Agile Toolkit Podcast

CIO for Enterprise Applications at Nationwide Insurance Michael Carrel covers rolling out agile enterprise-wide at scale, becoming comfortable with failure, and the ins and outs of building a culture of visual management, accountability, and innovation at this financial services giant.

 

Transcript 

Bob Payne: [00:00:21] I'm here with Michael Carrel from Nationwide. So Michael we've worked together years ago. What are you what are you doing now at Nationwide?

 

Michael Carrel: [00:00:31] Thanks. Yeah I'm the CIO for enterprise applications at Nationwide. So what I have a responsibility for is all plan build and run for technology solutions supporting our staff functions within Nationwide's marketing, legal, human resources, investments, finance and actually I.T. itself.

 

Bob Payne: [00:00:48] Wow, so that's that's great. So that that is has expanded since we had worked together.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:00:53] Lots of stuff.

 

Bob Payne: [00:00:55] Yeah absolutely. So what trends are you seeing in the Insurance sector right now. What are the drivers that that are driving innovation, driving your use of agile, driving the business, you know.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:01:11] Yeah. So a couple of things on the short term basis a lot of the trends that we're dealing with aren't different at Nationwide compared to other insurers, specifically you know on our property and casualty side we have lost trends and a rise in the industry due to distracted driving. We have, you know, there's lot of technology in cars these days and so when cars are in accidents our last costs go up as those accidents you know cost more to repair vehicles within our financial services industry. We have a lot of the Department of Labor is creating lots of changes within the financial services industry, especially the products that we sell: new life products. We have annuities and retirement plans.

 

Michael Carrell: [00:01:53] So the deal well into the regulatory environment is changing a lot. And in some cases you can look at that as an obstacle or as an opportunity. And so related to innovation there's certainly an opportunity there, as with the other things that I mentioned in terms of ways to help prevent distracted driving in particular, technology that we could use to help make our make it safe for our customers. Longer term trends are there as well. Especially in terms of in the in the auto insurance industry with autonomous vehicles, there's a lot there will be a lot of change in revenue within our industry over time as you look at driverless cars are driving increased you know, lower claims frequency which is going to drive down revenue within the industry. So, where are we going to look at revenue sources of the future? You know so innovation plays a huge role in not only how do we create competitive advantage out of the short term challenges we have but longer term than Nationwide how do we continue to fulfill additional revenue sources for Nationwide given the you know the contraction of some of our expectations that industry especially the auto industry going forward.

 

Bob Payne: [00:03:03] Yes so certainly those are a lot of the some challenges but also opportunities that are presenting themselves. How do you strike that balance between you know this trend is really challenging our bottom line or this presents a new opportunity because there's only so much time you have to sell new products.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:03:28] That's a great question. And you know what we focus on are really our customer journeys and where we want to differentiate ourselves.

 

[00:03:34] And that really helps us focus on the innovations that are that are important to Nationwide and specifically in areas such as such as strategic partnerships and ventures. Those are types of things that we're looking at to realize that innovation that we have with the Nationwide doesn't have to only just come from you with them. How can we partner with others inside and outside of Nationwide to be able to drive innovation learn from others with strategic partnerships and ventures opportunities. A lot of companies are. Nationwide is also one of them. In fact recently announced 100 billion dollar or 100 million dollar investment in that area. So we're taking it very seriously and to make sure that we deliver a great experience for our customers. And so we prioritize our investments based upon customer experiences that we want to differentiate ourselves within Nationwide and what we can bring to bear for our customers you go through that you know a lot of it too is that the technology capabilities that we have internally and growing from what we have today and then adding and the new capabilities that we're developing to make sure that we can deliver on those those experiences. And we're looking at it heavily all customer research and focus right. Because a lot of times the customer speaks in terms of the value of innovation. So there's a lot of great ideas and so you have to understand though which of those resonate most with our customers. Which of those are kind of on point with our brand and our value proposition to our customers. So making sure that we know what our customers value for for the cost is something that we're always continually looking at.

 

Bob Payne: [00:05:13] Yeah I mean what are the challenges with an organization that is as diverse as yours. How do you get those different lines of business to understand that the customer only knows one Nationwide sort of the apple model right.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:05:27] Yeah.

 

Bob Payne: [00:05:28] It's not just one you know not just this product that they're potentially buying. There are a lot of things

 

Michael Carrel: [00:05:35] Especially in our industry you're buying experience so it's not just you know we're not creating microwaves we're not creating cars right now we're creating promises to help our customers get back on their feet in difficult times.

 

Bob Payne: [00:05:46] Yeah and customer service is an important factor. How does how do lean and agile methods play into delivery of those customer experiences for you guys?

 

Michael Carrel: [00:05:57] Great question. You know a lot of times it's really important that you deliver value to our customers quickly and so agile for us is is key for us. You know DevOps has a lot of a lot of consomme practices around agile that we're adopting but it really is moving with speed and agility in our development lifecycle. But also in our planning as well you know there is a test to learn concepts that we work with a Nationwide to make sure that we explore what that concept could look like, test it with customers we have great user experience team that helps us with research with our customers. We test those concepts in a very iterative fashion and then actually have an agile at scale across nation with combined with dev ops to make sure that we can deliver those capabilities quickly to our customers.

 

[00:06:47] So it's certainly agile it even an issue I started more as more of an I.T. effort that focused on developing software in a better way. And we have rolled out agile enterprise wide at scale putting that earlier in the pipeline of delivery of capability and working with business partners is an area that we're still growing into a habit a lot in our direct to consumer experiences specially in our and the web in mobile space and then growing that beyond that is a priority for us and things like DevOps and deploying those things out across Nationwide are helping delivery teams at the same time agile planning practices is something that we're we're adopting to be able to kind of do more tests and experimentation and drive value to the consumer more quickly.

 

Bob Payne: [00:07:37] Yeah I think it's sort of interesting that agile sort of picks up quite often when you know what you're going to build how you used innovation experimentation to sort of drive that funnel to get because ideation is sort of a divergent process right what are all the possible possible things agile works well as a convergent how do we deliver this thing that we've decided to deliver so How are you using experimentation innovation to feed into that delivery funnel?

 

Michael Carrel: [00:08:12] A great example is this a test and learn concept that we house that we have a team set up that are focused on taking our high value ideas that are based on customer research and data that we've collected on what consumers want and where they may have problems today and then where we defined those customer journeys in points of differentiation as I mentioned earlier with that then a test and learn concept to be able to quickly learn to experiment around ways on delivering on that value proposition for that user experience because it can be delivered in various ways. And so we're just learning through that test and learn concept and then quickly getting that into a build team to get that deployed. Is our model so it's that concept of experimentation with applications even of funding and time and resources around test and learn kind of separate from defined build projects to give you the freedom to not treat to learn experiment without being the confinements of a project with some pre-determined kind of outcome and set of requirements. Because you know the user experiences, customer experiences you learn as you go and you experiment and you test..

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:21] And fundamentally change the direction you're taking.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:09:24] Absolutely yeah.

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:25] Yeah. Yeah. Has it been challenging to sort of inject that level of experimentation in certain areas looking for more of a plan going in than..

 

Michael Carrel: [00:09:38] I think teams that are typically have we've moved agile wide scale the build processes

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:46] And have a very mature process

 

Michael Carrel: [00:09:49] Yeah, And I think the biggest thing is being willing to fail and have ideas fail I think with anything that you're driving innovation you have to be comfortable with with failure and ideas not working and iterating perfecting an idea and so you do sometimes have to get past perspectives around wanting to get it right the first time and get everything perfect before you take a step forward versus intuitively kind of figuring out the kind of what's the best way to deliver on the value that you're looking to create whether that be a product you in the eyes of a consumer or a service experience and really exploring versus using more of a waterfall mindset around requirements and design like getting the perfect design and then implementing it. So getting people comfortable with that learning and and quite frankly some of it. It's how we what we've done to ourselves in terms of how we fund projects so really when you take some of those constraints away and then you eyes open your eyes wide open then and people can see the fact that hey constraints that perhaps drove us towards a certain mindset are now released and it gives you the freedom to work in IT or a fashion to make sure that you can really harness the value with the right the capability to kind of deliver the value that you're looking to deliver.

 

Bob Payne: [00:11:04] Yeah I think sometimes you have to sort of flip the mindset because insurance is essentially risk management. But the thing that I think a lot of people think when they think about experimentation is it's risky but I actually like to flip that around and say your biggest risk is that you're going all in on a single bet like real risk management is about.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:11:32] Yeah

 

Bob Payne: [00:11:33] Iterating ideating validating those ideas with your with your customers is right and you know the people that need to deliver those services.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:11:43] And at Nationwide are right we talk about being "on your side" and "on your side" as a is a commitment that we made to our customers and it's a lot. And it comes with expectations. So for us you know that you know while you were in the business of managing risk there. There also is a large accountability we have for delivering an on your site experience to our customers.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:12:05] That is important to us and that gives you get you know to be a little bit more creative with how do you kind of drive that and learn about what does it mean for a customer to be on your side. And when there are a vast amount of products and services and channels where we provide service it is hard and it's difficult requires experimentation. But I think our commitment to our customers is often gives us enough of that energy to kind of overcome the inertia sometimes of the risk element that is kind of the nature of what we do at Nationwide.

 

Bob Payne: [00:12:42] Yeah. Yeah so that's great because you know you've had a lot of lean agile methods throughout the whole organization. Now it's starting to move into ideation and I know you're also working a lot of dev ops initiatives too. Once you have that idea you can build it iterate on it quickly then how do you how do you get things out to out to those consumers to really close the loop because the million dollar idea is not it has no value if it doesn't actually start to solve customers problems or deliver on that value proposition. How are you guys using DevOps at Nationwide has that been a big initiative.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:13:28] Yeah it's a huge initiative for us. We're starting a very carefully to make sure that we are getting the model right before we have larger scale adoption. Know we have elements of dev ops across all of Nationwide but what we might consider more of like a gold standard of dev ops kind of fully embracing it. You know it's mindset. It's also automation.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:13:55] It's even some tooling that we put in place so we have some some model teams that have demonstrated kind of our recommended kind of full integration into dev ops that we have. We've worked through and now we're working on ruling that out across all our teams and many of them are which will have elements of dev ops both the full package which most importantly is the mindset right. It's not it's not just about the tooling. We have lots of tools lots of automation even amongst those tools to make it to make it easier to be able to you know to manage code migrate code build drive builds and do all that through automation. But it really is a mindset a mindset of teams to continue to even evolve our dev ops and perfect it you know with new learnings that come out of foods team so we're right now in the process of rolling that out more broadly across Nationwide through some model teams that have kind of perfected our model.

 

Bob Payne: [00:14:56] Yeah. And then ultimately how do you the loop with measuring customer behavior those ideas that you had that you narrowed down you built them. Now automated you push the deploy out. But getting that full loop measurement to really really achieve business agility and to your goal of DevOps.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:15:18] Yeah. And to your point we actually have a lean vision management system that's in place across all of I.T. and Nationwide starting out with local teams all the way up to the A level so I have my visual management system and so tracking key metrics of value there. So how long is it take from a requirement to get to production.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:15:38] You know how long you know how much of a backlog there are key metrics around velocity and speed that is in our visual management systems that we are you know we track and we are expecting certain lift from as we continue to get even more mature and dev ops as we roll out kind of our model structure across all of our lines and Nationwide development lines. So that's that's something we're very keen on is measuring the Emperor fighting. So where we have it's a learning opportunity to use metrics as you see pockets of matter X that in certain areas where ... in favor ability perhaps even over a norm let's learn from that we are what are they doing so we can continue to kind of learn from each other across the organization. But metrics on speed and agility are working in own management system. So we're also being held accountable for the value that we're looking to create. And quite frankly understanding where we're not meeting those velocity targets those speed targets of a driving value directly out you know getting into production as quickly as we can through through new lean practices and DevOps.

 

Bob Payne: [00:16:46] Yeah and you know I'm particularly passionate about visual systems so I'm always very very encouraged when I when I came out to visit to see the implementation you guys have. The thing that I think is most interesting and probably most important about the visual management systems that are some examples that I've seen is you have them at all layers.

 

Bob Payne: [00:17:12] And there are linkages and if something is measured the people that are supposed to change their behavior or maybe not change their behavior but whose work is being driven by those metrics are responsible for the metrics and that that is an area where I think lean organizations and I consider you as one I think are much better than most organizations. Just look at agile as just a delivery model or visual management. That's just for the team. You really have created an umbrella that spans the whole organization.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:17:57] It's really a mindset that has from all the way from the top down into our local teams and my own visual measurement system as a CIO is visible so people can come in and see my accountability section on my board. Our planning initiatives are our key project to build build metrics and that all of our metrics that through sequenced review cross all the dimensions of our key performance indicators are all in plain sight. People can associates can see those and see what we're talking about as a CEO candidate. So it's not. There's also that transparency their risk associates it's not just what they're they're not just working with the leaders or management system but my team is as well conducting other stand ups. Yeah how often do you do your standup. So we do our standups weekly with within our team and then we do an extra section even once a month on some deep diving into metrics that whose update frequency or more monthly versus versus weekly type checks that we do but we go through quick run checks our build projects our planning initiatives every week and then our accountability sections always looking at Voice of Customer problems sections. You know there are problems that we need to be doing a 3s on across our organization.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:19:13] And then also kind of keeping track of our releases coming up and the capability maturity within our teams as well.

 

Bob Payne: [00:19:20] Great. Yeah that's exciting. I know that you quite often do. You're doing a more formal A3 Lean continuous improvement process. Has that really are you getting a lot of things bubbling up from teams in the way that say a Toyota would have a continuous improvement bubbling up from the folks doing the work or is it that innovation.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:19:51] Theories are happening at all levels. No we don't. I wouldn't say I have a lot of escalated to me where they are blockers. You know we try to empower local seems to be able to drive improvement in their areas but items do that are more you know a systemic type things they do get bubbled up actually through the official management system so through blockers that we have and I actually do Gemba walks of the lean management systems of my direct reports and they do it levels down as well and and sometimes actually to be quite frank I will have a team that will want me to attend one of their gambles to be able to learn about a block or something where they might need my help as a CIO even if it's one of our delivery lines. I've done that on occasion. One of them team going through some agile transformation and really wanted me to kind of see some something that they were working on to be able to help drive that forward. So also a ton of gemba of a line to be able to also have firsthand experience with what they're dealing with perhaps an innovation that they need some support for.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:20:57] Or it could be a process change or a blocker that they need my help with.

 

Bob Payne: [00:21:02] And that establishes a lot of trust throughout the organization to really have that level of transparency. What's what do you see coming down the road that's exciting for you for the next five years? I know that's an awfully long ways to look out.

 

Michael Carrel: [00:21:17] I think with a lot of organizations you know we're focusing on legacy platform modernization so you know Nationwide we'll be celebrating 100 years as a as a company coming up here soon and so we are we have several transformation initiatives going on to really modernize some of our core platforms across our business so there are nimble going into into the future. And so that's a key focus for us. Clearly data analytics expressed in our business. We have done a lot of work there continue to do more extending that into even greater cognitive solutions with AI. So we're definite have a definite focus there is so much opportunity in that space and building that into the fabric of our solutions our mindsets is going to be important as we move forward as well as well as us continue to digitize organization. Their key priority for us. And then you with with all the innovation that we talked about before you know I think I'm excited about you know the businesses that Nationwide will will be in even 10 years from now.

 

[00:22:25] You know we've been a company who's innovated especially in areas of financial services kind of being a traditional PNC Insure and innovation that got us kind of really defining you know the annuity market a leader you know a company wide or country wide leaders and Pat and in 457 retirement plans we have a company who is a fabric of innovation has spurred new products new businesses for Nationwide. I'm very excited about new products and new businesses that we're not in today that we will be in you know 10 years from now as we continue to kind of focus on our core purpose of protecting what matters most to to our consumers and also helping people prepare for and live in retirement so excited about what that future is going to hold and things like our enterprise hackathons, local hackathons we do within our organization and then Chief Innovation Officer within Nationwide and all the partnerships that will kind of continue to grow to kind of continue to fuel the innovative spirit at Nationwide is exciting. I'm happy to be a part of it and I think you know I think we're really kind of getting the business in general and are going through this huge cycle I think many businesses are or the next 10 years of being another kind of transfer kind of transformation in terms of the technologies today AI cognitive type solutions and businesses I think are going. All this is going very different Ten years from now I think we're going through this next kind of revolution of with that technology is enabling. So I'm excited to figure out new ways of leveraging your technology new processes concepts to be able to drive that value for our customers.

 

Bob Payne: [00:24:02] Excellent I hope I'm as vital at 100 as Nationwide is. And I thank you so much for doing the talk.

 

Michael Carrell: [00:24:08] Thank you.

 

Agile at scale can get you to code very quickly, but then sometimes everything comes to a screeching halt.  The biggest bottlenecks are often found after teams are done with the code.  Dan James of Icon Agility Services joined Bob Payne on the Agile Toolkit Podcast to discuss Dan’s session at Lean+Agile DC 2018: Building a Lean Enterprise with DevOps.  Dan and Bob explore “shifting left,” creating a pipeline of smooth handoffs, and decoupling release from deployment.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm your host Bob Payne I'm here at Lean+Agile D.C. 2018 and I'm here with Dan James from Icon Agility or is that Icon Agility Services. 

Dan James: [00:00:13] It's the whole name.

Bob Payne:  [00:00:14] It's the whole name? Okay great. And your talk is on DevOps Transformation, scaling and and other things.

Dan James: [00:00:24] Yeah, Extending the Lean Enterprise with DevOps. 

Bob Payne: [00:00:27] Uh huh.What does that mean when you say that, Lean Enterprise? 

Dan James: [00:00:31] Well we know that agile at scale can get you to code very quickly and it comes to a screeching halt because we have a wall of confusion - agile wants us to go fast. Business wants us to go fast. But the systems team wants stability right and reliability and security. And so you know our code comes to a screeching halt and may go into a black hole for weeks and months before it is finally releasable. And so what what we help enterprises do is work out the strategy and the tactics before we even talk about tools we get into the tactics and the strategy of creating a pipeline that smoothes out and leans out the handoffs yet to in order to get something delivered. And so we do a deep dive with our clients we go in and do a full technical assessment of of how they're delivering value now. And we show them that their biggest bottlenecks are usually after the agile teams are done with the code and and help them get releasable a lot sooner.

Dan James: [00:01:35] And we give them strategies to protect their their product as they're developing it by having you know green blue strategies you know delivery you know being able to separate or decouple release from deployment so we can go to production every day. Right. But it may not be releasable until the business decides we have accumulated enough real value share and then that becomes a business decision. So by separating it also gives us more time to smoke test and do canary releases and other things to ensure that what we have put out there is is sound before we release it to the public.

Bob Payne: [00:02:15] Yeah. So..feature Toggles those sorts of... 

Dan James: [00:02:17] Exactly. And then we also teach the discipline of shifting left in the pipeline back to the teams. The responsibility for initial quality.

Bob Payne: [00:02:26] Right. 

[00:02:27] So we don't want to them to just throw their code over a wall and expect a testing team that had no input on the context of what they're building right to think of all the possible edge cases to test this stuff. And so so we instill in our assessment we uncover all the the practices that need to be fixed before we automate anything and making sure that initial quality I mean if if if you think you can deploy quickly but you're not unit testing your code then we have a big problem.

Bob Payne: [00:02:58] Yep.

Dan James: [00:02:58] You know the way that agile and scaled agile goes fast is by focusing on the quality.

Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Yeah.

Dan James: [00:03:04] And then we all go fast, And so that's that's the biggest thing.

Bob Payne: [00:03:08] Okay. For me I actually I actually believe the. So if you can't get stuff out it doesn't matter what your strategy is. I believe a lot of that the last mile work will allow us to shift lefter because ultimately I think one of the big problems that most organizations face in any sort of real agility they can get the wrong thing out faster but real business agility would use to use that for learning and it would have huge fundamental impacts on intake funding. You know lots lots of things that at least in the skilled agile framework they talk about but I don't see many organizations actually pulling the trigger on that. There are certainly some in those sort of leading leading organizations will be the the sort of models that that people look at for a little while until it becomes more common.

Dan James: [00:04:14] Right.

Bob Payne: [00:04:16] A lot of people fail to understand the organizational possibility and the organizational impact of DevOps if done right.

Dan James: [00:04:26] Yeah and very often we go into an enterprise and we have to start with the real basics the fundamentals because they want to jump in to Agile because they've heard about it and it's you know their competitors are already doing it. And so they're at a tipping point. But they don't even understand Lean. That's where agile came from. And until they understand Lean and the waste that occurs in all the handoffs between each step in our in our operational value stream they don't they don't understand you know that agile alone isn't going to get you it only gets half of I.T. fixed. But DevOps is the other half of I.T. and. And we're going to show that in our in our speaking slot today we're going to actually show here's the here's the the elemental chart of I.T. in general here all the departments that make a typical enterprise I.T. work only half of it is addressed by agile at scale.

Dan James: [00:05:21] So even a scale that only addresses half maybe 53 percent. Right.

Bob Payne: [00:05:25] Right.

Dan James: [00:05:25] It's the other half that we're trying to get which gets us time to market fixed it gets our products out the door gets the feedback from the customer that we are desperate to get. And it helps us learn and the whole principle of lean is is out learn your competition and then improve them. Share with you with what you learned. And if you can't do that then you know we have to go all the way back to fundamentals. And so sometimes in our transformation engagements we have to we have to go back to the Stone Age of a year 75 years ago and talk about lean to get them to understand. You know it it still applies today and we can't just say OK all our teams are gonna be scrum or all our teams are going to be Kanbun and expect it to solve all their problems and yet it only addresses half of the problems. You know what helps us get to code quick but it doesn't do anything else. No it doesn't. It doesn't get the code out of the black hole you know before it gets released so. So we're here to do that. We go into companies we do a deep dive a discovery an assessment of their of their DevOps side many of which are many of these companies are already doing agile at scale and doing it well but they're still frustrated because nothing's going out the door. And so we we helped uncover what most.

Bob Payne: [00:06:43] I might Argue that they're not doing well if they're.. if it's not Going out the door.

Dan James: [00:06:48] That that's true. And you know and you know Nirvana here is that the teams themselves have the power to release what they deliver or what they create.

Bob Payne: [00:06:56] Sure. Or to have an efficient way for that to that too certainly you know that may be an ideal to aspire to.

Dan James: [00:07:06] Sure. The Amazons of the world can do that.

Bob Payne: [00:07:08] Right. Well we are actually was just talking with Jeff Payne a little while ago which for us for the podcast listeners doesn't make much of a difference. It's on a different episode. But you know I think the potential for getting something out and getting it out. And you clearly articulated that those can be decoupled.

Dan James: [00:07:34] Yes. And and I think there's a lot people are they are way too quick to say ooh that's the next silver bullet teams team managed deployment. And for some organizations it is the perfect solution right. Lean Thinking looks at the entire ecosystem and is and tries to say what is the best solution for this organization. This team at this time with this technology and in so icy team managed deployment as a particular practice that may or may not be optimal in a given situation. So few people are looking in a lean way. They're looking at other people's recipes and that's especially in size fits all right. I think this probably solves a ton of problems that we have with you know safety and risk profiles and and regulatory regulatory.

Bob Payne: [00:08:42] Yeah but you know looking at it as the next silver bullet I know I'm always caution even though I to work with organizations help transfer them towards this goal but only in the in in so far as we set a target we move along and steer and bright you know.

Dan James: [00:09:01] And I don't know if it's luck or curse that in the last three or four years most of my clients have been in the financial services industry which is highly regulated right. So so I banks and lenders and investment companies and so forth that that are under such regulatory burdens before they can really say anything to the public. And they're under audit the threat of audit constantly and they're scared of the audits that they use that as a wedge issue to prevent agility to prevent improving and and reducing the handoffs between the steps and getting value.

Bob Payne: [00:09:38] Even though you have much more closely auditable compliance.

Dan James: [00:09:41] Transparency, all that. Yes exactly.

Bob Payne: [00:09:45] You know, What I want the the developer to need root password to production to debug a production issue.

Dan James: [00:09:58] Right.

Bob Payne: [00:10:00] I think I would like the new way is a lot safer and more auditable and you know immutable immutable infrastructure networks are certainly those things provide a higher degree of safety audit ability than we've ever had before.

Dan James: [00:10:19] That's right.

Bob Payne: [00:10:20] The problem is we need to ensure that teams are actually quite often that that the technique of audit and the things that you need audit need to change compliance are actually more compliance to the the spirit of those regulations than might have been when you had a big stack of documentation right which was only looked at when you need to practice for the auditor.

Dan James: [00:10:47] Yes. Yeah and we didn't exactly exactly .. Static documents are obsolete that the day they're published.

Bob Payne: [00:10:54] Right.

Dan James: [00:10:55] Yeah. So we found many of our clients have they're so afraid of of the regulatory side.

Bob Payne: [00:11:01] Yep.

Dan James: [00:11:01] That that they're just reluctant to release some of them might release once a year once or twice a year at the most. And they go through this long hardening period where they're there waiting until the code was already written months ago before they even do a threat modeling penetration test against it. You know. 

Bob Payne: [00:11:20] Thanks for making me snort. You know this hardening thing you know is there some sort of quantum stabilization of the bits in the silicone that I don't understand.

Dan James: [00:11:33] And they don't either probably.

Bob Payne: [00:11:34] Yeah I always think it's just the bureaucratic way of leaving time for people to raise their hand and say we shouldn't go.

Dan James: [00:11:41] Yeah and it comes down to fear. Right. You know that fear of release because they've been burned once or twice in the past when their technology wasn't as good as it is today. And they get burned and now they're they're reluctant to release until they are just 100 percent of you know feeling secure. And so we show them methods of ensuring that the quality is there the threat modeling is already embedded that you know long before it gets even staging.

Bob Payne: [00:12:05] Right. And so with the proper strategy you can ensure your quality in smaller pieces and get it to staging or in production but not to release until you have enough business value that you can trust that what's in production is clean and meets the security requirements meets compliance meets all those things. We're just going to have to work in a more agile way to cut things up into smaller chunks

Dan James: [00:12:28] Make sure it's tested upfront and early and often through the pipeline both both on the development machines and in the Coupée environments and in system integration environments.

Bob Payne: [00:12:39] Yep.

Dan James: [00:12:39] And that's what it ensures multiple chances to smoke test this stuff and and make sure it is ready for release and we can be confident in. And then after they've seen a few frequent releases you know then their confidence builds as a as an organization. And the fear diminishes and they realize okay lean and agile and a scaled agile with with not necessarily the brand name Scaled Agile but agile at scale and DevOps is working. And then they they start feeling better. The auditors in many cases you sit down with the auditors face to face they're going to audit on what you say you're going to do great. So it's good to show them that you're going to do a new thing you have to sit down and talk to them and you know work. We're going to do this a new way to please audit us on the new way not on the old way and the transformation becomes less fearful. 

Bob Payne: [00:13:34] Right. It Can,. 

Dan James: [00:13:35] It can. 

Bob Payne: [00:13:35] Depending on your auditor. 

Dan James: [00:13:36] Exactly so. So we're in the business of helping that transformation and it's a lot that a lot of the transformation is a mindset. It's not so much the practices and the philosophy and the principles and all that even though we do we do preach that. It's just it's more of a mindset. And so we focus on the vertical structure above the teams to make sure they're on board and they understand how to support this. 

Dan James: [00:14:01] Yeah because a lot of agile failures come from the lack of support from above the teams you know so they the teams are constantly being injected in an artificial deadlines imposed and all the stuff that that kind of ruins Agile you know it ruins Scrum. You know okay, we're right mid Sprint we're going to be changing things. Well, The teams are frustrated and their productivity goes down because we haven't properly trained management and that's what scaling it helps us do it provides the training and the understanding above the teams. 

Bob Payne: [00:14:29] Yep yeah at LitheSpeed we are focused a lot on leadership and transformational leadership as well. So most of our transformations start with with that sort of sponsorship but we've also started to try to create a path because management and leadership we're not as well represented in early agile thinking mistakenly. I mean Sanjiv wrote the managing agile projects in 2005 and you know we started the agile leadership academy and then follow on. You know we created that. Now we're starting to see things like Certified Agile leadeR and other programs for organizational leadership to really understand this which lean always had nice and is odd that that agile has taken as long to yes the teams and the ecosystem that the teams live in. 

Bob Payne: [00:15:34] That's right. And speaking of LitheSpeed we're going to be there tomorrow and Friday my cohort from Icon Brian Aho and I are going to be at LitheSpeed. 

Bob Payne: [00:15:42] Doing the DevOps.

Dan James: [00:15:42] And and training the SAFe version, the Scaled Agile version, of the DevOps course, which they accumulated from Icon. Mark Ricks for the last two years has been developing this and he and I and Brian have been teaching this now for the last nine months. But now we get to teach the SAFe version of it.

Dan James: [00:16:01] It's now fully integrated into the Scaled Agile Framework they've added a few things to make it integrate a whole continuous exploration. So we turn DevOps into a scientific experiment.

Bob Payne: [00:16:10] right.

Dan James: [00:16:11] And small experiments just like Toyota did 75 years. 

Bob Payne: [00:16:15] back to the future, i'm charging my flux capacitor even as we speak. 

Dan James: [00:16:19] Exactly 

Bob Payne: [00:16:21] Well thank you very much Dan great great having you here.

Dan James: [00:16:24] My pleasure.

Bob Payne: [00:16:25] Glad you're able to speak at the conference and come to Agile DC as well if you're interested. That's the large local cross vendor conference.

Dan James: [00:16:37] And that's in October right? 

Bob Payne: [00:16:39] Yeah it is yeah. I'm the chair.

Dan James: [00:16:41] Yeah and I'll be out here for the Scaled Agile Summit as well, the global summit in October so.

Bob Payne: [00:16:45] Great. Well we'll see you at both those events and thanks. 

Dan James: [00:16:48] awesome. Thanks Bob.

Bob Payne: [00:16:49] You're welcome.

 

After coding live at Lean+Agile DC 2018, Ben Scott of Ippon Technologies joins Bob Payne to talk code craftsmanship and getting proper feedback from the business side.  Ben explains a way to quickly build a quality demo from scratch – creating the first demonstrable piece of value.  Bob and Scott walk through their opinions on (shudder) best practices, living in ambiguity in agile methods, and bridging the gap between IT and business.

Bob Payne: [00:00:03] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne. I'm here at Lean+Agile D.C.. I'm here with Ben Scott and we're listening to "Stand in the Place Where You are" by RBM played on the music fiddle version which is really disconcerting for me. It's like Fugazi. You know elevator music which is definitely elevator music. But country elevator music. So Ben we were talking earlier about lots and lots of things but you were talking about sort of your experience here trying to do live coding and talk. What was your what was the gist of your talk? What were you talking about with.

Ben Scott: [00:00:56] So, let's start with the problem statement: Whenever you start a project from scratch mainly it's really hard to get good business demos and keep the business interactive with getting proper feedback. You'll see a lot of demos with terminals. Hey let's see what my code can do and you have to look at log statements or use post postman to demonstrate APIs. And then the business kind of glazes over it. And I think a lot of issues stem from developers trying to recreate everything internally. Someone has to provide a demo that even started a presentation with zero code I could provide a business level demo with a front end application backend with database usage deployed to the cloud. All within the same presentation within 45 minutes. So that was kind of the gist, some people really liked the felt it really demonstrated well what could be done now. They're probably unsure how to adopt down to their own organization but it's mostly a show that it is able to do that and you don't have to buy it. It's FREE. 

Ben Scott: [00:02:14] It's opensource a tool that I use is called J Hipster and I think overall great. 

Bob Payne: [00:02:23] Yeah I mean for those of us who've been familiar with play or Rails or any of the generative frameworks you know that it was not should not have been surprising but I realized how how painful it is for most organizations to get to that first demonstrable piece of value. 

Ben Scott: [00:02:50] Yes. 

Bob Payne: [00:02:51] It is a little a little insane. 

Ben Scott: [00:02:53] It is. The key differences are with J hipster is it really tries to adopt the enterprise level technology.

Bob Payne: [00:03:00] You see the full stack you've got full size containerized deployments. 

Ben Scott: [00:03:05] You can you don't have to but it sure does generate Docker containers. I use the docker file to let you generate a Docker container from your code. It will generate your CD pipeline script. It supports multiple privacy circles C.I. Jenkins obviously and a few other really really kind of handhold you through the whole process of getting a code from scratch all the way to diploid and ready. It can't do anything about your business level code that's on you right. But all the bootstrapping and plumbing it generates according to best practices of the time with us. 

Bob Payne: [00:03:45] I winced on the inside. I don't like the phrase best practices but best that I'm okay with.

Ben Scott: [00:03:54] Yes well it's always a big debate. What is best practice. Like for depending on where you are which technology you're using and your opinion because it's a hotly debated topic Your Domain Driven Design or you don't. Some people really love it some people hate it. Yeah that type of thing. 

Bob Payne: [00:04:12] Yeah I try to stay away because people always ask us for as consultants are always asking for the answer and there really only is know fee here given your situation. Here are a few options that we've seen people be successful. Yes you know and you know I always sort of try to steer people away from that. Like calling people resources. There's a few you like hot button words that I can't make can move resources around us our projects exactly rituals and scroll to find that I hate things that that pull it out of the somewhat grey world that we actually live in. 

Ben Scott: [00:05:05] Yes I actually like to prefer I prefer to live in this ambiguity. I don't like to define what scrum is definitely. I don't like too dear to a Agile philosophy per se or implementation whenever somebody dresses. Hey what is ads out to you. To me it's you delivered a piece of software that was correct at the right time and how you got there might differ based on the people working in your company. Yes we might use Scrum or not. It depends if it's a good fit with that place and sometimes it's now or sometimes they just decide as long as we do what scrum says we are agile and we just get away from what they really mean. 

Bob Payne: [00:05:50] Yeah. Defer to authority. There is a good strategy. 

Ben Scott: [00:05:55] So I don't like to prescribe things. 

Bob Payne:[00:05:57] Yeah. 

Ben Scott: [00:05:58] When we hire Scrum Masters always ask me what's your process. What tool to use. You know you use Jira. I don't prescribe - you use what you like to use right. 

Ben Scott: [00:06:07] Well your client will let you use yes whatever you is best for your situation which will change. 

Bob Payne: [00:06:15] So how do you so I know you've been doing a lot of technical coaching coaching. What do you what do you find most rewarding. Because sometimes it's it's you know it's it's a tough slog sometimes and there are always those little nuggets that just say yeah you know that will keep me going for a few months banging my head against this team or this wall or whatever.

Ben Scott: [00:06:43] So I really enjoy bringing upskilling developers on where they lack and I'm not a awesome developer. I'm a very niche developer who understand the agile practices so I can do their job testing frameworks Cucumber, or perform sensing as a Gatling I know how to do them and the basic forms right and the tools to know how to use them. Eventually it clicks at first like I don't want it. It is what QA is for but eventually it clicks and it's really fun to see a click. Likewise I work a lot with the business side on bridging the gap between developers and the business we actually start working together instead of the whole campus. This is the business that we need to take to go on like what we need is. Of course we do to this refactoring. We need to adopt this technology or just trying to bring them together so they actually work as a team and we'll stack clicks which is much harder than it was going developers.

Bob Payne: [00:07:40] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:07:41] That's that's really fun. 

Bob Payne: [00:07:42] Yeah that is. Yeah. We like speed we have that sort of mission of making people's lives more valued fulfilling and productive. It's kind of our or our mission if we can do that on an individual basis or you know we health and organization so that it helps the folks. But it all fundamentally comes down to you know people people in interactions and you know hopefully making a you know a decent world for them to sort of grind away at the code code is an unforgiving. 

Ben Scott: [00:08:21] Yes we'll spend days looking for that tiny little mistake. 

Bob Payne: [00:08:27] Yeah yeah. So what's the other big dogmatic thing you're railing against. I don't know that you're actually railing against any big dogmatic things but you seem like the sort of person that might.

Ben Scott: [00:08:41] There are some things I'm very strict on and it's is code craftsmanship to the detriment of sometimes I'm actually delivering value and I understand that. But there are times to be fast and dirty. You have a production bug. 

Bob Payne: [00:08:55] Yep.

Ben Scott: [00:08:56] There's a feature that needs to go to the market right away. OK we can do that fast and dirty. But if that's every time there's a problem. 

Bob Payne: [00:09:06] Right. 

Ben Scott: [00:09:06] And at that point I don't have any issues slowing everything down and I guess focus on craftsmanship. Let's focus on actually teaching what solid principles mean because over time you're going into being faster more maintainable code. The sustainable pace and that takes time to learn. It might take six months a year to really get there. It's a huge investment and it's the responsibility of the entire organization to to foster that. So just like we have the Center for agile excellence or you go to an agile coach organization talk about processes. 

Ben Scott: [00:09:39] You should have a software craftsmanship as well a new way to mentor the developers. And that practice that's probably where I'm the most strict on. 

Bob Payne: [00:09:51] OK yeah no that's ... Yeah. That's a good place to be strict I think. I often think of the three things that can make a great team. It's discipline, continuous improvement, and play the long game you know not the short term gain necessarily but product delivery is is not project right now.

Ben Scott: [00:10:16] And I completely understand there's times we have to go really fast for whatever reason it is. Maybe there's a bug that's costing thousands of dollars. When it's in production. 

Bob Payne: [00:10:23] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:10:24] And yes. Quick and dirty fix but then think about it and fix it again the right way.

Bob Payne: [00:10:30] Yeah. Well everybody. It's interesting because that the current understanding where the current sort of popular understanding of technical debt is that it is a bad thing and you know when they first started talking about it Ward Cunningham and and you know some of the folks on the first XP team actually used it in more the financial term debt. Sometimes you do take down. You know you go fast to be quick and you might incur some debt. You got to pay it down. Always cost a little bit more to pay it down. But sometimes that's the right decision. But when you're paying off the credit card with another credit card you're in drips. 

Ben Scott: [00:11:20] That compounds quickly.

Bob Payne: [00:11:21] Then You need to re platform the whole thing.

Ben Scott: [00:11:26] And then it just never ends. 

Bob Payne: [00:11:27] Yeah.

Bob Payne: [00:11:28] And that's what the craftsmanship comes in play because if you instill those values when you build a new software and maybe you'll be a little bit better and last longer. 

Bob Payne: [00:11:36] Yeah. So is IPPON primarily you know do you or most of the folks steeped in XP stream programming and. 

Ben Scott: [00:11:47] So I would say most of us are what I would consider like Premier consultants as far as developers. Most of us are developers. So in that sense we're a bit different from most agile consulting companies. We focus a lot on the engineering aspect of agile versus the process and most of our developers don't always subscribe to Agile values. They like to get their stuff done and they're like good code and beautiful aspects that don't always adhere to delivering to agile way which is fine. But you couple that wish people would truly understand agile and you've just multiplied yet the actual value of it. It's like the cross-functional needed agile deep expertise to guide the ship but you still need a technical deep expertise on what good coding practices look like. Yeah and we also like to embed with our clients. We don't always like to take the whole project and then deliver at the end. We like to develop right and while we could develop we'll pair with them or we'll teach developed practices how to test and how to automate the whole thing and the whole the whole package. I think that's where our values will be different than other places.

Bob Payne: [00:13:07] Yes. And we've you know at LitheSpeed we've been happy to be able to partner with the guys periodically because we focus primarily on the people in the process and you guys can focus on the technical chops. 

Ben Scott: [00:13:25] Yes.

Bob Payne: [00:13:25] Yeah. I'm primarily a PowerPoint engineer and there is no PPT unit. 

Ben Scott: [00:13:34] No I'm really bad at PowerPoint. 

Bob Payne: [00:13:39] I wouldn't say I'm good. But the reason I'm not very good is because there's no there's no unit test framework to how to get good. I was talking to somebody earlier because I I was when I was developing you know I got immediately test infected like TTD like real TDD not the ATDD or BDD. Not that those things are bad but that thinking and design process of TDD was an amazing force multiplier for me as not a terribly great developer. It allowed me to focus know where I was know that I hadn't broken something else because I couldn't keep every esoteric detail from the entire system.

Ben Scott: [00:14:38] Yes. 

Bob Payne: [00:14:39] In my head some people love that they loved the challenge of I've got every single detail in my head. But that doesn't scale. It does and test. 

Ben Scott: [00:14:52] It's a good thing you brought TDD like I have my own opinions about it. And you're right. Some people love us some people hate it. And to me there's a lot of focus from the process scores to do TDD when developers aren't ready for it.

Bob Payne: [00:15:06] Yeah yeah yeah. 

Ben Scott: [00:15:07] Just like everything will be fine if you just do TDD. 

Bob Payne: [00:15:11] Yeah I don't believe that to be true. Everything will be fine if you have engineers that are that are that really you know there I sort of look at the code and you can see the thought process of the developer in the code and that is much easier for me to read to read tested code than it is to to create an elegant you know you start throwing in some Lambda's there and we're we're we're parked. I mean because I struck part of my psychosis if you will. And I think it's reasonable to call it that around TDD as I started in Lisp and I don't know if you've ever tried to debug lisp or scala. It's probably easier now and in scala but there's just the interpreter. Back when I was doing this so you had a command line and you read in a file and something pops out and it is the most amazing black box in the world because it's just it's interpreted. It's a functional language and 42 is the answer, right? I forgot the question we asked in end. So unless you knew that those little pieces worked. Yes pull that out throw it into an interpreter and see if it give it some some values in and see if it makes sense because all it takes is a misplaced pen. It could be anywhere and it will usually evolve out to something that still works. 

Ben Scott: [00:17:04] And I guess where I differ what it is like or I'm strict on tests in the same commit as the code. 

Bob Payne: [00:17:11] Yeah. 

Ben Scott: [00:17:12] I don't prescribe to. You must write a test first.

Bob Payne: [00:17:15] Sure. 

Ben Scott: [00:17:16] But it must be in the same commit. Yeah that's that's kind of where I differ. And some people are really good at writing tests first. Some are not.

Bob Payne: [00:17:24] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:17:24] But everybody should be able to write before or after, there's not. Never does ..That's Not allowed.

Bob Payne: [00:17:31] Yeah I think it's a reasonable place to be strict. I think for me just I.

Bob Payne: [00:17:39] I loved Arlo Belshee. I think it was our Arlo Belshee that coined the term test infected because some people either are or are not. And it's like you know that zombie strain virus. And I don't know which side is the zombie in which is the not here but I think the TTD folks are probably the zombies. But if you were when you find yourself on one side of that divide I think that the folks that actually like TTD and I know it is not universal. It's it's one of the more powerful and least used agile engineering practices. 

Ben Scott: [00:18:15] Yes.

Bob Payne: [00:18:16] I mean Pairing, people say they pair, but nobody pairs. I mean not like.

Ben Scott: [00:18:21] Well not like extreme program where you must pair. Right. We like to pair for occasions like right. Here's a difficult piece of code. Let's work on it together or for mentoring. We'll pair for code reviews the type of thing we'll do some pairing for writing prose not so much right. How hard is it to write Pojos. You know it's so many people go down this rabbit hole to we test the setters and getters like I don't care. Like ok. Probably not. I'm OK. But really how long would it take you to actually do it if you said if everybody said we need to. 

Ben Scott: [00:19:09] So. So interesting thing. So the debate by just writing a piece of code using reflection finds a perjures sets the value gets the value a certain done. So all my pages are tested automatically.

Bob Payne: [00:19:25] Yeah. and now with generative frameworks it is it is relatively easy. I was cured of that debate because I'm not a great programmer. When I misformatted the way I created a Java date. And so when I made and I always know how to make your assertion not against the same constructor that you used. So I use distracted at this other date class add some other stuff in and misuse the constructor and when I assert it against the string format it value, i'm like "Well that's not right." And I don't know that I would have found that regular regular test or I would have I would have found like f'd up dates in the database or in the persistence layer or in the front end and I'm like I might not know. Then I've got a whole different problem but because I knew it I found out early that it didn't work like the debugging. For me it was just so much so much easier.

Ben Scott: [00:20:36] And eventually you have to use common sense. You look at your POJO like well maybe I don't need to test every single one of them. But if you're serializing a date you should test that because for whatever reason it's so strict that the date format it will kill you application is different for might just use a whole AI behind it to be able to extract data and decide what date it is. 

Bob Payne: [00:21:00] You guys likes you know you guys like screw up the order of the month and the day like what is this?

Ben Scott: [00:21:05] It has Slashes no slashes.

Bob Payne: [00:21:07] Dashes no dashes, dots.. 

Ben Scott: [00:21:10] Or you add milliseconds and you expect no milliseconds and it still won't truncate it'll just die right there.

Bob Payne: [00:21:17] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:21:17] So testing that. That's a good test. Typically also have a serialization test if it's data layer i'll serialize or deserialize back to the object, validate, but I might not validate. 

Bob Payne: [00:21:30] You know that was that it was more important when he had to write her own serializer.

Ben Scott: [00:21:37] Well I don't write my own serializer but I do write my own test for the annotations like for date format for example did you do the right format right. Does the precision matter or those type of things you have and I'm working on a project right now that for whatever reason the order matters. The order should not matter but whoever was sending it to they got that code where the order of your serialization matters and they can't just construct the object they actually validate it in its raw format first. 

Bob Payne: [00:22:05] Okay.

Ben Scott: [00:22:06] So then we have to validate that we send in the right Json format but in the right order each field. It shouldn't matter. At least in my opinion it should not matter. 

Bob Payne: [00:22:15] No. But yeah well unless you want strong coupling in implementations which I'm shocked at how many are organizations really like strong coupling.

Ben Scott: [00:22:33] I'm not sure they like it or just live with it.

Bob Payne: [00:22:36] Yeah it's Like oh my god. It's like it's like the old Korbo or SOAP. Oh man.

Ben Scott: [00:22:42] This is how we've always done it so we will continue.

Bob Payne: [00:22:44] Yeah. Yep. So what else would do you. What's interesting to you in what hobbies do you have besides like?

Ben Scott: [00:22:56] Kids.. Does that count as Hobbies?

Bob Payne: [00:22:58] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:22:59] It takes a lot of my time - it's fun time, it's really interesting and enjoyable to watch and grow. But I did find my most of my hobbies dropped away little by little.

Bob Payne: [00:23:10] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:23:13] When I did become a parent.

Bob Payne: [00:23:16] I picked up new hobbies like I had never watched soccer before because I didn't like sports because those were the people that beat up the geeks. And now I'm doing like Magic the Gathering which I avoided in college like the plague.

Ben Scott: [00:23:43] I never got into that.

Bob Payne: [00:23:43] Because I was more of a punk than a D&D. There's a reasonable Venn diagram there. But but. Now I'm going to Friday Night Magic with my son.

Ben Scott: [00:23:55] So that's a very fun but very expensive game.

Bob Payne: [00:23:59] It is. Like you know a lot of people like do sports gambling. I think that's even worse. You know.

Ben Scott: [00:24:06] Yes.

Bob Payne: [00:24:07] Liaisons in a Russian hotel. Let it get very expensive very quickly depending on what you're doing.

Ben Scott: [00:24:17] And I also do gaming video games typically do single player story type games.

Bob Payne: [00:24:23] Oh really? given your military background. You've had enough First Person Shooter..

Ben Scott: [00:24:31] We'll it's more that to play online takes dedicated time whereas a single player. I can stop anytime. Pause and walk away.

Bob Payne: [00:24:39] Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:24:40] I find that sometimes as a parent it's really hard to get an hour dedicated time.

Bob Payne: [00:24:43] Oh yeah yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:24:44] straight to play, it's like no I cannot help you to do anything because I'm in my game. If I'm doing single player I can quickly pause and do something else. That's how I mostly got into it.

Ben Scott: [00:24:54] Before kids I was mostly into Dota.

Bob Payne: [00:24:59] sorry?

Ben Scott: [00:24:59] Dota Which is a different type of game.

Bob Payne: [00:25:02] OK.

Ben Scott: [00:25:03] League of Legends. Very similar as the birth of League of Legends. Was one of the first of those types of games. 

Bob Payne: [00:25:11] Okay. But that's when I decided it would be hard for me to play because it requires 1 hour blocks. 

Bob Payne: [00:25:19] Oh yeah. Yeah.

Ben Scott: [00:25:22] Couldn't dedicate that anymore.

 Bob Payne: [00:25:23] I know, yeah. So there's there's probably a game waiting for me this evening when I go home. So let's see. But.

Ben Scott: [00:25:35] Let's see what else now spend time with family. Every Wednesday we have.

Bob Payne: [00:25:42] Long walks on the beach and.

Ben Scott: [00:25:43] Ah.. Not that, Just cook and eat and and drink and be merry. Revolves around food, and every Wednesday we have big family dinner. 

Bob Payne: [00:25:55] Wednesday?

Ben Scott:[00:25:55] Yeah Wednesday just because weekends are crazy. We also do on weekends. But we found that doing it in the middle of the week it kind of cuts the week and half.

Bob Payne: [00:26:04] Yeah. You talk about work a little bit the stress and excuse to escape the daily grind of get up go to work. Come back do homework or other things. It's another event middle of the week that's a bit unusual but yeah it works for us.

Bob Payne: [00:26:22] Yeah Wednesdays are not that exciting, it's dessert day. So.

Ben Scott: [00:26:26] I like family Wednesdays. It's fun.

Bob Payne: [00:26:29] Ok cool. We'll have to we'll have to do dessert/Dota/.

Ben Scott: [00:26:37] Well I haven't played that game in so long i'd probably be terrible at it now.

Bob Payne: [00:26:41] It's ok. You're better than I am 

Ben Scott: [00:26:44] Probably.

Bob Payne: [00:26:48] Thanks a lot, Ben Really appreciate it.

 

Carlos Rojas, Director of Technology and Operations at Fannie Mae, sat down with Bob Payne at Lean+Agile DC 2018 to discuss Business-Driven Agile Engineering.  Carlos shares thoughts on Fannie Mae’s trailblazing Agile transformation – from prioritizing agility-supporting corporate shared services (recruiting, contracts & procurement, and facilities), to machine learning and a mantra of “Automate Everything.” 

 

Transcript

Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Start there.

Carlos Rojas: [00:00:02] OK.

Bob Payne: [00:00:03] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne. I'm here with Carlos Rojas. And Carlos you're talking about transformation. We were chatting you mentioned how to how to use shared services. So tell me a little bit about your your your talk here today at Lean Agile DC.

Carlos Rojas: [00:00:24] Absolutely. So couple of things to highlight right. One is you go and change a culture, Most people start with the processes. Most people start with their methodology and then they say we're Agile. And I think that part of making it a transformational for an enterprise you know when you're talking about 10000 people when you're talking about 300 product teams that are developing software you know you have to take into account what we call the corporate shared services as well. You know think about the recruiting recruiting efforts. Think about the procurement. How do you write your contracts. Right. Think about your facilities you know. Do you have an open space that will be a reflection of what your mentality looks like. So you have to account for those things. Otherwise you know you end up with a great process but the culture is not impacted by what you're doing. So that's one of those things that I encourage companies to always think about.

Bob Payne: [00:01:16] Yeah. And we just I just recently talked with Jose from from from Fannie. And I know you guys are doing a very large transformation over there lot of DevOps. We do some some training with you guys. 

Bob Payne: [00:01:34] And I'm am extraordinarily pleased to see how how big the transformation has been over it over Fannie because I worked there on a couple of early Agile projects in the early 2000s and it was it was bureaucratically painful to do it.

Carlos Rojas: [00:01:56] I know exactly wh at you're saying. It was six checkpoints hundred twenty five deliverable is about nine months for a single release just to put a line of code in production. Now we've made a huge progress in terms of you know time time to market an average of about 30 days a month. We've got some project teams that are ready to deliver every two weeks. But again it comes down to Hey we incorporated our corporate shared services into the mix and then we think we we we instigated this concept of automation you know everything so far as he wasn't even called them up so to begin with. How do we automate it. You know if it doesn't make sense if it makes sense. How do we automate it and that's when we come up with this concept of that paved road so far as the pay really was. What tools are we going to use that will help us expedite or automate some of those controls that were holding us back. Right. So great transformation. Tons of work behind the scenes but you get the point here is we haven't finished. We're not done yet.

Bob Payne: [00:02:58] And lean, Lean never sleeps.

Carlos Rojas: [00:03:03] Exactly exactly. So right now for example one of our key you know tunnel vision eye vision items that we're trying to chase is agile engineering practices right. 

[00:03:15] How do we turn code that is maintainable how do we create applications of 19 applications that are going to help us with you know a cloud-ready approach not necessarily how do we go about the methodology what tools that we use now but how do we make that an engineer solution that is like the ultimate driving machine for us. So we're trying to look for that not perfection but that high performing team that will look into those proses areas that we'll tap into the business for example that's not a mission that's going to help us have more quality right provisioning of environments that's going to help us get faster at some point in time I think that we're going to be looking at how do we do infrastructure as code so that we have a fully blown solution where you build your own servers if you deploy your own servers as development team and you're responsible from beginning to end. 

Bob Payne: [00:04:11] Hundred percent audible and nobody has the password to production exactly one per cent cut off. It's not the engineer.

Carlos Rojas: [00:04:20] Exactly. But at least you can know who what when and you're not having a checklist to do it. It's all part of a creation of the solution right. Software. 

Bob Payne: [00:04:30] Yep yep you know I think it is. It's ironic and oddly a common theme and I don't know whether it's me or just the folks that are coming up to talk on the podcast today but almost every one of them we've talked a little bit about governance and how how this drives you to be more governable auditable reduces risk profile you know rather than being a risky play to be able to deploy twice a week or once every two weeks or it actually improves your risk profile considerably makes you much more audibly compliant with the controls. You say you have in place.

Carlos Rojas: [00:05:23] Yeah. You know it's interesting you mention that when I started my journey at Fannie Mae I ran a governance organization over SDLC and I was in charge of connecting with at risk partners like legal audit you know Architectural Review Boards change control boards and all of that. And instead of fighting through the system what we did is we partner up with all of the governance groups and we said you know you can do it the way you're doing it. But what if we do it this way and let's just compare let's explore let's figure out if there's a better way and if there is a thought that if it doesn't work on the exploration says that this doesn't make sense then we just go back and keep doing it the way we used to do it. I guess what the answer was always yeah that works better than the way we do it and we get more data. Thank you. So they were actually embracing it and promoting it for us. 

Bob Payne: [00:06:12] Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with Mark Schwartz from Citizenship and Immigration Service. He's sort of a firebrand CIO and he said when he first got there you know coming from Silicon Valley like you don't tell the CIO it can't be done. But what he got to government is people would say well you can't do that because of the far no federal acquisition of election.

Bob Payne: [00:06:39] And he said first he was angry and then he said I'm going to become the expert on the far and and what he what he did was that same approach was like ah here's what you wanted. You know here's the safety that you want from this regulation. And here's how we do it better. Right. It's sort of you know 

Carlos Rojas: [00:07:02] The approach works. You know where you partner with the groups that are supposed to be the roadblocks or supposed to be the longest pole in the tent. If it works you know.

Bob Payne: [00:07:12] Well it's, They're there to keep the organization safe safe.

Carlos Rojas: [00:07:19] Yeah you know if you don't do it it goes against what you're trying to accomplish anyway because you're not just trying to produce code faster you want it to be reliable maintainable with quality compliant. Right. So. So it's a matter of just you can argue whether the legislation is right.

Bob Payne: [00:07:35] But you still need to comply with it.

Carlos Rojas: [00:07:36] Exactly. But sometimes the legislation or the government has the right intent. It's how we approach it.

Bob Payne: [00:07:42] Yeah it usually does.

Carlos Rojas: [00:07:43] Exactly. So you know hopefully for those teams that are struggling with you know the governance aspect of this I'll also just take one thing at a time.

Bob Payne: [00:07:53] Yeah.

Carlos Rojas: [00:07:54] Because you know I've seen people trying to cover it all, oh we're going to fix all these problems right now you can use your theory of constraint was the biggest one. I just tried.

Bob Payne: [00:08:04] Protects the constraint, concentrate on that one.

Carlos Rojas: [00:08:07] Yeah. Did you read the goal.

Carlos Rojas: [00:08:10] Absolutely. That's what I got that from.

Bob Payne: [00:08:12] Yeah the Hurby or the Brian in the Phoenix project. Yeah. Put water where the fire is and in small increments it pops up. Yeah great.

Bob Payne: [00:08:27] So what are you looking forward to over the next couple of years getting accomplished.

Carlos Rojas: [00:08:33] So it's a phenomenal question.

Bob Payne: [00:08:35] It is also a journey it's not an end point.

Carlos Rojas: [00:08:37] It is a journey. It's not done so I'll say maybe three things that we're looking at right. So one is becoming a high performing team in terms of all the agile engineering practices. So really just looking under the hood and figuring out do we have the right automation and we have the right you know called brunching do we have the right techniques that are engineering techniques that will create a great product. That's one. The second thing that we have started working on is the AI machine learning so introducing much learning to our software development lifecycle.

Bob Payne: [00:09:09] Okay 

Carlos Rojas: [00:09:09] Right so right now we've been using some regression basic algorithms with machine learning to be able to look at the data on the history of releases that we have so that we can do two things one we can predict when a release is going to fail interesting. And then the second thing is if it fails you know we can start looking at the deployment scripts. Figure out hey this might be that two or three things that the reasons behind why that release is failing. Right. So we're piloting some of that solution right now. And I think that aspect is cloud. How do we turn these applications to be called cloud ready right when we know in some cases we have monolithic applications that have been around for 23 years.

Carlos Rojas: [00:09:49] How do you take that and move it to the cloud and get the benefit of it not just a lift and shift, but saying Hey lets triangle that application that are more functionalities to micro services I think those are the three components that we're going to be focusing on the next two years.

Bob Payne: [00:10:02] Yeah the the predictive analytics side that's very that's very interesting to me and I'm super curious how that sounds complex but it is probably something that I started while I had a sort of field career as computer architecture free I so far as I was doing that and then decided to go to procreate. So it doesn't sound that complex. I think the interesting thing for me is that you need a reasonably large dataset for that to be able to to really start to bear fruit. But I'm excited to hear you guys would have it so. 

Carlos Rojas: [00:10:52] So we have a reasonable amount of data on releases that go back you know years okay. But interestingly enough when we started training our morals we use a subset of six months. And when we started with that subset of data we identified about 150 fields that were important and then we had the model train for a few weeks and then we test that we said let's just see that confidence level and we put real data against that model and then our success rate was about 10 percent. It was really bad. It's no surprise right. So instead of saying instead of saying let's get more data more fields more of features we say let's take those hundred and fifty and gotten our way down to 50 and then we have a smaller subset of fields and we have a smaller subset of data for 3 months and then we trend the model again.

Carlos Rojas: [00:11:56] And then now we can tell you that we're you know successfully predicting with a 90 percent certainty certainty rate. So we went back to the model with less data less data elements are more precise data set and our success rate went up.

Bob Payne: [00:12:12] Well I mean look at you know what we're starting to see genetic markers for you know in biology that have a very large effect. So once you find the targets I think I think that level of that that that is amazing that you were able to how long did it take you to go from 10 to 90.

Carlos Rojas: [00:12:36] So it was about a 12 week project. But then thinking about thinking about the project I'm thinking about the data said it took us about 6 weeks. So I would say you know quarter a quarter and a half worth of you know.

Bob Payne: [00:12:49] That's amazing, are you using, what are you using back end engine?

Carlos Rojas: [00:12:52] So we're using TenserFlow. It's an open source from Google, using Python to write the scripts and to be quite honest with you because we're exploring our capabilities are just basic you know we're not building a beautiful website that people can access. We're just enabling the developers to say hey gone check this page and then you know pick your acid I.D. your application I.D. and some information on the model is going to give you the answers. So it's basic. Right. It's still in the exploratory mode. We've done a couple of good successful use cases and now we're trying to roll it out to the company.

Bob Payne: [00:13:28] I am I've been pleasantly surprised at the resurgence of Python.

Bob Payne: [00:13:37] I was in some of the early Python conferences Python back when they were here in Northern Virginia and D.C. and now running into it in the large corporations that they also have micro Python which runs on a microcontroller. So you can you can you can do hardware programming. You were always able to buy it you needed a heavy heavy thing. Now they're doing you know arm processors isn't super lightweight.

Carlos Rojas: [00:14:12] But the difference is you know the user experience at the end of the day you know when you started developing maybe you know in my case 20 years ago with Cobalt or C++ or even Java. Right. You have to have some sort of computer science background to be able to kind of like and understand that and and do something with it. Nowadays with Python, It's more of a English type of you know development where you don't have to be computer science guru to learn it and apply it so I think that's why it's being so helpful for the adoption of those techniques. 

Bob Payne: [00:14:49] I mean it was, there was a certain, well there's a whole philosophy around you know Python and you know people people do argue whether they achieve that but they wanted it to be an easy learnable right. You know part LAMDA part object part you know and be able to drop down to the metal pretty quickly with assembly or see you know the whole idea that you could tie in those when you needed to if you needed to program and see were able to easily tie it in with Python.

Carlos Rojas: [00:15:30] Exactly. And to be quite honest with you we're leveraging some of the open source you know libraries to execute on some of the you know projects that we have. 

Carlos Rojas: [00:15:43] So it's not like we're building something from scratch anymore right. So that's helpful as well.

Bob Payne: [00:15:48] Yeah. Well great Carlos. Thanks for coming in. It's a pleasure chatting with you and I wish you guys all the well you don't need luck all the hard work in the world. 

Carlos Rojas: [00:16:02] Thank you for having us here, appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.

Bob Payne: [00:16:05] Thanks.

 

Modern Agile stickers everywhere are helping Modern Agile stick.  Dean Chanter of Capital One recalls his Accidental Experiment with Modern Agile (cake for every release!).  Bob and Dean talk through the power of the laptop sticker, evolving and “upskilling” ScrumMasters, and Lean roots.

 

Transcript

Bob Payne: [00:00:05] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne and i'm here with Dean Chanter and Dean you're from, You're at Cap One.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:00:11] Yeah, Currently at Cap One.

 

Bob Payne: [00:00:14] You're doing some work with scaled Agile and you're saying you sort of accidentally started applying Modern Agile. I'm super curious about that journey.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:00:25] I did it was very interesting so I joined Capital One about seven months ago, was with Intel for about 13 years before that, and when I first got to Capital One everybody had a Modern Agile sticker on their laptop there was actually a bunch on my desk. So I just slapped one on my laptop. I had heard about it before I got the Capital One but Intel was a big SAFehouse and so that was kind of how we did things there and made a lot of sense and so, maybe three or four months ago, my gallbladder decided that it no longer needed to be in my body and so's listening to Josh's podcast and listen to things and he and John Cutler were talking.

 

Bob Payne: [00:01:02] Okay, yeah I've had Josh on my podcast.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:01:04] Yeah. So Josh asked John -he's like What do you think about Modern Agile. What do you mean to you. And John was like you know what. It really makes me feel like we can try anything and we don't have to stick to one framework another. And I realized then that some of the things I have been doing it kept on with my teams was just that right. I had a lot of teams that were Scrum Teams and Kanban teams and we had ARTs so we had you know single teams but they needed... They were looking for a refresh right.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:01:37] You know some new ways of thinking about things that we brought in things like product discovery. We started looking at cycle time. Right. We just we started celebrating everything. Right. We had cake for every release we had you know just how.

 

Bob Payne: [00:01:54] Dangerous when you're a real DevOps...

 

Dean Chanter: [00:01:56] Exactly. Exactly. Well that was one of the things we went from releases that were on average and they say average because it wasn't a true cadence of about six to eight weeks. We're now releasing twice a week. OK. You know just because of trying to setting audacious goals right. Right. Using that we want to really use more frequently. Right. And once we set that goal we started working through the different things and different challenges that it takes to get through. We actually even if we don't have content for release on a particular day that we're supposed to be released, we'll still do the release. The reason is is because it allows us to go through those motions right and should identify more ways to we found things by doing that that maybe we should leave - blue green releases right. So maybe we should leave green up a little bit longer so we could fail back if we need to. Eventually, you know the goal there is eventually getting to where we could do continuous delivery if we wanted to.

 

Bob Payne: [00:02:56] Yeah. That's great. So I'm so curious how you got the big batch of stickers. Did Josh come to CapOne and.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:03:03] He did.

 

Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Okay.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:03:05] So Josh came to camp while he was a keynote speaker. CapOne does a technology agile conference internally once a year.

 

Bob Payne: [00:03:13] I've spoken that years back yeah.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:03:15] I wasn't there for that yet but that's how the stickers ended up on my desk. So.

 

Bob Payne: [00:03:21] Yeah I have been doing a series of of of talks using modern agile as a sort of framework to look at Lean and depending on where I go and how how I either call it. "No one gives a shit about your practices" or "disrupting the cult of the cult of practices". I'm a scrum trainer but fundamentally believe that scrum is a starting place and the goal is not to like do scrum. The goal is to get into this. You know this idea of experimentation learning and changing and and so you know I was an old XP extreme programmer guy. So you know I've known Josh for a long time and you know that talk really. It was actually that sticker was the deflowering force.. It's probably not appropriate to say but I had always had Virgin Macs with no stickers on them until that one made it on my last Mac.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:04:31] That was the first sticker I put on my cowpat on issue laptops. Have it if you have a habit of putting stickers on stuff for me is like yeah I'm fine. I agree. I agree. You know that's actually one of the things so I do manage a group of Scrum Masters right, and ScrumMaster is fhe title that Capital One gives them you know I looked at, look at them more than just that, right? They're team coaches, I've got a couple that work as a scaled coach right? As well, and so-

 

Dean Chanter: [00:05:05] That was one of the things that we spent a day together back in March you know kind of strategizing you know our improvement areas that we wanted to go with the team right. And so that's one of the things that I mentioned to them right is that you know if you look at it from that Modern Agile lens you know then I'm asking you to balance that coaching and the delivery right and ,. And one of the things we talked about is like sometimes as you know agile coaches all too often want to wait for that big moment and that big huge coaching opportunity, that next retro or their next delivery, right? So one of the things I talk to them about is sometimes coaching in the moment and being a player with your teams is actually the best opportunity for that coaching moment. I actually got one of my Scrum Masters now who is actually a performer on the release. So since we've got teams that are applying good DevOps practices right the teams are the performers on the release and so she's actually the performer. What.. and the reason for that is that it allows him to have an extra person separation of duties or his since she's not coding that she can have that access to that prod environment. But it's a lot harder to identify a lot of areas of waste that the teams were seeing because she's got that different lens.

 

Bob Payne: [00:06:20] And when you get when you get even further down the dev ops path you'll be able to deploy without access to prod.

 

Bob Payne: [00:06:27] Exactly. Have an auditable..

 

Dean Chanter: [00:06:33] Yes. That is the goal.

 

Bob Payne: [00:06:35] Yeah.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:06:36] But in the meantime it's allowed the ScrumMaster to provide value in ways that they haven't in the past.

 

Bob Payne: [00:06:43] Right, You know just you know I like to poke at stuff. It's kind of what I do.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:06:50] Oh yeah.

 

Bob Payne: [00:06:52] So you were working with. Well my friend Beth Wong.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:06:58] Yes. So that's another interesting thing. So Beth and I are actually kind of paired together with the teams that we're working with. OK so where I'm providing that more tactical delivery focused management of the scrummasters, Beth is actually paired with me as a true coach. Right. And so she doesn't have that accountability to the product. And so she she and I are able to do things that having a single RTE in a scaling house wouldn't be able to do. So Beth is able to run workshops and you know she was able to bring in someone and worked with them and that's how we started our lean product discovery is because I was able to stay focused and she was able to coordinate those types of workshops. Another thing that Beth is is able to do. She's actually run in a technical coach and so that's one of the ways that we're accelerating that automated release goal that we have for this.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:00] Yeah. Yeah. I loved working with Beth and I know she's she's excited to be the guys now.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:08:05] So yes it's a great partnership.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:08] Yeah. Super. So what else is exciting for you lately?

 

Dean Chanter: [00:08:13] I mean definitely as we're evolving you know our scrum masters you know and what we call upskilling them. Right.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:21] So we've got some folks on my team that you knew six seven years ago as CapitalOne went through its original agile journey right went to see some class and you know they're great at following those rules.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:35] You probably are not aware of. In 2005 they started a huge agile journey.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:08:43] I've heard that.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:44] It's been swept out and then.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:08:46] Exactly as a multiple and in depending on what Capital One is a large organization depending.

 

Bob Payne: [00:08:52] Are we talking card?

 

Dean Chanter: [00:08:53] So I'm in card, right. Exactly. So different journeys there but the teams I've been working with I've been five or six years is kind of about as far as they can look back.

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:05] Right.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:09:05] And so again kind of going back to that me asking my team to be that more player coach. So we're looking at different ways of kind of seeing the way the teams work right. Right now they're working through Mary Poppendick's original book.

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:22] Yeah.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:09:23] Right. So one of the interesting things about me and my journey started with Intel and so Intel being also not only a product development team but also a manufacturing to Jamie Flinchbaugh in the intel years and years ago long before I started there.

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:40] Right right.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:09:40] And turn into a lean house.

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:42] Right.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:09:42] And so

 

Bob Payne: [00:09:44] Lean manufacturing. It's always ironic to me that many of the organizations that do really amazing lean logistics are lean manufacturing and I'm not saying this about Intel because I don't actually have firsthand knowledge. They look at agile they're like you know we can't do that. That's not it's not you know it is really ironic that it is they do have the same same roots.

 

Bob Payne: [00:10:10] You know clearly manufacturing is a different is a different thing than product development.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:10:18] Right.

 

Bob Payne: [00:10:19] And. But but lean product development has also been around for you know almost 75 years.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:10:27] Exactly. So and that's where my journey started right. Is is in then so. It's almost like if you talk to the folks at Toyota about Lean manufacturing right now. What is lean? this is jus t what I do. So, at Intel, for me that's what it was right. You know I.

 

Bob Payne: [00:10:43] They don't fetishize lean in the way that scrum teams fetishize Scrum.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:10:47] They don't.

 

Bob Payne: [00:10:53] My Precious Scrum.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:10:53] Exactly. Exactly. And so you know I you know we you know when I was running a team.

 

Bob Payne: [00:10:57] I'm the agile golem.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:10:59] yeah yeah yeah exactly. So when I was running at my first team team ride of developers and we had daily stand ups and we committed to you know we committed to the goal for that day and the next day we talked about you know how we go towards that goal right. Even if we were working on a bug right. We didn't commit to finishing the bug. We committed to the experiments that we were going to run that day. Right. So when I transitioned to Agile you know it just kind of made sense for me right now come in the CapitalOne that I think it's kind of flipping the coin. I feel like that's a lot of the things that we're working through as a team evangelist. At least in my area is bringing some of those thought patterns.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:11:41] Identifying the waste and running experiments right and less about any one particular process or and other. Metrics is another thing that we are bringing and doing which has been very interesting as well.

 

Bob Payne: [00:11:55] Cool experiment to learn rapidly.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:11:57] Absolutely.

 

Bob Payne: [00:12:00] And in fact the only one I have a little trouble explaining to executives is the make people awesome, because they don't care. Many of them don't. If they could go to the boards and saying yes we're we're we're we're selling the customer crap, we're torturing people and we've got higher revenues you know.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:12:25] And that's definitely a shame but.

 

Bob Payne: [00:12:27] It is. It is. But I've I've enjoyed I've enjoyed you know Josh's poke in the eye and you know I think it's going to stick.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:12:41] I think so too.

 

Bob Payne: [00:12:42] Yeah because it's a sticker because he often makes a joke how do you make. How do you make an idea stick? Turn it into a sticker.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:12:50] Turn it into a sticker I haven't heard him say that but I like that. Well I like what he's been saying lately. right. He was at LeanAgile US in February and I got a chance to see his keynote there right. He opened the keynote. Are you curious as I say that's what I took back to my team. Right. You know are we curious? You know and another one of the things he said there is I know have you identified a ceremony or practice on your team and just gotten rid of it to see what would happen. Right. And that's another one of the challenges that I gave to my team as well.

 

Bob Payne: [00:13:24] Yeah I mean you know Toyota doesn't.. They'll throw stuff out left and right that you know. Lean is the machine that eats itself to make itself better.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:13:37] Yes.

 

Bob Payne: [00:13:37] And I don't think Agile is there yet but that's that's one of my goals. So I really love you know he framed it in a way that pulled together many of the thoughts and conversations a lot of us had been having. And so I'm happy to carry that torch for him for a little while.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:13:58] I almost kind of I don't know if it came on the cusp of or maybe there has something to do with it but I feel like a lot of the fights that you see you know on Twitter or blog spaces you know around Scrum vs Kanban, estimates or not... I feel like a lot of that has calmed down recently. I don't know if it's if there's a correlation there. But at least for me that's what I see.

 

Bob Payne: [00:14:25] I think there's more correlation than causation would be my guess. I think people are just worried about you know foreign policy being run on Twitter. So no estimates or mob programming thing is just..it's like Oh my God I can't believe we were arguing about that stuff.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:14:40] Yeah maybe.

 

Bob Payne: [00:14:46] So thank you very much for coming in and appreciate it and hope you have a great talk.

 

Dean Chanter: [00:14:52] Yes. It was fun.

 

Bob Payne: [00:14:53] Great.