 Okay, guess we can start welcome to my session Today I will talk about Continuous improvement at unique and I will talk about how we manage to keep and improve our ability to innovate You might wonder why you see two names up there, but only one person in front You can relax your eyes are perfectly fine Unfortunately, my co-speaker Roy, he's not that fine He's more looking like that at the moment. So I will be the one giving this speech and I Hope I can answer all a few questions So quickly about me. My name is Laura Fairbecker. I'm working at Unique for four years I'm a senior project manager and the team leader of the Drupal team as well as type of 3n project managers As you might hear I'm German. I'm married and if I don't work I like to go go running As it's already Wednesday afternoon and you might all be a little bit like tired and exhausted We brought you a little chocolate so you can re-energize and Have a lot of strength for for our speech So I will give you quickly the chocolate and you can pass it around So I would like to start to give you a short introduction of Unique because Unique is the company We are talking about today Unique was founded in 1996 in Switzerland As a spin off of the University of Bern By four students two of these students are still working at Unique They are of course not no students anymore But the one is our CEO and the other one is working for business development We are like you could call us a one-stop shop we do everything from consulting creation development and operations and We strive to ensure our customers online success in digital marketing and digital commerce last year so 2014 we had sales of around 40 million and Our 280 employees Situated in five offices two in in Switzerland in Bern and Zurich two in Germany Cardsville and Munich and one in in Austria and Vienna and a couple of years ago We also started to set up a development center in Roslav that's important Our mission Unique's mission is that to increase our customer success in e-business We try to do this this through passion for what we do to have fun for our work and With our experienced and skilled employees. I don't want to scare you off with this slide But I think it's important to understand that we are not a Drupal only shop And I think it's important to to understand And to know this to understand how we function our organization is set up So we are not only doing Drupal sites Drupal We offer our clients for example adobe experience manager Hybrid side curl, but also other open-source solutions such as magento and type of three, but Drupal is the most important, of course We We serve more than 200 clients Here it's also important to know that we are not focused on one specific area not on one specific industry We serve clients For example in the manufacturing manufacturing business for example Mammut Traders like Hornbach service providers like Zurich insurance or credit Swiss Consumer brands like Coca-Cola or pick-up set and public enterprises for example this this was posed But of course we also conducted numerous exciting projects with Drupal as for example Zurich insurance where we Want a lot of prices last this year and for example, Schweizer illustrator, which is a magazine in Switzerland And if I'm correct, it's still the the biggest Drupal site in Switzerland So talking about Drupal at Unik As I said before we are not a Drupal only shop So also our Drupal team looks a little bit different as it might look in in your companies or in other companies our team members not necessarily have Framework specific know-how But they rather have in-depth know-how in their specific discipline for example, we have the designers UX experts front-end Developers project managers that work with different CMS not only Drupal, but of course we also have Drupal specific as experts that do nothing else and Some of them are even here today in this room and also at Drupal com As we are talking today about continuous improvement and innovation It's important to to know and to understand our culture because I'm sure that Our culture is very important and it triggers the way we do innovation and the way we do continuous improvement Our core values you can see them here in there in the green rectangle. It's being competent So this means that we are working with the leading technologies That we are passionate. We love what we do. We have fun in what we do We we try to be personal. So we are we take responsibility. We appreciate every employee in our company We we are reliable. We keep our promise or at least we try to keep our promises We are quality driven and efficient meaning to use the time responsibly that we have So I showed you a little bit how our organization is maybe different to your organizations And that that our mission and our culture our key values are like the basis for everything We do that it's very important for us to remember them and to work with them in mind But we were thinking is this really enough to be successful and to have fun in what we do and improve The way we do continuous improvement or innovation and for sure it's not so At unique we we introduced different measures on a company-wide basis for all our 280 people For example, we introduced the total quality management. It's operational then 2008 and It's something where all our processes for all our businesses are are shown so that that people May look them up if they are not to show what to do Then we know who messages quality messages These are meant to encourage our employees to suggest improvement ideas this could be something from requesting that we have automatic out-of-office messages until like The need for larger screens instead of two small screens Whatever you can think of and these quality messages May be opened by everyone in the company They are put in our Jira so you can see them you can follow them if you want to to know what's the process So it's very open for everyone We also know community of practices or like php user groups Know-how sessions because we are we are sure that we can benefit a lot from the experiences of our peers So if we can talk to them Then we can learn a lot and Last but not least we know unique versities and universities are our trainings our refresher sessions training days Where the the people in our company? Learn our processes if you're new to the company then you can can learn it But also if you are a member for years, maybe you need to refresh a little bit So I guess this is this is already a lot what we what we have here, but And it helps us like triggering and triggering innovation. It helps us working on continuous improvement and I'm sure it's it's a huge advantage of a company of Working for a company like unique to have this like because it gives you a certain stability It helps you focusing on on these topics but I Guess it's it's still not enough to really be innovative or have time to to focus on this and We were with Thinking about okay, what what can we do? Where are we coming from? So we we do Drupal since 2007 roughly since then of course our projects Projects increased in size and important The expected expectations increased as well not only the expectations of our clients But also of the team of course to have higher standards Also, we we needed to or try to like adapt the Drupal processes to our unique way as I said We are not a Drupal only shop so we we have experts in all the different areas and somehow we need to fit the processes here of Course working with processes may be sometimes killing innovations who had problems with that and We had of course our employees have have numerous ideas and tasks that they were working on to to improve things But we had no chance really trace them so one day and we were thinking of one important and very influential men and We said we want to want to change Change something so we said okay, we have a dream to Please don't get me wrong. We don't want to be compared or think that we are Comparable to what this man said or done or did of course not but still in 2014 we formulated our dream and And This is our dream that innovation and financial success are not mutually exclusive that a large large portion of Developable working time can be invested in innovation if everyone does their part in fulfilling the business unit goals So that was our dream in 2014 Okay, very easy. So if we are successful we can spend time on innovation Not that easy, I guess Anyone know this situation? Okay, you're nodding I'm sure a lot of people know that Renew it of course as well still we know it We are like working in the project business We have tight schedules. We have customers who want more and more and more and we are very very busy and working on that and and Sometimes you just forget that you might just change a little bit and you're more efficient and you can do your job better So we ask ourselves How we might be able to manage that how we might be able to to change from this like square wheel to a round wheel and How are we able to find the time to to realize that we can or that we need to change something? so in in 2014 We talked about that and then we decided okay now. We definitely need to change something. So we initiated OMEA labs OMEA is only the name of our business unit Like our department you can forget the name. It stands for online marketing engineering and analytics and We started with OMEA labs at the beginning of 2015 with a pilot beginning of this year so the goal of OMEA labs or the goal of labs is to give every member of the team the Possibility to spend a large percentage of the working time on innovation So our on topics the team would like to invest time in on topics the team thinks that that are really important for the team or for the business unit or for the person itself and We said of her like certificate And asked her the team members, okay If you're really if you are committed to do that if you want to to join us doing that then please sign the form and It was very quickly that everyone signed the form and they told us okay. We really like the idea We are committed. We want to do that So we said okay, we will start that and maybe it's important to know that our department like OMEA Is the only one at unique yet Who's doing that so we were the only one starting with this project What's also important are like the basics of their OMEA labs model first of all Labs is an investment. So we invest money for that. We don't charge anything to our customers It's all our like the money we earned that we want to invest in there And of course to be able to invest invest money We need to earn it first. So it's very important for the labs model to to work that we reach our business goals and Of course, we did a little research on like how other companies Apple Google who are very Innovative do that and we found out that even even Google is like using something. That's called the 70 2010 model And they believe that if they put like 20 70% of the energy in dedicated core business 20% of the energy and Businesses that are related to the core business and 10% in like crazy thinking or unrelated core business that they can Make a step further that they can Encourage the people to work on innovation So we said, okay if Google does it this way then can't be wrong So we said, okay, we concentrate on our business goals if we can reach them then there should be time for for labs Okay, of course, we had a look at their Existing meetings the existing channels that we had and asked us ourselves Do we really need them or maybe could we cancel them to have more time for innovation? Of course, like there are some rules and regulations at unique that still need to be met like if you Want to go on vacation you need to ask for that and stuff like that and of course if we Have blocker tickets with our clients and projects Then the team needs to to work on them because if there's a blocker for the customer, of course, we don't want to Have the customer bait The specific setup of the of the labs model is that we said, okay We have 20 men days per person per year that are available for innovation and We split these 20 days up into three parts So the first part is like one fixed day per month per person and We decided to have have it every third Wednesday in the months and this day is really it's fixed in there And the resource planning it's blocked in the calendars. So that's very clear Okay, this is the day where we're working on innovation on continuous improvement on on things that are interesting for us But not on customer projects And during these days we set up these these yellow signs Maybe you know them from the airport or something It's like a warning sign for everyone else in the company and they know if they see it Okay, today is a laps day. I better come back tomorrow because today. No one will talk to me They are all concentrated on their innovation topics on their on their non-client related projects In addition to this one laps day We have a half day per month so four hours per month per person Which is also fixed in their resource planning so that they really have the time They only need to pick like a day or half a day when when to do it And in addition to that we have two so-called Joker days Per year and these may be used for for conventions for special trainings This is very flexible there the employees can can choose it themselves and For the for the laps model We also created then their project overview sheet where everyone can enters his or her ideas Describe them maybe give references or a jar a ticket and then we set up like a for-face Plan for for the ideas so in the first plan it's really about creative thinking about brainstorming No sanity checks. It's really like crazy thinking if you want to say I want to name it like that You could ask yourself question like could we try this or that did you ever think about something so that really the ideas can pop up and the second phase There the employees are a little bit more analytical that they challenge the ideas Maybe they ask detailed questions. They discuss it with their peers. Is it really a good idea or did I forget something and the third phase is like decision thinking or just doing it Implementing whatever the idea is Maybe if you if you are not sure about something you can always discuss it with your with your boss with your team leader With our business unit leader or if it's it's a huge idea or maybe the evaluation of a need to that could be used Then you can discuss with our business unit lead. That's right. Who should be here, too If you want to create a business case to work to work even more on that Of course, it's also sometimes the case that we put an idea on hold We say okay, maybe the idea is good But at the moment, it's just not the time then we mark it like that and maybe we can pick it up later Of course, it's also important for for OMEA labs that we not only concentrate on innovation continuous improvement during these days, but try to like Introduce it in our and our daily lives and in there in the daily work And then do we that we talk about it as we spread the work word and we have like Unique internal social media channels like Yammer or we have a company block that we talk about it there I Guess it's it's important to say that the majority of the initiatives that are handled with OMEA labs are really independently Done by the team So only the big projects are discussed with their team leader or the project The business unit lead the majority is done by them on this slide I show you like a screenshot of our project overview that you believe me that we're really doing stuff and that there is a list Of course, it's only a very short part of the list, but I wanted to show you this that you believe me What I'm what I'm telling you so how that there the Drupal team my team worked with OMEA labs They use at the moment they use labs to to solve project challenges and difficulties. They are facing to improve project work with results they get from the labs sometimes To deal with topics that are evolving from new company standards one example at the moment is for example team city and Maybe to delve into topics that were discussed during Drupal meetups Or I'm pretty sure after this Drupal con there the list will increase tremendously with topics that they would like to to delve into and Here's a list of some some examples that they dealt with up till now since the beginning of the year One is that they for example introduced be had testing to write human readable test stories They learn to get to get better in writing these tests They introduced phantom JS to Automate the front-end testing They evaluated contributed models such as the penalizer They introduced new vagrant boxes for example that are closer to our hosting environment for internal IT They evaluated and introduced black fire today to detect performance difficulties and and learned how to to use puppet and write on manifest with that and The most recent Thing that they did I guess it was finalist last week if I'm not wrong It's the development of an automatic updates bot for our customer projects. They call the Drupal update bot the Dup And I will go into a little bit more detail about this Using or having this Drupal update bot which is based on symphony 2 It creates a jara ticket You see an example up here with all the required information with the security updates that that are That are present it pushes the update to a feature branch and This is done very quickly mostly overnight and it's very precise so we can minimize the problems or the bugs that might rise from an from an update and Having an increasing number of clients and also websites that we support It's it's getting more and more important to really react fast and to these security updates So this was a very big business value. So to say for us to have this Of course, there are other things that they are working on. This is just in just a short list of the things For example, they they are evaluating Kraftwagen at the moment They work on introducing new build process with team city as I said before of course, they are also looking into Drupal 8 and symphony 2 and And like in the in the planning phase on what they want you to have a look at is also the introduction of sonar cube Then platform performance monitoring. This is something for example that is on hold at the moment and Lockfire analysis was blank When we did there or when we'd like the rehearsal session of the session during a Drupal meet up We were asked how we measure if laps is successful for me. Our laps is successful and To be honest up till now. We don't really measure it. So we we are not checking numbers We don't do like controlling and putting a price tag on every lap stay Because of course, it's important that we reach our business goals as I said before otherwise we couldn't Finance it but we see laps mainly as an investment. It's an investment in getting better But it's also an investment in having satisfied employees So if we like reach our business goals and and pay Sell what we need to to sell and then have our have our satisfied customers then We are sure that we we are successful with laps and I would say it's currently the case. So We don't need to measure anymore but of course it wasn't All easy from the beginning as you can imagine the the first omelapse day was was quite chaotic Everyone was standing there not really knowing what to do what what to do with the like the freedom the new freedom and at the time not being Asked to work on a client project But really do whatever you want to do come up with new ideas to brainstorming But we are we have no September so we had a couple of omelapse. So it's it's getting better. The people are getting more structured they Usually they they meet before the laps day and and decide on plan and prioritize what they want to work on They they got used to ignore the clients and her project managers ignoring isn't is a hard word but I'm sure you know what I mean and We also learned that if we talk with our customers about what we are doing about the laps and explain them what we are doing there Most of our customers really they understand what we are doing They accept what way we are doing and they even believe that they will profit from it in the future. So that's really good Of course, there are still Project planning difficulties that we need to to solve sometimes there is a client who needs her a Rollout that day. So we need to discuss with them. Okay. Does it really need to be that day? Can we postpone it? but we can we we solve these problems Of course, it it needs to be coordinated if the team needs For example other resources from other teams For example from our internal IT it was important for their setup of the wagon regent boxes for example and To to remind the team to document and to track track what they are doing So as we have the the labs they only once a month and they can choose the other time Freely, it's important for them to know. Okay. What what did I do last time? Where do I want to continue and? Of course give updates and talk about it that the rest of the company sees what we are doing In the best case they're impressed and want to do the same, but it's very important to talk about it Let me check if I forgot something so Why is it cool? Why do we really like omelapse and and are convinced that it's the right thing to do? I think the first thing is that we Somehow see it at the bridge between their dynamic open source world like the Drupal world and our more process driven world It's also it's very nice for the team because they have their the time To focus together on topic on a task that is not client related and work together and I'm sure I'm allowed to say that at almost every developer likes to to deal with technology technological advancements they are fun doing that and As I said, we are convinced that we are getting better each day We do the labs and and at the end of the day. It's really cool to be part of a winning team, so we're really convinced this is cool and Maybe to let you know we had or as I said we we started in the beginning of the year with the labs as a pilot Some weeks ago two weeks ago. We did our business planning for 2016 and We decided that we will continue with OMEA labs We might change it a little bit to be to be more flexible and to give those employees and the team that are really committed and want to spend more time the opportunity to do that so we can We can give their the time more freely So we will continue next year with a little bit different setting But we're sure that it's it's good for us So now it's the time that I would like to know from you How you're spending your time on innovation do you have any tips how you are doing it and How how you manage to to make the time available if you also sometimes are like sitting on the square bike and and neither the round wheel and If you have any other formats for for innovations that help you do that Any any inputs from from your side? Yeah, I think there's a microphone on on the side because it's unrecorded so We're not exactly doing it just yet But we are discussing it. We're slightly bigger companies. I'm not so focused only actually we go a bit beyond I'm not sure if the microphones really working if you want you can also come closer come to me Sorry Hi there. Okay. Yeah much louder. So We've been discussing this and actually it's interesting to see a model in which you managed to get it work On that distribution of days that you mentioned because you mentioned like a fixed day per month And then half a day free of use within a month plus two that you could use conference and stuff We tried that before well not that exactly but we like we work scrum and we were like alright second Friday Of which is scrum like the afternoon will be free for you to spend it What we saw with that pattern is that people tend to just use them on Fixing or all these blocker appear because there's there was always last-minute things So we were about to pilot something that we wanted to call the hack weeks Which was basically just concentrate that time Together in a shorter space of time where we were sure not to be doing anything related to like all releases out of the door So no blockers could actually come because everything was safely in production and no new development starting for like those five days and we actually We're thinking around because we have several teams with different dependencies We were even thinking having cross-hack weeks. So actually people getting on to outside teams to to get that So we're actually about to start piloting that like within the next month or so What I definitely think that is useful for is things that what you mentioned before So basically to get the teams to make that extra effort to go into new technologies that they're not yet comfortable with So things like jumping to be had we're now having days focusing on continuous delivery for example So we're not using it yet And when you go to developers effect the first reaction always is all that's gonna require a lot of time It's too difficult doesn't work for us that kind of thing So you really need to allow your teams to get that extra time to actually see it down on reflect on what they need to change to Go to those places because otherwise they just go not for me not for this project were too busy, etc Anyone else do you maybe have questions to me on like Do you have questions to me like how we are doing Specifics that you didn't maybe understand I that you would like to have more details Yes, please Yes, I will repeat it Yeah, the question was that if you have a large development team of like 1020 people That it's if it's difficult or that it's difficult to have them learn something on one day like something difficult and Motivate them to do that during that day said correct Doing it in parallel all together at the same day The department we are using a mayor labs with we have 24 25 people but I Think it was never the case that all of them did the same thing at the same day it was more that maybe they grouped into pairs of I Would say maximum of five and they were discussing things and working on things and For example with with the be had they were working on that and then After they've been at the point that they had the feeling okay We understand it now that they kind of like gave training to the other ones So I think we never had it that really all the 20 people were working on the same thing at the same day because One reason is also that the people can decide by themselves what they are doing it's not me telling them Okay, today you're working on this and this and this it's really them to decide what are they working on and The chance is that all the 20 people decided the same day that they want to get better in the same thing is Quite low. So yeah, I guess if you really want that that all of them are working at this at the same thing Maybe it's a completely different model. You you set up a training day for that better maybe more questions Okay, then thank you I'm available afterwards a little bit if you're interested in working for it, then please apply and He also our contact details if you want to get in contact afterwards Roy wasn't here today, but of course, he knows everything about about OMEA labs as well So you can of course contact the two of us and thank you for your interest and have a nice day. Bye