The countdown is on. In one week’s time, thousands of IT and business professionals will descend on London for the latest iteration of DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 (June 25-27 – InterContinental O2, London, UK). The three-day event is jam-packed full of keynotes, breakouts, workshops (and, not to mention, parties!) designed to help attendees take their DevOps initiatives to the next level.
At Tasktop, we’re gearing up for yet another fantastic conference (Booth P4). We are more excited than ever to share how Tasktop can solve your DevOps transformation woes by going beyond CI/CD and adopting an end-to-end value stream approach to software delivery.
As veteran platinum sponsors, we’ve gained a lot of wisdom over the years into how best to maximize the your time at the conference. Here are four tips to get the most out of DOES London 2019:
Tip #1 – Develop a plan of attack
At a large conference with numerous content tracks, breakout sessions, and onsite activities running in parallel, it’s important to strategize your time. Ask yourself:
- What are my goals while I’m here?
- What sessions do I want to attend based on those goals?
- What do I want to take away and share with my team?
Once you’ve answered these questions, we recommend reviewing the agenda and scheduling calendar alerts for those that interest you (remember calendar time zones!).
Make sure you set alerts for the following Tasktop speaking sessions – each one rich in information about scaling DevOps transformations based on successful real-life experiences
Transitioning from Project to Product: An Experience Report
Tuesday, June 25 at 2:40pm – Arora 6&7
Nicole Bryan, VP of Product Development
Nicole will be sharing Tasktop’s experience of moving from an Agile and DevOps-structured organisation where Product, Engineering and Operations transition from separate teams into a single combined Product Development group organized solely around product value streams.
Time Theft: Using Flow Metrics to Expose Crimes from Conflicting Priorities and Unplanned Work
Wednesday, June 26 at 2:10pm – Cutty Sark
Dominica DeGrandis, Director of Digital Transformation, author of Making Work Visible
Today’s IT workers are drowning in non-stop requests for time; days are filled to the brim with meetings, while nights are spent heroically fixing problems. The real crime of the century is time theft – one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations. In this talk, Dominica reveals what you ought to know about Flow Metrics and how they can help you expose time theft so you can make better business decisions.
Project to Product: Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework
Wednesday, June 26 at 5:00pm – Arora Ballroom
Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO and founder, author of Project To Product
Based on his vast experience working with Fortune 100 enterprises, Dr. Mik Kersten presents a new concept – the Flow Framework™ – to unravel the enigma of enterprise software delivery. Attendees will discover an approach to help their organisation to better understand the human and system dynamic that underpins their IT infrastructure.
Tracking Business Impact – What’s The Point?
Thursday, June 27 at 11:25am – Arora Ballroom
Carmen DeArdo, Senior Value Stream Management Strategist (Tasktop), author of Standing on Shoulders: A leader’s guide to digital transformation, and Paul Shepheard, Head of Delivery Platforms and Services at Deutsche Bank
It’s estimated that the human race spends over $3.5 trillion annually on IT. The world’s largest companies invest billions in tech-driven change each year. But do they know how effectively we’re investing that money? Do we know if those investments are adding the intended value (if any?).
“This is a place to meet up with DevOps authors, founders, and speakers to hear life-changing stories about DevOps transformations.” – Dominica DeGrandis, Director of Digital Transformation, Tasktop, and author of Making Work Visible
Tip #2 – Embrace the opportunity to network
While the large crowds at conferences can be daunting, take a deep breath and remember you’re surrounded by like-minded individuals all looking to better their software delivery capabilities and accelerate the time to value of their software products.
Networking is almost always priceless. One of the best ways to come away with new ideas and perspectives is to ask other attendees what they are doing and experiencing. With the conference theme “Get Together, Go Faster” in mind, IT Revolution has established various ways for attendees to network, learn, and ask as many questions as possible.
These opportunities include:
- Speakers Corner – Dedicated time and location to ask the plenary speakers questions that go deeper on the information presented earlier that day
- Café maigre: Led by Dominica DeGrandis,, attendees can connect with and learn from their peers in a semi-structured format across the three days of the conference.
- Birds of a Feather Sessions: Less structured than Lean Coffee, these sessions are driven by specific topics that attendees want to discuss and learn about.
- Industry Party: In addition to sponsor giveaways (Tasktop is giving away a Bose SoundLink Portable Speaker at our booth!) and great food and drinks, the industry party is a great opportunity to meet with vendors and continue conversations with fellow attendees and speakers.
- Slack Workspace: Join the shared Slack workspace to interact with speakers, attendees, and sponsors at the conference and beyond.
You took the first step of showing up, take the next step by having the conversations.
Tip #3 – Take advantage of onsite activities
When there is a break without sessions in the conference agenda, there are often other great opportunities to participate in. From product demos (Tasktop’s demo is Wednesday, June 26 at 1:00pm in the Arora Foyer) to workshops, I can assure you there is never a shortage of content.
At DOES, IT Revolution hosts a book signing every year giving away complimentary copies of books from IT Revolution authors including Gene Kim, Mark Schwartz, Dominica DeGrandis, Dr. Mik Kersten, and more.
This year, Tasktop is sponsoring the book signing of our CEO, Dr. Mik Kersten’s book, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. From 7:30pm – 8:15pm in the Arora Foyer outside, Dr. Mik Kersten will sign 500 complimentary copies for DOES attendees.
Don’t miss your chance to pick up your free copy along with complimentary copies of books from other IT Revolution authors.
Tip #4 – Planning is key for success
Whether it’s launching a new product or attending an industry conference, planning is key for success. Here are a few of our commendations:
Check the weather: London is notorious for rain and no one likes to get stuck without an umbrella. Keep an eye on the weather the week of your trip to make sure you’ve packed appropriately
Wear comfortable shoes: When you’re not sitting in a session (or standing at those that are a full house) you’ll be on your feet. With the dress code in mind (Business Casual for DOES London), wear the most comfortable pair of shoes you own. And never, NEVER, wear new shoes. Your feet will thank you later.
Don’t forget the essentials: Laptop charger, portable charger, pen, paper, refillable water bottle. Nothing is worse than wanting to take notes or snap a photo of a slide and not being able to do so. We’ll have pens at the Tasktop booth (P4) in case you need one.
Join us for chat – and get your DevOps transformation back on track
“A major problem today is that many companies still take a narrow view of DevOps, focusing on integrating only tools in the release pipeline. To be truly effective, they need to consider the entire software delivery cycle. Connecting and automating the entire toolchain from end-to-end is a key enabler in the shift from managing software projects to delivering products and business value.” – Nicole Bryan, VP of Product Development, Tasktop
Be sure to stop by our booth to say hello to our friendly, smart and helpful team to have your questions answered on how integration is fundamental to your DevOps success. And why DevOps – through CI/CD and Release Automation – only improves effectiveness in only one part of the software delivery process.
Despite investments in CI/CD and Application Release Automation (ARA) to eliminate the bottleneck between “dev” and “ops”, many enterprises are still finding that their time to value is still too long, unmeasured and unpredictable. That’s because there’s bottlenecks, latencies and dependencies further upstream, as well as down.
What’s more, once the delivery bottleneck is solved, organizations no longer know where their current bottleneck is – nor how to find it. DevOps/Release Automation tools were not designed to provide visibility into work further upstream – they’re focused on all activities in the release pipeline from code commit to production. With no holistic view or end-to-end traceability, the software delivery process remains obscure and unmanageable.
By integrating those teams and tools in the release stage of the value steam with all teams and tools in the ideate, create and operate stages, enterprises can finally accelerate the flow of product-critical information from end-to-end in real time between all key stages – and finally begin reaping the vast benefits of DevOps.
Schedule a meeting
Not sure when you can swing by the booth? No problem: Schedule an on-site meeting with us before you arrive at a time that works best for you.
See you in The Big Smoke!
