EP 284: Software Delivery Leadership Forum & DevOps World 2020, CloudBees

com, and you're listening to another DevOps chat podcast. Today I'm joined by Sam Fell, area vice president, enterprise marketing at Cloud Bees. And we're talking about actually a separate interest of interest to both of us.

It's the new software delivery leadership forum and we'll get into that. Welcome to DevOps chat, Sam. Thank you, Mitch.

Pleasure to be here, as always, great speaking with you. Absolutely. I always enjoy talking with you.

For folks that don't know you, I know you've been in the industry around DevOps for a while. So a lot of folks know you're calling me old. Is that it?

I didn't say that. I've got the gray hair. You're still.

Just introduce yourself for folks that may not know you. All right. Wonderful.

So I am Sam Fell. I am Vice president at CloudBees Where I've been for the past year, we were acquired in as part of the electric cloud acquisition where I ran marketing at electric cloud. A lot of folks, know electric cloud probably knew that as well as Cloudbees, of course.

How long ago did that acquisition happen? That was literally a year ago in May. So we are this a year really just coming up on a year.

So all the exciting stuff was happening, all that stuff that made me lose my hair and all all that was happening right now. And we were just so thrilled with the outcome to be, you know, the company, the electric cloud was we had a pretty nice name in the space. But when you look at Cloudbees and you look at the community that they've created and you look at the access to the brains that they have, it's a tremendous opportunity.

Were you know, obviously I'm really excited to be able to be here and I'm excited about sharing this journey with Accelerated Strategies Group. Right. Thank you.

I'm excited about that, too. Cloudbees is a great organization and as was Electric Cloud. So.

So let's get into the. We made it announcements are actually you you did a press release about the software delivery leadership forum and there's a connection to DevOps world and some other things. May we start with that and then we can talk about accelerated strategies, involvement in it.

Lovely. Awesome. OK.

So, you know, we've been running probably people would say the most successful DevOps conference for years now. DevOps world, Jenkins' world. Almost two thousand people show up to learn more about what's happening in the space.

There's hands on practitioner based workshops and training for people to really get their hands on and get them dirty about how to implement these changes that have to happen as your digitally transforming your organization. One of the things that we took a step back and we were thinking about is what we don't really have is a place for the leadership to be able to participate. And, you know, we've done leadership seminars and workshops before, but we've never said that DevOps world needs to be a place where not only the practitioners are coming, but where the leaders are coming to learn, not the practitioner level information, but how to lead the practitioners.

What are the prod with a process is one of the the methods that people are learning and using and trying and failing with and learning from. And so we thought we would add that to the program. And as we were thinking about adding it to the program, we also thought because of the way that the DevOps World Jenkins' World Show has evolved, I as a as a vendor looked back at DevOps Bill Jenkins world.

And I was always very willing to sponsor that event when I was at Electric Cloud because it was an open event. There was not a ton of bias towards cloud these products necessarily. It was really about the community and it was about educating people.

And so in that same spirit, when we were thinking about how do we make sure that there are some objective independence in the way that we're putting out the ideas around, how do you need? How do you lead this transformation? How do you make sure that your teams are all on the same page?

We felt that it was really helpful to have a third party. Help us with that programing. And so that's, of course, this is KUB to accelerate the strategies.

This is why we sort of reached out to you. There's obviously great synergy between the work that we're doing. And we thought, who better to help us craft this program?

Can the programing for this conference than the five people over accelerate strategies? So that's pretty much where we're going. And then you and I have had lots of conversations about what that software delivery leadership forum should look like at the event.

And so maybe I would pitch it back to you and you could talk a little bit about what we're thinking about for DevOps World Software Delivery Leadership Forum. Absolutely. And thanks so much.

We appreciate you approaching us. And it was exciting to work with you on on this. And I agree.

Know DevOps world. Yes. This cloud is behind it, jenkins' world.

But the community that you've talked about really elevates it above any one vendor to use that word. And just the fact that electric cloud, you know, Wood and many others would sponsor a conference that's put on a whole petition. The competitors were there unhappy about it because the audience is the right audience.

These are the people that are in the weeds making it happen with their fingers. Now, what we're saying is, hey, these people are there in the weeds that are using their fingers. They need other people to help on the time to support and pave the road for him.

And so and I would imagine, too, that, you know, one of the drivers behind leadership as a topic is his organization scale tried to do DevOps on more than two or three or four independent projects. That's when you get into the heavy lifting. That's when you've got to have management support.

And now I see I know you do, too. Leaders are reaching out and trying to find resources for themselves, educate themselves. Lessons learned, pitfalls, community that they can be part of, as well as the technical folks.

Part of their community, and that's in large part from what we've talked to why? To go after this software delivery leadership forum. That's right.

Exactly. What do you want to talk a little bit about what the proposed format would be at the leadership forum. Wonderful.

Yeah, I'm happy to. We have some research that we're gonna be launching and talking about at around software delivery that we'll be discussing and presenting some of the findings from. But the main point of how we've crafted this to be, it's a parallel track.

It's not a separate venues, separate place. P. director, software leader kind of role.

But it's also product leaders as well as transformational leaders. And those are the folks that we really would like to attract to attend to this, because that's that combination is always what needs to come together to achieve some business strategy, a disruptive strategy, a product delivery, some kind of financial effect that we're trying to have on the organization. So that's it's a track of about twenty two different sessions.

But we're gonna have a number of things. They'll be highly interactive. So we're going to have some panels with some audience participation, kind of open forum for questions and answers with different experts.

And we'll have people that, yes, there'll be some folks who are product company. There'll be folks who are analysts like from Accelerated. But not only Accelerated will have other other analysts there.

And then we'd like to have as many practitioner as a business role, technical leadership role as well to get that perspective and plan some workshop and some things like that. So, you know, my goal is I don't want everybody to take three things away from this conference. Whatever those three things are, come back to work to your company, to your team, to your organizations that, you know, I picked up some really good stuff.

This one, I had no idea somebody was facing the same issue and they actually solved it away. I was thinking about it, validated our thinking or, you know, threw it out the wall, out the window. And we've got a whole nother approach.

But I'm sure glad I didn't I didn't march down that time. Death March. Failing fast is winning.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

So the call for presentations is open right now. Yeah, I can go to DevOps world dot com and there's a button there that is a call for presentations. So I'd information love to have folks and we are reviewing submissions actively right now.

So it's good they're getting out from that release. We're getting quite a few submissions, which is really nice. There's some suggestions around some of the topics that we're looking to have people talk about governance, security.

Those are big topics. So, yeah, definitely interesting to get people's perspectives and to see what they have to say. We're excited about that.

It is so full disclosure, we both have an interest in in this and participating. But it's good to be on with you to talk about it. Yeah, for sure.

You know, I'm curious, too, because you're doing this. Well, let me ask you, why did you decide to name it the Software Delivery Leadership Forum? Because I know we went around a couple names.

Couple of ideas. Yeah. So.

Well, when you think about the the work that the fine people are doing, whether they're doing it from a DevOps perspective or they're just in dev or they're just an ops or they're part of the executive team who's not part of development or operations, but they have a vested interest in development and operations getting their stuff done right. Every it is is such a hackneyed expression. It's very overused.

But every business is a software business. And now in this age we find ourselves in the digital connection with your customers is more important than anyone and ever. And so there are other people beyond just Devin Ops.

And so originally it was going to be the DevOps Leadership Forum. But it's really we think it's more about that delivering that software or delivering those services that are foundationally built on top of software. And you can call it whatever you want.

But down at the down to the base layer, somebody is written code. Somebody built that code. Somebody had to deploy it to a server so that people can get any value from it.

And so the software delivery lifecycle, the SDLC is something that we think a lot about in the SDL F, like the Software Delivery Leadership Forum, because the SDLC is still alive, it's still kicking and application lifecycle management matters even in the age of DevOps. And so we thought that this would be an appropriate name for what we are trying to put together with you is a place for people, a community to come together that's built on the community that we already have all these practitioners who already understand. How a lot of this stuff works, but now they're just looking for some guidance and some, hey, I don't want to go down that road again because that guy already failed.

Right. Failing fast and learning from it is not a failure. Exactly.

There's some maturing that happens in the technical community. I'm confident we can build that with the business product and technology leadership. It's interesting.

We're in the midst of maybe we're in the still in the early part of this, I don't know, the whole coalbed, 19 and being in lockdown. And of course, there's the health and, you know, come to some case. You've been losing people that we know in our family or friends.

So in all due respect to that, you know, I've talked some things I've talked about on another venue, which is a text run. TV is it's interesting to see this. Graduation's on that launch by the well.

Thank thank you. It's a lot of fun to do. Yeah.

It's a lot of fun to do some great content down there. Yeah. Textron dot TV.

Yes. Two to four hours a day. Monday through Friday.

So keep you company. I call it the view for technology people. Very nice.

So it is even in this situation, you know, we're locked down, right? We're brigs working from home. Most people are.

I've noted restaurants have all gone to delivery. They've gone to curbside during delivery. Even restaurants around here now started to come up with new offerings to essentially take home packaged meals, kind of like you would have thought from one of those box delivery services.

And even places like Best Buy has curbside delivery. I had to build a computer in the the delays of shipping something from a manufacturer so long, you know, and that they had to change their apps. They they rebuilt their app or added to their app and their Web notifications to have a button to push to say, Sam, in the parking lot.

And I'm in a white this car and here I am. And by the way, here's my QR code or scan code and or not be validated. Exactly.

And that that happened in weeks. That wasn't you know, that's a few weeks that those two examples, you know, happened. Now, think of like minds away commerce finds a way.

Maybe that's. It does. It does.

And kudos to those folks and many others who were looking for maybe we didn't disrupt it, but disruptive business strategy. Yeah. Was a transponder.

Yeah. They need to respond. Life finds a way.

I love it. DevOps finds a way. It'll be interesting, I think.

You know, given the timeframe, the dates are September 21st, the 24th in Las Vegas. And, you know, we'll have several months behind this. Hopefully not too bad, but several months of experience.

I bet there is going to be a lot of stories, many stories of folks who have reacted and responded. In some sense, that's the same age. Right, exactly.

On that change. So talk about a good test. Well, not good.

Talk about a test situation for the flexibility and agility of our businesses. Yeah. This is the crucible that's still right here.

And so one of the other things that we're doing and Mitch, you're part of this as well, is that we're so excited about the software delivery leadership forum that we actually don't want to wait for the September event to get started. And so what we're actually doing is we're creating an online virtual series of software delivery leadership forums with our first one coming up at the end of this month in April. On episode one of this series is going to be on upskilling.

It's on adapting humans at the speed of DevOps. And we're going to be joined by our friend, Jane Groll, our mutual friend Jane Groll, and Evan Orleck, who's for health, our mutual friend, and Wright and other analysts with the accelerated team with you over Reija Strategies. Right.

And so and we'll be joined even further after they've given their little talk about the survey results. And we're actually going to get an interesting cut of data for the European because we're doing two versions of that event. One for the US time zone friendly and one for a media timezone friendly.

And so for the EMEA one, there's going to be a different kind of the data that's going to be much more focused on that geography, which we're really excited about. But we're having a whole bunch of other folks join us as well to be able to have that conversation because we're really wanting to try and create, again, a community where there's interaction between the attendees and the folks who are on the webinar or on this virtual event, because so many events, people parade out, folks that are saying here's how is successful and then maybe you get five or 10 minutes at the end for questions and answers. And so we're kind of going to flip that on its head.

And we're gonna have 30 minutes upfront for the software delivery leadership forum. Thirty minutes. Front for Jane and everyone to go through their findings, to talk as subject matter experts about this topic that they certainly know a lot about.

And at that point, we're going to introduce a couple of other panelists to join us on camera and start fielding questions directly from the audience. And so the folks who are going to be joining us this time around. R.

here at Cloudberries. So one who better than a person who's in a jar to talk about what what's. That's an interesting perspective.

What's unique about that from skills and training of their people? Robert Reeves was the CTO data. All right.

So how is a technical person who needs to hire technical people? What is that like? What kind of people are you looking for?

What skills do you find deficient? What skills you find lacking that you'd like to see? Of course, you're joining us.

And so really, really excited about that. And then over in Europe, we've got a couple of other people joining as well. Evolution or like we'll be on that one, as well as Cheryl Rozelle, who is over at, I think, Polycom right now.

And she used to be at eight and see, not a customer, I think, anymore, but she was a customer and she definitely has an opinion about this. So we're really looking for people with different perspectives to have a conversation. I'm going to be on there.

You're going to be on there. I'll be moderating. I'm going to be looking at the chat window the entire time.

All the panelists will be able to respond to the questions that are posed in the chat. There's going to be a mechanism for people to vote the different answers up or down. Which is pretty cool.

And my role is really going to just be to to interject and and speak on behalf of the people on the chat and say, hey, Bill brings up a good point. Hey, Debbie just brought up a really good point. She disagrees with you.

He thinks that that is wrong. Whatever. I'm going to try and be a conduit to make sure that the audience feels like they're part of that conversation so we can have 30 minutes of upfront.

Let's set the table subject matter expert speaking stuff and then we can have an hour of live Q&A. As long as that audience has questions, we're going to try our. That's that's great.

That's fantastic. It's, you know, communities in some way starts with conversation. That's what draws people in and of what's happening.

What are those folks talking about? What is that? Oh, I have a question.

I have a thought. And I'm sure we'll get some opinions coming in on those questions. Sometimes their thoughts are written that way that, hey, don't you think this is true and stuff the way you said it is.

Actually, it's some of that challenge, as well as seeking information that helps advance it for all of us. And, you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat, if you will. I was on a crowd chat with DevOps Institute, I think it was about a week ago.

And we had folks from all over the world chiming in and giving there with some prompts that we were asked. And it's fantastic to see people, like you said, to challenge the status quo, to give their opinion of what's worked for them, to understand, because that, you know, you get an understanding of how some people's situations are just different. And, you know, there is no best practice.

I think Men Wealth is Abla and Mathew Skelton. They talk about this all time. There's no best practice.

There are just lots of good practices that kind of apply for various different apply to different areas. But you can't just say that there's one best practice. So we're kind of a variation of the best practice theme.

I just ask you, your new one of us can predict the future. You know that accurately. But what are your thoughts about this virtual event?

Virtual conferences. Is that something you think will stay with us in a meaningful form post covered in whatever. How we're working all that environment?

I do. I do. You know, See-Saw Riley has canceled all of their physical conferences.

And so regardless of what ends up happening, I think the same way that the businesses like Best Buy and the other folks that you talked about are transitioning and they're shifting. I mean, I'm seeing this week, I'm starting to see all the activities that my children were involved in are now they're finally acquiescing and saying, OK, we're transitioning. Now, here's the zoom link for you to join for the you know, for the kung fu class.

And you're just going to do it in your living room. But you have to still wear all of your things and you still have to show up and be polite. And so they're also transitioning and businesses are transitioning.

They're learning how to work more remote. I'm very lucky to be working at a company that's ninety nine, 90 percent remote already. So it's not a huge change for us.

But it is a huge change for the folks that are working remotely at my company who have now children at home. And so education is going to be impacted. I'm talking with Charlie Bhatt's, who's an analyst over Forestry's a teenager versus St.

Paul or St. Thomas. Excuse me.

And he's talking he and I talk all time about how is it how is education going to be impacted by this? What are you know, as a parent, I'm sitting at home and I'm working, but my children are here. They should be doing some school things, but it's very hard for me to keep up with that and keep track of it.

And it's I think it's hard for a lot of the educators because they haven't had the experience and the virtual meeting space that we've all been sort of used to for a while. And so I think there's a lot of learning that needs to come out of this. But I.

I see. And one of things that Charlie says is when people have no jobs, they can do a couple of different things. But one of the things a lot of people do is they go back to school.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you give people viable options to educate themselves and make themselves again. All about the upskilling conversation that we were just having.

How do we enable these people to be able to make sure that they're going to stay relevant? And how do we help them get jobs for the folks that are right now that they don't have a job because they're forced to be in an office that's closed? So I think that there will be quite a bit of focus on how do we educate at a distance?

How do we make the collaboration work better? And I think I think it's happening already, naturally. People are getting more accustomed to being on video calls.

Right. People who used to never want to be on a video call on others flipping on their video because it's like, you know what? We're all in this together.

And one of the things that I really appreciate before we started scheduling this, I ran around everyone in my house. They said, hey, guys, please don't scream for the next 30 minutes cause I'm gonna be recording something. But the fact is, is that I'm on meetings with people and, you know, my kids and my wife will walk by and we'll speak and.

And now it's it used to be where I was embarrassed by that because it was an intrusion into my workday. And sort of the mind shift that I think is happening is that now what's happened is that I'm allowing work into my home. I mean, you're entering into other people's home at the same time.

I'm also entering into this fall. But I think there's a much more understanding and much more I'm more comfortable anyways with there being life happening outside of me. It's like the classic BBC video, a girl, literally two year old girl who runs in the room.

He was he was like appalled that that would happen. And now if that happened, hopefully he wouldn't be right. So my whole life as an audience is into its life.

Right. And hopefully as a humanity, we're getting better about that. T.

T. preparedness survey back in February, and things happened so fast that just the traditional survey couldn't keep up with the changes that are happening with work at home and how and how this is evolved. So we've also launched a flash poll survey, and I'll be talking about it on tech strong TV this week.

But one of the the initial ones before we announced this flash poll, then one of the initial ones is what is the most or the most critical? You only got one choice between kinds of services that you use to support your work at home staff. It is email, collaboration services, meeting, file sharing, phone, all kinds of things.

Which ones had to degradations, you know. Yeah. And it's surprisingly collaboration and online meeting services were equal.

Those are the top two within one percent of the top two. Worst performing. No.

This is a of our most critical to my business. Critical, OK. Supporting it.

We're going to do another survey on what have you had issues with. That's actually launched this week. I just and I just saw that one.

So thirty seven and thirty six percent, I think online meetings with 37. So an email was like 20. So that tells me people have already made the shift into slack and Microsoft teams and hang out and Google and whatever other forms they have for their corporate chat.

So I think that skill of collaborating that way is something that will be a natural outcome of the situation we're in. Yeah, I think so. I mean, as hard times force people to think differently and we're a very resilient species.

We've been around for a while and we'll figure this out. But it's it's terrible to have to go through it. It is.

It is. We just hope everybody gets through OK. Yeah, that's what we're open for.

Well, Sam, it's great pleasure. What a fun. Always to talk with you.

Thanks for being on the podcast and for joining us today. Sharing and also sharing with Accelerated Strategies, the Software Delivery Leadership Forum. Excited to do all of those events with you and take that dialog to the next level and bring and really build the community among the leadership side.

Me too. Wonderful. Thank you, Mitch.

I appreciate your invitation and stay safe. You bet. So, you've listened to another DevOps chat podcast.

This is Mitch Ashley. Thank you, everyone.