DevOps Insights & Value Stream – Bob Davis, Plutora

This is Textron TV. But the great pleasure being joined by Bob Davis Bob is CMO with flutora. Welcome, Bob.

It's great to be here Mitch. I appreciate the opportunity to chat. It should have a lot of fun here.

Always always love talking with you. So for folks who may not know you may not have heard of Futura. Tell us about yourself and your background a little bit about Victoria.

Sure. I'm a long time start up guy. I've been involved in building startups is my 10th one and join Futura about five years ago and really went on the Journey of of digital transformation of looking at what it takes to get better and release better software and I increasingly increasingly complex environment and that's where we're plutora really started something like 10 years ago.

I joined five years ago and and we then kind of evolved with the market as a part of the value stream management space. So as as that started to evolve and and crystallize we became an early member there and I've been fortunate enough to be involved in that as well as the value stream management Consortium where Torah is a founding member. So we're heavily involved in digital transformation value stream management as a part of that and so forth.

So it's been quite a journey. Well, you know, it's to me I'm not gonna describe the official definition of value stream management. But to me, it's about connecting the dots and making sure that the dots are lining up with as frictionless as possible to get the right outcomes.

I you put it put a nickel in here. Hopefully get a dollar worth of value out of the other end that you can go to market with to be absolutely out of that's kind of like I'm always using that as my test to like, okay, are we on track are we getting should get and how do we know that's the value stream? Yeah, my perspective is colored by my my history and networking and network management where you know, not long ago.

I don't know a decade or two ago. We would it was all about heterogeneous management, you know, the notion of managing multiple different kinds of things that are in your network and and so forth and guys through management has a similar approach of being the ability to manage a heterogeneous development environment. We're heterogeneity is describe.

Not just a multiple tools. And multiple steps in the process design tests that sort of thing but multiple methodologies and multiple processes. So it's a complicated thing and buying stream management seeks to connect the dots as you say and then provide the visibility to see what comes out the other end and hopefully that's valuable in the customer.

Well, we be nice if we had one, you know workflow stream happening through our development process, but they're literally dozens maybe hundreds in some cases and they do it overlap and interconnect, right? You know, I need some changes in the Legacy system for their new mobile app and push right whatever. That's right.

And that's very typical. That's very typical of what we see. We're not when we go to market.

We don't sell to people. I mean we would cheerfully but we don't typically need to sell to people that are you know, you know a software company that started you know and designed their development. There's tool chains around, you know, a common theme and everything is is nice and buttoned up and and they know how to do it, you know, they started from scratch that way, you know, you look at your Googles and your spotifys and what have you and and that's a story success, you know component.

That's not how that's not the reality of what we see what we see is it's messy, you know, these come the companies we sell to the you know, Global 2000 would be a good, you know category to think about you know their legacy. They've been around a long time hundreds of years and some in some cases and it's it's fascinating to see them struggle with trying to get control of that estate so that they can keep up with the digital transformation that is Necessary to compete these days and that's the struggle that we see when we go to market both from a vendor point of view, but also a Consortium point of view where from that angle it's more of an industry resource. So we get a lot of questions and I see a lot of people coming into that asking those very questions.

How do I start? You know, it's very complicated for them. It's not like devops where we kind of know cicd is sort of really good place to start right?

Because it all builds around that that process or at least to some degree not so in value stream management well, Tell us a little bit about I mean you're living eating breathing, you know advisory management every day. So you're immersed in in the industry and what's happening look to get kind of your your readout of where we are and you mentioned kind of where to start is one of the big challenges folks have anyway what maybe some of those other side challenges are sure you know, I think the industry has become much better known, you know Valley Stream management is a concept is is now, you know, a part of the dialogue that you that you see when you go to trade shows conferences, you know, look webinars look online though, the vendor landscape, um has you know gone up significantly, I you know double tripled in terms of that and people on the peripheral, you know, you know doing guys through management stuff, you know, and and leveraging that it's the good news is that there does seem to be a real almost a gold rush to Understanding this because there's promise in them their Hills kind of thing. I mean, it looks good.

I can see it. The promise is almost Nirvana. So there's there's that the flip side is it's gotten very noisy.

And it's gotten you know there that there's campfires that burn that you know, no, this is the right approach. No, this is the right approach and that's normal stuff. I don't think that that's a sign of anything unhealthy but it is a complication when it comes to you know, an IT professional trying to understand how to get started in their messy environment where they've got multiple different processes from old style waterfall to the most up-to-date things.

We talk to one of 3200 applications. Some of those are built with a hundred and fifty or more microservices and they're and they're in the independent and dependency links to Waterfall applications that are housing highly secure data. And how do I evolve those things and people man?

I just don't get it and and oh, there's a promise here. But it's complicated because it's not just about buying a tool. And that's one of the things when devops started, you know it there's a lot of history and I'm oversimplifying of course, but at some point it was certainly true that it was a rust automation.

It was like I want to automate deploy. I want to automate release. I want to automate this and those had real quick gains.

And they and it was you know, so I was able to have sex start small by having a tool mainstream management isn't about a tool. It's about actually understanding all the tools. And and putting them all together and getting a view of of the broader picture and that's what makes it hard to start with because I'm touching so many different things.

So that's the struggle there's how do I get started? And we see that a lot and that's what people are coming to us for because there's problems with process. How do I evolve my processes so that they can conform or lend themselves to a more successful delivery of value to the customer.

How do I set up my workflows so that I am not waiting for things so that things are are moving smoothly not just within a workflow but across workflows where I don't have the visibility. How do I do that? And how do I do those things without meeting every morning for an hour talking to the people that have peace?

It's a complicated process and then the big problem we're seeing is the leadership, you know, the there isn't There's no solution call it what you will all little letters. No acronyms. No product names no platform names, but the solution to solving the problem of being stuck in my digital transformation.

There's nothing in the budget. That deals with that. And the value stream management is one of those things there isn't anything so that means I've got approved of value.

to my leadership and that's right. Now that's a problem leadership over multiple silos. So I've got to be high enough to where I get budget control and and I've got cultural differences.

You know, the Ops guys might be very into you know particular vendor like servicenow. And the agile guys might equally be into a particular vendor like digital AI with agility or jira. And both of those companies have views on how this should be done.

What do I do? How do I manage that? That's complicated and that's what we're seeing and people are going okay.

I got it. I understand the value. long term But now I've got to justify it and now I've got to implement it and it's a cultural financial budget process nightmare.

That's what people are seeing. So it's slow so we saw in the Valley Stream management Consortium research that only last year only about five percent of the company surveyed had actually done anything with ice cream management at all. It's up to about 20% but a lot of that's pilots and small teams.

So it's still and it's early stages really stage. Yeah. You know some of these problems are why?

Yeah, having lived in in some large corporate environments not all my career, but some my career it you know, it isn't either or it's all the above. Right? We have all those tools and more we use all of them at the same time required three companies and they use three other things, right?

So a lot of times it's just knowing what you're what you have and that that knowing what you have is it's always been a moving Target now. It's a running Target right? It's it's moving it.

I mean, it's getting ready to move it bullet speed here pretty quick because it just it's flat out changing every day everywhere. You can't stop it to measure it any one point time. I'm wondering as you as you maybe there's something in the day to that might be about You know and sticking my digital transformation in the quality world, you don't run off and solve every bottleneck, right?

There's methods of figured out which bottleneck this off right and you know, usually you focus on the biggest bottleneck, but but it may not be the right one because that night might make a difference where they're gonna ship a quality product. I imagine there's somewhat of a process like that to help people figure out so I got six problems on my digital transformation. Which one do I go work first and how can I use volume stream management to do that?

Right? That's absolutely the that's the entreated the discussion of you know, what do I do first? And I think that the, you know the conventional wisdom.

I think the best practice on that is is this concept of value stream mapping. And you know, it's it's you know, which which is predicated on the fact that you haven't you've identified and understand your value stream. So really it boils down to you know, the beginning of this is you do it do can you identify your value streams?

Just even one just like a value stream and a value stream is anything is is the delivery of a product or service and everything that associated with that from the development of testing the law, you know sres and the production side. I mean everything that's involved. And a value stream mapping exercise is not a new thing.

It's been around for really decades in the as we all know on the manufacturing side, but it allows you to go through and look at how the idea flows through the software Factory out to the customer where things are getting touch. Oh, I didn't know we had to go to get the the change, you know, Advisory Board, you know approval. Oh, that's new.

So now I'm waiting two weeks. Everything's done. I'm waiting two weeks, you know, these kinds of things understand all that and once that's done you get a sense of where the bottlenecks are.

There's a I'm sorry, go ahead. No I was It well, I mean and well, I was gonna just say once you see the bottlenecks. I've got to do two things.

First of all, I want to pick the ones that'll matter. You know, the big bottlenecks a good place to start. But I also want to pick a bottle neck that I have.

control over Mm-hmm. So I expected that I can actually do it. If I if I find them there's going to be bottlenecks in that value stream some of which are are bringing into play multiple organizations, maybe a security team.

Maybe I mean, you know and and getting that Organization for lack of better work fixed so that it's efficient. Whatever that means that is fairly daunting. I mean, there's a lot of organizations and if you're doing it with a shared service like security the implications on other teams using that service would be there.

So you're biting off a pretty big project. But if you have a relief management project within your purview where you can do things like simplify the allocation of testing resources, so that I'm no longer waiting for those that's a fairly pragmatic requirement that I might have complete control over so I can start to adopt that. I can see that it's a part of a bottleneck that is material to the efficiency of my value stream.

I have the ability from a organizational reach perspective from a budgetary control perspective to implement such a thing. I can do it against the backdrop of the Strategic plan, which I understood when I saw the value stream and I can start to just to provide valuable insight to my leadership on what is actually improving. And that will give me the kind of wind in my sales to attack broader problems because I've been able to show success and that's really key because if I stream management is about value but it's so often the promise of ice dream management is the value to the customer the acceptance and approval of the history management and organization is about the value to the organization.

And not and those are not always in lockstep and that if I can simplify that by making that all part of a domain I have you know, you know influence over my life is more simple I can show value and I can start to prove out the efficiencies to the organization. Well demonstrating the promise of the value to the customer and if I can do that I can get through the leadership challenges and that's like a full 25% of the respondents. We talked to said that's what's holding them back.

Um, and so it's it's like it's a good thing. So, you know, that's that's kind of where it's at. So if you're starting small, but not just because you want to be small you want to be small.

in so you can influence it and also show the material in um benefit to the overall efficiency of the value stream and one of the things when you're Changing a culture you're inducing a new way of thinking or new way of doing something. I've learned the hard way by doing it the wrong way and I realize that Ben grantually learned that the right way oftentimes. It's not picking the right problem.

It's picking, you know problem that you can succeed at it's it's enough size that it's right matters, but it's not so big we don't have to solve the big hairy problem that's hanging out there. But you're really are teaching yourself in the organization how to do this and start to recognize patterns. Just like we think about software patterns right to Singleton pattern.

If a design pattern, right, you'll start see those things. This is very we've seen this before it maybe have its own tweaks and variations. But yeah that you're building confidence in the team.

They're building confidence and themselves really is what's important that okay. I'm starting to get this and as opposed to failing three times giving up, right. That's never a great solution.

That's right. I mean failing can be great. But I mean you we need you need to move forward you need to get you know, you need to demonstrate that success.

I think that's that's so critical and you know, that's you know, that's the benefit devops had because you know, and you know cicd elegant container or get micro service orchestrated cicds pipelines are a new thing there was you know, what it used to be. Let's just deploy automatically, you know, and we'll get that done and it's like great. So it's it's we forget that we went through a lot of those steps with some simple wins on some important components of the cicd pipeline.

Let's extend that out because now it's best your management. It's actually reaching out beyond the development side. You know when I started in devops the solution was if you're in Jenkins and you start using get your devops, okay good, right.

Yeah things have evolved a lot from there. Okay. Yeah, and you know, that's part of the thing is that people for the last, you know, Well for the last 12 years or so, they've been involving on devops and just prior to that.

It was all the changes associated with agile and the agile approach and and so there's been a lot of change a lot of tools and a lot of introduction of of standards and platforms and specifications. A lot of that's happening. Now, we have another one to try to you know, knit it all together and we do see it.

There's another thing which is just fatigue. Mmm, you know people yet another change program. It's like, you know, let's pump the brakes here.

We need to figure that. That's another reason why I've got to be able to show value. There's nobody's gonna snub their nose at Value, you know, like show it and and being able to tie short-term efficiency gains.

Because everybody wants it cheaper every CIO in the world as a remit to drop the prices. They're budget by 10% or so every year so I gotta have a efficient but I've got a, you know get to the promise of the other end if I can do both and that's the promise here then it's awesome. But it's hard.

It's a People don't believe it just off the surface. They want to see it, you know it's and and that proving in the value even case studies, you know, as a marketing person case studies used to be the bomb everybody little case study. Oh great, you know not so much anymore.

It's it's the encouraging people like it. But no your mileage may vary. I want to see what it looks like in my environment.

So you got to be able to get to that value piece pretty quickly or people get you know, you you sit in a POC for three months by the end of the three months. They forgot why they did in the first place. I mean, it's like they've moved on.

Things are you know, it needs to be happening. So you need that Cadence and Valley Stream management. When you when you watch a real high level webinar, it's such a big nut to crack.

It's it's very daunting and that's what I'm trying to see here is how do we make that big nut to crack approachable? Well, which made me think of I'm glad you mentioned webinar littora has a webinar. I think it's on October 26th.

Yes, and you've asked me to join him happy to do that. I'm looking forward to that way that to join you at that webinar. And I think what you've honed in on around this, how do I get started?

Where do I get start seems like if you're going to answer a question. That's the first one you've got to answer and that answer. So it sounds like I think that's something we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about and I just conceptually but really kind of digging into it so you can walk away and second now, you know how to decide where I'm gonna gonna go work.

Yeah. It's a complicated. That's right.

That's exactly right. It's a complicated question. I think there's a lot of pieces to it and if we get it, you know, get some interactive questions, you know, so it can be about culture.

It can be about leadership. It can be about tools and technology and be about process Evolution. It can be about so many different things and one of the areas one of the very first things when people say where do I start?

It's like start Where You Are Hmm, you don't have to start somewhere else start where you are. If you're not real mature in devops, that's okay. You can still get started.

There's ways to get started. In fact, there's benefits in getting started. If you if you have that kind of more of a green field than a Brownfield.

So, I mean, it's like start Where You Are and and depending on where you are the recipe might be a little different. So how do I recognize that? How do I approach that?

These are all things that we can explore with with a good interactive session. Excellent. Excellent.

Well, I'll put the link for the webinar on the 26 into our description. So when this video goes up folks can go check it out or even after it great and and be part of the conversation because it will be conversational. That's how we like to do those things.

Any parting thoughts here. Bob was we get ready maybe that is sort of our next thing that we can help folks with and also be sure to tell them where they can find out more about plutora. Yeah, that's where I was going to go.

I mean, I think that there's there's two things. First of all putorra. com.

We have lots of information up there. In fact, one of the things we offer is there's a cicd tools Universal. We have little write-ups on pretty much every tool you could conceive of in the cicd world just just to kind of poke around and see what's there.

So there's a lot of resource to get you know development information. org and up there. You have a lot of information on on you know how to get started.

There's research. There's a lot of what is value stream management anyway kind of material. So so there's lots of stuff and I don't know if anybody can is happening to be at the devops Enterprise Summit and in Vegas and a couple weeks the there will be a day conference ahead of that as well as during the show with the vice management Consortium called floatopia, which is a little gathering of some of the Influencers in the in the Valley Stream management World consultant Spenders, what have you so there's a lot of places to poke around we could with this kind of information.

We hope to give you more of a guide on how to how to maneuver through that wealth of information. So there's your resources of both those so well fantastic Bob Davis CMO with plutora great talking with you and look forward to doing it again. Great talking to you Mitch.

We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye.