Carmen DeArdo

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:44

Who is Carmen DeArdo? What’s been your journey?

Carmen DeArdo  00:51

Hi. So I’ve been pretty fortunate to have an interesting journey. I started my career at Bell Labs actually. I spent about 25 years in the telecom industry, doing some things that probably seem a little antiquated now, like 800 service, although it’s still going to some level and other network capabilities, messaging. So I got the benefit of kind of working in that environment, learned a lot about Deming, Shewhart started at Bell Labs, 25 I think it was, little before me. But then kind of after the telecom bust I went contracting for a few years. And then I ended up in Nationwide Insurance here in the US. And I was fortunate to sort of get involved when they were in doing some agile, lean DevOps kind of journey. And that’s where we became customers at TaskTop. That’s where I got to meet Mick and some of the people, Nickerson could find at TaskTop in 2007. And got involved with kind of through relationship with IBM, that we’ve partnered with Jean Kim, and the DevOps enterprise summit, I kind of just fell into those things by luck. And so a few years about, I guess it’s about three and a half that I decided to join TaskTop to help other customers on their journey, which was really at that point became more around value stream management and utilizing DevOps practices and agile and lean to improve delivery and the end. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three and a half years here at TaskTop.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:59

Nice. And you have a book I want to talk about that you’ve written, Standing on shoulders that Leaders Guide to digital transformation. I haven’t read it yet, I ordered it. I’ve kind of looked through some stuff and some of the topics from the book, but I’m really looking forward to reading as well. And looking at the reviews. People seem like, enjoy it. And then it seems to resonate with people, especially when it comes to holistic transformation. 

Carmen DeArdo  03:33

Yeah, I have a copy of the book here. It’s a book, Jack Mar and I wrote. I worked with Jack, my jacket nationwide, and it won the DevOps.com 2020, DevOps over the years, some kind of book of the year. It has a lot of the stories and what’s interesting, I guess, is like found even at Bell Labs obviously, last century, DevOps wasn’t a thing. But we were doing things that were, I think, in the principle of what DevOps came to be. So I actually went back and resurrected some stories from Bell Labs, which I find interesting. So yeah, hopefully, people pick it up, they’ll find it useful. So I’ll be interested.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:29

And maybe I’d love for you to share a couple of those stories. Also, maybe one of the things that I picked up, which is your foreword by Jean Kim, and one of the first sentences, he’s describing you and he said, his humility and singular focus on weatherizing or touch on technical practices at Nationwide stood out to him. What did he mean by that? As far as I know, humility part by think, we talk about architecture, and technical practices and modularizing those inside a large insurance company is an enormous task. And I’m assuming when we talk about architectural practices includes business architecture as well, not just IT architecture, or is it more focused on IT architecture?

Carmen DeArdo  05:32

It’s probably more on IT. But I think it does bleed into business. I think the thing that struck me when I first came in the doors of nationwide, which is 2005, I’ve been hired essentially to try to help operationalize agile. So as somebody put it agile was kind of being done as a hobby rather than a price. Right? It’s like, well, we’ll do an agile project, and now they had vendor, but then when it was over, there was nothing left in the environment. And really, the thing that struck me was, I guess, it took me a while to realize this right. In Bell Labs, we had been working in a product mindset, right? We had products, we had the 800 products and everything, and nationwide was project. So there was legions of project managers. And I remember application owners telling me they couldn’t keep control of their applications, their systems, because they were being tugged and pulled. And we were using clarity, and we had people10 hours on this project. And so, what struck me was just how different things were. So really, a lot of my focus was trying to get people to think more about things from a product perspective. Now, it turns out, that’s where my experience with Mick joined up, because Mick’s book is project product. So one of the discussions that we had, I was actually comparing how things had been done at Bell Labs compared to how they were being done at nationwide.

And what I found then through my involvement with Gene and DevOps enterprise summit was well, that was the norm, right? Nationwide was the norm not Bell Labs. And what I found was a lot of people were trying to look at things more holistically, which is kind of what the heart of DevOps and lean are is optimize the whole, it’s the first way that Jean talks about in the Phoenix Project and it can be a lonely experience when you’re one of the few people at the company who are trying to think this way and I had help it, it was a nationwide and I did talks with Cindy Payne and Jim Graf Meyer and Dan Ritchie and other folks. But Alan Bill is from Maine but Jean has allowed us to commiserate with other people who are going on this journey and what was working and what wasn’t and being able to use those experiences and those stories became invaluable I think to some of us especially if you go back to the 2014 conference when it was much smaller, more intimate than what it eventually, thanks to the success gene, had an IT revolution grew into and so got to meet just some amazing people from other organizations Topo Paul from Capital One and Cordy Kessler, and had the Meek men and the list goes on, I’m going to leave out names and more, but I just think my sense was always trying to get people to think I used to call it think horizontally, right? Think more holistically, think about it from the experience of the customer and who is your customer and I think what we find is, especially if you’re on a most of the products if you will, companies have are not external customer facing their shared services, their like billing systems and client, if you’re insurance billings claims things like that, or client communication or many of your platform systems, people don’t tend to think of those as products and they don’t tend to architect them for flow or speed and sometimes not even sure who their customers are. Right? I have this scenario I called the jersey syndrome, which is where we keep these high level OKR, so I use it now just for better [inaudible 10:10].

What’s a team [inaudible 10:10] want to sell more merchandise, right? They want to sell more their jerseys, right? It could be a soccer team, football team, whatever. You don’t want to go to like your offensive lineman or your defenders and say, what’s our goal this year coach? We want to sell more jerseys? What are you saying? You want me to go out of the stadium and wear jerseys? What are you saying? Well, obviously, right? What you want is to do something better to make the team successful, so that people want to wear and buy your merchandise. But I think sometimes we take these high level OKRs like customer retention or customer expansion, when you’re talking to a platform team, that means nothing, right? Platform teams need to understand well, who are your customers? Well, my customers are developers or testers or people who need environments, who need monitoring setup. Okay, what are your goals? Well, it might be automating these capabilities, providing more self-service capabilities. And so I think what gets lost sometimes is, the fact that we have a lot of these internal systems or products that also have customers that are internal customers, and they need to focus on flow and business value and all the same things that the customer facing systems do. And I think that’s one of the things that we try to get people to see that think more in and around what really getting in your way and how do you think more horizontal to value more quickly?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:59

And that’s why I asked around architecture, because it requires to look at the whole organization, not just IT architecture, but business architecture, and say like, okay, how are we actually structured? And how is that value flowing? Or how far horizontally do we see? Sometimes you might be looking horizontally to but not all end to end, not seeing the full picture. But I’ve worked with a lot of insurance companies and in banks and I don’t know, if you see the similar pattern in the sense, the challenges, with a lot of legacy systems, usually people have been there for a long time. Resistance to structural changes, or people just say they will be like, Miljan, I’ve seen this wave come through, I’m just going to ride this wave before agile or something else. And it seems like in the last 15, 20 years stuff has changed, but not much has changed. And going back to your title of the book Standing on shoulders, it’s almost like we haven’t really embraced those fundamental lessons that we’ve learned from Toyota from just companies that have embraced more of that product-based thinking and helped our employees to, I still work with clients, it’s same issues that we dealt with 10,15 years ago, and I don’t know if you’ve seen that, I don’t know what your thought is on just that mindset, and structural architectural change, and switching from that project or silos and functions to more of end to end value stream product-base, whatever you want to call.

Carmen DeArdo  13:48

Sure. No, I think you’re exactly right. I mean there’s terms now, safe terms and I think the team’s topologies, the work that has been done there by oh, gosh.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:03

No, I know exactly [inaudible 14:05]

Carmen DeArdo  14:04

Manuel, about operational value streams and development phase streams, right? And if you look at it from a customer experience, they have their operational value stream, right? So my car, we had a famous example of a hurricane it turned into a flood and so there’s a lot of flooded car clients. So you want people to use the web, the direct [inaudible 14:33] and using all your human resources to get these claims in. So there’s many systems, right? They’re going to call in and they’re going to say, I have a claim and then as they go through their process, they’re going to hit many systems as part of their journey through the operational value stream, you start to actually look at all those systems and are they really optimized and the end? I mean, typically, they’re not. And so that’s where we try to get people to think more broadly around, what is the experience of your customer whether again, you’re an external product or an internal product? And where is the work. And I think an important concept here is, sometimes we talk about Lean and utilization, and we think about keeping people busy. Well, people will always stay busy.

A lot people are going to be busy. It’s not where people are waiting, it’s where work is waiting, that’s invisible. It’s not like a car production plant where you can go up to the fourth or fifth floor, look down and see, this inventory is powered up here. And in software, that’s a lot harder. So what we try to get people to think about is, where is the work waiting? Where is the work building up? Because that’s what leads from your customer experience and that’s what they’re experiencing. And then it’s an interesting conversation sometimes, because we’ll try to talk about something like flow time and like what’s your flow time from beginning to end? And people say well, we get everything done in two weeks. Well, does your customer actually get things in two weeks? Well, no, but I don’t want to start the clock earlier or stop it later. That’ll make us look bad, right? Now say, I know, I use this car example. I’ll say well, If I drop my car off Monday at a shop, and I don’t get it back till Friday, I haven’t had my car for five days. And you’re telling me well, it’s only on the lift for 15 minutes, what do I care? I don’t care how long was on the lift. I didn’t have my car for five days. So sometimes we’re measuring it from our perspective rather than putting ourselves in the customers shoes and say, okay, I’m without a car for five days, it took five days, where are the wait times? Right? What can we do to speed up those times in order to improve the delivery? And I think a lot of these practices are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. And so we become very good at kind of the local optimization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:27

And that levels back to the structure, right? That goes back to the structure of the organization, if I’m incentivized for that, and like, we’ve focused so much on productivity where we’ve optimized like you said, one area but not really. And when we look at incentives, right? This is another thing in organizations that hasn’t really changed much. But we incentivize individuals, I had some recently, Downey executive, like Miljan, I know, but I got kids in college, I know what’s right but I got kids in college and this what I’m incentivized. So a lot of times you see people, they get it, but the system and the policies are essentially directing their behavior towards something that’s not necessarily the best for the company long term. So how have you maybe nationwide or with other clients, how have you been able to help leaders? Because I think a lot of times leaders are just not fit for the job. It’s almost like that Peter Principle, right? Like, they haven’t been, they’ve been promoted but they’re not systems thinkers, they’re not really thinking. And for those that are kind of, they get it, they don’t have the support that they need in order to do the right things.

Carmen DeArdo  18:51

Yeah, I think you hit on the key point, we used to have a saying that the technology is the easy part, the culture is the hard part. And so one point, I can remember in my career where I was working with 21 areas that were kind of different business areas. And somebody said you can’t get 21 leaders there to agree on the day of the week, right? How are you going to get it to happen? And I said, well, I don’t need 21 people, I just need one. Because, I mean, I’m a believer that if you can get one example and build stories, and I used to try to tell stories from other companies, and that can have diminishing returns, right? Because first you get the story, well, we’re not a unicorn. Well, okay. But then I would use Topo Paul stories from Capital One, he was there. But people need to see it happening in their own environment. Those are the story deck, right? There’s a book I think that talks about that stick written by brothers, I am not good in remembering names. But make it stick, I think it was a call. But those stories are powerful. So I believe you start small, you kind of to make it the grandest, have the privilege of working with your task, calls it the coalition of the willing. And you have to have leadership support. Right? But find one area, two areas where you can start to create these stories,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:31

Or experiences, I guess stories are related to experiences on the..

Carmen DeArdo  20:36

Right. So I can remember the first time we were working with an area and they were able to release on a Tuesday after morning or something, and we…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:50

You just went on mute.

Carmen DeArdo  20:57

I guess I wasn’t moving anything long enough my screen. Sorry about that. So we used to create experiment, we call them experiments. And the focus was really on accelerating the delivery of value, right? That was the only thing we were focused on. We had done other things on lean and cost and quality and all those things. But we’re saying what is it? We ask the question in retrospectives. Very specifically, what’s causing you not to be able to go faster? Not just, what can we do better? It’s like very specific, what’s in our way? And so then we would design experiments, and do show and tells. And the shows and tells became pretty popular, other people would come, other leaders would come and they would show and most of the time they were successful, sometimes they weren’t. But that was okay. It was an experiment, we were trying. And then having those stories from those experiences, I can remember the first time we did the show and tell around a team that delivered in on a Tuesday and there were some people getting somewhat emotional about the fact, that was the first time in their 10,12-year career, they didn’t have to spend a weekend away from their family doing a release, right? And they could do these releases. And so then other business leaders said, well, hey Janet’s area, they did a release on a Tuesday, what the heck, you’ve been telling me for years, I can only get it on the second Saturday of the month. And so those stories became very powerful, we had people from other, I’ had managers come to me and say, Carmen, all my people want to go work for these two teams now. And it’s like, well we can fix that, right? We can get you going. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:57

No, I think that’s been, yeah, my experience to, like just getting people because you can say and share stories from other companies, sometimes that helps just to bring people in, but ultimately, you don’t change your mindset, anybody they change our culture, culture is a result something in my opinion not something that you can immediately change, it’s a result of changing the systems, changing the mindset, changing the practices. But when we look at that change, and when we look at that kind of holistic view and change the culture, changing the leadership mindset, it is really through that experience, and if you think about anything in life too like, looking at what COVID thoughts in a sense of things like that, things like I’ll be doing interviews like this and teaching and my mindset and my approach is changing probably has changed the culture across the globe around. So in experience or event can be done quickly or can last long, is what creates, in my opinion, that change. So when it comes to transformations in organizations, what have you seen work? Is it really those experiences? What about leadership mindset? Then what role does it play, what type of leaders you have, and they’re understanding on what needs to happen?

Carmen DeArdo  24:32

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, you obviously have to have, like I said, talked about that story says, leadership support at some level or some minimum amount right, to get things going. And I don’t think people really do understand leadership and especially systems thinking, I think sometimes leaders fall into the trap of, well, if I’m the leader, I should be driving the best way to do things, I should be the expert, I should be the one setting forth the process improvement initiatives. But I’m a firm believer in Deming’s view that the people closest to the work actually have the best ideas, the concept of quality circles and what leadership is about is allowing those teams to be able to try things, set up the guardrails, right? Set up some conditions to be able to try things and then harvest what works and operationalize those things. So for example, what I see a lot of times is a mechanical approach to DevOps, it’s like, well, if automated testing is good for team A, it’s good for everybody. Well, I’m not going to say it’s not good, but maybe that’s not where the issue is, right? It’s like, I use the example. It’s like taking a bus of people to the doctor, and they all come up with the same prescription.

Do we really understand what teams need and then give them options, the DevOps capabilities improvements in people process technology should be available, the full menu should be available based on what the need is and so good leaders allow their teams to experiment and then operationalize those results. And they understand the difference between what’s a systemic issue and what is a special case. And a lot of times I think we react to special cases as if they’re systemic. And so doing operational reviews, you can look and say, okay, what is systemic here? For example, too much work, we see too much whip. Most times, it’s systemic across organizations, we start a lot of things, they get stops, and we start more stuff, we talk about a pool model but really, if you’re an internal system, or shared service, works getting pushed on you, you’re not the one committing to it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:13

That’s what I was going to say, coming back to what you said about the Toyota or the Lean system, we can visualize it, a lot of what we do, it’s not visualized. So the first thing is, can we visualize to see where those bottlenecks are? So I work with a lot of clients, and they don’t even know, they just manage stuff in JIRA or some other tool, but they don’t really have any clue in a sense of what’s really going on and where the bottlenecks are. So could we maybe talk about that, like visualizing work, the importance, I think that’s another that goes back to the kind of the basics and standing, this visualizing work is not something that Agile community invented, it’s something that’s been around, but it’s still something that I think most companies are not really good at and understanding where the bottlenecks are. The first part is understanding, visualizing work, and then understanding truly where the bottlenecks are.

Carmen DeArdo  28:10

Now, that’s a great question. We talk a lot with our clients about three phases, learn to see, learn to improve, learn to scale. And the first thing, and I think we see this a lot of time, people jump into learn to improve before learn to see, it’s kind of like at the end of the day, if you’ve ever done an A three, right?  The left-hand side is the problem and the right-hand side is the countermeasure. And people start with the countermeasures like No, understand what the problem is. And so learn to see I mean what we do and we have a product, I know, this is not an advertisement, but this product allows you to connect to the various tools where work is done, right? So the Agile management tools, the service management tools, the quality management tools, the portfolio management tools, and follows kind of the journey of the work to show you where it’s flowing and where it isn’t. And because again, it’s about the work. Right, people will stay busy and so what we find is most of the time, it’s not what I call caught Dev to clod. It’s not really that part of it anymore, right? It’s called the cloud. It’s more a lot of times bottleneck is on the work intake side, right? It’s taking months from a concept to get to the point where there’s a card in the backlog of a team. I mean, one organization we work with half their time and money was spent before work on to the backlog of a team, so even if they were perfect on the right-hand side of their value stream, they were leaving everything on this left-hand side without any visibility, without any management, without any improvement.

So how do you really know where it’s going fast? So well, we try to get them to think about is these concepts around work. And in mix book, the flow framework, we talk about four types of work, features, defects, risks and debt. And people understand features and defects. And risk, we mean things like security and compliance, not project management. So a typical example is, you’ll talk to leaders of a company, they’ll go well, do you do security manager? Well, yeah, we have tools, we spend millions of dollars, we have tools, we have people certified, we do static scans, we do dynamic scans. Great. How long does it take you to mitigate something from finding a critical vulnerability, and I’m not talking about one like log for J that makes all the headlines, right? But just a typical scan where you find bunch of vulnerabilities to you fix it. What’s that process like? And they’re not very streamlined. It’s like well, security managers running report, then they have meetings, and they try to beg somebody to fix it, right? Because, especially if you’re in a project mindset, who wants to pay subgrade struts library or something? Nobody, right? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:26

It’s coming out of my project, right?

Carmen DeArdo  31:29

No, so we’re checking all the boxes, right? We’re doing the activities, right? But we’re not looking at the outcomes. And so by starting to measure classify these things like, well, how do you represent risk in your toy, right? Is it an artifact in JIRA? Or your agile management tool, right? Is it even visible? Because if it’s not visible, then you can’t manage it. And then that is another one, right? That is basically anything you’re investing to improve in. And so it’s technical debt, but it’s also people process technology, it’s implementing a DevOps practice, that’s going to take capacity that has to be prioritized, that has to be visible, wealthy organizations, when we start to work with, the risk in the network are not visible at all. And I think, then that reflects back to the business, right? They think, okay, if I have a team of X people and two pizza teams or a bunch of two pizza teams, all they’re doing is working on features, maybe the bugs, which I hope they don’t create. It’s like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:43

And I think that’s another issue, maybe just to dwell over on this, because of risk and that are seen as IT problems, not business problems. And really, they’re business problems, not IT problems.

Carmen DeArdo  32:58

That’s a great insight, I’m going to use on Linux. I think you’re right; it is seen that way that these are business problems, but again, they’re IT problems, but..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:16

I think the reason I say that is the ignorance of saying like not understanding it, not understanding the business risk of it, if I don’t invest in DevOps, if I don’t invest in these risks, and most of the people on the business side don’t fully understand these things. So it’s easy to say, I don’t want it, this is somebody else’s problem, they need to take care of it. Rather than understanding it, you might not be expert on it, but like investing in it, prioritizing it, that needs to come from business in my opinion, and at least support rather than just focusing on the shiny things. 

Carmen DeArdo  33:56

I agree. Yes. And I think that is a key element. We talked about value generation versus value protection, right? So if you look at value generation, people think of features, but actually that is a component of value generation, because that is an investment to deliver value fat more quickly. So if you invest in debt, you’re actually investing in value generation. Value protection is around defects but also risk and it doesn’t do you any good to generate value if you can’t protect it, right? Because you can get customers but if they’re going to leave because PCI, PAI vulnerability exposure, what have you gained there or compliance issues? So I talk about it sometimes, like individual needs a balanced diet, systems need a balance of and that’s in mix flutter in the flow framework. It’s flow distribution.

So we show people, well, here is your flow distribution of what you’re delivering cross features, defects, risks and that and most of the time, companies aren’t even investing 5% in that risk? Well, that’s a conversation to have with the, as you said, with the product owner, the product manager, the business side, are you comfortable with this? I use the example of, I take a fleet of trucks and I’m going to a cross country delivery. And I don’t maintain the trucks, I beat the crap out of them. My drivers are all working all the time. Maybe I make my delivery to California from Maine, but who wants to be the next person to take over this fleet. And those systems are what gives you in the end, it’s the systems that bring you recurring value, right? Projects come and go; initiatives come and go. What’s permanent is the systems. And you have to do the adequate care feeding of the systems. And I think that’s what gets lost. So try and..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:05

No, I think it’s also visualizing. So maybe I want to spend a little bit of time talking about value streams, stream mapping but another thing, a fundamental thing that I see almost everybody struggle with is answering, what is value? We talk about delivering value, we talk about value streams, we talk about = stream mapping, but when you ask people, what is value? They just give you a blank stare, right? So how do you define value? How do you help people, when they say we value this, we value that? Obviously, it’s not just one thing, it could be looked at from many different but from your perspective, how would you answer that question? How could the organization look at how they define value?

Carmen DeArdo  36:50

Yeah, when I’m talking to a team, and again, right? It can be external product and internal product or platform product, one of the first questions we ask them, and it’s one of those things again, that’s what Mick talks about a lot is value. And so I’ll say to them, okay, put yourself, why you exist? Why do customers care? If you went away tomorrow, who would miss you and why would they miss you? Right? Because that’s how you’re being valued. And you’re right, a lot of times, its crickets, especially if you’re with a platform today will say, okay, what is the value you provide? Right? It’s not again, it doesn’t have to do with insurance policies, or finance, or whatever you’re selling, if you’re in a car, it’s all about the cars are selling, right? It’s about monitoring how much monitors and environment set up and self-service capability. So one of the first things that we do is try to get people to think about who are your customers? And why do they value you? Why do they care? Who would miss you if you went away? And get them in their own words to talk about, what is value and how should it be measured? Because if you don’t understand that, then how do you know that what you’re doing, it doesn’t do any good to improve flow if it actually isn’t improving value?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:22

Exactly. And we’ve talked about customer value, but we could look at it, that’s another thing that’s part of, in my opinion, business value, but you could look at from a risk insurance, let’s just say insurance companies are very risky and very [inaudible 38:32]. So like value could be, hey, we don’t have our data compromised or whatever it is that we have high confidence in that part. But like just having discussion, typically understanding and communicating, one of the biggest challenge that I see is like product owners can’t really communicate what business value is. And it can change and they can over the year, whatever it is but just a common understanding of what is currently valued for this thing.

Carmen DeArdo  39:03

Right. So what we do, and we can do this in this product is we get each product to enter various things, we add value, cost, quality, and then happiness to the team. Because happy teams are productive and productive teams are happy, if the team isn’t happy, there’s something off the track, right? Either there’s too much whip, they’re not spent getting time to focus on technical debt, they’re working with a fragile code base. And so we work a lot to get them to quantify what are those things they’re going to measure and then look at how the flow correlates with what’s happening there to make sure that we are on track that we’re moving the needles in the right direction in terms of what means the most to the customers of this product, again, no matter if it’s a platform product or an external facing product. A lot of what we’re doing here is trying to have the data to drive the right conversations, right? For the team themselves to be able to say, what do we think, again, is keeping us from going faster. Well, we show them various places where they have bottlenecks in their system.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:28

Yeah, could be through value stream mapping or in what ways they show, how do you expose the system and those bottlenecks?

Carmen DeArdo  40:37

So what we do is, we start out with a conversation with the customer about what artifacts in your tools represent features, defects, or isn’t that, right? So features might be epics and features and stories and things that start somewhere on the left-hand side, right? In through their agile management eventually, go through a release. And we are able to connect to the most popular tools that companies use to identify those artifacts and map the states into either active or waiting or done states, and then actually show them the journey of their artifacts through their value stream network and say, okay, here is where features spend the most time. For example, before you were talking about customers, and back-end systems and legacy systems, we were working with a company that had a new financial product, and they had front end teams and size priority, and we started looking at their work.

And we’re saying, okay, well, you have this big in progress stuff, but what’s really happening? Then they’re saying, well, some of our stories go to these other 10. Well, okay, let’s see, let’s bring their work into it. And we found, there’s some legacy system no one’s paying attention to, that’s completely abs, too much work in progress. And there’s this long wait states around release certification. And not only was this product works in there, but they were serving like 20 other products. And so everybody was suffering, or being impacted by these delays in the release of this legacy system, and no one was caring about, no one was investing. And it was on some two-year improvement roadmap, but it was like, you can call whenever you want to the front-end teams, nothing’s going to happen unless you start to pay attention to this back-end system. And so that’s where we see a lot of..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:00

So in a way you use your tools essentially to paint the picture to your customers in a sense, what’s going on and here’s really what’s happening. And it’s almost you’re mapping how values for, I think it’s also looking at dependencies, I’m assuming, and not just where the bottlenecks are, but you can identify dependencies.

Carmen DeArdo  43:24

Yes, right. I think most companies and I put something on LinkedIn about this yesterday about value stream networks. And I remember Mick talking about this, when he was on a plane ride once to see me in Columbus, he said, he was looking at the map of all the hubs and all the routes. And he goes, this is sort of like how work flows through companies, right? If you’re a large company, you have 1000s of systems. It’s kind of messy, right? And we probably didn’t design it. It wasn’t designed intentionally, it started out where this system needs talk to this system. And they have to talk here. And pretty soon you end up with this very complicated network of how work is broken down. And okay, I have to do an initiative, I need work from a billing system, I may need work from…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:21

Here we go again.

Carmen DeArdo  43:25

I need work from all these dependent systems. And if you can’t see that network, you don’t understand where things are piling up in other places. So..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:39

That’s the first thing I mean, so I agree. And it naturally kind of grows into this mess. But this points back to now you can even see it and you see all this mess, and you might fix that mess for five years. But ultimately, if you don’t have a way of those coming back to the leaders, in a sense and I see those leaders almost also as part of being architects, organization architects, not just ideal architects, understanding the lean and some of the systems thinking, complexity management fundamentals, and being able to manage or lead through those systems, so that you don’t get in the same situation 10 years where you are. And I think it’s generally like let’s bring in the consultants, let’s have them tell us what to do. They’re going to give us a playbook and then we’ll be all set, rather than saying, I need to know as much as these consultants know, in order not to get us in the situation that we’re in right now.

Carmen DeArdo  45:38

Exactly. So we talk about value stream management, which is now a new discipline that Forster has created, a new category that encompasses a lot of these concepts of lean and value stream mapping, but does it in a more automated way by pulling information from the tools themselves that are supposed to represent how work is actually done? I used to joke sometimes, that because I did a lot of value stream mapping, and it was sort of like how we wish work was done, how we hoped the work was done, but it really wasn’t our work was done. Well, we’re showing them now, based on the journeys of these artifacts in their states, how work is actually being done. And then we want to train now, we are not consultants, right? Now, if they want to use a consultant or partner, we have partners, that’s great. We want that, but they need to take ownership. I mean, I will tell people, I’m not going to come in and tell you what to do. How about that do I know? Your people know more about how to improve things that may, right? So what we’re trying to do is train them to utilize the capabilities that they have and unleash it. And it is a multi-level. So you have the teams themselves in their retros that have to be able to start to ask, what’s keeping us from going faster, running an experiment? Experiment can be a DevOps practice, people process technology, something. Experiment has to have three things, a goal, activity, but you also have to wait to measure its success. Because I see people argue after something was over, it was successful. It’s like, if you don’t..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:27

The success is defined differently from each kind of perspective, but another thing that we make assumption is that people actually want to do this stuff, right? Like we talked about self-management, and people taking ownership of continuous improvement. But in reality, it’s like Scrum Masters are and like these change champions are the only ones that are excited about, a lot of times about change and taking ownership. So it goes back to that culture and mindset where you actually have to create a culture and mindset when people do you want to take ownership. It’s not like, when we talk about value stream management, I’m assuming we’re talking about, like you said, on multiple levels, and people being able to manage that how that value is flowing and understanding where the bottlenecks are and going back again to those basics.

Carmen DeArdo  48:18

Right. So that yes, it’s multi levels. So then we also have what we call VSM for leaders, right? So most companies have something called like an operational review, or some kind of review, they do them every month. They need to be looking at, we call them the flow metrics which Mick defined, they have to be looking at these flow and business results. And the leaders have to be looking at the systemic problems that they have. All right, so if I’m a leader and I can look at my matrix and I see that across the board, we’re not investing in security and that, that’s my problem. That’s my problem to solve with my leaders. That’s not the teams, right? The teams will eventually be impacted. That’s a systemic problem, right? If I have too much work in progress across the board, that’s my problem to deal with my leaders.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:18

So let me ask you this then, because I’ve asked these others. So the leader that you just described, based on your experience, what percentage of leaders do you currently see that act from that perspective in organizations or with your clients? What would be rough percentage if you had to guess?

Carmen DeArdo  49:37

It’s low.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:41

That’s why I asked.

Carmen DeArdo  49:42

It’s probably less than, I think some people and, it’s not that they’re not capable, right? I don’t want to come across like why? No, these people are smarter than me probably, right? It’s just that the culture is not such right that they’re motivated or incentivized to ask those questions. And so in practice, I see this being done almost hardly ever, right? Especially where there’s a focus on flow and accelerate delivery, right? It’s more or less.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:21

That’s right. Yeah. And that’s why I asked.

Carmen DeArdo  50:25

Right, we’re going to implement something. So we’re good at saying, well, let’s implement agile, let’s bring in consultants, let’s implement safe. And those are all great things. And those are all necessary. But as far as actually systems thinking, I have decks on Deming that I use that are 30 years old, and they still apply, right? Because.. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:48

There’s knowledge and there’s ability, the reason that I brought up this question is because I think many people that I consider experts, including yourself, when I asked, what is necessary for a leader to know? Can you actually have a successful organization without these leaders? And everybody’s like, no. Right? And then I asked how many of these leaders, what’s the rough percentage that you see, and everybody’s pretty low. So what’s that telling us about the industry and how far Agile has progressed, how far organizations have matured? Because if it really hasn’t, like, we kind of know what was required, you need to change leadership mindset, you have to have leaders that have to be capable of understanding how they systematically change the organization. And yeah, we’re saying what we need is not there yet. And I see some signs, and I think maybe in 10 years, we’ll have a different conversation. But short term, I think, it’s challenging, and it’s challenging for people in organizations, because those are the people that can unlock and almost unleash the people in their organizations. And it’s not happening. And I don’t know if COVID is going to trigger that. But what is your thought on that? Do you agree that you see my point as far as like, what’s needed versus [inaudible 52:11]?

Carmen DeArdo  52:12

Absolutely right. And I go back to some of the things we’ve discussed already, where I’ve seen this be successful is where you can have a partnership between the business and IT leader, and set the example and almost like put the rest of the organization to shame, I mean, almost, to the point where it’s obvious that these people got something going here and they need to pay attention now. And it can turn pretty quickly, when you’ve done inertia columns, right? But you got to get those first couple of success stories. And then you have to be able to advertise. I used to beg people I worked with to tell their stories. They don’t want to hear me or my team, we need to hear you tell your story. And it can be infectious in a good way once you get this going, but you have to get those leaders and their teams, and those stories and then that’s what’s going to impact the culture. Because people are naturally going to be drawn to it in and I have seen, I talk about when you know you’re successful is when you’ve changed cynicism into hope, right? As you said, before cynic, where Carmen is the flavor of the month. We know people then start to get hopeful for, that’s when you got something, right? And that’s when you can start to impact the culture and it isn’t easy. And it’s a journey. That’s why I don’t even really, we mean transformations in our book title but it’s really a journey and it doesn’t add, right? It’s continually striving to get better as part of that plan, do check act, Shewhart cycle, whatever you want to call it, continuous improvement. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:19

Yeah, same as you can call personal like hopefully we’re transforming through our life. I’m not the same person that I was, but it is a journey. It’s more of a journey than transformation. Transformation is almost the artifact or like something that is happening, but the journey is something that you take on and it’s, so yeah, no, that’s what concerns me in the sense and creating those experiences, telling those stories and when we’re too busy to just not seeing the work, not seeing where the bottlenecks are, it’s easy to confuse being busy for actually getting stuff done. And I see that a lot too. And which goes back to what we talked about at the beginning about not knowing. What else from your perspective around this topic, you think is important to know around the journey or transformation? What have you seen works well? What has worked on nationwide and other besides things that maybe we didn’t discuss yet?

Carmen DeArdo  55:36

Well, I guess I can give you kind of a couple philosophical points. A couple of things I said folks was, don’t always look at how much more there is to be done. Because that can get people depressed, we should be better, we can be better, why aren’t we better? Sometimes you have to look at how far you’ve come, right? And you can’t let perfect be the enemy of good or getting better. So number one, again, understand it’s a journey, celebrate your successes, we’re not good at that. Understand they’re still work to go. But don’t despair, because you think we should be better than this. And then I think the second thing, I’ve talked to people about is, ideas sometimes it’s not the idea is bad and may just not be right. Okay, sometimes the culture isn’t ready for this show, that doesn’t mean, it’s a bad idea. That doesn’t mean it can’t work later. That just means, okay, this has sustained the backlog for now. And then the time may come when it’s ripe, and you can play that card. So I talked about patience and perseverance. So you have to kind of be patient and persevere through this. And that’s where I think the community is very important. Because if you’re in an organization or in a role where you feel kind of like, the sheep, the voice in the wilderness, that’s where the organization, the community, Gene Kim, what he did with the DevOps community and other folks can be an inspiration to try to continue to move forward, because it’s worthwhile and it’s necessary, because the companies that are getting this, the gap, I think, between the companies that are getting this and the ones that aren’t, is grow.

And we don’t want a situation where a few companies are dominating most of what’s happening from an IT perspective, right? It’s healthier for us to have more organizations getting this, getting better, being able to prove, being able to compete, and that’s part of what motivates me is to try to help them to do that, and it is possible. But again, you have to take those steps, first steps to get better, and you have to commit yourself to that journey. And you have to have some leadership, obviously buy in to help navigate that, but take advantage of all the folks that you have on the ideas that they have, because they’re very powerful. I remember, I’ll just leave you because I know we may be running out of time. A manager came to me and said there was a woman on their team that he has all of a sudden she has all these great ideas. And she never said anything. And it’s like, well she had worked at other companies. And I think she had felt rightly or wrongly like well, people aren’t really interested in my experiences, in my ideas. There didn’t seem to be any forum to get them out. So she was very good at doing her work. But now that she saw that people were actually listening and there was a forum, all these ideas started to pour. And now that was not an exception. You saw that a lot. People don’t want to come to work and not be productive or not have happy customers. Nobody wants to do that, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:34

When I have a voice.

Carmen DeArdo  59:38

They can do amazing things. But again, that has to come from leadership.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:42

Yeah, absolutely. You just reminded me, I had this experience. It was another insurance company and I did this retrospective, it was New England around this time of the year. And I drove to this satellite office and it was intended to do a quarterly retrospective for this group. And I remember one lady saying Miljan, they treat us like mushrooms. And before that, I didn’t know what she meant, I never heard that term before. And I was like, I don’t know what you mean. She’s like, they keep us in the dark and free their [inaudible 1:00:23]. And that’s the worst thing they can have, like disengage people that feel like they’re not being heard, not listened to. And these are the people that have been, in this instance, this lady was with the company for 20 plus years, she’s seen her colleagues being blocked out through the front door of the company. And there was no way at that point, there was no way that you could engage this group of people to say, try something else. Because at that time, they probably had what we call change fatigue, it was just like, no, I gave up, this is just paying my bills. And unfortunately, I see still a lot of that, but it is sad. Sad to see in those organizations, people like that.

Carmen DeArdo  1:01:18

Yeah, it is sad. And I think a lot of what Jean Kim talks about that motivate him was to try to improve the life of IT work, right? And it is exciting when people start to get it, right? And the lights come on. And like I said, that hope grows out of that cynicism. But it’s a journey and leaders need to invest now, right? I mean, time is getting shorter and the companies that aren’t even on this path are just going to fall further behind. So I’m excited to try to work with organizations and try to get them, and really a lot of time, it’s just really enabling the people who are there, and giving them the tools really, to make some of this happen, right? Because there’s a lot of talent there, it’s just are they really empowered or enabled to make the changes that are needed with the right leadership mindset.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:02:25

Well, is a big part. And maybe the last thing that you can talk about which I heard you, when you did the interview with Mick, people want to work in their tool of choice. Could you just elaborate on that, because I think that’s really important? Because there’s a lot of, in a sense pick this tool because of this price, or whatever it is or aligns with this. But what do you mean when you say that people want to work in their tool of choice?

Carmen DeArdo  1:02:59

So, yeah, I think one of the most ignored and probably the most important product that we have is really our pipeline, right? Our development pipeline, we tend not to think it of it that way, we tend to make a lot of decisions around, okay, well, we need an Agile management tool, we need a service management tool, we need a quality management tool. Well, but that is a product, right? If you think about your flow of work from identifying and different types of work have different genesis, right? A feature may start in a portfolio with an idea, right? Or plan view or two like that, and then eventually, it’ll turn into artifacts that go into your agile management tool. If you have defects, obviously, you’re going to your quality management, when you’re going into deploy and release management, your service management. So there’s a flow here, and there’s really a network of tools that represent that flow of work and couple things you don’t want to have are multiple versions of the truth like what is the truth? I have an incident in service now. But then I have a defect associated when JIRA. Well, this status says that status, do I have to log in to this tool? How many tools do we want to develop just to log into? Developers really only want to be in three tools and this really came from work I did with Cindy [inaudible 1:04:35] and [inaudible 1:04:36] Meyer nationwide, they want to be in their IDE, right? Their development environment, they want to be in their agile management tool. And they want to be in slack or whatever version of slack you have, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:04:50

Location. Yeah. 

Carmen DeArdo  1:04:54

And they don’t want to have to log in to five different tools, well, if you want to see your defects you’re going to… Sorry.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:05:17

So if you want to see the defects and,

Carmen DeArdo  1:05:20

Yeah, and they want to go into service now, they don’t want to be going into six, seven different tools, right? And that’s really where Mick’s idea of TaskTop came about, it was about bringing work to people, right? To their desktop, if you will, rather than have them have to search for work. So part of what our products do is allow these artifacts to flow between these tools. But ultimately, if you’re a developer, you want to be able to see all your different types of work in front of you in your JIRA or whatever, if you’re a service man, if you’re doing change management or incident management, you might want to be in remedy or Service now. And seeing and you want what you’re seeing your representation in the world to match everybody else’s representation of the world otherwise it’s a facade, right? So getting people to be able to focus and being their tool of choice for the work that they’re doing, right? Well allows them to be more productive and effective. And as what we try to do with some of our technology is keep everything in sync, and give you a view of the overall view of work.

So that other people who are looking at the value stream, we call this concept like a value stream architect, although very few companies call it a value stream architect, but can look above this of the frame, look at the flow and identify, well, yeah, here’s our issue, it’s taking forever for work on the left hand side between IDA and where features and stories are ready to be developed, or it’s all this time we’re spending in the release certification to deployment is where we need it or in an instant, and it’s all this, maybe it’s in the triage or some other part of the process that maybe takes a long time. So what we’re trying to do is get people more effective in their tool of choice, so they can focus on what they’re trying to do while also making sure that the system is working in an optimal way. And it’s that balanced that you really need and that takes different perspectives and different views of how work is flowing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:07:51

Is there anything as a last thought or maybe message that you want to share?

Carmen DeArdo  1:08:01

I guess kind of a summary, kind of what we probably already talked about is, no matter whatever situation you’re in or other organization, making this journey is possible. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it is possible and I think leaving people hopeful that I’ve seen companies go through this, and we’re working with companies right now to go through it and we see the successes that can come out of this. So no matter where you are from your whatever landscape, whatever place you find yourself in, it’s possible but you got to start, right? You got to start and commit yourself to this journey of data driven continuous improvement and it can happen. But again, I think you got to start with those small steps and then watch it blossom from there.