an industry analyst weighing in as well. So, this is Gartner, in their Predicts 2021, - which was actually published at the end of 2020, - saying that to reach this next level that we're talking about, - this next level of capabilities, our I&Os, - that's our infrastructure and operations leaders in Gartner speak, - must focus on value stream management to maximise flow, - which we all know about. It's the first of the three ways. Improve delivery, efficiency and drive innovation. So, Gartner also thinking the same thing. Now, Gartner were responding a little bit in this - to something Forrester did. And we could point to Forrester, actually, for starting this renaissance. Renaissance, the word, means rebirth. You probably know that. So, there's a big... I studied English literature at the university. We had a renaissance in literature in the 1600s, - where people like Shakespeare started to retell a lot - of the classical stories from the Golden Age of Greece. So, when we're having a renaissance, we're coming around again - and revisiting something. So, what Forrester recognised is there was something - that was triggering this interest in value stream management. And we'll come back to the history of value stream management in a bit. But what Forrester did in 2017 - is they published their first wave around value stream management. Then they did another one in 2020. And this is the quote from the 2021. And it's saying here that when they published that first report, - very few of the application development and delivery, - AD&D and Gartner speak, leaders had heard of VSM. But since then, this market has evolved rapidly. Now, as somebody leading the Value Street Management Consortium - and heavily involved in the annual research we've done, - we're just on the cusp of delivering our fourth annual State of VSM report, - I think this was a little pre-emptive. We have quite a few conversations at the consortium - about where we are in terms of the technology adoption curve, - if we're crossing the chasm, if we've crossed the chasm, - if we're in the early majority, those kind of conversations. And I'll touch back on that later on as well. But Forrester recognised that there was a link - between what was happening in VSM tools and DevOps tools - that was driving this behaviour, making us look closer at value streams. Now, when I was doing all of that work with these companies around the world, - those engagements looked like multi-year engagements, - where I would spend a few days a month on site with different teams. With Lloyds Banking Group, for example, every year for several years, - I would go around and meet with all of the teams. We would discuss where they were at, we would plot them on the assessment - and plot their capabilities and see where they were improving. We try and dig out the stories about who was doing amazing things - and share them across the organisation. So, making local discoveries, global improvements, and do all of that. But as well as the assessments, I had another load of tools in my kit bag. Some of it was the classroom training from the DevOps Institute. Some of it was more interesting experiential learning, - like we had a Phoenix project game from Gaming Works, - and various other components that we would package up. And one of these things was value stream mapping. The very first value stream mapping exercise I did - was with a company called VocaLink, subsequently bought by Barclaycard. And what we mapped was a project - where they separated their retail and investment banking parts - of the BACS payments within HSBC Bank. And they recognised that this project they'd done with HSBC, - they were going to need to do it again with all of their banking customers. So, they mapped the value stream of that project - to understand how it had gone, how they could productise it, - and how they could improve it as they went forward. This was before the DevOps Handbook came out. But when the DevOps Handbook came out, again, from IT Revolution Press, - one of the things I was relieved and felt validated by - was the inclusion of value stream terminology within it, - specifically within these two chapters - about selecting which value stream to work with - and then understanding the work in that value stream, making it visible. So, I was like, "Great, I'm not the only one that thinks - that this value stream management work - should be included in what we do in DevOps". And it kind of makes sense. Jane Grohl, who is the CEO of DevOps Institute, - she used to describe DevOps as the harmonious, polygamous marriage - between lean, agile, and ITSM. So, of course, value streams are lean. This makes sense. It's part of DevOps. But it kind of brought it to the fore. But this history of value stream management is interesting - because it's been here before. In fact, we can trace the history of materials and information mapping - and these ideas of looking at flow quite a way back. I often talk about the Venetian arsenal - as one of the first places where people tried to map this flow. But most commonly, we know about Ford - and Toyota in Japan in the 1950s is where a lot of this comes from. So, we've kind of come round again. Sometimes value stream management in the market - in recent days or weeks or months, - I've seen it have criticism levelled at it that it's a shiny new thing. And it's really not a shiny new thing. We've known about value streams for a long time. We've learned a lot about how to map them. We've still got quite a lot of things to learn. This is true in all things in life. But it's coming around again. We know a little bit about why, - but let's have a dig a little bit deeper as to why it's happening - and how you can combine these two disciplines always working. First of all, here's a little snippet from Telstra. Telstra, one of our VSMC members, - Value Stream Management Consortium members. All of the case stories I'm putting in here today, by the way, - are available on the Value Stream Management Consortium website, - and you can view the talks in the members portal as well. So, Telstra quite simply is saying that this is the next step for them. They've kind of done the Agile transformation - and got as far as they've gone with that. They've seen that value stream management is the next thing - to evolve them to the next goals they've got - and get to the outcomes they want to see next. So, this is very recent. But my personal Bible for value stream management - is this book from a guy called James Martin, - who in 1995 published this book called The Great Transition. My next question is, who's heard of James Martin before I put this up? I know you have. [Laughing] So... I've been studying this book for quite a while with customers - and in the context of the value stream management consortium. And writing this presentation, I went back to it again - because I did one of those things... I asked Gemini to remind me - what The Great Transition said about value streams, - and it told me it didn't talk about value streams. So, I moved house recently, - and a lot of my books are in a box in the garage. So, I had to go out into the garage and find my book, - and I brought it back in, I had to... I'm sure you've all had this experience where you've had to... nicely explain to Gemini that it's not quite right yet. This is one of these instances. Because the whole of part two of the Great Transition - is about value streams and actually the reinvention. Now, James Martin... For some reason, I hadn't learned that much about him - until I picked up his book again, and then I started to dig around. He was born in the 1950s in the UK. He was British. He went to work for IBM. He was from a working-class background, but he got into a grammar school. He was quite a smart cookie, quite introverted, - but became quite a good speaker, an absolutely prolific writer. He wrote something like 120 books. He managed to agree an unusual royalty arrangement with IBM, - which basically meant that he became a billionaire - through the books that he wrote and the speaking that he did. He bought an island off Bermuda, - where, unfortunately, in 2013 he passed away in a kayaking accident. But he had a pretty good life as things go. He was also incredibly philanthropic, - and there's lots of things at Oxford University he's invested in. But this book for me... I've not claimed to have read, let alone heard of all of his 120 books. But The Great Transition for me was very interesting. Now, I want you to think for a moment about where you were in 1995. I was just finishing my degree - in English Literature and Language at London University, - wondering what to do with it. And I spent a lot of time temping at university. I knew I didn't want to be a journalist. I wasn't ready to write novels. So, I let the wind blow me wherever it blew me. It blew me to IBM. And that's where I was, it was just the start of the Internet. I'd done a module on my English degree, on English and computing, - and learned about HTML and the Internet. And I remember sitting in the Lotus department that I was in at IBM, - and we would, at the end of the day use the Netscape browser, - see what we could find on the Internet, which was almost always NASA. And that was about it in 1995. But in this book, James predicts the digital transformation - that we've been living through now for several decades. And the biggest point he makes is that to make it effective, - we need value stream management. But somehow this message got lost in the annals of time, until about now. Sorry, the formatting on this slide has gone a little wonky. But let's just do a little bit of value stream management 101. Let's talk about what a value stream is, for starters. I like to say a value stream is anything that delivers a product or a service, - but you can get a bit more detail from James here. So, we need a starting point. We need an idea, where it starts, - and we need to finish it with the customer. And if you're into beginning with the end in mind, - you probably want to start with thinking about that customer and that outcome. But it's an end-to-end thing. It's a collection of steps or processes. And what we care about is the value that's moving through it. So, what are we trying to create? My next question for you is, - who in the audience has ever mapped a value stream? I've spoken a little bit about... Quite a few of you have done it so far, that's good. So, mapping a value stream is the entry point into value stream management. But I want to emphasise that there is a difference - between the practice of mapping and the practices of management, - as described by James Martin and also in other books - named Value Stream Management from multiple authors. So, when we map a value stream, - what we're doing is something that's very human-oriented. Pre-pandemic, it was almost always in a physical space, - and we would get together for a day, up to four days,