 Okay, thank you. I am incredibly excited to be here today I'm super passionate about DevOps and I'm super passionate about Seattle so two great tastes that taste great together And I want to spend basically the next 30 minutes talking about my abysmal failures and DevOps So hopefully that you can learn from my mistakes One disclaimer. I tried to do something a little different with this particular talk I hand drew all of my slides Which means I only have about six or seven But an insane amount of content to try and get through in 30 minutes I'd love to get your feedback on these slides Don't throw anything at me. Maybe just pull me aside after and You know, even if you're like look I god Paulie don't ever do that again I struggled for 30 minutes to keep my breakfast down So I've worked at Hearst for almost two years now That is a self-portrait of me by the way if you don't think that's good That's just really kind of downhill from here in the graphics department. So let me apologize up front I was hired to work with ten business units regarding transformational change with Agile DevOps lean and those business units are broken up into Three market verticals. There's the health care. There's transportation and there's finance Now I went out to all the business units to start to get to know them better To really start to focus on what their unique challenges were where they were in the journey what their maturation was And I realized fairly early on that these business units weren't communicating with one another And so I had this idea that I mentioned to my leadership and said hey What if we created a big? Enterprise-wide community where we broke down the barriers not just between the teams in the business units But how about we do it between the business units and Leadership was like hey, that's a great idea Paul. We should absolutely do that How are you gonna make that successful? And I said I Don't know I kind of had an idea I didn't really have a plan at all So I learned a valuable lesson if you mentioned something that's a good idea to leadership Make sure you have a plan in your pocket Because they'd like take that stuff really seriously. So am I all right Polly you need a plan now For me as a probably is with the same for most of you I rely pretty heavily on my past experiences to make decisions about my future whether I'm trying to solve a problem Or come up with a plan Unfortunately, I also recognize that I have a couple of minor shortcomings And I'm aware about these things so I try to mitigate them as much as I can one of which is I sometimes get a little too Biased about my past experiences. So I rely or lean on those too heavily So what I didn't want to do here was take one of the transformational ideas that worked really well for me With regards to a smaller company say 200 300 people and then just make it bigger That to me was sort of equivalent of having a recipe that's delicious for four to ten people and just doubling it until it feeds 10,000 and if any of you have ever been to reinvent you kind of know what I'm talking about and so I Recognize that I was gonna have to reach out and do a little more research right probably field research Go to conferences like this And also I wanted to make sure that I didn't become too myopic now This is probably my biggest problem Especially when there's technology and a kind of fun challenge involved I have a tendency to kind of get too wrapped around the axle. So I'll give you an example So when my son was very young He was reliant upon a sound machine to rest asleep, right? We wanted to wean him off this sound machine for several different reasons So I came up with this brilliant idea of why don't just move this sound machine a little further away from the bed every night You know, maybe put an extension cord on it run it down the hall And my wife said well, why don't you just turn it down a little bit more every night and I said Well, I mean, yeah, if you want to do it the easy way, I guess, you know But I'm an engineer. Okay, that kind of is what I'm talking about. I'd already broken out like my Arduino boxes I had a Lego train set down the hall, you know, I had I was graphing the distance the train was traveling and graphite I'd already bought the domain name So the problem there was I I got a little wrapped around that axle, right? Maybe a smidge too involved and not really thinking outside the box The good thing there was that I did receive collaboration and I was amenable to it I just didn't ask for it. So I recognized that that was a problem of mine sometimes So I thought collaboration This is a great way to have a foundation sort of an MVP that I could build on from that point forward Maybe we would make collaboration the basis of everything we would do from that point forward. I Also have the distinct pleasure and honor of knowing a lot of people super smart intelligent people in the In the DevOps community, so I thought what a great idea I can just reach out also and get feedback on this idea. So it's not just again me getting to myopic so As an example, I called Jean Kim and said, you know, hey, then this is my idea I'm thinking about this is sort of a foundational idea and I'll build on this and we'll expand it to all 25,000 employees and You know, I'll never forget what Jean said to me pause He said he said Good Lord Paulie, it's two o'clock in the morning. And how'd you even get this number and that you know, that really stuck with me, right? Because I think what Jean was really saying and I'm paraphrasing here because it's a family show Was that there's never too late to really focus on competent and effective communication So I thought that's it. I'm gonna take Jean's advice And I'm gonna do Communication as the basis now that's important because without communication you really can't do any of the other things So I took this road map. I went out to the business units. I Talked to the executives and said, okay, you know, here's the road map this is how we're gonna get from here to there and We're gonna focus on culture and process and tools right all the normal kind of stuff We're not gonna try and change your culture instead What we're going to do is we're gonna focus on lean principles and agile and DevOps And we're gonna drive the behaviors that we want to see and then that will influence your culture And yes, we will be focusing on your unique challenges But at the same time we're gonna be focusing on the bigger challenges and breaking down these barriers between the business units I Created a maturity model and the maturity model would provide clear communication on Where they were in that journey Okay, so father stays coming up So I told my dad I made him a promise that I would include him in this talk So I want you to notice here that like from each like I don't know 55 to 70 His fashion just kind of screeches to a halt So that's my homage to my dad. He basically at 55 was like this is it This is the last pair of clothes I'm ever buying and I'm just gonna wear them until they just disintegrate really, you know revealing a bathrobe and slippers underneath So that's for you dad. I love you Okay Communication was the basis right so this is where we're starting so how do we go about executing this plan? Now, I know you're gonna say Paulie. This is really simplistic and that's only because it is really simplistic But I'm a big believer in Occam's razor and the simple solutions often the most correct. So I started with chat Now chat, you know, obviously you Hearst didn't invent chat, right? I didn't invent chat They had tried chat before but they took a very sort of it corporate approach to it as a company of 25,000 plus people would and You're probably familiar with this. You know, they they pushed out software to your laptop It was hooked up to AD so you could search for other people and you could use it to talk to someone if you wanted to The difference here was I tried to rally everyone under a you know around a cause So for me it was about collaboration And it was about getting people together to innovate and to be creative It was about building a community not just deploying a tool So the kind of fun and cool thing here Was that we built the community together, right? So we had guidelines and we agreed on those guidelines as a community There were no NSA. There were no secret police We policed the the community as a community as well Complete opt-in if you wanted to download the software and be a part of the community That's awesome. We would love to have you if not that's okay, too And we started with about about 50 folks and it ballooned to 800 very quickly And this is cool because again, it's opt-in. So those people wanted to be there So you are creating and collaborating with the community that wants to be part of the community Now some managers did have some concerns, right? There were some worry that people were gonna sit around all day and just watch cat videos and You know not actually get any work done. This by the way is an accurate representation of how I play golf and there I go. I Think that's a pretty reasonable response for missing a one-foot putt. Don't you I Wasn't worried about this. I was more worried about no one even using the product at all, right? Everyone being like oh great another BS application. I got to keep up with Well luckily it turns out we were both wrong Luckily for us people started helping each other very quickly and that's why it ballooned up Was all about getting people together that wanted to help each other Now of course it started in the teams first as you would expect then it moved to the internal BU Then the real funds started happening when across the BU's people started helping each other Even during like outages people were joining hands and helping each other during an outage one in a completely different market than the other and Then the real magic happened and this is where ad hoc Self-formed cross-functional teams created rooms and developed innovative products without any input from leadership They just got together. They just made it happen. Why because they were passionate and they wanted to and now they had an avenue to do it This was awesome. They were creating products that could be pushed up sold and generate revenue for the business All from just communicating seems simple, right? So I'm like hey sweet mission accomplished right all I need is a podium and an aircraft carrier I can drop this mic and walk away well Not exactly right so I love analogies So I'm going to tell you an analogy that I'll use through the rest of this talk and that is I like to think of The product that they created that this cross-functional team created as an airplane and And they got one brave soul from that group to get climb up into the cockpit and Fly this plane right and that's sort of pitching it to leadership So they taxi the plane out onto the runway they turn it our Brave pilot kind of gives us a salute thumbs up throttles up it rumbles down the runway It's up to 200 miles an hour. It Creams into the trees at the end of the runway in this massive fireball And I kind of imagine everyone just kind of like Oh my god the horror What happened Polly and once again, I'm like I'll get back to you. I don't know So all I know for sure is things went horribly wrong So I need to figure out why So I try to be introspective at this point This is in the beginning of December of 2015 And I'm like I've got all of this figured out right I've got a solid roadmap built on foundational principles It's built with artifacts and documents that reinforce the roadmap. I have a maturity model. It makes sense And I'm clearly communicating that so why am I failing so it's okay. I'm gonna go back to the business units And I'm gonna talk to the CTOs. I said, okay, listen, I am dedicated to you guys being successful But I'm failing and I'm perfectly willing to admit that I just need to figure out how we we get past this I said I'm gonna have a conversation with you right and it's gonna be open and it's gonna be honest I'm gonna be vulnerable. There may be tears. We may hug I don't know what's gonna happen. We're just gonna go with it now the great thing here was that They were just as open and honest with me because I led with that again all back to communication, right? Now Good or bad. They all said essentially the same two things which is good because there was consensus Unfortunately, they were all my fault And so the first thing was like hey look Paul you came in here in the beginning of 2015 You had this roadmap you had this idea. We love it. We agree with it and you kind of dumped it on us and We already had our resources allocated for the year both budget People right the projects are all planned out and now I don't know how we're going to accomplish all this extra stuff Without additional resources a huge resource constraint problem I was like, okay. Yeah. All right. I hear you. I hear you Number two again love the roadmap looks good. I totally agree with everything on it But it's a bit prescriptive So, you know, you kind of didn't ask us and I was like, oh ouch That's collaboration sound familiar to a couple of stories earlier, right? So I fell victim to those anyway and why because I got wrapped around the axle because I love engineers and I love code And so I lost sight I stayed too long with the individual contributors and I didn't include the leadership early enough I said, okay, no problem. No problem. We can fix this. Let's look at 2015 It's a building year and a learning year and let's look at 2016 is a brand new year with a fresh new dev ops scent You know by the by the end of 2016 dev ops will smell like a fresh Carolina pine forest Resource constraints first I went out and hired three incredible people I hired, you know Levi Smith and Aaron Blythe and Alexa Ali and we formed a consulting team and they're phenomenal And what we do there is we go out and do month-long Dedicated engagements where we're embedded with the business unit. So we help them We don't do work for them and give them a product We help them get that kicked off, right? If you're interested in buzzword bingo, right? We're force multipliers and so the idea there is that they don't feel so much onus on them to figure out something brand New we help them with that and then we support them throughout the process I started going around and doing value stream mapping workshops These are three-day workshops I do at business units and this allows the executives to get together and really focus on Where we're seeing barriers to flow and where we're seeing too much in in the form of cues And we start really building out where we want to be and So this is starting to address the second issue around collaboration So I took my roadmap and my maturity model. That's the actual documents there And I chucked those into the trash and said okay, you have the contextual knowledge of your business unit You tell me what you want on the roadmap So we use the value stream map alongside the the old roadmap and some guidance from myself and we built out all new roadmaps that were uniquely Guided towards each individual business unit. So this was fantastic the business Leaders were like hey, I can see actual value coming from this. I could see business value derived from this So count me in I'm on board. I'm like awesome now. There's an accomplished right now. No So we taxied the new plane out Arguably it's getting harder and harder to get pilots up into the cockpit But I'm like you're gonna be fine. You'll be fine that last guy didn't always do it. Trust me So throttle up we starts rumbling down the runway and everyone's just like holding their breath with anticipation It gets close to the end. It rotates it lifts off barely misses the trees right wheels come up and everyone's just like much rejoicing and Then it kind of settles down into the forest into a fireball and I'm like I'll be back so What happened I don't understand I I felt like I had such great consensus I had the people who signed the checks and pushed the agendas on board I had the people who did the actual work on board. There's no one left Why is this plane not able to sustain flight? Who am I missing that needs to provide additional lift? At this particular time, I was reading a book by a gentleman named Nietzsche And I've read this book a couple of times if you've never read him. He's a pretty interesting guy And the book is called the birth of tragedy now You can have to give me a little bit of poetic license here Because it doesn't fit exactly but this is where my frame of mind was at the time So I wanted to share this with you now in the birth of tragedy Nietzsche talks about these two diametrically opposed intellectual perspectives On one side you have the Apollonian now roughly speaking the Apollonian perspective really really sort of encompasses and accepts control and order And you have the Dionysian and the Dionysian is the antithesis, right? So it really accepts and looks for sort of chaos and change and accepts disorder And I started thinking about how Apollonian kind of reminded me a little bit of leadership You know leadership likes to prognosticate they like to forecast numbers they like to control where they are in the marketplace They want order they want to be able to know where they're going Dionysian reminded me more of engineers Right we expect them to be create Creatists right we expect them to make something from nothing with only a little bit of information So I started thinking okay. Well. Oh, I who's left there must be someone left and I can't figure out who I'm missing for me was that person right there was middle management and You know unfortunately for me I kind of overlooked them and I kind of feel like they often feel overlooked I Was a middle manager once arguably I still am depending on how you define the role middle manager and so I Was I okay the I need to really understand why middle managers are Having such a hard time. They're really in an unenviable position where they're stuck between both of these worlds And they have to manage up and down Simultaneously they have to create results put them into format that's consumable by leadership and Simultaneously cultivate creativity from the engineers And oftentimes doing this within two hours of one another right? I mean it's really really rapid how quickly middle manager has to change from from one hat to the other So I needed to understand okay Why why what's driving the behaviors here? Why am I seeing these results? There's a reason for everything right? And so I started with looking at three big things incentives drivers and fears So my objective was hopefully this would help me to understand the behaviors Now in this case incentives are really goal-oriented. I'm speaking here around goals Now there's lots of different incentives right you maybe you're incentivized to be here today to hear people talk Maybe you're incentivized to be here today to Network and meet other people maybe you're incentivized to be here today just to get away from your boss for two days Right in the case of corporate America goals are pretty important and you kind of can't get rid of them even though I'd love to So I recognized that middle managers were Predominantly goal-driven at an individual level and what happened inadvertently was that their goals were not always aligned with their team goals Sorry, can you not hear me? Is this better? So their their goals were very individualistic and that was a big problem, so I realized Maybe we should take a step back and make sure all the goals are aligned not just the middle managers So we started with business goals and we made sure that they were clearly articulated and started with why the business really needed to define for us Why we're doing this? Why are we doing DevOps? Why are we doing agile? Why are we transforming? Why are we in this market? Then we took those and distilled those down into team goals And we really heavily focused on team goals and minimized individual goals The reason for this was essentially so that I could try and draw in the middle manager into a collaborative mindset So that they could be part of this innovation rather than feeling a part from it, and I think that was a big sentiment Right, they felt like the individual contributors were working on those cool stuff And I'm stuck here just doing HR stuff and approving PTO and I don't get to do anything fun It's like okay, well we could fix that and of course DevOps initiatives that were on the roadmap were also interwoven into the team goals We didn't often use the word DevOps in some organizations It has a bit of a negative connotation Not that it's a bad thing, but if people feel like it's a little overplayed. So that's fine I think the ideals behind DevOps are still rock solid And so we just made sure that those roadmap items were part of the overall goals Drivers for us extrinsic not really a big deal The the pay and comp packages all those things were we're pretty comparable across all the businesses So people weren't really as worried about that as they were intrinsic rewards, right? And so this Kind of boiled down after all the interviews to three big things right who you work with who you work for and what you work on Who you work with I focused heavily on making sure that there were avenues of communication So that there were peer groups for middle managers, and this is across business units, too, right? So the idea is I have some unique challenges or they feel unique to me, right? Everyone kind of faces the same challenges, but when they're yours they feel more personal and more unique, right? I'm I am special just like everyone else kind of thing and so we made sure that everyone could communicate in a safe way and kind of Share those challenges and collaborate on how they could work together to fix them Now who you work for that's just us making sure that the relationship between leadership and the middle managers Was a solid one. They were providing air cover. They're providing resources But most importantly that they were not just providing lip service around empowerment, right if you say yeah You know I want you to innovate then you have to be willing to let middle managers take some risks and What you work on this is where we focused on things like dev ops and agile and lean and other you know Methodologies and principles to try and free up some of the time for middle managers so that they had an opportunity To work on innovative ideas, right? We're telling them we want them to do this We now need to provide them the platform to do so now the interesting thing is this is a great segue into fears Because somehow by me doing all of this stuff in automating and people were coming up to me saying Pauli I'm really worried about you automating me out of a job and I said well, okay. We'll talk to me about that What's going on and the ironic thing was they weren't really worried about being automated out of a job They were quite frankly more worried about being dev ops out of a job And what I mean by that was I was pushing hard to move decision-making down and out in the organizations Now when you do that You also have to flatten the organization with regards to accountability if I have people making decisions They should be held accountable for them not the middle. I mean they're responsible, too, but that should be shared accountability So I started coming up with this little mantra where I said okay It's sort of like a loss of what I call CPR and this was the fear the fear of loss of control The fear of loss of power and the fear of loss of resources And so I started saying what what about if I told you I don't know. Maybe maybe we don't need middle managers And the response I got was I knew I knew I knew you were gonna fire me and I was like whoa No one said anything about firing I'm saying Maybe I don't need you to do all this Menial tasks these little brush fires that burn up half your day every day Maybe instead of being a middle manager. Maybe I need middle leaders. I Need you to lead from the middle I Need someone that can lead change I need someone that can lead innovation I need someone that can lead their teams, and you don't even have time to do that right now, and it's not your fault Now here's the cool thing. I still think it's you I Still think you're the right person for the job The organization is transforming You can't help that we're going to do this we have to do this to remain competitive in our market We have to what I want is I want you to transform with us Now this is not like this miracle that happens overnight right Leadership is hard and it's like a muscle. It takes time. It takes effort and it takes work and Just like when you go to the gym you have to burn calories the business has to burn calories, too If it's only you saying I want to be a better leader in the business like yeah, that's awesome Let me know when you get there Kind of sucks right it's a partnership. It's a symbiotic relationship So for me, I was like, okay We really need to focus on burning our own calories on this You know through mentorships and training a lot of these middle managers that want to become middle leaders are new at management They've never done this before They need us to help them And a lot of times we just kind of throw them out there so When I be I was promoted to promoted to a manager a long time ago when I was a developer And I felt like I was fighting fires and I was providing value value through like guerrilla warfare that's kind of how I thought about it and I'm in the trenches with my buddies and in one day somebody comes along and grabs me by the scruff of my neck and throws me Into a middle of a minefield and goes congratulations You've been promoted to manager and I said it's not really a promotion It's kind of a job change like I'm not even doing anything the same anymore And I felt like any step I took in any direction Had the potential to blow up in my face and no one was there to help guide me through this minefield And the real fear was I now have people behind me that they stuck onto me Now if I step on a landmine I've got collateral damage and if they did nothing wrong other than that They were told to blindly follow the blind guy. So This is what we focused on and we had all the middle leaders on board Very excited Very empowered. We're helping them along. We're doing this together So once again We pull that plane out onto the runway Now it's virtually impossible to find anybody to fly this thing So we you know we get the new guy because he doesn't he doesn't know Just wedding profusely and I'm like you can be fine. You can be fine. We're bad at those other two guys I didn't know what they were doing. You know what you're doing So throttle up it rumbles down the runway now literally no one's breathing right We're all just holding our breath. I go God if this initiative doesn't work. I'm not sure I've got enough Sweat equity here to try another one. I'll just have to go work somewhere else Gets to the end of the runway and it's tight it's close it rotates it lifts up the wheels scrape the trees And it's off And that plane is flying no way it's soaring And all because we focused heavily on this last bit because it ended up being the most important piece of the whole puzzle We focused on getting the the middle leaders engaged and incentivized to be part of the team We made sure that they had an avenue to talk about stuff when things were hard a safe environment for them to do that So that they could talk frankly with other middle leaders We elade their concerns and fears by saying listen man I am out here in the middle of the minefield with you and we'll go together and if we step on a mine We step on a mine But we're together out here And it was just that little bit of communication and trust and really frankly burning not a ton of calories to do this either by the way And That was it Now we had the whole organizational line and we were able to hit speeds and velocities that I didn't even know were possible And we were creating now products and innovative ideas completely ad hoc And we're driving internal satisfaction So that's my story. Thank you so much for spending it with me and I appreciate it