Dean Chanter - Lean+Agile DC

06/07/18 • 15 min

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 ...

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.

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

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

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.

Previous Episode

Dan Fish & Gabe Weaver - Lean+Agile DC 2018

Agile didn’t work as your silver bullet? Not a surprise, according to Very’s Dan Fish, Product Manager & Agile Coach, and Gabe Weaver, Chief Product Officer. Dan and Gabe joined Bob Payne at Lean+Agile DC 2018 to talk Agile methods, holacracy, and the hard work required to solve organizational impediments after adopting Agile.

TRANSCRIPT:

Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne, i'm here at Lean+Agile DC. Why don't you guys introduce yourself since.

Dan Fish: [00:00:08] Sure. I'm Dan fish I'm a product manager and agile coach at Very.

Gabe Weaver: [00:00:14] And I'm Gabe Weaver I'm the chief product officer at Very

Bob Payne: [00:00:17] Excellent. So you guys are here talking about why agile might not be the silver bullet everybody everybody's been making it out to be. And you also do Holacracy at Very so I'm excited about both of those things. I like to blow stuff up and I love you know experimenting with self managing teams and strategies. So those are a couple of things I'd like to talk about. So what sucks about agile?

Gabe Weaver: [00:00:51] I don't think it's necessarily that it sucks. I think companies suck.

Dan Fish: [00:00:58] Honestly it's very subtle , Gabe.

Gabe Weaver: [00:01:00] Yeah. No but but really if you look at some of the some of the data that's coming out stated the agile from today's seventeen's survey is a 4 percent in the company's report that it's not actually enabling them to have more market agility to respond to changing market conditions adapt and really move more quickly in business. So if you start to like peel back the young into why that is it goes pretty deep but I think a lot of it goes back to the construct of how we structure organizations

Dan Fish: [00:01:31] Yeah. And I'd say it's sometimes too much of a silver bullet or a you know it's like a salve you can sprinkle and everything will kind of go away. And the work really comes in after you've put some of these processes or or roles in place you know where do you go from there and how do you solve the organizational impediments that are there. That's the hard work and that's the real I think substance behind this sort of movement of responding to change and empowerment and bottom up stuff. How do you how do you actually make that happen particularly at large organizations that are used to top down management or centralized decision making and yearly budgets. Those are the hard problems to solve.

Bob Payne: [00:02:10] Yeah.

Dan Fish: [00:02:11] Rather than just you know what's you know a sort of a small scope problems that are just affecting one team. I think we've kind of seen them seeing that and solve that in a lot of ways that they are not. Not completely but it's you know how do you change the organization. How do you change the mindset and the culture and culture gets undervalued a lot

Bob Payne: [00:02:29] Yeah. So culture gets undervalued. A lot of talk a lot of talk about culture but not a lot of work and culture is fundamentally hard work. You know the old adage that culture eats strategy for lunch so you know if you want to create an agile environment that the current culture in the organization is going to resist resist those changes even if there are changes for the good. So I think the culture gets absolutely undervalued and the agile practices get overvalued. I

Bob Payne: [00:03:12] Absolutely.

Bob Payne: [00:03:14] I mean I get a rash when people .. I get a lot of rashes.

Dan Fish: [00:03:20] Sounds like a personal problem.

Bob Payne: [00:03:20] It really is. I should care less. That would be easier. But you know I see people talking about you know the scrum rituals and like these are their meetings they're not rituals there's nothing.

Bob Payne: [00:03:34] You know if if if Taiichi Ohno came back to life and saw that Toyota was using the same processes that they that he and Demming came up with. You know 75 years ago he would freak.. He would freak out, he's like you you do not understand what we were going for there because the practices and processes are subordinate you know to getting stuff done creating value for our customers following work flowing value through the system. I mean the practices are just- they need to change and evolve then people were they put agile in here. They codify it make it a little precious little thing and then they don't change the intake to the three year strategic plan. One year funding competitors come out with new stuff. Well we're on the strategic plan will react to that in three years.

Gabe Weaver: [00:04:33] Yeah I don't even ant to get started on scrum and my disdain for it. But I think what's really interesting is that most companies treat is a way to gain efficiency. So but really what it is in the heart of it of where the Agile Manifesto came from was enabling people to...

Next Episode

Carlos Rojas - Lean+Agile DC 2018

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 ...