 Hey everybody, it's Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with James. Hello. Hello there. So for folks that don't know you James, who are you, where are you and what do you do? So I am Director of Development Operations at Coati Software. I am based in United Kingdom in London. My role is responsibility of platform engineering, development operations, SRE and also automating testing. My day-to-day is pretty much anything yet operational, making developers' lives easier, empowering developers. As part of that I'm a Microsoft MVP, actually called Ambassador and a Microsoft Certified Trainer as well as I hold many certifications in Microsoft and other areas. I'm a big advocate in the community. You're in that world of the certifications. I just saw somebody, one of your countrymen Sarah Fennah had her page of her certifications around that. It's a full-time job keeping up with each of those things, so more power to you there. Well it's interesting, so you're an Azure MVP with Microsoft kind of shifting back to a more granular focus. So I started as a SharePoint MVP, I'm on my fifth or sixth rewrite of that or bucket that they put us in for that MVP and suddenly I see somebody got a brand new MVP this month as a SharePoint MVP. There's a PowerPoint MVP, they're again doing that, naming the specific technology that they're really focused on. So if that were the case, if it were more granular, what specifically would you be focused in? Like on DevOps side of things or is there a particular technology that you gravitate towards? Yeah, it would be more focused on DevOps here when we go through highlighting our contributions over the year. It's very hard for, I would imagine Microsoft when I am listing items where I'm talking about Azure by working on things like Terraform and in that same bracket of that content. So when I'm listing it, it's like it's a developer content as well as an Azure content, but it's that middle ground where it's DevOps and that's where it's going to become that much more finer identified MVP status. I would imagine that DevOps would be that area of expertise that I fall into. It's amazing how much that space has evolved because what I was, so years ago, actually prior to joining the Microsoft ecosystem, I worked in IT teams and a number of startups and some big companies and DevOps was not a phrase that was out there. We did SEM, so the source code management, worked with engineers and giving them the tools. I was in the project portfolio management side of things, not quite in the DevOps space, but again, I was managing what engineers were doing as well as what the PMs and business analysts were doing as well as far as the tools. What's been your primary topics that you've been talking about, speaking on writing about? What are your primary contribution types? Are you more comfortable writing or videos? So over the last few years, it's all right and I have a very detailed blog that I usually at least contribute once a month to at least, but this year I have pushed myself to doing YouTube content, so the last couple of weeks, I've been releasing at least two videos a week, so that's my target now to do that as well as continuing the blog writing as well. So yeah, it's one of those things that I'm trying to show the tech side of things. How for me, I find that doing DevOps is quite easy, but when I talk to people and they explain how I feel something so easy to do, people go, I didn't know that or that's quite difficult for me and I found out from going to other organizations and talking to them is actually the same statement. I don't know if we're doing DevOps right or if DevOps is successful and these are the ones trying to create content for is, oh, I've done this, have a look at what I've done and I get a lot of feedback. You're from people going, oh, they saved me hours. Oh, this has helped me in the right direction. And we say like DevOps is not all about tech. And this is one of the things we say to the execs here. There's not, oh, you can buy a DevOps product and go, OK, now you're doing DevOps. It's not as the culture side of things as well. And again, that's why I'm trying to advocate, especially this year, I'm doing a few talks on effective leadership and also successful development operations, trying to get across here that culture is a very primary thing that you need to ingrain, but you also need to have the culture and the technology. It's not just the tech. It's not about the culture. It's both together and you have to do that and get everybody on board. So I have got a very similar topic again, coming more from the project portfolio management side where I would talk about change management. Again, it's it's very much fits within this space. It's and it's not you're right. It's not just about the tools because you could have 10 companies with a project management software package and they could use it 10 different ways. They can be effective. I was just talking with a partner about creating features for a chargeback model for those that have ever attempted to do that. I've worked with a couple of companies where we've attempted to do that, where you attempt to put pricing around like your internal IT services so that you can a lot budget that each business unit spends on it, that that kind of thing. Again, it could be very different between different organizations and culturally the organization's ability to. Do those do take those follow that methodology, follow the utilize those tools to their fullest extent. So, yeah, that's a it's the soft skill side of operations and engineering. Yeah, and this is where I find when I'm having conversations is trying to find the right person, which I say is not an individual thing. You usually need an advocate in a company yet and to make anything successful, especially DevOps, but trying to find the middle ground between someone that has the soft skills and also the very technical skills. And again, someone in the middle back and do both. And this is where I try to have a gamer you need to sometimes you can find someone very technical and train them up here with the soft skills. Yeah, and build them towards that middle ground. Yeah, then the soft skills. Yeah, it's quite good to then build them up to the technical. And that's what I try doing is trying to bring that middle ground to organizations so that we can not have one person in an organization that can advocate it all and deliver it all, but have multiple people that can bring all that together and all work as a team as well. And that's what the DevOps culture is all about that type of approach. So, well, that's what's again, it's very similar over on, you know, the the PMBA side, you know, it's what business analysts do. They're usually the people that understand the technology. They may not be able to code. They're not the engineers, but they understand it and they communicate what they can translate business into technical and technical over to the business folks. You also something else that you said about, you know, people coming up and your things that might be easy for you, like one of the things that I remind, you know, MVPs about talk about often is that you can't forget those kind of entry level topics because although you've mastered them and moved on and sometimes it's more exciting to talk about the new cool features and tools, there's always people that are just at the beginning of their journeys and need that other fundamental content. Yeah, and that is literally what most conversations are. You once you've done it, what I find is once I've done it, I move on to the next thing and more complicated. Yeah, I don't forget it. But then I take advantage that I know it now I have that information, but organizations are quite still far behind in this type of journey. Some organizations like startups might not take the correct journey in regards to taking a development operational approach. And because of that, they then find themselves catching up with that curve. So even though you think companies mature, they might be mature in regards to their growth, but not in their actual operational culture. And having that conversation, like I say, you're going back to the basics seems to be quite a common approach. I find you when I go to an organization, I don't. I usually find it more interesting going into an organization where there's a lot of work to do. I would like to say, I mean, if I got bored, I think I'll move on. To be honest, I'd like the interest of constantly doing work in challenging and when I do find an organization that where there needs a lot of work, need doing, that's interesting to me. But usually you have to start with, I usually say it's the foundation. My father-in-law and my wife's side of the family, it's all construction. They do some type, it's either general trade, plumbing, all that. So when I talk to them, they always talk about construction. And I've started using the terminology that when we talk about building, if we look at a structure, it's usually easier just to tear down the structure and rebuild it again. So the easiest way to do it is to start with a new foundation and build up from there, trying to work with a falling structure. It's a lot of work, it requires a lot of support and everything. And it can take much longer. Sometimes if you can start with a clean slate, it's better to start with a clean slate. And most of the organizations are more than happy and willing to start with a clean slate and work on that culture. Yeah. No, I've seen that many, many times. And you have a new leadership coming in and saying, hey, we're going to completely change the way that we're doing this. There's things that we're doing well. We want to leverage those things. But especially with the technologies like we're going to fundamentally change this and do this different. And it's sometimes you know that you have or that new leader has the support of the executive team, the founders, the CEO, whatever, because they're allowing them to come in and make that change. They're invested in, hey, you're part of hiring that person, bringing in that expert is because they have, they've been successful in doing it that other way. So, you know, change for change sake is never great. No, a hundred percent. And I think, I think if an organization is honest year with you, if they are going out for recruitment and they need someone to come in, I think they understand you, they're looking for that specific role. It's for either because they do really well, which if I look at it and I go, OK, well, that might bore me, bore me a little bit. But if they're saying that there's a challenge we're having, like we're we're starting out our journey or we've tried doing this journey. It's not work down. We're trying to revisit it. That's where it's like, OK, so it's changed needed. And they go, yes, because what's currently working is not working for us. Or we've started from scratching. And that's where I go, oh, yeah, that interests me a lot. That does. Yeah. Well, it's the other side of it, too, is that in operations, management, again, I spent about half of my career in those types of roles running operations teams and IT operations and where you're continually looking at and assessing, what are we doing? Is this healthy? Is this the right way? Can it be done better? So even though you might be high performing, I guess why I'm a big fan of like the maturity model in general. There's maturity models on just about every system and types of organization. But just to you might be high performing, high functioning in some areas and below average in other areas. And so there's always you're never done because people change, technology changes, the business requirements change, all those things which can impact. Now, whether that you're interested in going through the constant, you know, a review and changing that up, there's something to be said about career progression, trying different roles, doing other things, moving around, not just staying someplace. But there are some people that just absolutely love that, love that space. Yeah, 100 percent, yeah. Again, I've had that experience before and I really enjoy it myself. And when, especially now, I think text over the last few years, we always say, I think it's a repeat repetitive comment here. We say that text growing so much and it's changing so rapidly. And we say that so often and then over the last 12 months, we've been seeing a massive rapid change and everyone execs, yet engineering managers and all that all talking about, oh, how do we add AI or how do we embrace AI and how does AI impact us? And you're like, oh, that's another change. And we know that over the next few months, over the next few years, there's going to be something else or the growth in these areas where we're working on, especially with Microsoft products, for example, where they're moving a lot of their power platforms, yeah, over to the new fabric platform and that's a change, even though it doesn't look massively changeable, but for my organization, operational side of things, it's like, well, this change is more in grinding to Azure and how does this work, how does that work and all that changes. Yeah, it's interesting. So I joined my first SaaS software company in 2001 and what we went up against trying to sell customers and partners, bringing them in of the benefits of the cloud. It was a really tough sell back then joined Microsoft in 2006 at the beginning of what is now Office 365, again, selling people on the cloud. And I was talking with Jeff Teeper, President of Collaborative Apps at Microsoft about the cloud journey. And he said he felt it wasn't until like 2015, 2016, you know, when he felt like people finally clicked, like they got the cloud, they understood the benefits and kind of the momentum was towards the cloud. I think the citizen developer stuff, the power platform stuff, sped up a lot of that, but you're right. I think all of that. I mean, that that was 15, 16 years of that change. And over the last 12 months with generative AI, I mean, we're seeing just shock waves. Like I don't think we've ever seen change this fast because even with the advent of the internet, I mean, that was a slow crawl to get performance up to we all had high speed internet. You know, so this is just you're right. It just sounds like this throwaway phrase, like it's like change happened so fast or so. Yeah. No, it's it is. It's the rate of change is speeding up. Yeah. And I think about these organizations like Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud, yeah, they all compete, yeah. So they need to go first to market as fast as possible. And they know they've learned over the years and lessons learned. And we do this at our own organizations that you learn from your previous experiences and for something like an AI generative product, it was easier to go. We're going to give it to people for free to try. And then once you do that, people get using the buzzword, it gets loads of press about it. So this is all there. And then when you start releasing corporate and enterprise versions and go, OK, now you can build on it yourself, yeah, integrated with your own products. And here's some sessions and here's some free learning material and all we're going to do loads of certifications. Yeah, on that side, you can build up your engineers on it. And we can throw some experts for you to help you get all up to speed in your organization. Twelve months, yeah, it's like the plan's been there for years. You know, they knew what they're doing. You can say it's a marketing thing in regards to how they strategized it, yeah, and hit the market. And 100% here is a marketing strategy and it worked really well. Again, everybody all trained up and all ready and talking about anything. But saying that is also how I see text moving forward now. This is where we will see a day one announcement and how within 12 months that is literally all we're talking about and how people skinning up on the end, how we need to evolve ourselves as engineers, operational IT in individuals we need to start learning so much quicker. So there's a massive impact on us and the content side of things, even though we can learn from people like Marks of Learn is how we need to learn from each other. We need to start sharing that information as well. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm most interested. I think 2024 really is we're going to start seeing the the business application of the technology. We got the hype cycle. We got all the marketing push. We all bit hard on this idea of of AI. We're playing with the diverse technologies. I'm paying for a couple of different tools that are adding value like I get it. The pricing that now it's like the the the world is available. You know, everybody can get the the the Microsoft technology now like co-pilot is available to order, not just the 300 seat threshold, the enterprises. There's the like I've got my own instance. I've got the like the home version. My family have, you know, teams and the the product suite, the productivity suite, office suite. And so now you can buy 20 bucks a seat, get everybody in there or or just myself, you know, on those those tools that I'm using. As well as, you know, organizations under 300 seats can get the enterprise at 30 bucks a month as well. I mean, it's great to see that that happened that quickly. But I'm most interested now in seeing the case studies, the examples. Here's what we actually did. So it's fine to go out there. Like everybody suddenly is an expert in AI. But what are the actual real world examples? Like James, I want to know how it's changing your job in the DevOps. I think some exciting stories that are going to come out of there and how you're actually leveraging on a day to day. So that's the I think that's what we're going to see this year. Yeah. And that's what I expect to show as well. Yeah, there's a lot coming out from other individuals. I've had stories I've heard of I've experienced myself. I'm working with our own internal development team in using things like GitHub Copilot to actually speed up their coding delivery times and helping them write test test plans and helping with documentation, which is a big thing in development. So those stories. I know, yeah, from my experience, they're going to come out this year and it's going to be amazing on those topics as well as integrating them into business applications. And I do hope I imagine it will happen this year but I do hope that we will see very soon you from others here that this is what we did and this is how we did it. And this is how much of an impact is made at the moment. Like you say, we bit hard on AI. Yeah, the result from it. I think that's just the necessary is the next step in the adoption cycle. The next group of people need to see the data. They need to see the specific scenarios. They can't just be like, hey, we could use it this way. No, show me. Show me how this actually was used in these scenarios. And what are the data points? How much did it improve? And I think that's yeah, that's going to be 2024. That's it's it's going to be interesting. All of the marketing heavy presentations from last year are need to make the switch over to practical application and data. Yes, 100 percent. A great. Well, it should be interesting, but James really appreciate your time great connecting with you. For folks that want to connect with you, reach out, where are you most active in social work and people find you? You can find me on LinkedIn under James Cook. I'm also active on X slash Twitter at official Cook J. So either of those two platforms, you can. Those are the all the unofficial ones that are out there with your your face out there. Yeah, I'm on I'm on so many socials. Yeah, trying to get away from some platforms. Yeah, but yeah, it's still still the dominant ones. So yeah, those two are where I am prominently. So if you contact me on any of those or follow me on any of those, you'll get all my latest updates. Great. Of course, we'll have all the links to James profile out on the blog post out on YouTube and out of the podcast. So James, thanks so much for your time. No, thank you.