Dan James - Lean+Agile DC 2018

Agile at scale can get you to code very quickly, but then
sometimes everything comes to a screeching halt.  The
biggest bottlenecks are often found after teams are done with the
code.  Dan James of Icon Agility Services joined Bob Payne
on the Agile Toolkit Podcast to discuss Dan’s session at
Lean+Agile DC 2018: Building a Lean Enterprise with DevOps. 
Dan and Bob explore “shifting left,” creating a pipeline of
smooth handoffs, and decoupling release from deployment.


 


TRANSCRIPT


 


Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm your host Bob
Payne I'm here at Lean+Agile D.C. 2018 and I'm here with Dan
James from Icon Agility or is that Icon Agility Services. 


Dan James: [00:00:13] It's the whole name.


Bob Payne:  [00:00:14] It's the whole
name? Okay great. And your talk is on DevOps Transformation,
scaling and and other things.


Dan James: [00:00:24] Yeah, Extending the Lean
Enterprise with DevOps. 


Bob Payne: [00:00:27] Uh huh.What does that mean
when you say that, Lean Enterprise? 


Dan James: [00:00:31] Well we know that agile at
scale can get you to code very quickly and it comes to a
screeching halt because we have a wall of confusion - agile wants
us to go fast. Business wants us to go fast. But the systems team
wants stability right and reliability and security. And so you
know our code comes to a screeching halt and may go into a black
hole for weeks and months before it is finally releasable. And so
what what we help enterprises do is work out the strategy and the
tactics before we even talk about tools we get into the tactics
and the strategy of creating a pipeline that smoothes out and
leans out the handoffs yet to in order to get something
delivered. And so we do a deep dive with our clients we go in and
do a full technical assessment of of how they're delivering value
now. And we show them that their biggest bottlenecks are usually
after the agile teams are done with the code and and help them
get releasable a lot sooner.


Dan James: [00:01:35] And we give them
strategies to protect their their product as they're developing
it by having you know green blue strategies you know delivery you
know being able to separate or decouple release from deployment
so we can go to production every day. Right. But it may not be
releasable until the business decides we have accumulated enough
real value share and then that becomes a business decision. So by
separating it also gives us more time to smoke test and do canary
releases and other things to ensure that what we have put out
there is is sound before we release it to the public.


Bob Payne: [00:02:15] Yeah. So..feature Toggles
those sorts of... 


Dan James: [00:02:17] Exactly. And then we also
teach the discipline of shifting left in the pipeline back to the
teams. The responsibility for initial quality.


Bob Payne: [00:02:26] Right. 


[00:02:27] So we don't want to them to just throw their code over
a wall and expect a testing team that had no input on the context
of what they're building right to think of all the possible edge
cases to test this stuff. And so so we instill in our assessment
we uncover all the the practices that need to be fixed before we
automate anything and making sure that initial quality I mean if
if if you think you can deploy quickly but you're not unit
testing your code then we have a big problem.


Bob Payne: [00:02:58] Yep.


Dan James: [00:02:58] You know the way that
agile and scaled agile goes fast is by focusing on the quality.


Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Yeah.


Dan James: [00:03:04] And then we all go fast,
And so that's that's the biggest thing.


Bob Payne: [00:03:08] Okay. For me I actually I
actually believe the. So if you can't get stuff out it doesn't
matter what your strategy is. I believe a lot of that the last
mile work will allow us to shift lefter because ultimately I
think one of the big problems that most organizations face in any
sort of real agility they can get the wrong thing out faster but
real business agility would use to use that for learning and it
would have huge fundamental impacts on intake funding. You know
lots lots of things that at least in the skilled agile framework
they talk about but I don't see many organizations actually
pulling the trigger on that. There are certainly some in those
sort of leading leading organizations will be the the sort of
models that that people look at for a little while until it
becomes more common.


Dan James: [00:04:14] Right.


Bob Payne: [00:04:16] A lot of people fail to
understand the organizational possibility and the organizational
impact of DevOps if done right.


Dan James: [00:04:26] Yeah and very often we go
into an enterprise and we have to start with the real basics the
fundamentals because they want to jump in to Agile because
they've heard about it and it's you know their competitors are
already doing it. And so they're at a tipping point. But they
don't even understand Lean. That's where agile came from. And
until they understand Lean and the waste that occurs in all the
handoffs between each step in our in our operational value stream
they don't they don't understand you know that agile alone isn't
going to get you it only gets half of I.T. fixed. But DevOps is
the other half of I.T. and. And we're going to show that in our
in our speaking slot today we're going to actually show here's
the here's the the elemental chart of I.T. in general here all
the departments that make a typical enterprise I.T. work only
half of it is addressed by agile at scale.


Dan James: [00:05:21] So even a scale that only
addresses half maybe 53 percent. Right.


Bob Payne: [00:05:25] Right.


Dan James: [00:05:25] It's the other half that
we're trying to get which gets us time to market fixed it gets
our products out the door gets the feedback from the customer
that we are desperate to get. And it helps us learn and the whole
principle of lean is is out learn your competition and then
improve them. Share with you with what you learned. And if you
can't do that then you know we have to go all the way back to
fundamentals. And so sometimes in our transformation engagements
we have to we have to go back to the Stone Age of a year 75 years
ago and talk about lean to get them to understand. You know it it
still applies today and we can't just say OK all our teams are
gonna be scrum or all our teams are going to be Kanbun and expect
it to solve all their problems and yet it only addresses half of
the problems. You know what helps us get to code quick but it
doesn't do anything else. No it doesn't. It doesn't get the code
out of the black hole you know before it gets released so. So
we're here to do that. We go into companies we do a deep dive a
discovery an assessment of their of their DevOps side many of
which are many of these companies are already doing agile at
scale and doing it well but they're still frustrated because
nothing's going out the door. And so we we helped uncover what
most.


Bob Payne: [00:06:43] I might Argue that they're
not doing well if they're.. if it's not Going out the door.


Dan James: [00:06:48] That that's true. And you
know and you know Nirvana here is that the teams themselves have
the power to release what they deliver or what they create.


Bob Payne: [00:06:56] Sure. Or to have an
efficient way for that to that too certainly you know that may be
an ideal to aspire to.


Dan James: [00:07:06] Sure. The Amazons of the
world can do that.


Bob Payne: [00:07:08] Right. Well we are
actually was just talking with Jeff Payne a little while ago
which for us for the podcast listeners doesn't make much of a
difference. It's on a different episode. But you know I think the
potential for getting something out and getting it out. And you
clearly articulated that those can be decoupled.


Dan James: [00:07:34] Yes. And and I think
there's a lot people are they are way too quick to say ooh that's
the next silver bullet teams team managed deployment. And for
some organizations it is the perfect solution right. Lean
Thinking looks at the entire ecosystem and is and tries to say
what is the best solution for this organization. This team at
this time with this technology and in so icy team managed
deployment as a particular practice that may or may not be
optimal in a given situation. So few people are looking in a lean
way. They're looking at other people's recipes and that's
especially in size fits all right. I think this probably solves a
ton of problems that we have with you know safety and risk
profiles and and regulatory regulatory.


Bob Payne: [00:08:42] Yeah but you know looking
at it as the next silver bullet I know I'm always caution even
though I to work with organizations help transfer them towards
this goal but only in the in in so far as we set a target we move
along and steer and bright you know.


Dan James: [00:09:01] And I don't know if it's
luck or curse that in the last three or four years most of my
clients have been in the financial services industry which is
highly regulated right. So so I banks and lenders and investment
companies and so forth that that are under such regulatory
burdens before they can really say anything to the public. And
they're under audit the threat of audit constantly and they're
scared of the audits that they use that as a wedge issue to
prevent agility to prevent improving and and reducing the
handoffs between the steps and getting value.


Bob Payne: [00:09:38] Even though you have much
more closely auditable compliance.


Dan James: [00:09:41] Transparency, all that.
Yes exactly.


Bob Payne: [00:09:45] You know, What I want the
the developer to need root password to production to debug a
production issue.


Dan James: [00:09:58] Right.


Bob Payne: [00:10:00] I think I would like the
new way is a lot safer and more auditable and you know immutable
immutable infrastructure networks are certainly those things
provide a higher degree of safety audit ability than we've ever
had before.


Dan James: [00:10:19] That's right.


Bob Payne: [00:10:20] The problem is we need to
ensure that teams are actually quite often that that the
technique of audit and the things that you need audit need to
change compliance are actually more compliance to the the spirit
of those regulations than might have been when you had a big
stack of documentation right which was only looked at when you
need to practice for the auditor.


Dan James: [00:10:47] Yes. Yeah and we didn't
exactly exactly .. Static documents are obsolete that the day
they're published.


Bob Payne: [00:10:54] Right.


Dan James: [00:10:55] Yeah. So we found many of
our clients have they're so afraid of of the regulatory side.


Bob Payne: [00:11:01] Yep.


Dan James: [00:11:01] That that they're just
reluctant to release some of them might release once a year once
or twice a year at the most. And they go through this long
hardening period where they're there waiting until the code was
already written months ago before they even do a threat modeling
penetration test against it. You know. 


Bob Payne: [00:11:20] Thanks for making me
snort. You know this hardening thing you know is there some sort
of quantum stabilization of the bits in the silicone that I don't
understand.


Dan James: [00:11:33] And they don't either
probably.


Bob Payne: [00:11:34] Yeah I always think it's
just the bureaucratic way of leaving time for people to raise
their hand and say we shouldn't go.


Dan James: [00:11:41] Yeah and it comes down to
fear. Right. You know that fear of release because they've been
burned once or twice in the past when their technology wasn't as
good as it is today. And they get burned and now they're they're
reluctant to release until they are just 100 percent of you know
feeling secure. And so we show them methods of ensuring that the
quality is there the threat modeling is already embedded that you
know long before it gets even staging.


Bob Payne: [00:12:05] Right. And so with the
proper strategy you can ensure your quality in smaller pieces and
get it to staging or in production but not to release until you
have enough business value that you can trust that what's in
production is clean and meets the security requirements meets
compliance meets all those things. We're just going to have to
work in a more agile way to cut things up into smaller chunks


Dan James: [00:12:28] Make sure it's tested
upfront and early and often through the pipeline both both on the
development machines and in the Coupée environments and in system
integration environments.


Bob Payne: [00:12:39] Yep.


Dan James: [00:12:39] And that's what it ensures
multiple chances to smoke test this stuff and and make sure it is
ready for release and we can be confident in. And then after
they've seen a few frequent releases you know then their
confidence builds as a as an organization. And the fear
diminishes and they realize okay lean and agile and a scaled
agile with with not necessarily the brand name Scaled Agile but
agile at scale and DevOps is working. And then they they start
feeling better. The auditors in many cases you sit down with the
auditors face to face they're going to audit on what you say
you're going to do great. So it's good to show them that you're
going to do a new thing you have to sit down and talk to them and
you know work. We're going to do this a new way to please audit
us on the new way not on the old way and the transformation
becomes less fearful. 


Bob Payne: [00:13:34] Right. It Can,. 


Dan James: [00:13:35] It can. 


Bob Payne: [00:13:35] Depending on your
auditor. 


Dan James: [00:13:36] Exactly so. So we're in
the business of helping that transformation and it's a lot that a
lot of the transformation is a mindset. It's not so much the
practices and the philosophy and the principles and all that even
though we do we do preach that. It's just it's more of a mindset.
And so we focus on the vertical structure above the teams to make
sure they're on board and they understand how to support
this. 


Dan James: [00:14:01] Yeah because a lot of
agile failures come from the lack of support from above the teams
you know so they the teams are constantly being injected in an
artificial deadlines imposed and all the stuff that that kind of
ruins Agile you know it ruins Scrum. You know okay, we're right
mid Sprint we're going to be changing things. Well, The teams are
frustrated and their productivity goes down because we haven't
properly trained management and that's what scaling it helps us
do it provides the training and the understanding above the
teams. 


Bob Payne: [00:14:29] Yep yeah at LitheSpeed we
are focused a lot on leadership and transformational leadership
as well. So most of our transformations start with with that sort
of sponsorship but we've also started to try to create a path
because management and leadership we're not as well represented
in early agile thinking mistakenly. I mean Sanjiv wrote the
managing agile projects in 2005 and you know we started the agile
leadership academy and then follow on. You know we created that.
Now we're starting to see things like Certified Agile leadeR and
other programs for organizational leadership to really understand
this which lean always had nice and is odd that that agile has
taken as long to yes the teams and the ecosystem that the teams
live in. 


Bob Payne: [00:15:34] That's right. And speaking
of LitheSpeed we're going to be there tomorrow and Friday my
cohort from Icon Brian Aho and I are going to be at
LitheSpeed. 


Bob Payne: [00:15:42] Doing the DevOps.


Dan James: [00:15:42] And and training the SAFe
version, the Scaled Agile version, of the DevOps course, which
they accumulated from Icon. Mark Ricks for the last two years has
been developing this and he and I and Brian have been teaching
this now for the last nine months. But now we get to teach the
SAFe version of it.


Dan James: [00:16:01] It's now fully integrated
into the Scaled Agile Framework they've added a few things to
make it integrate a whole continuous exploration. So we turn
DevOps into a scientific experiment.


Bob Payne: [00:16:10] right.


Dan James: [00:16:11] And small experiments just
like Toyota did 75 years. 


Bob Payne: [00:16:15] back to the future, i'm
charging my flux capacitor even as we speak. 


Dan James: [00:16:19] Exactly 


Bob Payne: [00:16:21] Well thank you very much
Dan great great having you here.


Dan James: [00:16:24] My pleasure.


Bob Payne: [00:16:25] Glad you're able to speak
at the conference and come to Agile DC as well if you're
interested. That's the large local cross vendor conference.


Dan James: [00:16:37] And that's in October
right? 


Bob Payne: [00:16:39] Yeah it is yeah. I'm the
chair.


Dan James: [00:16:41] Yeah and I'll be out here
for the Scaled Agile Summit as well, the global summit in October
so.


Bob Payne: [00:16:45] Great. Well we'll see you
at both those events and thanks. 


Dan James: [00:16:48] awesome. Thanks Bob.


Bob Payne: [00:16:49] You're welcome.