 So, my name is Yif, I'm from Tidesong. So today, I'm going to share about our journey in actual, in the past 10 years, the problem we face, and what kind of measures we have implemented along the way and out of the news. So, a brief introduction about our company. We have 82 people in Singapore from 12 different countries. So, we are a very typical small and medium enterprise here in Singapore. The Singapore definition of small and medium enterprise is a company that has 200 people. So, I guess there are two reasons why I'm here today. First reason, because we are a very typical small company. So, we are facing the other issues, or the other benefit, the other small company too in Singapore. So, we also enjoy the advantage of becoming a sister and also facing a challenge like the always increasing operational expense, also the making of IT poor. Especially, by her Mr. Chan's speech yesterday, that government is going to hire problemers which also make me very worried. Yeah, because we are competing a bit on IT 10 as well. The second reason why we are here today is because, probably because we made a lot of mistakes. So, we learned something along the way and probably it is why I'm here today. So, when we look back for the past 10 years, we can't combine it to four different ages or different age of time. And we have different behaviors or different ways of working in each different ages. So, I will go through the age one by one. I'll start with my first age with the story of movie theater. So, movie, when you go to a movie, where would you sit? In the center, you'll see in the center. However, when I go to a movie, this will be the C-Type. Yeah. So, because I was taking up a support role in customer service, and also as a project manager. So, because I was the only one, so I need to answer the phone call at any time. And if you are taking up, I think how many people here actually are taking up support roles when you stand by and you work? What kind of time? No? I love you. Okay. So, if you are doing the support or you are standing by all the time, you will know that wherever you stay at home or you've got nothing to do, the phone will keep silence. However, whenever you go out for a party or you go out for movies, the phone will ring back. So, that's what happened to me. So, I always pick the same question. I can get to the exit fast this way. And the reason I am doing that because I was quite, I think I was quite good at knowing our system because we start to work with our system from day one. And for three years, I've been standing by 24 hours a week for three years. It sounds very miserable. However, I did not feel so. I feel that I'm actually like a superman because I know how to deal with all the tasks and I'm very good at it. I know how to communicate with our customers. And not only me, I believe all our team members, they feel the same way. They feel like they are group superheroes. So, I call this age of heroes at a point of time. However, it's not so easy to be heroes because if they are people from China, you will know that currently in China, the working hour, most of software companies, they have a working schedule called 9.96. 9.96 means 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 p.m. a week. That's how they work in China now. And our working hours are much longer than that. So, it's not really easy to be heroes as you can tell from this statistic. The red line is our head count. So, we increase from 5 people to 25 people in 4 years. And the yellow line is actually the terminal rate. It's how many people left in our company? So, as you can see on the tool set, there are 70% turnover rate. And we only have 7 people. So, we really had a hard time to keep people because our working hours are very intensive and very long. However, by tool 7, the terminal rate dropped. But we didn't change our way of working, actually. I guess just people get used to it. They get used to these intensive working hours. This is our organizational chart, organizational chart, private time. Because actually, I didn't know what's organizational chart. I was an engineer. How many managers are here? We're taking out like a project managers, department managers, about 20%, 30%. I'm going to tell you a little secret. Engineers don't like managers. Like engineers, what we think is we do all the hard work and managers take all the credit. Yeah, okay. That was what I thought back then. So, we are proud that we are all engineers. We don't need a manager in our team. And we don't need a manager's assistant. And we are happy the way we work. Until something happened in my life, and someone came into my life and changed my life forever. This is my daughter. She was born in 209. So, by 209, after she was born, I realized I cannot be the only one who's doing us a favor. Can we imagine that for the customer call me and say, hey, we got an issue. Wait for five minutes. I'm going to change my diapers. Change the diaper for my daughter. It's not possible. So, I got to somehow outsource or let our people do what I do. And also, at that point of time, I don't like to be here. So, I express that. But who is going to do our work? Because at that point of time, it's all familiar with our system. And we work so, we spend so much time when we see the user going. We think of what we are doing. So, we really don't like to let the new guys do our work. Because we know the new guys, they are very stupid, right? They make all the mistakes. But because of all of us, we start to get to an age of marriage. We start with kids. We need to, we cannot spend that long hours working everywhere. So, those are the things that we need to do to make other people or the normal people know how to do the newest task. And some of them work quite well or sometimes took us some time to do that. And I will not go into the detail because I do not have enough time. But I have to discuss afterwards. But let's just start doing that a few times. Always remember to be clean, not unusual. If the sustainable is the key. Sometimes, sustainable is not very important. Like in a star, you don't know where you will survive next year or next month or next week. So, it's kind of luxury to talk about sustainable. However, if the business is there, we need to react on the team to make things work. Because individual, they are very weak, right? They are very vulnerable. They can get sick. They will be leaving the organization. So, it is found a risk management perspective to react on the team like individuals. Then we enter into a different age which is like the big system into smaller, smaller modules. So, we enter the age of my terms which means each of us will have different areas to protect, to work on. And I will take care of my area and you will take care of yours. So, we go into the specializations. At this age, we spend a lot of time on the organization structures. So, we have different... Now we know how to draw the organization chart. So, we have different functional requirements and we even have different functional teams which focus on people like familiar and taking teams. We even go further. We go further into one department handle the development, the other department handle the operations. So, guess what happened? No programmer want to work in an operational team, right? Nobody want to fix other people's part. And everyone want to be in the development team because in development team, you get to play with all the cool stuff, all the new stuff. And nobody want to go to the development team. So, we can't change that just after a couple of months. Different responsibility actually resolve some issues. This is our incident rate. As you can see, we have no data before toward 7 because we are so chaotic. We don't keep any data. So, after toward 7, we start to report some data. And actually, by specialization, the incident reduced by 50%. And HR turnover rate returns quite high. At that time, it was 30%. And we have about 40 people by then. So, every year, about 10 people were left. The number seems high but it did not make it to me at that point in time because I know the average maybe in IP turnover rate of 20 to 30 is quite normal. That is what I thought. So, I didn't pay attention to that. Rather, I would pay attention to how do we deliver software faster because users are increasing and we cannot keep up with the speed how to deliver functions. So, we try various ways how to make the delivery faster. And personally, I think the most effective one is to change the scope. So, we can push a small scope to the market to test out if the market really wants it. People will invest more time into it. And I think the most... What the customer wants the most or what they like the most is this one. It's a secret developer tool box which means it's to copy and paste, scan the test, scan the UI test and hard coding. Because the customer will see it very, very fast. I guess there are new programmers here you will know this is really the way to show the outcome. And it has some consequences that you will face in your later age. So, what I learned in this age is that software delivery is easy. However, maintenance is the hard part because especially if your business is growing, if your business is not growing, you don't have a requirement to change. You don't need to change. Then everyone will be happy. However, if you've got to keep up with the business, you need to make some change that it's become very hard. By 2012, I have a gap year. I have a gap year one year off from my work. And this year, I was calling to do the national service because I am from Taiwan and every mail-off in Taiwan we got to serve for one year. I've been delayed for quite some time so I need to go back. And I am really grateful for this experience because I got to express something different from my work. And, you know, in this big system in this big system, what you have been told to do is open different from what you are actually doing. So, it is kind of surprising to me because it's really out of my knowledge. But something catches my attention. In this big system, there are so many people, thousands of people in this system. How did they manage to work? How did they get it effective? How did they manage to move forward slowly? So, I start to think, can we make programmers like soldiers? Can we do that? So, we make programmers replaceable. So, like soldiers, if you replace someone, they can take over very quickly, right? If we can do that, I don't need to worry about the tunnel, right? Anymore. So, we start to look into it to find the answer is actually SOP. Standard operational procedure. Then, we also have a training program to train out the people. So, I call this age of SOPs. So, we spend a lot of time just making SOPs. SOPs for the development, SOP on how to handle a task, SOP on how to handle the issues. And, this is our organization, Charles Biden. So, we have this organization, Charles Biden. So, we have different functional departments. Different focus. And, we have a project manager to coordinate among different departments. We also have a team leader for each team. The outcome. Incident remains the same. It did not change so much. Collaborative reduced. I don't know why. But, when I look into details, although the number looks very low, it usually explains people. Usually, the more experienced people will spend there about 2-3 years in our organization. And, they are normally taking up the team leader roles. Because, in the previous one, you will see team leader need to report to both the project manager and department manager. So, they are just too much pressure on them. And, also they need to check out the newcomers, teach them how to do a task. So, after some time, they just spend out and left the company. Next to the product, the downtime increased by 200%. Because, we do all the hard-coding and scheme the task. Now, it's a pain-back time. So, nobody is there to change the system. Because, whenever we change something, something else or what people can do. And, we don't know how to deal with it. However, during that time, I am thinking how to identify the productive people. Because, there are so many people in the company. There must be some people who are productive, some are not. So, if we can find out those productive people, we keep them, then let the productive people go. So, we started to kind of measure the productivity. So, those are the things we have tried to measure productivity. And, we started the department KPI, started the team KPI. Fortunately, we didn't have time to implement individual KPI yet. Then, we started to measure how development outputs efficiency and outcomes. This is then for me was, it really works. Whatever you measure or improve, or it appears so. Like, given example of if we measure the life cost, the life cost will be increased for sure. Because, we are engineers. We know how, we know how we are very good at numbers. Although the things did not change so much. Then, this is what I see by the point of time. Because, I see the people are living. They are living with the organization of knowledge. And also, there are so many issues, so much downtime on our product. I don't know what to do there. So, I see nothing. I did not see the future of our company. It's okay to say it now, but it's not okay to say it now. Then, we start to have some, we start to talk about our job, because we are kind of dead. And the time we start to talk about our job is about 2014. I believe most companies started our job earlier than us. Then, we start to try this by engaging the consultant into our company. Because, we say, okay, those are the five people who are going to do squat. So, they are all yours. So, you can tell them whatever you want them to do, including not going to office or going to jail or whatever. They are all yours. And we will review back in the next three months to see the results. Because I cannot see any more, right? It's already at the bottom. You can't go in first. And, after three months I come back and I join into their spring planning session as an observer. So, I was not allowed to speak or to participate because as an observer, you need to keep silence. So, I was sitting there and watched them do the planning. And I was thinking, what the hell are we talking about? Because they are actually talking about very, very basic stuff or sometimes wrong stuff. And by assumption I would assume everyone in our organization we are aware of those fundamental problems or fundamental system architectures. And that is also the reason why we stick with squat. Because it allows me to see something I could not see before. It's a reality. We are looking at reality. Reality is people don't know what they are doing. But before that, because we have team needs, we have project managers they sort of cover up cover up the reality. And they are very good at it. So, we continue with the swarm. Then what change there are many conversations going on in the company. So, they use intensive post-its. We even use the post-its to to catch a Pokemon. And so, I call this age of post-its. Amazing things happen. This is our organization structure currently. So, we have departments handle one or more products. And we don't let we already have the products to cost departments. Because they will increase the communication cost. And within each department we have end-to-end teams. We break down the curate department and put all the curate into the team. And for the teams, we don't have team needs. We have a squad master for each department. Incidents reduce by 40% this year, compared to the last period of time. And human resource trend actually decreased quite a lot. We have about 10% of people living last year. And this year we have less than 5% up here now. However, I also don't see that very low is a good indication that maybe it also means people are getting too comfortable. It's a major part of you. Then we have a downtime reduced by 80%. And most of the efforts, most of the credit goes to the technical parties. The continuous integration, the unit test, we can catch the effects before it's close on to production. So, our product downtime reduction reduced quite a lot. So, this is how I feel about it. I feel that I am still in back. However, I see a bright light over there. So, if we work toward this direction, maybe we will be under the sunshine one day. Then this is what I pay most attention to in this field of time. So, how do we communicate better? Because in yesterday's bus also talked about what the software we do will reflect the way we communicate. So, if we do not communicate effectively, our software will not have issues as well. So, those are the things we try how to make the communication more effective. I believe in Becky's session yesterday she also talked about SAPI model. I find it's a very effective way to discover our assumptions and how to realize the assumptions for each other. Also, I believe facilitation is a one must have skill for the score masters. So, what I have done is actually there are minimum strength of grace between red and white. Actually, there are different options out there. Because I was an engineer so I started engineering. In engineering, we tend to think the world has is either red and white or zero or one. They are actually nothing to be changed. However, in the real world, there are so many possibilities between but we need to find out by having conversations or having conversations with each other. So, those are the different ages we have. And among them, they have different behaviors. Those are some of the keywords I heard in different age of time. So, in age of keywords, what I heard most is like commitments. So, you are responsible to make this happen. In age of SOP, it's more like accountability. Because we realize the work cannot be done by single person. So, it's a conversation. You have accountability to make this work. However, in age of policy, what we say to the most is the ownership. It's about how do we create environments to make people here want to contribute to a product by itself, instead of forcing them. Also, we have different emotions. We did a survey to everyone in our company. So, the survey was like pretty solid, say, most significant emotion you have each year. So, I guess something you can see here is the interesting appears everywhere. So, I guess our conversation is still interesting. The targeting is dominant emotion in the age of SOPs. And it is also reflecting my emotion back then as well. What surprised me is the two new emotions appear which did not have, did not have before. It's happy and thoughtful. And I think it's quite amazing after two years that these two emotions appears. So, those are the things we have tried in the past 10 years. The two words we have explored and initially we started with a focus on two words for process that in recent two years we focus on two words for people. Now we start to focus more on two words for our products. The coaching might be like, okay, which especially we focus first. So, we focus on product first, process first, or people first. I guess the answer is various about different organizations because we all have different contexts. However, I could suggest some metrics to measure to see the current in the current situation. I am not proposing those two be the KPIs. Okay. Just somewhere to measure the current situation. So, those are for products, those for process, and those for people. For people, I will pay attention to lofters and the number of post-its being used. Because I believe engineers we are all very introvert people since myself I am very introvert. So, actually we don't really like to speak. And post-it allows us to write down our thoughts and share it and make our thoughts express to other people. So I think this is a very powerful tool. So what's next for our time itself? Actually, I don't know. I don't know what's next but we did not plan ahead since 2010 years ago. We did not plan for SOP we did not plan for the SWAP or our journal. What happened to us is actually in spare and dark process. So we see the problem and we try to find a countermeasure and do something about it. So what I do know is that we will keep changing. And we are lucky that we are still surviving. So we can keep changing This is where I can sleep now. Not holding a hand for anymore. I hope some of us in our company is not doing that. And this cannot happen with all the people. Although we mentioned that we can focus on people or on process or product. By the end of the day, we are still young people to make things happen. To create amazing stuff here. And we also receive a lot of help along the way from different organizations We are very fortunate to learn from the teachers and the friends. So those are my lessons that are in our 10 years journey. So always rely on team not individual because individual is very individual is very fragile and it's from the risk management part of you. You need to rely on the team. So self-organizing team is actually to me is quite effective tool to reduce the risk of organization. And so far the area is easy but then it's hard. If you find that it's successful for you measure below the improved so be careful of what you are measuring just like in Fred speech he also mentioned only measure what's really matters. And there are many stretch of great so we need to talk to each other find out what's the best. What's the most suitable color for your time. And when you finish changing your affiliation so this will be my show for today and I have to do here your thoughts or comments or feedbacks So as you said it's a period Yes but you know so yeah it looks like at least you know okay so you are saying that you wish the core coverage to improve but do you want the core coverage to improve for your quality of your quality the core coverage is not a very concrete example you cannot tell what's your quality what's your quality but core coverage may be one indication I won't say the core coverage is good but at least it's some kind of indication okay it's an indication it is only a good indication if they are not rewarding to stand with it okay it's very important to have more core coverage to have high core coverage people will right or make it 100% that's very easy to do that I believe for also where you know how to make the coverage higher so it really does not help in the quality of the product yeah so my question is it's also kind of major but but do you really think it's really improved the thing you want no I will not measure the core coverage I would rather measure what's happened on the product that's why we showed a example of incidence how many incidents have been happened on the production that's more important it's an indication of product so the problem is it's not a problem saying what you measure you approve it's a problem of it's a problem of measurement and do you really want to improve your core quality of core coverage or you want to increase the quality of your product I think that's a question but the thing there is for the quality of product as I say it's not something you can directly measure so that's why I measure the incidence the number of incidents the number of issues after the product is gone okay yeah so in terms of your product development and the ideas and the actual product that you make so not the development side how does that work how did it improve or what were the challenges that you had in terms of engagements and being collaborative and floating on the solution in terms of teams so in the end you came up with product team so what was the collaboration from like the whole you know obviously the development team implements an idea that other business analysts or product owners have put together but how did that journey from the whole product definition side and creating a cool product and having the team being engaged the team will be engaged if some ideas are found there for them for if they have some ideas that are the product is contributed by them they will be engaged they will feel that and also taking part to make this product successful so if the teams are just ordered to do whatever they've been told to do I see that it's very hard to keep them engaged because they were just doing what they've been told so if you move them to the product discovery process which if they can take part with the product owners to come out the stories or items together not many of them but maybe some of them I believe will help on engagement so they will feel that they are taking part to make this product more more powerful and so did they prove or was that not the issue was the issue more on their whole development this is an issue because of the engagement for everyone and if they don't have engagement they cannot make good products Hi, thank you for the interesting sharing about your training just have one question to ask I believe this is a problem for you to answer because you are managing many teams so how do you evaluate the performance of the members in the product team it's a very challenging problem what we are currently doing is we try not to do an individual KPI so we are having a team KPI or a product KPI so actually everyone in the department is having said KPI like regardless whether it's a PO product owner or a team or other roles their KPI is all focused on product so everyone will receive 50% of their bonus is based on their KPI in the real world organization we want to return some to people right so we have another portion which is for the manager to decide but the majority is based on the whole team KPI whole department KPI based on the product and we have a small portion just for the manager to decide for the retention so in that case since we talked about self-organizing team do you allow your people to choose to join any of the team by their own will okay we have a team forming process so we for one department about 20 people so we let them choose what team they want to be at first after that we do not allow change to people because when we change team members the team dynamic will change also then that impacts their delivery their effectiveness but we do not let the change back too often maybe just once a year or after the forming after one year if you want to change the team and you can request then we do change teams yes a little bit related you mentioned you have recovered from matrix to product oriented teams like QA system is embedded how about support partners but we are working on to put things in because actually it took us about one and a half year to get QA's exciting team because our organization we do not want to just lay out people just not our way of working so we try to we have some process to make people aware to make every QA aware that this is something we do to put the QA's exciting team so we take down training also we teach them how to do the coding some of them they do not know how to do we also teach the developer to do the testing they let aware the importance of test so let us take close about one and a half years to put every QA inside the team I believe for support function we are working on that but it will happen gradually I would not suggest a sudden change Do you link to the KPI and to mention to celebrate and bonus KPI and KPI mentioned KPI, Salcum and Salary X bonus How do we do our KPI? What do you do? Link? Do you link KPI to bonus on salary and bonus? Is that right? Okay, thanks So KPI will link to bonus but we don't link to the salary we kind of having a transparent start us here we have a transparent salary scheme so for the developers they aware of their for example we have a job grade from 9 to 9, 10, 11, 12 so everyone in the job grade of 9 they receive the same amount of salary they know that promotion criteria so they need to submit their promotion proposal and to get promoted to 10 then everybody in the 10 will receive the salary and for the KPI it is only to do with the bonus it is not to do with the bonus because actually it is very hard to measure individual performance I don't think it is possible individual, as a team as a team, as a team and doing one product, you can measure that but if it is a team effort I don't think it will be easy or possible Hello, for the changes in your organization, so expand for thank you is right for the organizational changes were there any that were suggested from bottom up or is the suggestion always came from you and top down you mean the suggestions will go for trial or go for scrim? regardless of the change because there are different ages from which the direction came to do the change first was that a suggestion from the team that's my intention so the question is bottom up or top down in the first three edge most of the changes are top down as you can see the management make a decision to make a changes because since we make a decision to go for a trial and go for scrim and we try to involve as many people as possible in the decision making so we also look for we also create an open space for anybody from there with open space technology okay so we will try to create open space to gather information or to gather feedbacks so most of them are top down top down so bottom up one question you mentioned about the 996 phenomenon right? I think it's starting late of heroes right? now we are at the age of four states do you still see that happening or is it better? even the 996 the long working hours it's become very less no maybe not a good sign it's become less and what happens is people will come to work if they really want to make something happen so I think it's really many needs to control the time they work but we are focused on what we will achieve so we will now work at that level however the people will still come in by themselves if they are okay what were the challenges when you moved to the job from that time? today is more structural wise because we have functional teams and each functional team have a department manager like for example QA and FUNCAN FUNCAN manager so it is very important to get a managed finding and I think they would personally like to see that because they are a manager now then they see their department go away they are not delighted and it takes a lot of effort to tell it's for the good for the organization and actually it does not affect what you are doing because now manager will become a QA coach as a QA manager you become like a QA coach so now your role is more to teach people how to do your testing well learn and come in control so with this you need to make people feel safe you can now say your department will go overnight then nobody else will support the transformation anymore as your use of agile or the application of agile evolved over the last few days like any new practices that you have taken or any discovery parties the application of agile in general like we do pair programming quite a lot pair programming and also we put a cutlery spending pressure server to start over the fitting test and we learning how to do QD QD and some people they still don't know about those are a few chemical for me so we can probably do for our workers and booths they are some engineers over there we can share more in those but that's what I mean thank you