The theme for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 was Get Together, Go Faster – and while that was definitely not my experience going through customs at Heathrow Airport, it rang true through many of the plenary and breakout sessions.
This year, Tasktop was a platinum sponsor, a book signing sponsor and had four speaking presentations at the conference. With 19 Tasktopians in attendance, it was an excellent opportunity to meet with DevOps champions, customers and partners from across EMEA.
After proper caffeination thanks to XebiaLabs on Monday morning, Chris Hill – Jaguar Land Rover Head of Systems Engineering – kicked off the presentations by discussing the culture of DevOps at the automotive company. He reflected that democracy isn’t always the right approach to software delivery and reiterated the importance of articulating the ‘why’ behind decisions, even if it’s sometimes difficult.
Later in the morning, Tasktop Director of Digital Transformation, Dominica DeGrandis, spoke about visualizing impacts to your workflow and metrics. The presentation addressed the constant challenges of conflicting priorities and how to best solve them by making your work visible.
Then Tasktop Director of Product Marketing, Naomi Lurie, and Senior Solutions Consultant, Laksh Ranganathan, talked through what enterprise IT can learn through a startup’s journey into Value Stream Management.
Naomi and Laksh spoke about Tasktop’s integration journey to connect our own end-to-end value stream including the challenges, lessons learned, and the metrics captured along the way. Like Marvel’s Ant Man, while Tasktop may be a smaller company, we’re solving the universal bottlenecks that larger IT organizations are facing, enabling us to help our customers to solve their own.
During the presentations and breaks, I encouraged attendees to drop off their Tasktop attendee bag inserts – a lego brick – to the Tasktop booth. The lego bricks represented a £1 donation to one of two reputable charities in the realm of technology.
We selected ComputerAid and Girls In Tech as the two deserving non-profit organizations; the former dedicated to empowering the developing world by providing access, education, and implementing technology to developing countries, while the latter helps create a support framework to help women advance their careers in STEM. By the end of the conference, we had committed nearly £500.
On Monday afternoon, Tasktop VP of Product, Nicole Bryan, and former Nationwide Insurance DevOps Technology Director, Carmen DeArdo, spoke on the practical realties that large enterprises face when moving from a project management mindset to a product mindset. The session was so popular that it was standing room only and attendees we’re even getting turned away. Luckily, the session was recoded and will be shared with attendees soon (phew).
During Monday’s afternoon break, we decided to do something sweet for our technology partners who were also sponsoring the conference. By sweet, I mean we literally delivered dozens of delicious logo branded cupcakes to each partner booth. Tasktop would not be the organization we are today without the support of our extensive partner network and if that isn’t reason enough for a cupcake, I don’t know what is.
As the day came to a close, the early-release signing of Tasktop CEO Dr. Mik Kersten’s new book Project To Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Over twenty years of experience and research has been poured into this book and over 275 attendees walked away with the first copies. Are you one of the first? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Tweet to Mik using the handle @mik_kersten and the hashtag #ProjectToProduct. Only four months to go until the final copy is released at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018!
Wrapping out day two were sessions from Barclays on the shift to end to end value streams which include the PMO, dojos from Verizon Wireless, and a deep dive into Project To Product and “The Flow Framework” from Mik Kersten himself.
By the end of the conference I was questioning my choice of footwear, but I am also more certain than ever that it’s time to go beyond CI/CD by adopting an end-to-end mindset to software delivery. It’s only then that organisations will truly understand how to:
- Scale their DevOps transformations
- Improve their Time to Value (TtV)
- Visualize their flow to find the bottlenecks of sub-optimal performance
- Glean the right metrics for continuous improvement and faster delivery of business value.
We’ll be at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas this October and hope to see you there, in the meantime, we look forward to continuing the conversation.
We will also be publishing a new e-book this week – Beyond CI/CD: why you need Value Stream Integration alongside Release Automation – that provides a more in-depth look into how end-to-end flow to ensuring you maximize your investment in release automation and accelerate your software delivery.
Keep an eye on our blog and social channels for its publication!
