It’s been just over a week since this year’s virtual DevOps Enterprise Summit USA and I don’t know about you, but I am already missing the vibrant Slack conversations, the impromptu Gather interactions, the industry-leading content and the many networking opportunities that brought together the thriving DevOps community.
DevOps and OKRs
The event saw the return of Tasktop’s founder and CEO, Dr. Mik Kersten, who took the virtual stage to do what he does best: sharing his – and Tasktop’s – experiences working with Fortune 100 organizations to help them transition to a product-centric operating model.
Speaking about DevOps and OKRs, Mik shared some of his “lessons learned” from large-scale transformations that leveraged OKRs and Flow Metrics to create an end-to-end, organization-wide feedback loop, as well as pitfalls that snapped some organizations back into the waterfall ways of measuring delivery. The goal? To show how traditional organizations can use OKRs to move from project to product, and to help them move faster in terms of becoming a digital innovator.
“The whole idea of the Flow Metrics is to have a set of flow key results that tell us whether we’re improving or whether we’ve got impediments or bottlenecks that are slowing us from improving. The idea is that we track the business key results, as well as the flow key results.”
– Dr. Mik Kersten
To view the full presentation, click here.
Evolving the HCSC mindset
Also on the agenda was a session hosted by Tasktop’s Principal Flow Advisor, Dominica DeGrandis, and Senior Manager of DevOps at HCSC, Tashfeen Mahmood. In this fascinating presentation, both Dominica and Tashfeen gave insight into how one of the largest insurance companies in North America evolved to conduct experiments during their open enrollment season.
Focused on business results, HCSC teams addressed missing feedback loops in their delivery engine to be more responsive to insights gained from customer experiences. They addressed this feedback with fast experiments for delivering features, which made it easier and more compelling for customers to sign up for HCSC’s plans. From frozen to flowing, HCSC’s strategy set teams up to be nimble during peak season.
“We went from a fear of making change and production to being hopeful about the learnings we will get from it. We went from a place where changes were frozen to where business value started flowing to production. And we went from being distant from our business to having shared business goals and objectives.”
– Tashfeen Mahmood
To view the full presentation, click here.
Banking on Flow Metrics with Bank of New Zealand
A highlight for me was hearing from Paul Littlefair, CTO and BMK Lakshminarayanan, value stream architect at Bank of New Zealand.
In their presentation, both Paul and BMK spoke about BNZ’s transformational journey and how they have been working on establishing the Flow Metrics to continue to innovate, stay ahead, deliver excellent service and support their customers.
While BNZ is just at the beginning of its transformation journey, this session offered invaluable insight into why driving a digital and innovation agenda faster is critical, as well as how to get started using Planview Viz.
“We are a leading bank in New Zealand and we need to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market. We haven’t waited for the stars to align, we’ve got on with it and created value stream architecture and we’ve introduced the Flow Framework into our system, and made it fundamental. It’s early in our journey but we’re already seeing value. The teams are committed, excited and engaged and we’re seeing culture improvements because every engineer can now see how their work impacts business delivery and helps support an effective DevOps culture.”
– Paul Littlefair
To view the full presentation, click here.
If these presentations get you thinking about learning more, Tasktop has resources that can help you, as well as ways to keep the conversations going through the Flow Framework Community.
Take a Course in Flow Metrics
The Flow Institute offers a range of courses on the Flow Framework® and Value Stream Management.
The on-demand course, Introduction to Flow Metrics, with Dominica DeGrandis introduces Flow Metrics and provides a deeper dive into what they are and why you need them. The course explains the theory behind Flow Time, Flow Velocity, Flow Efficiency, Flow Load and Flow Distribution.
