What do you think the geographic distribution of devops maturity is in the US? I'm located in the Midwest, but find most of the top performing organizations I hear about are on the coasts. Any tips on finding local elite or high performing organizations to learn from?

What do you think the geographic distribution of devops maturity is in the US? I'm located in the Midwest, but find most of the top performing organizations I hear about are on the coasts. Any tips on finding local elite or high performing organizations to learn from?

As a highly introverted person, I find remote-first as an IT strategy extremely appealing. How does it change the Devops formula? Any suggestions on successfully meshing the two?

As a highly introverted person, I find remote-first as an IT strategy extremely appealing. How does it change the Devops formula? Any suggestions on successfully meshing the two?

Any advice on making a low performing devops organization appealing to individual contributors with experience from high performing organizations? Closing the gap from behind, when the leaders are also more skilled at learning, is extremely difficult.

Can Gene speak more about the principle of Locality? That’s a new term to me and I’m wondering where it came from and where I can learn more about it in terms of software. Finished the book BTW and really enjoyed it.

Can you help suggest ways to stop rewarding heroics? In the book we see people working overtime and performing heroics to fix problems, get releases in, etc. It starts to become a pattern and what gets recognition. Any thing you've seen that could work to reward no issues, non event releases?

Can you help suggest ways to stop rewarding heroics? In the book we see people working overtime and performing heroics to fix problems, get releases in, etc. It starts to become a pattern and what gets recognition. Any thing you've seen that could work to reward no issues, non event releases?

@jess.bilderback Would that include the “Hero” who is also a “Code Arsonist’? e.g. The Fire Fighter that goes and burns down buildings and claims how awesome the station is doing?

@jess.bilderback Would that include the “Hero” who is also a “Code Arsonist’? e.g. The Fire Fighter that goes and burns down buildings and claims how awesome the station is doing?

I have worked with those before…

Then there is the Fireman Sam style that has a Norman on the team, if anybody has younger kids and is sadly familiar with that painful show…

I just finished the unicorn project. Interesting read.

@genek Maxine was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award to Maxine Chambers for Abolishing TEP-LARB,” and I’ve seen enough dysfunctional Technical Governance structures to cheer her along with everyone else. But the LARB was set up with honourable objectives, so if not through an ARB, how are those objectives best achieved?

@genek Maxine was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award to Maxine Chambers for Abolishing TEP-LARB,” and I’ve seen enough dysfunctional Technical Governance structures to cheer her along with everyone else. But the LARB was set up with honourable objectives, so if not through an ARB, how are those objectives best achieved?

Hey Gene! As you are an advocate for functional programming and it is clear how it is better in most scenarios, my question is: are there any exceptions? Meaning, have you seen situations where you'd recommend solving with imperative programming instead, because it would either be faster or take less memory than with functional programming, and if so, which one?

Hey Gene! As you are an advocate for functional programming and it is clear how it is better in most scenarios, my question is: are there any exceptions? Meaning, have you seen situations where you'd recommend solving with imperative programming instead, because it would either be faster or take less memory than with functional programming, and if so, which one?

Thank you for a very good book and all the excellent work at IT Rev! A mix of questions: 1. Technology. How common is that word these days compared to IT? In companies producing cars, planes etc technology can be a lot more. 2. Code vs databases. How much work in TUP is about developing code vs developing databases? It’s not so easy to have databases loosely coupled. Scott Ambler with Agile Data (and Disciplined Agile) has more info. 3. Different types of databases. Is there some idea of the mix of different databases in TUP, like relational, graph, doc, search etc? How is the mix? 4. Make or buy. How much of the IT systems in TUP are developed in house and how much is bought? Suppliers can give the impression that you can buy systems have the functions you need (ERP, MRP, MES, PLM etc). 5. Visualize the teams. Is there some diagrams of the teams and the org in TUP? To better see the team topologies. 6. “The wast architecture beneath”. A good phrase in the book. How can you improve the understanding of complex software, when you are not working as a developer? Many people often underestimate software.

Where does one find an Erik? Wondering how does one get progress at the grassroots level when one doesn't have the air cover/backing at the executive level, like Maxine and Bill had with Erik covering them with Steve and Dick.

Where does one find an Erik? Wondering how does one get progress at the grassroots level when one doesn't have the air cover/backing at the executive level, like Maxine and Bill had with Erik covering them with Steve and Dick.

TUP and TPP have a big focus on DevOps with the IT department and the business. These books describe many things that are really important and new to many people. The Goal has a focus on manufacturing. What novels (and non-fiction books) can be found today in a wider area (see areas below)? Does IT Rev plans for more novels here, or knows of others who have plans? Area 1: From Parts Unlimited to Cars Unlimited. Or from DevOps to Industrial DevOps. Product development of cyber physical systems (CPS) is often complex and dependant on software. Feedback and testing can be a lot harder. Area 2. From Parts Unlimited to Hospital/Government Unlimited. Hospitals and the public sector can be complex and dependant on software. I think area 1 and 2 can learn a lot from TUP. In the book The Age of Agile, Steve Denning describe some of this but as a non-fiction.

Hello, all!!! Looking forward to the AMA session that starts shortly! Thanks in advance to all of you submitting questions, and to @alexb for his help in marshaling them for me! I thought our last AMA was outrageously fun and the ground we covered was fantastic! I’m looking forward to hearing the recording and seeing the transcripts!

Doing some math with @alexb — we can probably get through 26 questions in the next 90 minutes, if we average about 3.75 minutes per question, which was the approximate pace last time. 🎉

<!channel> AMA starting in 5 minutes!!! Link to join live: https://zoom.us/j/526622617 The questions:

1. Taylan Ayken &amp; Andy Tinkham: Why Dr. Eric referring to people as "sensei”? Why does Erik forgot names? What’s the reasoning behind that choice? 2. Keith Klundt: Perhaps an observation, but I'll try to turn it into a question as well: much of what I read in both TPP and TUP, as well as DORA/IT Revolution publications does not explicitly address team structure, at least not in the explicit way that Project to Product, Team Topologies, etc., does.  In my experience, that allows many engineering leaders who express love for DevOps but still adhere to matrix org structures believe that org structure is not a contributor to team/org success. I had lunch with a VP today who said as much, i.e., a matrix org in which dev managers allocate team members to different projects is as effective as a dedicated, autonomous product team org.  I would love to see concepts from, e.g., Project to Product and Team Topologies be made more explicit in DORA/IT Revolution publications. Does @genek have an opinion on this? 3. Taylan Ayken: One game I was playing while reading The Phoenix Project was associating the characters with coworkers. Writers usually base characters in their book on real people they've interacted with. I'm wondering who was the real Brent or Maxine or Dr. Eric? 4. Mike Snyder: I’m wondering if anyone has done a similar evolution of the DataHub transforms and Narwhal.  Would you be willing to help me get the basics of the architectural approach you applied? I have a client that could use some help understanding some different basic approaches to modernizing how their data is integrated and made available for the business to use in new ways without just subscribing to a massive ETL and consolidation effort. 5. Per Krarup: We (the rebels) were inspired by The Phoenix Project to do continual deployments on physical products, inside our full scale manufacturing plant. Do you know of anyone who is doing, have tried or considered something similar? It would be nice to trade experience. — Our context: The company has a billion dollar revenue, and everyone else are doing changes, through Stage Gate projects on an annual release cycle, with a minimum of six month deployment lead time. The production start date is locked two or three years in advance, prototypes have been replaced with massive Design Review Boards. Imagine the carnage at every production start 6. Rainer Hansen: Hi @genek, I'm wondering about the ways an architect can increase flow. May you give some examples? What is the most important skill of an architect to increase flow? 7. Roman Pickl: What are your thoughts on developer productivity teams? 8. Steve Elgan: Gene, what do you suppose the origin of the ancient, powerful order (aka the bureaucracy, aka silos) is given that it exists in so many organizations? 9. Jerreck: Part 2 kicks off with the announcement of the one month feature freeze for Parts Unlimited which we saw in TPP was a huge success.  I've read about the successful feature freezes with LinkedIn's Inversion and Microsoft's freeze for SQL Server security updates in the early 00s, but I was wondering if yal knew about some unsuccessful feature freezes and what might have characterized those vs the successful ones? 10. Denver Martin: What are some ways you would recommend to  convert Executive Management to the rebellion?  I think it is easier to find the engineers and developers and not hard to convince them to work towards the greater good.  I think it is harder to find the Executives that could help, what are some ways you think we can approach those as we start seeing positive movement of the needle? 11. Proctor: Having looked across the industry are there any signs/signals that represent a likely show-stopper for transformations?  What are the lead dominos that have to fall, before one can pull off the mindset change. Accelerate and The State of DevOps Reports give a number of items involved, but are there things that are the linchpins to the transformation being successful or unsuccessful? 12. Jess M: Do you have any suggestions on ways to quantify value of having a feature freeze, or after a feature freeze quantifying the value of what was accomplished? How about any suggestions on typical/general items to prioritize first for a feature freeze that would make the biggest difference? 13. Adam Hawkins: Follow up on my previous question regarding distinguished engineer. I think asking what about org size and distinguished engineers was the wrong framing. Allow me to retry: what are the inflection points in an organization where considering a distinguished engineer role makes sense? 14. Phillippe Guenet: To what measure would you agree that Organisation and Architecture are a mirror of each other. This makes it difficult that if you want to address either you have to address both. Tech Debt needs to be addressed with the Operational and Organisational debts that go with it. — Same question for accelerating DevOps with rearchitecting in Monolithic environments. Getting the code of 200 devs to merge and build without issues is difficult. Breaking down into smaller services / smaller teams is a way of accelerating the devops practices in my view (and a path to Microservices too). Is there a max team size to Service that you would recommend? 15. Scott Styles: What do you think the geographic distribution of devops maturity is in the US? I'm located in the Midwest, but find most of the top performing organizations I hear about are on the coasts. Any tips on finding local elite or high performing organizations to learn from? 16. Scott Styles: As a highly introverted person, I find remote-first as an IT strategy extremely appealing. How does it change the Devops formula? Any suggestions on successfully meshing the two? 17. Scott Styles: Any advice on making a low performing devops organization appealing to individual contributors with experience from high performing organizations? Closing the gap from behind, when the leaders are also more skilled at learning, is extremely difficult. 18. David P Moore: Can Gene speak more about the principle of Locality?  That’s a new term to me and I’m wondering where it came from and where I can learn more about it in terms of software. Finished the book BTW and really enjoyed it. 19. Jess M: Can you help suggest ways to stop rewarding heroics? In the book we see people working overtime and performing heroics to fix problems, get releases in, etc. It starts to become a pattern and what gets recognition. Any thing you've seen that could work to reward no issues, non event releases? 20. Pete Franklin: @genek Maxine was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award to Maxine Chambers for Abolishing TEP-LARB,” and I’ve seen enough dysfunctional Technical Governance structures to cheer her along with everyone else.  But the LARB was set up with honourable objectives, so if not through an ARB, how are those objectives best achieved? 21. Fernando Bitti: Hey Gene! As you are an advocate for functional programming and it is clear how it is better in most scenarios, my question is: are there any exceptions? Meaning, have you seen situations where you'd recommend solving with imperative programming instead, because it would either be faster or take less memory than with functional programming, and if so, which one? 22. Proctor: Where does one find an Erik?  Wondering how does one get progress at the grassroots level when one doesn't have the air cover/backing at the executive level, like Maxine and Bill had with Erik covering them with Steve and Dick. 23. Johan Tegler: A mix of questions: Technology. How common is that word these days compared to IT? In companies producing cars, planes etc technology can be a lot more. —A— Code vs databases. How much work in TUP is about developing code vs developing databases? It’s not so easy to have databases loosely coupled. Scott Ambler with Agile Data (and Disciplined Agile) has more info. —B— Different types of databases. Is there some idea of the mix of different databases in TUP, like relational, graph, doc, search etc? How is the mix? —C— Make or buy. How much of the IT systems in TUP are developed in house and how much is bought? Suppliers can give the impression that you can buy systems have the functions you need (ERP, MRP, MES, PLM etc). —D— Visualize the teams. Is there some diagrams of the teams and the org in TUP? To better see the team topologies. —E— “The wast architecture beneath”. A good phrase in the book. How can you improve the understanding of complex software, when you are not working as a developer? Many people often underestimate software 24. Johan Tegler: TUP and TPP have a big focus on DevOps with the IT department and the business. These books describe many things that are really important and new to many people. The Goal has a focus on manufacturing. —A— What novels (and non-fiction books) can be found today in a wider area (see areas below)? Does IT Rev plans for more novels here, or knows of others who have plans? —B— Area 1: From Parts Unlimited to Cars Unlimited. Or from DevOps to Industrial DevOps. Product development of cyber physical systems (CPS) is often complex and dependant on software. Feedback and testing can be a lot harder. —C— Area 2. From Parts Unlimited to Hospital/Government Unlimited. Hospitals and the public sector can be complex and dependant on software. —D— I think area 1 and 2 can learn a lot from TUP. In the book The Age of Agile, Steve Denning describe some of this but as a non-fiction. 25. Georgii Ivankin: Copying from the discussions: what amuses me is how little attention is paid to Maxine’s family (at chapter 9 now). And she has kids! It seems she is not seeing them at all with all the overwork and hangouts at the bar. I wonder if this is on purpose and will change when they fix things in Parts Unlimited. However, this work-life imbalance isn’t explicit, like it was in TPP (or was it The Goal?). Can you comment on this @genek? 26. Ariel Kirshbom: Was interesting to see the inclusion of project/program management into de rebellion, as often I have seen PMs be associated with the problem and not necessarily the solution. Would like to know more on PM participation on DevOps environment and as part of the rebellion 27. Caroline Lange: You mention project Unicorn in The Phoenix Project. Did you have the idea/structure (or log ideas) for The Unicorn Project book while you were writing the Phoenix? 28. Theo Studer: Question about the Third Ideal : How much should be invest in improvement over really doing the work ? Push to an extreme it would mean producing nothing and just theorising about the best way of doing things, which is not good, right ? 29. Quent: Do you have any relationship to Burr Sutter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao87epknEbw . If yes, what are your thought differences and similaries on DevOps and Agile? 30. William Judd: Kirsten is clearly a force with which to be reckoned and her expertise is held in high regard. But "project management" in software development seems to be going away (there's no project manager in scrum, for example). Are you seeing anything like a "renaissance" of project management in areas like value stream management? 31. Kristian: How do you prevent having two departments in the same organization from having two drastically different practices in operations? Similar to how Maxine seemed to have been in a much more ready quiped team as oppose to what she experienced in the Phoenix project. 32. Keith Klundt: @alexb and @genek thank you for the thoughtful answers. Dedicated, cross-functional teams probably gets the best attention in Accelerate on pp181-3 in the section that describes squads, chapters, etc, at ING Netherlands. I wonder if the Good Product Team described by Marty Cagan at SVPG is a construct that can be identified (or proven not to be critical)? In my experience, such teams, which are optimized for speed, trump other team forms. https://svpg.com/good-product-team-bad-product-team/

Hope @genek had some breakfast this time. 🙂

Yes, I made sure to have breakfast this morning!!!

Copying from the discussions: what amuses me is how little attention is paid to Maxine’s family (at chapter 9 now). And she has kids! It seems she is not seeing them at all with all the overwork and hangouts at the bar. I wonder if this is on purpose and will change when they fix things in Parts Unlimited. However, this work-life imbalance isn’t explicit, like it was in TPP (or was it The Goal?). Can you comment on this @genek?

Copying from the discussions: what amuses me is how little attention is paid to Maxine’s family (at chapter 9 now). And she has kids! It seems she is not seeing them at all with all the overwork and hangouts at the bar. I wonder if this is on purpose and will change when they fix things in Parts Unlimited. However, this work-life imbalance isn’t explicit, like it was in TPP (or was it The Goal?). Can you comment on this @genek?

Was interesting to see the inclusion of project/program management into de rebellion, as often I have seen PMs be associated with the problem and not necessarily the solution. Would like to know more on PM participation on DevOps environment and as part of the rebellion

EMOJI REACTIONS ON THIS MESSAGE (to let us know how we're doing)

@alexb when we get the transcriptions, will they include the links/sources Gene and others mentioned?

@alexb when we get the transcriptions, will they include the links/sources Gene and others mentioned?

Heather Mickman presentations DOES14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exrjV9V9vhY (year 1, Target) DOES15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-VbB1fG5o&amp;t=1s (year 2, Target) DOES16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FMktLCYukQ&amp;t=10s (year 3, Target) Most recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzvSWIM-wJQ&amp;t=526s

Thanks

@alexb and @genek thank you for the thoughtful answers. Dedicated, cross-functional teams probably gets the best attention in Accelerate on pp181-3 in the section that describes squads, chapters, etc, at ING Netherlands. I wonder if the Good Product Team described by Marty Cagan at SVPG is a construct that can be identified (or proven not to be critical)? In my experience, such teams, which are optimized for speed, trump other team forms. https://svpg.com/good-product-team-bad-product-team/

https://twitter.com/mcfunley/status/1194713711337852928

@jerreck.moody ^^

Can you provide a reaction / synthesis to this in a tweet or post or message? Ping Gene and I to let us know where to find it. @jerreck.moody (tweet above is where you'll find the failed feature freeze story.)

Can you provide a reaction / synthesis to this in a tweet or post or message? Ping Gene and I to let us know where to find it. @jerreck.moody (tweet above is where you'll find the failed feature freeze story.)

🙂

How are we doing?

💪

💯

:thinking_face:

💯

😁👌

:)

:unicorn_face::unicorn_face::unicorn_face::unicorn_face::unicorn_face:

👍

😁

👍

👍 👍

🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XYIs-6ZMjk&amp;t=1s

One issue that I've seen organizations that have not gone through a transformation is that multiple people are effectively doing the same role. This manifests most clearly in the product management function. When Business and Technology still are considered separate from each other, then you effectively get two (or more) people providing pieces of the product management function, sometimes with conflicting overlaps. What ways have you seen this problem overcome?

The Brad Feld blog post on distributed work: https://feld.com/archives/2020/01/the-future-of-work-is-distributed.html

The Brad Feld blog post on distributed work: https://feld.com/archives/2020/01/the-future-of-work-is-distributed.html

https://itrevolution.com/love-letter-to-clojure-part-1/

👍

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620456415511269376/

Yes, I've said "I wish we had an Erik". If I'm not mistaken, in TPP, he may have been a catalyst behind the scenes leading to Steve "going first" as in 5DoaT from Lencioni. To the AMA question this morning asking how to approach finding executives who might join the Rebels, I think there is something about the combination of his technical sage and board relationship.

Amazing questions this time around! Absolutely appreciate your insight on everything!

thank you, was great!!

Yes greatly appreciated!

Thanks so much!✅

Thank you @genek and @alexb!

You're welcome!

<!here> The recording for AMA #2 is live: https://youtu.be/wQktlXp_Y3g We have a time slotted for Gene's 3rd AMA on January 27th — 11am PST. Before then, we have some other surprises setup for you on January 22 (7am PST), January 23 (1pm PST), and January 24 (8am PST). Make sure to mark those times down on your calendar, and we'll tell you more about what we have planned on Monday. Otherwise, resume week 2 discussions!