 Welcome everybody, I can see you can see the screen, happy Friday firstly and happy DevCon Friday, it's great to actually be part of DevCon this year and I'm looking forward to giving you a quick overview of our presentation for today. I'm joined with a manager from our team, Stefan Magnate, who was part of this process with me, we'll get to all the introductions as we go along. But first, welcome to our presentation. It is called Code Whiteboard Action, and we're going to take you through the scene of how we managed to leverage design thinking for our quarterly planning process. And we did it through movies. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Eve from Lonely. I am the product owner for the Community Platform Engineering team. I've been with Red Hat overall for the last four years to spend in facilities management and the last two spent with wonderful people on the Community Platform Engineering team. My background is primarily customer service and facilities management. And then I started out in the project management product owner side of things for the last couple of years, and then CP got stuck with me. I'm also joined, as I said, with one of our managers, Stefan Magnate, and I'll hand it over to you, Steph, to give you an introduction. Thanks, Eva. So yeah, my name is Stefan Magnate. I'm an engineering manager in CPE. I've been with Red Hat probably about eight years now, last year and a half or so on the CPE team. My background before I joined CPE was more in the consulting side of the organization. I'm probably about 20 to 25 years worth of experience in IT. So that's me. So over to you, Eva. Action. Thanks, Steph. So when I got to the Community Platform Engineering team, they had just started their adult transformation. The Community Platform Engineering team, the clue is in the name is a community facing team. We support the Fedora project and the Centus project. So our team was very used to reactive firefighting work. Some planned but not really much of a focus on it. It was all just the work comes in and you get it done. And like they're rock stars. So there wasn't an issue, but there definitely was space and some growth that we could carve out places for planned work. And we still have a firefighting crew. It's software engineering, so bugs and fires happen. And so there was still a need to retain some people to mend those. But we definitely were able to look at how we could plan some project work and start delivering value ahead of time. And it worked out because that's how I got my job. So they got, they got me. And because I was new enough into the agile world and the team was also new enough into the agile world, we got to learn together. But because we were starting off together, we went agile by dummies. And we did planning exactly by the book. We just said, right, you have to do quarterly planning. And that means that you have to plan for three months worth of work. And we just did X, Y and Z. And we used slides, docs and sheets. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with those tools. They are necessary evil to the world, but they are a little bit boring. Certainly to somebody like me anyway who prefers more in person talking visuals. But look, we needed to learn the basics. We need to learn the mechanics of quarterly planning. So we stripped it right back. And then we realized there could be a little bit more to life than this. Thankfully, when Stefan joined, I knew he had a bit of experience with it. So I reached out to him and I said, I'm getting a bit bored. Please help me. Yeah. So I suppose I came into the team then and had some previous experiences, I think experience, consulting engagement, so a lack of stuff, which, which I could then see, you know, maybe I could bring some new ideas. We could have maybe a look at some previous techniques that I might have used or, you know, some new ideas about how to just make the whole thing a bit more engaging. Maybe even how to give it a bit more of a personality, how to, you know, gain those insights from, from, you know, all the people in the team, all the people, whether you're a manager or an engineer or a product owner or a stakeholder, whatever it is. You know, we wanted to get that information and not just, you know, sending an email, getting an email back or filling in a document and then someone having to read it and all that stuff. We wanted it to be a much better experience for everyone. So, you know, that was when we kind of said, right, what can we do here? How can we give this personality? What's, you know, what's the best way to obviously try and we're still, we're very much a remote team. So, you know, everyone's dispersed around the globe. And so how could we get all information together? How could we actually make sure that, you know, things are captured from all the people that are in the team. So, we've got the next slide. We can show you a little bit about what we came up with first. So, we had a look through the Open Practice Library. So, you know, this is the main kind of thing of this talk as well is, you know, the great resource that the Open Practice Library is. And if you haven't heard about it, you know, it's kind of an open library where people can contribute all the great agile techniques, processes, procedures, all that kind of stuff, you know, there's some great stuff in there. So, we had a look at that. We said, look, what can we, what can we maybe get from that that could help us potentially bring this thing to life a little bit. And we came up with something called, we call it initiative stories. So, there's a design practice, design thinking practice technique in the Open Practice Library called cover stories. And we said, we would, you know, we would have a look at that. Does it give us a bit of personality for each of our initiatives? And what can we do with it? We tweaked it slightly. We wanted to make it slightly different. It didn't suit us exactly. It was more kind of a newspaper style thing. So, that maybe didn't suit. So, we tweaked it slightly. So, you know, we wanted to also make sure that we could do this in a, you know, place where, you know, everyone could contribute, like I said. So, online whiteboarding made kind of sense there. And Miro happened to be the tool that we had access to in Red Hat. So, that's what we went with, because we didn't have to set up accounts, right? And everyone had access to it. And it was very important as well that we had all this information contained in one space, so that, you know, you direct the people to this one space each time. And, you know, that's where you went. That's where you added your information. That's where you read about the information you needed, or will you discuss things? Okay. So, Miro is the tool that we use. We came up with a cover story, an initiative story idea. And I'll just run you through a little bit of the thinking behind it. So, first of all, we wanted to have some kind of image, a cover image. So, something that represented, gave the initiative a bit of life, okay, a bit of personality. We then had headlines, or big headlines, as we call them. So, this was the thing that, what would people say if they seen this initiative? What would be their initial reaction to? What was the most important things that, you know, that they would say about it? We then had some critic reviews. So, what would people who were experts in this initiative, or had knowledge previously about this? What would they add to this? What would they be able to say about it? We wanted to capture that. We also then had, you know, how long we thought it would take. Maybe it's like a 12-week initiative, or a six-week initiative, or whatever it was. What was our estimate on how long it might take? We also had quotes. So, as we went along, you know, from the community, or from stakeholders, or whatever, people might have said, you know, I really want this done because, you know, of this, or even make a big difference in this way, or whatever, we felt that would add something to the initiative as well. We also had brainstorming section where, if it didn't fit anywhere else, people could discuss things back and forth, and just, you know, add things in there to make it a bit more of a free-flowing conversation in as well. We had, you know, how many people this might require? Do we have the right people with the right skills? Would it take, you know, two engineers, or UX people, or whatever it was? We had that there as well, and we tried to capture that too. We then also had, like, the project briefs, and you know, further information that, you know, that we had about it, captured previously as well, and we had those captured there as well. And I suppose the whole thing was to bring this together in a much more dynamic way, so that people could easily understand, you know, what was being captured, where we were with things, and why we were doing it. So I think if we move on to the next slide, and if we'll explain a bit more about that. Oh, crap. Yep, I will. Just went off my screen. Yeah, so we said, right, we have a good idea, we have a foundation, let's go technicolor. We went with movie posters because a lot of our team are movie buffs, and I think Fernando spoke about it in his talk earlier today about, like, where's the biggest problem with people with online training? But it's the same principle with planning. You know, what's the biggest thing? And for me personally, it's attention. If I join a call, and I'm looking at a document, I have four other tabs open, and I'm going to be on all of those. If I join a call, and I'm looking at an appointment in Killbill, I'm going to say, look, how is that? Let me look closely at this one. So we wanted people instantly drawn into our planning. We wanted to get their engagement right off the bat, so that we had their attention, and that they were going to be engaged in our conversations, in the technical discussions. And we also wanted people to, we wanted to capture those commentaries and those insights. So we got people to record them via sticky notes, or we did some facilitator calls in our pre-planning sessions that people joined, and I recorded their commentary as people were discussing. But everybody had a corresponding color, and I'd explained why that was a stroke of genius towards the end of it. But as you can see, it went from slides and documents that people would skim and get bored with with something very, very, very visual and eye-catching. And you're already interested. I know we all are. So what it looked like together was this. You can see there was loads of contributions from people, and it came from all perspectives. So all of our stakeholders and team, they all had a corresponding sticky. I think we had purple for Santa, some blue for Fedora. We had, I think, green for management, so everybody got a color. And it was visual and eye-catching. So you're already drawn into that, even if you didn't contribute, but you did want to read it or see what you're doing. You're already, your interest is peaked by going onto these boards. It looks kind of cool as well. What was interesting for me, though, personally as a product owner with this process, with this different way of still recording the same information that you need to have a successful quarterly planning call, is when I was looking at the movie posters for a corresponding project, because, like, that's just how I'm wired. I think it's funny if I can find a project that, the project details a movie that could kind of summarize it too. But I kind of tricked myself into learning more about the projects that I was presenting to team stakeholders, because I had to know the project details very clearly to find the matching movie poster. So it's a win-win. And I enjoyed doing it. But also because they're so engaging and because they're such a talking point, everybody that was on those calls either had something to say or they had an observation to make or they were learning something from it. And we ended up recording loads of commentary on all of the projects that we were discussing that was under consideration for our quarterly planning, which meant that any of the projects then that went forward in the next quarter for work had this deep, deep analysis already done in advance of the project launch. And I can't tell you how many times we were sunk for time at the beginning of the project launch, because we were running off of a very simple document that had some important points, but not the heart of it, not the root of the project. And the unknowing unknowns are always going to get you. And we seem to be able to eliminate a lot of those unknowing unknowns just by getting everybody together and talking about it collectively and writing it down. Stickies or otherwise, it's important to write it down. So we found we were getting loads of benefits from already changing our approach to this, but what it meant for the quarter coming up, what was being worked on, that was still left to be determined. So I handed over to Steph to tell you what we did there. So we captured all that information. What do we do with it? How do we make some decisions about it? How do we prioritize, got various stakeholders, want to make some decisions about what do we work on? Capture all this great information and it's great. So previously in the past, we've run some techniques about how we can make some of those decisions. But probably unintentionally, it might have been just one or two people that did a lot of the talking or seemed to kind of drive a lot of decisions. So we wanted to make sure that we got more of a consensus. We wanted to make sure that everyone spoke, that everyone was heard, that us as a CP team as well were much more facilitators in the conversation and discussion, then kind of driving it. So we wanted to try and bring all that together, get all the stakeholders agreeing on things and try to work out how we can do that, how we can do that, how we bring it all together and how do we get to prioritization? How do we know what the team is going to work on for the next quarter or the next year or whatever it is? So we said, let's dip back into the practice library again, there's some great techniques in there. And one that I had previously run as well, which is a very, very simple technique, one of the most simple techniques in there, but very effective, it's called priority sliders. And the basic, most simple principle of this technique is that every item on a ranking list can only be in one place. So every item has its own place and no two items can ever share the same ranking or be of the same weight. So basically what we did then was we had all our initiatives. We put them into a simple grid like you see there and then we talked about them. So we made each stakeholder group discuss why they felt that this initiative belonged at the first ranking or the last ranking or whatever it might be. And as we went down and as we iterated through that a little bit, other stakeholders maybe realized the importance of it for other people or they realized, hey, I want some of that as well or I need some of that as well or some of that will help me in the future. But the whole thing about it was to get that discussion going, to make sure that everyone's perspectives were heard and everyone got that opportunity to speak. And we did have to iterate over a few times before we got to a consensus, but we did get to that consensus fairly easily. And I remember on this technique, the previous engagement before where we had to iterate a few times and the first time we went through it, we had a particular ranking, one to five or one to ten or whatever it was. But then probably the fourth or fifth time around where everyone had spoken, everyone had discussed it was the complete opposite. People have realized things that they had not realized before and there was an agreement that the least important previously was now the most important. So it's a really powerful technique to do that. And it's a really non-confrontational way as well of getting consensus and unanimous decision and agreement on a plan going forward. So that's how we ran it. Priority sliders was it and very powerful but very simple technique. So where did we go from then there? So we were finally ready for the release of our quarterly planning moving. We had done the pre-planning, we had gained all of our insights. We had discussed it, we had asked people to contribute, which they did. Before we got to our priority sliders though, the necessary evil of email is still a thing and it's the way the world is. And it is important. So while we did want to inject more fun and personality into our planning, I do feel like we did that. We also recognize that there is a need to make sure that that information that we were enjoying capturing from people gets rolled up and gets distributed. In a way that everybody can consume. Not everybody will enjoy going on to a whiteboard and reading through stickies. Some people do, some people don't. But everybody does get an email. So whether you choose to hold off on the planning and wait for the summary email then or you're engaged with the planning all the way through. We wanted to make sure we had covered both phases. So this is where our color coordinating stickies really paid dividends for me anyway. As the product owner and the person who goes into these boards and previously Google Docs and tried to kind of capture and summarize like the what we had discussed and what we had realized about these projects to send to stakeholders before we made those decisions. Because everything was color coded, I was able to say this is how CDE feels, this is how Fedora feels, this is how Sentis feels. And it was great because we were able to categorize and then into risks, technical details, etc. So that was all able to go out before the planning call and we had more reach. Like I said, so there was teams that were subscribed maybe to our team mailing list that wouldn't be in those insights calls that got this information and was able to contribute back and say, hey, we're interested in this. Let me know how this progresses. I want to track it or don't forget to consider this. Our team is a dependency of this particular piece of software. So that all was rolled back in and people could read and the stakeholders and team got to our prioritization call and they were very, very clear on what they were discussing and voting on. Once the voting completed, the results went back out by email because we don't want to miss people being aware of what we've discussed and planned. The call is recorded, the link was sent out and our own team, our own development team is, it's an open call to them. So everybody is welcome to come and watch and see how it goes. So it was just a very easy straightforward way for me to capture that information in a more fun way because death by Google Docs is just not a good way to live. And that was our quarterly planning process. Revant changed, moved to movies, coming to a cinema near you. But our film critiques did have some very nice reviews to say from our stakeholders. Any day that's not a spreadsheet related one is a good one. The human interaction was great. There was a strong team connection built because they felt part of our process part of our team, they were more willing and empowered to share their thoughts. And they get a bit controversial without feeling like they'll offend. And having the information illustrated and having it much more visual just meant that people were already more open to contributing and discussing. And there was a couple of movies that were added to people's must watch list too, which is always a good thing. So this was just became much more fun by leveraging the open practice library and just thinking a little bit outside the box on a very standard practice of how we could just be a little bit more innovative and fun and dynamic with it. And I'm pretty sure that is the end of our movie reel. So Steph, take it away to the end. So hopefully everyone enjoyed that got something out of it. You know, it's been a bit of a journey for us, but I would recommend everyone have a look at the open practice library have a look for some techniques there. Don't be afraid to tweak them a little bit as well. In terms of, you know, they might exactly suit your needs, but, you know, things can be tweaked very easily. And you can work on there. And just look, I suppose anything me as a manager, I think that creates a bit more engagement in the team. You know, a bit more fun. We had a little bit of fun with it as well, which I think was an important aspect of it too. Not to forget that, you know, although we're doing software development and things like that, we can also add a bit of fun into that as well. So look, thanks everyone for listening. I suppose we can roll the roll the end credits there. Yeah. See if they work. It's screwed up again. It wouldn't be a presentation without a modification sketch. I'm a firm believer of that. But our contact details are here. Thank you all very much for joining. We hope you've given us an inspiration on how you can maybe change your, your quarterly planning with your team or to just make it a little bit more enjoyable for yourself, if not for anybody else, because if you're the one doing it, it should be fun for at least you. Yep. I think we have a few minutes for questions. Hey, thank you very much for your presentation and for your refreshing ideas, sharing with us. It was very interesting. I don't see any Q&A yet, but let's give people a few more seconds if they're writing it. In case you have some questions, you don't want to ask it there. You see the contact info for our presenters on the screen. So feel free to reach out to them. Thank you, I have to add the slides to the talk, which I will do after this call. So if anybody wants to go through them again and clean some ideas, you're more than welcome to do so there. Thank you very much. There are no questions at this time. So let me thank you again. Have a nice day.