Throw back to one of our favorites, in case you missed it!
Steve is obsessed with making tech human and leveraging it to deliver continuous value. For the past 20 years, his focus has been on using mapping techniques to guide ambitious and struggling teams towards their true north. He's a former startup CTO, agency consultant, systems and release engineer, finance IT manager, tech support phone jockey, and pizza maker. All focused on the flow of value, all the time.
In this episode we cover:
Agile and mindsets
Importance of flow in life and in business
Value stream mapping
DevOps
Entrepreneurship
Capability mapping
and much more...
To connect with Steve:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/devopsto/
Email: Steve@visible.is
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Fatimah Abbouchi (00:00):
Hi everyone and welcome back to another
episode of Agile Ideas.
I'm Fatima, ceo at AgileManagement Office, mental Health
Ambassador and your host.
This podcast is sponsored byAgile Management Office,
providing high-impact deliveryexecution in an agile era for
scaling businesses.
(00:21):
On today's episode, we'retalking to Steve Pereira.
Steve is obsessed with makingtech human and leveraging it to
deliver continuous value.
For the past 20 years, hisfocus has been on using mapping
techniques to guide ambitiousand struggling teams towards
their true north.
He's a former startup CTO,agency consultant, systems and
(00:43):
release engineer, finance ITmanager, tech support, phone
jockey and pizza maker allfocused on the flow of value all
the time.
His latest project can be foundat wwwvaluestreamlink.
Please join me in welcomingSteve Pereira to the show.
Welcome, steve to the show.
Steve Pereira (01:07):
Thank you for having me.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:08):
It's lovely to be here.
You're very welcome.
I know we had to do a littlebit of finessing to get the time
zones right, so where are youjoining us from?
Steve Pereira (01:15):
I'm in Toronto, Lovely sunny for once.
Toronto.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:19):
Beautiful, beautiful.
I've definitely got that on mybucket list.
I would love to go theresomeday.
The closest I got was when wewent to.
We went to the US.
Well, we went to Hawaii, whichwasn't, you know um the US
mainland, but we did end upgoing there and it was amazing.
But Toronto is definitely onour list, so I hope to get there
one day, um, in the near future, if COVID persists, and doesn't
(01:41):
persist, rather, and allows uspermissions to go.
So, um, maybe I'll see you inperson one day.
Fingers crossed maybe.
Steve Pereira (01:49):
Yeah, you're welcome here anytime.
You can uh, jump, jump out herefor the devops toronto meetup
or maybe devops days conferenceabsolutely that sounds amazing.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:59):
I?
Um have done some research andthere's a lot of things I want
to talk to you about and I thinkyou're going to help educate
our listeners on a few topics aswell.
But before we kick off, one ofthe things I wanted to learn a
little bit about is I read inyour submission around the fact
that you know you're so obsessedwith flow that you actually
(02:20):
used to apply it when it comesto you know, when you were at
home and basically in yourbedroom, and you said something
about your bedroom and flow, andI just want to understand that
a little bit more, and if youcould tell us the story, it
would be great.
Steve Pereira (02:33):
Yeah.
So I was kind of a strange kid,I guess.
I I mean strange and lazy atthe same time.
I hated cleaning my room, um,and I always just wanted
everything to kind of stayperfect so that I could focus on
other things, and I supposethat that's continued throughout
my life to some degree, butparticularly when I was a kid I
(02:54):
just tried a bunch of weirdexperiments to try and save time
and make my life easier.
So and when you're a kid youknow the most challenging things
in your life are like cleaningyour room right and getting to
school on time.
So that's where I spent, youknow, quite a bit of time and
attention with these experiments.
And so once I tried making mybed and sleeping on top of my
(03:17):
bed so that I didn't have tomake it in the morning.
That was not ideal, not thebest way to use a bed, obviously
, but got the job done.
So it was sort of like overrotating towards efficiency, of
like I don't have to do thisthing but at the same time, you
know, not the most pleasantsleeping experience.
Then the other thing was goingbeyond the bed to like the
(03:39):
entire room.
So if I don't touch anything inmy room.
If I don't use it, it staysclean all the time and nobody
hassles me about cleaning myroom.
So I moved into my closet for awhile and luckily I had a closet
big enough.
It was not really I mean bigenough, as it was not big enough
to live in.
It was not a room, but it waskind of a fun experiment to see.
(04:02):
Okay, well, I don't have toclean my room, it stays perfect
if I just live out of my closetfor a while.
If it works, it solves a largepercentage of the problems that
I have to deal with on a regularbasis as a kid, and I spend
more time playing and enjoyingmy life.
So, yeah, I was just a strangekid in terms of experimenting
(04:23):
with different ways of livingand, I guess, ways of working,
which is where all of my focusis these days.
Fatimah Abbouchi (04:32):
It's actually a really interesting story,
because what I take from that isa couple of key things.
Well, one, you made sure yourstakeholders were happy, which
in this case, would have beenfamily.
Two, you also started gettingused to the discomfort that
comes with.
You know entrepreneurship andprojects and delivery, so you
know you were learning that at areally early age, whether you
knew it or not, that it wouldtake you to where you are today.
Steve Pereira (04:54):
You know what?
I've never heard thatperspective before and I'm
inclined to agree with you.
I think that, yeah, I haddefinitely an enterprise mindset
from a very young age.
Fatimah Abbouchi (05:06):
Absolutely.
I remember as a very, veryyoung child, sort of in the
early years of schooling, Iremember in the backyard
creating garden cafes andselling bugs with leaves and mud
, thinking that you know it wasa store and I was trying to make
money and it was just a littlebit of a fun.
But I think, you know,sometimes you have it when
(05:26):
you're really little and youdon't realize it, but then you
obviously you spend a lot oftime to empower yourself to, you
know, play on that and actuallyexpand into where you are today
.
So, yeah, very interestingstory.
Thank you for sharing that.
Now I wanted to um help ourlisteners understand a little
bit about something that youtalk a lot about.
We talk a lot about a lot ofthings.
I've been looking at yourprofile.
(05:46):
It's very impressive.
But one of the things that youtalk a lot about is flow, and I
know we just touched on itbriefly, but could you help
describe what does flow mean forour listeners and why you're so
obsessed with it?
Steve Pereira (05:59):
Yeah, well, I think that one of the wonderful
things about flow is that itmeans different things to
different people and a differentperspective.
So if you want to zoom out tothe organization, or you know
you can zoom, you can zoom flowto whatever level.
It's one of those things that'skind of fractal in that the
same sort of principles applywhether you're looking at the
(06:20):
micro or the macro and at anystage.
So that's one of the thingsthat really captures my
attention is this idea of whatare the things that are true
whether you're zoomed all theway in or zoomed all the way out
, and flow is one of thosethings.
And really, if we're talkingabout at the macro level, you
(06:40):
can talk about the flow of valuethroughout the world, right,
and over time.
But what's probably mostrelevant to the audience is like
the flow of value throughout anorganization, from its raw
materials, like ideas andproblems to solve, and customer
opportunities and needs anddesires, all the way to
(07:04):
satisfying those desires.
So whether they are forcustomers or for the enterprise
itself or its employees, and soflow is like value.
It kind of applies to differentstakeholders and different
perspectives, in different waysand at different levels, but I
(07:26):
think that for an enterprise,what they're really trying to do
is reach this extremely highlevel of performance and then
sustain it over time, whichhistorically, has been a
humongous challenge, right?
This is why we have digitaltransformation as such a problem
throughout the world is becausewe haven't had that flow.
We haven't had that adaptationand that evolution over time of
(07:49):
flowing from.
Okay, well, this was thebusiness model of the time, when
these pieces were placed inthese positions and the world
was a certain way.
But once you unlock, differentcapabilities and new conditions
arise, you have to flow todifferent ways of working,
different ways of satisfyingyour customers.
(08:12):
And so the other major factorthat probably most people are
familiar with is personal flow,like the idea that we get into
the zone and we kind of flow,like the idea that we get into
the zone and we kind of narrowour focus to exactly what we're
working on and the rest of theworld falls away.
And that is the reason why thathappens is because all of the
(08:34):
friction goes away, right, likeall of the things that stop us
from staying focused andconsistently making progress
have been sort of removed fromthe situation, and I think that
that is something that resonateswith all of us, like hopefully,
we've all experienced it,hopefully we experience it on a
(08:56):
regular basis, because it reallyis a wonderful thing to make
progress in that way and toreally enjoy our work and
hopefully, you know, it's pairedwith a sense of clarity and a
sense of value, so that you'renot just getting in the zone and
(09:16):
flying off in the wrongdirection.
So I think when I talk aboutflow these days, I'm talking
about flow in the context ofclarity and value and pulling
all three things together,because I think that without any
one of those three, or withoutthose three together, you really
(09:38):
run the risk of not making theprogress that you hope to make
and not really reaching yourfull performance potential.
Fatimah Abbouchi (09:49):
Yeah, absolutely, and there's a lot of
research around flow.
I've read a lot of books sortof around time management and
getting into that sort of flowstate.
For some people it might be,you know, 90 minutes, others
might be three to four hours.
I find that for me, the flowstate for me is mostly
applicable on the weekends,where I don't get distracted by
emails and messages and WhatsAppand phone calls and things like
(10:11):
that.
Have you found any particularyou know techniques, very
helpful, that you couldrecommend to people to get into
that flow state?
Things like, for example, oneof the ones that I've heard
about recently is you know, putyour mobile phone in another
room as an example.
Is there anything that youwould recommend to listeners
that maybe that can help them bebetter in flow?
Steve Pereira (10:32):
yeah, I think.
Well, one thing about me is Itend to spend much more time on
the macro than the micro, sowhat I'm what I'm going to talk
about is kind of the patternsand the principles around it,
because, rather than a specific,you know you should do X.
I think that, in terms of themajor factors that affect flow
(10:58):
are things like friction andwaste and delay, and waste and
delay, and so the way that thosethings sort of manifest
themselves in individualworkflow is looking at things
that can interrupt you.
And one of the ways to discoverthat is not necessarily in the
(11:20):
moment, because usually we'retrying to do something, we get
interrupted, but then we'retrying to do something, we get
interrupted, but then we'retrying to get back to the thing
and we don't actually take thetime to say why was I
interrupted?
What is this part of a largerpattern?
And so I'm a big fan of kind ofstepping away on a regular
basis and looking at how are weworking, how am I making
(11:45):
progress on a regular basis, andwhat is the distribution of my
time right?
How often am I gettinginterrupted over the day, over
the course of the day?
There's apps that you can useto monitor that.
But you could also just use apost-it note and you know like,
mark a line for every time youget pulled out of what you're
doing it out and mark a line forevery time you get pulled out
(12:08):
of what you're doing.
Another big thing that I'm a bigfan of is blocking out time
right, so not just kind of goingwith the flow in terms of
scheduling, because if you justgo with the flow it's very hard
to measure right, and I thinkmeasurement is very key to
realizing what's happening andto understand what's happening
so that you can makeimprovements.
So things like blocking out timein your calendar, for instance,
(12:30):
is almost like a hypothesis.
It's almost like saying I willspend this time doing this thing
and when it comes time to dothat, you can then look back and
say well, I plan to spend twohours on this.
I only got 15 minutes worth ofwork done.
I actually had to move and dosomething else, or I got a phone
(12:52):
call, or this, this and thishappened.
So out of that two hours, Iactually only got 15 minutes of
value out of it.
That, I think, is at the microlevel, what I often look at at
the macro level inside oforganizations.
So the same sort of principlesapply what were you planning to
do and what actually happened?
(13:13):
And what can we do, what can wesort of discover about what's
happening in order to design amore bulletproof system, a more
or a less fragile system, or aless interrupt driven system?
Fatimah Abbouchi (13:29):
Yeah, absolutely, and I think on that,
like you know, as at anindividual level it's, you know,
an hour and 45 minutes of timewasted in that example.
But now, thinking about it froman organizational perspective,
the bigger organization, themore the way.
So I want to circle back to youknow you mentioned before
around value, so value streamsis another term that for many
(13:49):
people may be not familiar with.
We're doing some work in thatspace at the moment.
Could you help our listenersunderstand what a value stream
is and how that connects to flow?
Steve Pereira (13:58):
Yeah, well, it's great that you introduced flow
first, because I think flow ismuch more familiar to people and
value streams really kind ofbuild on this concept of flow,
in that they are the way thatvalue flows through a sequence
of activities.
So at an organization levelyou're probably thinking of
(14:24):
value streams in ways that thecompany delivers its products
and services from that initialneed or desire or idea all the
way out to customers, and thosecustomers again can be internal
customers or external customers.
And really the reason that wecall them value streams is very
(14:45):
deliberate because obviouslystream you want flow involved in
this process.
We're not doing anything onceanymore and we don't want to do
things in large batches or witha defined start and end point.
Everything has to be continuous.
So the stream aspect, the flowaspect of value streams, is very
(15:09):
intentionally part of the termand value really is the reason
why we're doing any of this.
And I think that you know whenwe talk about process a lot of
people will recoil.
There's a bunch of processnerds who love the topic, but
most people, I think, have thiskind of knee-jerk reaction that
(15:33):
process is bad and process isthe thing that makes me
miserable in my work.
It pulls me out of my flow.
It's the thing that keeps mefrom doing my job, and so adding
value to value streams andadding, replacing process or
process improvement with valuestream management and value
(15:55):
stream improvement means thatwe're focusing on value and flow
right, rather than just doingthings for the sake of doing
things or doing things for thesake of standardization or
consistency, efficiency.
We don't care about thosethings as much as we care about
value and flow, and I think thatthat's really important when it
(16:18):
comes to defining what we'retalking about when we're talking
about value streams.
Fatimah Abbouchi (16:24):
Some people would say, or I've heard them
say oh, value stream mapping isjust another word for automation
.
What's your thoughts on that?
Steve Pereira (16:35):
I think the wonderful thing about value
stream no-transcript, but youmap out that entire process and
(17:17):
you measure it so that you cansee where are things potentially
slowing down, where can weimprove.
And what's most common and, Ithink, most relevant to the
software world in the modernworld is a little bit lower
level.
I mean, we don't we're notshipping tomatoes around the
world and this sort of likedelivery aspect of software is
(17:41):
very trivial.
It's the easy part, thedevelopment.
That's hard, which is verydifferent from manufacturing,
right, manufacturing.
You spend a little bit of timeon development and then you're
just delivering all the time.
You're just constantly crankingthings through the factory.
But the idea behind valuestreams and value stream mapping
is let's look at this flow ofvalue and measure how it gets
(18:06):
from one end to the other end.
And what's really common forfolks in the agile space and
software space is something likethe release process, right, the
release process, where youmight have multiple products
that each have their ownindividual value stream coming
together and flowing into eachother and out to customers, and
(18:30):
that can be really challengingin terms of understanding what's
happening but also measuring itso that you can improve it,
because we don't often we justlike to work.
We don't usually like to stepaway and say, like how is any of
this working and where shouldwe be improving?
And that's where automationcomes in.
Like, the idea of value streammapping isn't to automate
(18:53):
everything.
It's to automate the biggestopportunity that you have or the
biggest risk that you have inyour value stream, because
automate everything is terribleadvice.
If you have any kind ofpriority which we always do
there's always something that'smore important than something
(19:13):
else.
So if we say, automateeverything, you're probably
going to start with the thingthat's not going to make much
difference or you run the riskof not targeting your biggest
opportunity.
So the way that I like toapproach value stream mapping is
let's look at the entireend-to-end process and measure
it so that we can make very gooddecisions about.
(19:35):
Let's focus on A, then B, thenC, because A is going to be the
fastest thing to fix and it'sgoing to give us the best return
on investment and it's going tohave the highest impact for
customers.
We have ways of prioritizingwhen we measure, and without
measurement we just have a bunchof people's opinions, and that
(19:58):
is where we are right now.
And that is the differencebetween a value stream map and a
process diagram or a flowdiagram or a flow chart.
Without that data, you justhave everyone's opinions
battling it out and people canargue all day and you might have
productive arguments, butyou're not going to be as
(20:18):
effective as using a valuestream map.
When you use a value stream mapand you're seeing the
measurement of each activity inthe process, you have your
biggest opportunity just popsout, right, and it just
instantly becomes obvious toeveryone that spending 20 hours
on this one activity is a moreimportant focus for us than this
(20:44):
two-hour activity over here.
Right, and that's reallyimportant.
When it comes to the fact thatwe have cross-functional teams
and we have diverse teams and wehave big teams.
These are not two people teams,right?
If you've got eight people on ateam, you have eight different
opinions on what we should bedoing, and so we need ways of
(21:09):
taking those eight separateopinions and bringing them
together into alignment so thateverybody can agree or at least
disagree and commit.
Right, at least they havesomething concrete and clear so
that they can say yes, you knowthis by the numbers that make
sense.
I might not be supercomfortable with it because it's
(21:29):
not my area of expertise, but Iunderstand.
Everybody understands numbers,everybody understands that 20 is
more than two, so it simplifiesa lot of decision-making and it
can really target yourattention so that, instead of a
huge backlog of 50 things and nopriority, you've got three
(21:51):
super high priority initiativesthat you could probably start
tackling today and that, I think, is super powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi (21:59):
I think you touched on a really important
point.
Obviously, value streams isquite horizontal, but then
you've got all of these verticallines of business and divisions
and departments and things likethat.
Something we've seen well, I'veseen quite a lot of is the
disconnect between your verticaldivisions of HR or finance, et
cetera that traditionally it canbe quite controlling in the way
(22:22):
that they like to deliver workand manage work and oversee work
.
And then I'm seeing theorganisations now introducing
horizontal value streams and thetwo.
The way that they connect, orrather disconnect, at the moment
is becoming quite problematicbecause they're not used to
going from doing things one wayto a new way which is going to
(22:42):
be more efficient.
And although you're talkingabout departments like finance
or legal or HR that typicallyuse data for a lot of different
purposes, they're struggling toget on board, I find, in some
places with the value streamconcept.
So what's your advice for thosethat are involved in developing
out the value streams andgetting those stakeholders on
(23:03):
board who maybe are not used toworking in delivery?
Steve Pereira (23:07):
Yeah, well, I think that that's a really
important point.
Where the rubber meets the road, any of these things that we
want to do to improve flow andto improve value delivery in the
organization become likethey're confronted with reality.
Right, and, and we can talk allday about moving to more
(23:29):
streamlined teams and movingtowards flow, but the reality is
that you have to convince theorganization that this is worth
the trouble and worth realigningthe way that they think about
business, because this is not atrivial change for a siloed org
chart driven organization.
(23:50):
And I would say that what'sreally valuable with starting
with value stream mapping, isthat you can really measure the
performance of the organizationas it is today.
So instead of saying we have todo this, it's going to be
(24:14):
better, just take my word for it, which is what happens with a
lot of agile implementations anda lot of transformation efforts
.
It's like this will pay off.
Just trust me, or you know itworked for all these other
people.
I hate that approach.
I don't think that that iscompelling.
I don't think that peopleshould have to put their
(24:34):
reputations on the line.
They shouldn't have to take arisk.
They shouldn't have to take arisk.
They shouldn't have to askpeople to blindly trust them,
and you know I put that.
I think that puts a lot ofstrain in an organization and it
doesn't encourage a data-drivenculture.
It doesn't encourage a culturewhere we are doing our work
(24:58):
based on a qualified hypothesis.
You know a hypothesis isn't.
Hopefully this works out, ortake my word for it.
A hypothesis is, we believe,based on, you know, some form of
evidence or something thatwe're basing our hypothesis on,
that this will happen in youknow some boundary of time, not
(25:20):
eventually and not hopefully insix months.
We're going to measure this inthree months and we're going to
find out if we were right or notand then we're going to adjust
and have a new hypothesis.
I think for a modernorganization, that's how you
have to run things.
You can't just say take my wordfor it, and these other folks
are doing this and it worked forthem.
(25:41):
So the first starting point isreally drawing out that value
stream map with whateverparticipation that you can get,
and hopefully you've got someexecutive sponsorship for this.
That will help actually makechange once you reveal the
opportunities, because nobodywants to come up with a bunch of
things that look superpromising and then drop it on
(26:04):
someone's desk and have them say, well, this is not my focus,
I'm off doing what I'm doing andI don't want to be interrupted
with this.
Thing Pulls them out of theirflow, right?
So you have to be consideringall of these things when you try
to make these moves, and so, byincluding the right
stakeholders, by including theright perspectives, you can
(26:24):
create this value stream mapthat shows here's the cost of
the siloed operations that wehave right now.
You can see as we try to getthings done it's got to go
across here and then up, andthen over and then down and then
back and then all over theplace before it gets to the
customer and all of a sudden,you will have these really
(26:49):
valuable insights that you canbring to these separate
departments and say is it like,do we really need a 10-day SLA
on this?
Are you guys?
Do you have so much of abacklog for work that it needs
to take 10 days to get us anapproval for this?
And maybe that's true easier?
(27:11):
What if we could make sure thatwe check these three boxes?
And that reduces the work thatyou have to do by 50% or 80%,
because a lot of the cases wherewe have these complex value
(27:32):
streams, where there's a lot ofgates and there's a lot of
different silos and things goall over the place, there's a
simple answer.
There's a simple opportunity totake something that requires,
you know, a big meeting orconsensus, or you know some
complex decision-making, likethere really isn't super complex
(27:54):
decision-making that we need todo on a regular basis.
Right, most of our decisionsare like if this, then that, and
because it's that simple, itcan be almost automated.
And when it can't be automated,we can enable and empower
people to make that decisionvery quickly because you can
provide them with enoughinformation to say yes or no.
(28:16):
And a lot of times, when we lookat large organizations, they're
happy to get rid of thesestupid decisions that don't use
their brains.
Like nobody wants to be agatekeeper and people would
always rather be working onsomething that's more creative,
more valuable, that allows themto feel a sense of flow in their
job.
And so I think that we'relooking at the same sort of
(28:58):
motivations, the same sort ofsudden.
You know we have a very strongcase in an organization that is,
you know, cares about evidencewhich is not everybody but in an
organization that is reallycommitted to better and
improving their performance.
A value stream map gives youjust an incredible tool to
(29:22):
surface these opportunities andmake them very clear and very
easy to act on, compared withanything else I've ever seen and
it's really interesting becauseyou know I haven't asked this,
but I think it's a.
Fatimah Abbouchi (29:35):
It's a you're going to probably going to say
yes now, because we've usedvalue stream mapping in our
business and we're a 10 personbusiness, so the size of the
business doesn't matter.
It's actually easier to do itin a small business because, for
obvious reasons but you can useit, you know, in your
day-to-day as a small businessone of the things that I've I've
read and also learned a littlebit more from your work is
(29:58):
around value streams andcapability mapping.
So one of the things thatyou've talked about in the past
is collaborative mapping.
So you briefly just touched onit.
I think we didn't spend muchtime on.
But I'm interested to know.
You talk about crowd.
You know like crowdsourcingdata.
Can you talk a little bit moreabout that?
Steve Pereira (30:16):
yeah to me, I mean inside of an crowdsourcing
data is all about aligningperspectives, right?
I think that this idea ofperspective alignment is so
critical because we spend somuch time in our own heads.
Usually, when we get theopportunity to collaborate with
(30:42):
people or share or discussthings with people, it's
happening verbally or it'shappening over increasingly over
text, like chat ordocumentation, and there's so
much that's lost, right Cause Ican.
We all had experiences wherewe've had a long conversation
with someone and we come awayand we think that was great.
It's like we covered everythingthat I wanted to cover and the
(31:03):
other person walks away and theythink that you covered
completely different materialand they have a completely
different understanding of whatyou just talked about.
And now you're actually worseoff because you think things are
better, but you've actuallyleft with a bunch of assumptions
that you didn't have before.
But you've actually left with abunch of assumptions that you
didn't have before.
(31:49):
And to me, this idea of mapping,especially collaboratively, in
a way that's very clear and veryeasy to understand, ideas.
You're connecting concepts,you're connecting notes and
pieces of information togetherinto networks and into clusters,
and you're able to zoom out andzoom in incredibly effectively,
(32:12):
like literally, but evenfiguratively, you're able to
zoom out and zoom in and you can.
You have such a strongerability to make sense of things
together, and that isincreasingly important because,
(32:32):
as we have more diversifiedteams and we have more in terms
of cross functionality so peoplewith different expertise, but
also people with differentexperiences, but also people
with different experiences anddifferent perspectives Bringing
them together withoutcollaborative mapping means that
you're probably missing a lotof information, right?
(32:54):
There's probably a lot ofthings that are being
interpreted differently byeverybody, and it's very hard to
come to agreement on thingswithout doing this step of like
pulling things out, connectingthem together and then allowing
people to either comment onthings directly or copy that and
(33:14):
change it based on someoneelse's perspective.
Like, I've been in a lot ofreally productive meetings where
we map something out andsomebody has been silent
thinking about something forlike half an hour and they just
say, like, while you guys weretalking about that thing, I just
(33:34):
made a copy of this and Irearranged it because, like,
this makes sense to me and thiswasn't making sense to me, but
what do you think about this?
And it's totally changed theconversation and in some cases
we're like, oh, that's, that'stotally right.
Or in some cases you can be,you can, you can, uh, encounter
(33:56):
that situation and think, Ithink I know where you're, you
know where you're coming from,and what if we just what if we
just looked at it this way?
Or what if we connected thesetwo things together?
Or what if we split thedifference?
There's so much that we can dowith this and I just think we're
just scratching the surfacewith it right now.
But that kind of talks aboutthis perspective alignment thing
(34:22):
.
It doesn't talk about yourcapability thing.
But capabilities to me arereally important when We've
revealed opportunities.
So once we've done some mappingand we've highlighted some
risks or opportunities orinsights, how you actually act
(34:47):
on those really depends on yourcapabilities right,
(35:18):
no-transcript?
Or that you know we'vediscovered as opportunities.
So capability mapping for me isa way of taking just the most
important things that we'vehighlighted in the value stream
(35:39):
and examining our ability toimprove those things.
So we're not looking at everycapability.
We're not looking at somethinglike a maturity model where
every possible capability isbeing analyzed and picked apart,
because that's a lot of effortfor things that might not even
matter to our current scenario.
(36:01):
So what we do with capabilitymapping is look at, okay, of the
three opportunities that wesurface that are super high
priority, the most importantthings that we could be doing,
what are the capabilities thatare going to enable those
solutions and get us to where wewant to go?
And usually that's a list oflike eight to 10 things.
So all of a sudden, of all thethings that we can be focused on
(36:24):
and worried about, we have thisnarrowed list.
And then we pick it apart andlook at what do we have to
support these capabilities?
Who owns them right now?
Does anybody own them?
Do we have a backup for thatperson?
You know, if that person has togo and work on something else
or they have to take a vacation,who's going to make sure that
(36:46):
doesn't fall through the cracks?
And we look at things like do wehave documentation for that
capability?
Are we using a service toprovide that capability?
Maybe that service needs to bereplaced with something better,
or maybe we need to figure outhow to use it better.
And we also look at comfort.
I think that comfort is a veryvaluable thing in a team,
(37:11):
because people don't like doingthings that they're
uncomfortable with but they'realso not going to do a great job
when they're not comfortable.
So if we're asking people toperform at a higher level, to
improve the performance of aspecific capability, we want to
(37:31):
make sure that it's notsomething that is totally
panic-inducing or that they feellike is going to fall apart at
any moment so they don't want totouch it.
So looking at all thesedifferent dimensions for each
capability means that we canscore these things and now,
instead of just three thingsthat we need to focus on, we
(37:53):
know how to focus on thembecause we know what is actually
going to make them happen.
Fatimah Abbouchi (37:58):
What's actually going to make a
difference I think, um, you knowyou touched on a really good
point.
You need to get stakeholderbuying.
So the people that are going tobe working within these streams
, um, they need to have thatmindset, mindset shift.
You know agile, everyone talksagile, I talk mindset.
You know the two, the you knoware one and the same.
But actually getting people tonot only do the crowdsourcing
(38:19):
part, which you mentioned, whichis really important, but then
it gets buying as well, becauseone of the things that we seem
to find a lot we do a bit of areview for organizations and
identify, you know, hundreds ofthings that they could address,
but you're right, you can'taddress them all.
They have to then map those totheir capabilities and then
they're going to decide whichone, which ones of those are
priorities.
And you're right, at any pointin time, you might only be able
(38:41):
to work on eight or ten items,depending on the size of your
team and the size of yourorganization.
That's been one of the thingsthat we've personally seen being
a really small, a smallbusiness as well.
So I think that you need to getthat stakeholder buy-in and I
think I like what you saidearlier about actually getting
measuring measuring first andthen putting that in front of
them then to get thatstakeholder buy-in.
And I think I like what yousaid earlier about actually
getting measuring first and thenputting that in front of them
(39:01):
then to get their buy-in,getting them to be part of the
crowdsourcing, and then it's upto the organisation to then
therefore prioritise whatthey're going to focus on so
they can then help their teamsto uplift their capabilities in
general.
Where do you think the valuestream mapping fits within an
organisation?
Is there a particulardepartment or function, or do
you think it could be happeningacross an organization in every
(39:23):
area?
Steve Pereira (39:25):
That is a question that I love and I think
that we are figuring this outvery much at the moment.
I'm not sure if the audience isfamiliar with a book called
Team Topologies.
That's a wonderful book that'stalking about how we organize
teams and using specificpatterns to really break down
(39:53):
how we structure organizationsand the interactions between
teams and the work that flowsthrough these teams in different
ways.
I would love to see teamsreally examining their
performance on a regular basisfrom the inside, which is to say
(40:16):
, like every three to six months.
Which is to say like everythree to six months.
But the challenge with that isthat you can't see things that
are happening to you veryeffectively.
Right, we're not very good atstepping out of our bodies and
considering where we couldimprove.
Right we're.
We have very powerful biasesthat are affecting us all the
(40:39):
time we're busy doing the workand it's very hard to say well,
I'm going to step away tosharpen the saw before I go back
to sawing things.
So, although I feel like it isa very powerful capability to
leverage inside of teams and Ithink there are opportunities to
(41:00):
do that, if there's no buy-into have an external party do
this work, you will get betterresults by having an external
party do the work.
So the way that a lot oforganizations will start with
this is hiring someone likemyself to come in and be that
external party.
But what I ultimately want tosee over time is something that
(41:22):
Team Topologies calls anenabling team, and an enabling
team floats around theorganization and works with
teams to unlock higher levels ofperformance.
Higher levels of performance,and that can be through
providing coaching, doingassessments, doing things like
value stream mapping or outcomemapping or capability mapping,
(41:55):
and that means a few things.
So it means that that teamdevelops expertise in terms of
every experience from every teamin the organization, so they're
able to find patterns andcommon challenges, which means
that they'll be able to suggestsolutions that might level up
everybody right.
They'll be able to see well, ofthe 10 teams that we dealt with
(42:15):
, eight of them are encounteringthis one common problem, and if
we were to solve it, it wouldlevel everybody up.
That's a wonderful thing, andit's something that I don't get
to do very often, becausethere's very few organizations
who want to hire me to gothrough eight teams, but what we
often do is we'll go through acouple of teams, you usually
(42:37):
will find these commonchallenges and you'll find these
common opportunities.
And then what we do is we provethe value of investing in
something like an enabling team.
I train the team, get the teamrunning and then they scale it
to, you know, 50, 200 teams inthe organization.
It becomes a capability of thecompany to constantly be
(42:59):
sharpening the saw andconstantly leveling up, and that
, I think, is a superpower thatdoesn't exist right now.
You know, right now we haveagile coaches.
It's really hard to say whatthey're doing, that's measurable
, that's data-driven, that isreally leveling up the
organization and improving theflow of value, but because
(43:24):
they're usually locked intoframeworks that are working
against that.
But you know, I think that withthese collaborative mapping
techniques, with thesecollaborative mapping techniques
, it's beyond getting data andbeyond surfacing these
(43:44):
opportunities.
You're also doing team buildingexercises at the same time.
Right, you're bringing peopletogether who don't have
conversations very often, whodon't really understand each
other's work otherwise, and withsomething like a value stream
map or capability mapping,you're able to reveal what's
happening to everyone and whatactually goes into delivering
(44:07):
value, and that builds a senseof empathy in people.
You know, I've worked with a lotof teams where, after doing the
mapping, we have people frommarketing say I had no idea that
that's how we develop software.
I didn't understand any of itand I you know I have a new
sense of appreciation for that.
And likewise we have a lot ofengineers who say, like you know
(44:30):
what?
I finally understand whymarketing wants mock-ups early,
like I understand why we need tohave conversations earlier in
the value stream, because we getto this point at the end and we
throw them a bunch of code andsay, well, like the deadline's,
monday, go ahead and write upall your documentation and get
your press release ready.
(44:51):
So it's a tool not just forfinding opportunities but for
truly building teams in the mosthuman sense, in the most
collaborative sense of the word.
Fatimah Abbouchi (45:05):
So enabling teams would be where your
continuous improvement sits.
You're helping the organizationto continuously improve, being
one of the core components ofthat.
I think you're right around.
You know organisationstypically don't want to, you
know, pay an exorbitant amountto have an enabling team, but
they need to start somewhere.
So by bringing someone in andwe find typically bringing in
(45:27):
that external perspective mostteams within an organisation,
particularly working, you know,in the past as a contract
resource, we can be very, youknow, tunnel vision on what
we're doing and not reallyseeing how, particularly in
governance, in the space thatI've sort of spent a lot of time
, we might make a change thatimpacts all of the delivery
teams down the line but notactually think about it from
(45:48):
their perspective.
So that value stream actuallyenables the linkage between the
governance activities and theproject delivery activities and
so forth.
So I think I agree with you.
I don't want to circle back onthe Agile Coach piece.
Agile Coaches are everywhere atthe moment.
They're one organisation thathas hundreds of them at one
particular point in time, and Ithink the part that they need to
(46:09):
also have to be optimal intheir roles is not just
understanding the Agileframeworks or tools or methods
that relate to Agile delivery,but actually also having that
continuous improvement lens,having that delivery lens,
having this you know some ofthese the ability to tease out
from stakeholders across theorganisation and bring that
(46:31):
insight together and thenmanaging that and then uplifting
people.
So there's so much more to itthan just knowing how to use
Scrum or Kanban or any of thoseparticular frameworks, and I
think that's missing for someagile coaches Not all of them,
of course but yeah, I think it'snot always.
I find organizations sometimesgo let's just bring in an
enterprise agile coach.
And that isn't always the onlyanswer.
(46:53):
It's actually a lot more aboutlike sort of what you've
mentioned.
You actually need to understandwhat you're trying to fix
before you bring in someone tohelp.
You know, improve it if youlike.
So, I do want to bring theconversation around to something
that you're also verypassionate about, so correct me
if I'm wrong, but you run thebiggest DevOps community in
(47:15):
Toronto.
Is that correct?
Steve Pereira (47:18):
In Canada actually.
But, but uh yeah, I think we'reprobably like third in North
America, but that might havechanged um that's amazing yeah
it's, it's a big, it's a biggroup.
Fatimah Abbouchi (47:28):
Yeah so do you want to just just really help
listeners that are not familiar,just understand what DevOps is
and then just tell us more aboutyour group and what you guys do
, guys and girls.
Steve Pereira (47:38):
Sure.
So I mean this is a greattransition from Agile, and part
of where I see challenges forthings like roles, like Agile
coaches and Agile frameworks isthat the reason that DevOps sort
of arose as a popular topic anda popular focus was that Agile
(48:01):
actually got really good atdelivering software, really good
at creating code that wasvaluable to customers Quickly as
it was moved from a bottleneckto a capability and it started
(48:22):
to do a really good job.
The bottleneck moved, theconstraint moved to deployment
and operations.
All of a sudden you have a lotof great code, you have a lot of
valuable features that you candeliver to customers, but how
are you actually getting them tocustomers?
Valuable features that you candeliver to customers, but how
are you actually getting them tocustomers and how are you
making sure that they run andthey stay performant and you can
(48:44):
scale to actually meet thedemand of all of these the great
benefits that you're deliveringwith your agile software
delivery?
So DevOps arose because weneeded to literally bring Dev
and Ops together.
So we had IT, we had operationsteams making sure that nothing
(49:07):
fell apart, but they were, asAgile became more effective.
They were just constantly beingburied by new code changes,
things that developers wanted todo, tools that they wanted to
leverage, new capabilities, anduntil we brought the groups
(49:28):
together to literally eliminatedthe space between dev and ops,
there was this huge adversarialrelationship, because they have
totally different incentives andanytime you have separate
incentives you will haveconflict.
So the software developmentteams were focused on creating
(49:48):
and shipping as quickly aspossible right Velocity, getting
fast feedback and theoperations teams so, in short,
they were focused on change.
Change as much as possible, asoften as possible, and the
operations folks.
Change is the worst thing thatcould possibly happen, right?
(50:09):
The best case scenario foroperations is that nothing ever
changes because nobody getspaged, no one has to fix
anything, nobody has to changeany of the working system to
accommodate new requirements andnew demands.
So of course they were at odds,of course they were butting
(50:30):
heads.
They would never talk to eachother because they had in a
siloed organization.
Dev is doing its thing, ops isdoing its thing, and so it arose
as a set of principles andpractices and supporting tools
(50:53):
and services that facilitatedand enabled close collaboration
between these groups, and that'sreally what it's all about.
There's a famous acronym calledCAMS for DevOps, which is
Culture, automation, measurementand Sharing, which kind of sums
(51:14):
it up.
And later, very soon after thatcame out, it was changed to
comms, which includes lean.
So culture, automation, lean,measurement and sharing.
And the reason that lean wasintroduced was because of flow
and value streams and the ideathat we have to look at the big
(51:39):
picture.
Lean is all about looking atsystems and looking at the big
picture and understanding theflow of work through the entire
value stream, and that isactually a level above DevOps.
Because when you really thinkabout lean and you really think
(52:00):
about the big picture and thisis why I don't really focus on
DevOps anymore and I focus moreon value streams, because the
real boundary for value streamsis upstream of dev and it's
downstream of ops.
Right, it is a much biggerpicture.
It's the real end-to-endprocess of delivering value and
(52:23):
that means that it involves, insome cases, portfolio planning,
in some cases, legal compliance,it involves HR, it involves
marketing, it involves sales, itinvolves everything that it
takes to deliver value, whichmeans when you're looking at
everything it takes, you findwhere the real problems are,
because all of a sudden, youlook for them and you see them.
(52:47):
You have a way of seeing them.
If there's a lot oforganizations that are super
fixated on DevOps and theywonder why they can't move
faster, and it's because there'ssomething upstream or there's
something downstream thatthey're not looking at and you
can automate everything aroundsoftware development and
delivery and still miss agigantic bottleneck.
(53:08):
That's somewhere else and it'sthe things that aren't automated
that are the biggest problem.
Fatimah Abbouchi (53:14):
Yeah, absolutely.
And if you think of the size ofa DevOps team in an
organization in comparison toeverybody else, you need to get
them on board, you need to get,like you said, finance, you need
to get HR, you need to get theregulatory.
You need to get all of that intune.
And I definitely agree.
I think the value streams isthe way to go about it and it's
not about I think earlier wedidn't actually land on where do
(53:34):
we think it sits, which is areally good case in point,
because DevOps typically sitswithin an IT department for the
most part, whereas value streams, for example, in our business,
is at the top layer, juststrategic layer.
So in other organizations it'sacross the whole breadth.
It should be across the wholebreadth of an organization.
Maybe it sits up with strategyor whatnot.
(53:56):
But so, steve, how can peopleget involved with what you do?
Where can they find moreinformation about you?
Because you're a wealth ofknowledge and I think people
would definitely want tocontinue following you on your
journey.
Steve Pereira (54:09):
Well, I appreciate that.
I hope I haven't rambledeverybody to death, because I do
get overexcited about this.
This is the challenge withsomething like value streams,
because it covers every part ofevery business in such a deep
and profound way.
I end up talking abouteverything everything involved
in software and technology andbusiness, but that's what I love
(54:34):
about it.
So it's been a pleasure talkingabout it with you and I hope I
haven't led the audience on toomuch of a winding road.
But if anyone is interested inasking questions about this or
finding more information, we canput the link to my website in
the show notes.
I have a resource page that's alot of content around what?
Fatimah Abbouchi (54:55):
are value streams.
Steve Pereira (54:56):
What is value stream mapping?
I go into a lot of contentaround.
What are value streams?
What is value stream mapping?
I go into a lot of detail there, and there's the ability to ask
questions there as well, ifyou're looking for answers from
me or other people who areparticipating in this, because
it is an open dialogue.
I have also recently publisheda book that I call Flow
Engineering, which is a focusedversion of a book that I told
(55:17):
you about earlier.
So I've also recently publisheda book that I call Flow
Engineering, which is a focusedversion of a book that I told
you about earlier.
So I've recently sort of paredit down and focused it directly
on the idea of collaborativemapping, and I'll share the link
for that as well.
That's just flowvisibleis.
My website is visibleis and myemail address is stevevisibleis.
(55:37):
My website is visibleis and myemail address is steve at
visibleis.
So for anybody who can't lookat the show notes because
they're driving or whatever andthey just want to get the
details without digging into theshow notes, or if they don't go
everywhere that the podcast isgoing, feel free to reach out to
me there.
I love to hear from anyone whois thinking about this, debating
(56:02):
it wondering how it differsfrom other different approaches
or different ways of looking atthings, or if they've hit a
roadblock or they're strugglingto convince their boss.
These are all things that Ilove to talk about, and I'd love
to hear from anyone who wantsto chat about any of that.
Fatimah Abbouchi (56:18):
That's amazing .
I can definitely vouch for.
You are obsessed, which is good.
It's always good to be obsessedabout what you do.
It makes work a lot of fun, soit's been an absolute pleasure.
Before we let you go for theday, is there anything else that
you'd like to share with ourlisteners?
A call to action, a piece ofadvice or a question to ponder?
Steve Pereira (56:39):
listeners a call to action, a piece of advice or
a question to ponder.
Yeah well, that's a greatopportunity.
I would say that people canstart with this a lot sooner
than they think, and I wouldn'tsay that the best approach is to
build out a value stream map ontheir own and really start to
go to work with it.
But I think it's reallyvaluable to just take you know
you could take the next five, 10minutes and really think about
(57:03):
the start to finish of how yourteam does what it does and
consider whether your focus isthe true value stream or some
small piece of it and what youunderstand about the big picture
.
So that can mean drawing twoendpoints and a bunch of cloudy
(57:29):
areas that you don't understandand maybe some information about
what you do understand, andthen that gives you something to
pull your understanding out ofyour head and really start to
think about.
What does it take for me tounderstand this and to have a
conversation with someone elseabout it, so you can take that
(57:51):
cloudy illustration of a valuestream where there's a ton of
question marks and you can bringit to someone else and say does
this make sense?
Do you know any of thesequestion marks.
Do you know what these are anddo you think it would be
valuable for us to do thistogether, to map this out, to
see what this looks like, and tochange all those question marks
into information and change allthose question marks into data
(58:14):
that you can use?
So I think that wherever we arein an organization, wherever we
are in a journey towardscontinuous improvement, we can
do something today with this,and that's something that I
really think is powerful, andit's rare, because a lot of the
stuff that we deal with it's,you know, we're looking six
(58:35):
months.
Six months from now, things willbe great because we'll have
that automation, or we'll havethat thing, or things will be
different, or it's, you know, 12months or 18 months.
We've got this big roadmap thatstretches off into the distance
.
There's not much that we can dotoday or tomorrow, and
collaborative mapping is one ofthose things, and that's what I
find is so powerful about it andgets me so excited to share it
(58:58):
with people, because it reallyis something you can do.
That's really going to make adifference for you immediately
and it's going to not only payoff right away, it pays off
forever.
Every three to six monthsyou're going to get this sense
of clarity and alignment and itcan keep you on the right track
(59:19):
but also keep you constantlyleveling up, and I think that's
so powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:23):
That's amazing and I think, unlike you know
transformation programs or othertypes of things once you set up
the value stream, you've gotthe opportunity, just
continuously improving.
You've done the hard work tostart off.
Steve Pereira (59:32):
Right.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:33):
It's about improvement, so it's a win-win
when you think about it.
That's amazing.
It's been such a pleasuretalking to you and I hope to
visit you in Canada one day.
So I really appreciate yourtime and I'll make sure I
include all of those notes inour show notes as well.
And, yeah, look forward tohaving future conversations, for
sure.
Steve Pereira (59:52):
Likewise, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you for the time.
You're very welcome.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:55):
Thank you for the time.
You're very welcome.
Thank you so much for listeningto this podcast.
Please share this with someoneor rate it if you enjoyed it.
Don't forget to follow us onsocial media and to stay up to
date with all things Agile Ideas, go to our website,
wwwagilemanagementofficecom.
I hope you've been able tolearn, feel or be inspired today
(01:00:18):
.
Until next time, what's youragile idea?
Hi everyone and welcome back to another
episode of Agile Ideas.
I'm Fatima, ceo at AgileManagement Office, mental Health
Ambassador and your host.
This podcast is sponsored byAgile Management Office,
providing high-impact deliveryexecution in an agile era for
scaling businesses.
(00:21):
On today's episode, we'retalking to Steve Pereira.
Steve is obsessed with makingtech human and leveraging it to
deliver continuous value.
For the past 20 years, hisfocus has been on using mapping
techniques to guide ambitiousand struggling teams towards
their true north.
He's a former startup CTO,agency consultant, systems and
(00:43):
release engineer, finance ITmanager, tech support, phone
jockey and pizza maker allfocused on the flow of value all
the time.
His latest project can be foundat wwwvaluestreamlink.
Please join me in welcomingSteve Pereira to the show.
Welcome, steve to the show.
Steve Pereira (01:07):
Thank you for having me.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:08):
It's lovely to be here.
You're very welcome.
I know we had to do a littlebit of finessing to get the time
zones right, so where are youjoining us from?
Steve Pereira (01:15):
I'm in Toronto, Lovely sunny for once.
Toronto.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:19):
Beautiful, beautiful.
I've definitely got that on mybucket list.
I would love to go theresomeday.
The closest I got was when wewent to.
We went to the US.
Well, we went to Hawaii, whichwasn't, you know um the US
mainland, but we did end upgoing there and it was amazing.
But Toronto is definitely onour list, so I hope to get there
one day, um, in the near future, if COVID persists, and doesn't
(01:41):
persist, rather, and allows uspermissions to go.
So, um, maybe I'll see you inperson one day.
Fingers crossed maybe.
Steve Pereira (01:49):
Yeah, you're welcome here anytime.
You can uh, jump, jump out herefor the devops toronto meetup
or maybe devops days conferenceabsolutely that sounds amazing.
Fatimah Abbouchi (01:59):
I?
Um have done some research andthere's a lot of things I want
to talk to you about and I thinkyou're going to help educate
our listeners on a few topics aswell.
But before we kick off, one ofthe things I wanted to learn a
little bit about is I read inyour submission around the fact
that you know you're so obsessedwith flow that you actually
(02:20):
used to apply it when it comesto you know, when you were at
home and basically in yourbedroom, and you said something
about your bedroom and flow, andI just want to understand that
a little bit more, and if youcould tell us the story, it
would be great.
Steve Pereira (02:33):
Yeah.
So I was kind of a strange kid,I guess.
I I mean strange and lazy atthe same time.
I hated cleaning my room, um,and I always just wanted
everything to kind of stayperfect so that I could focus on
other things, and I supposethat that's continued throughout
my life to some degree, butparticularly when I was a kid I
(02:54):
just tried a bunch of weirdexperiments to try and save time
and make my life easier.
So and when you're a kid youknow the most challenging things
in your life are like cleaningyour room right and getting to
school on time.
So that's where I spent, youknow, quite a bit of time and
attention with these experiments.
And so once I tried making mybed and sleeping on top of my
(03:17):
bed so that I didn't have tomake it in the morning.
That was not ideal, not thebest way to use a bed, obviously
, but got the job done.
So it was sort of like overrotating towards efficiency, of
like I don't have to do thisthing but at the same time, you
know, not the most pleasantsleeping experience.
Then the other thing was goingbeyond the bed to like the
(03:39):
entire room.
So if I don't touch anything inmy room.
If I don't use it, it staysclean all the time and nobody
hassles me about cleaning myroom.
So I moved into my closet for awhile and luckily I had a closet
big enough.
It was not really I mean bigenough, as it was not big enough
to live in.
It was not a room, but it waskind of a fun experiment to see.
(04:02):
Okay, well, I don't have toclean my room, it stays perfect
if I just live out of my closetfor a while.
If it works, it solves a largepercentage of the problems that
I have to deal with on a regularbasis as a kid, and I spend
more time playing and enjoyingmy life.
So, yeah, I was just a strangekid in terms of experimenting
(04:23):
with different ways of livingand, I guess, ways of working,
which is where all of my focusis these days.
Fatimah Abbouchi (04:32):
It's actually a really interesting story,
because what I take from that isa couple of key things.
Well, one, you made sure yourstakeholders were happy, which
in this case, would have beenfamily.
Two, you also started gettingused to the discomfort that
comes with.
You know entrepreneurship andprojects and delivery, so you
know you were learning that at areally early age, whether you
knew it or not, that it wouldtake you to where you are today.
Steve Pereira (04:54):
You know what?
I've never heard thatperspective before and I'm
inclined to agree with you.
I think that, yeah, I haddefinitely an enterprise mindset
from a very young age.
Fatimah Abbouchi (05:06):
Absolutely.
I remember as a very, veryyoung child, sort of in the
early years of schooling, Iremember in the backyard
creating garden cafes andselling bugs with leaves and mud
, thinking that you know it wasa store and I was trying to make
money and it was just a littlebit of a fun.
But I think, you know,sometimes you have it when
(05:26):
you're really little and youdon't realize it, but then you
obviously you spend a lot oftime to empower yourself to, you
know, play on that and actuallyexpand into where you are today
.
So, yeah, very interestingstory.
Thank you for sharing that.
Now I wanted to um help ourlisteners understand a little
bit about something that youtalk a lot about.
We talk a lot about a lot ofthings.
I've been looking at yourprofile.
(05:46):
It's very impressive.
But one of the things that youtalk a lot about is flow, and I
know we just touched on itbriefly, but could you help
describe what does flow mean forour listeners and why you're so
obsessed with it?
Steve Pereira (05:59):
Yeah, well, I think that one of the wonderful
things about flow is that itmeans different things to
different people and a differentperspective.
So if you want to zoom out tothe organization, or you know
you can zoom, you can zoom flowto whatever level.
It's one of those things that'skind of fractal in that the
same sort of principles applywhether you're looking at the
(06:20):
micro or the macro and at anystage.
So that's one of the thingsthat really captures my
attention is this idea of whatare the things that are true
whether you're zoomed all theway in or zoomed all the way out
, and flow is one of thosethings.
And really, if we're talkingabout at the macro level, you
(06:40):
can talk about the flow of valuethroughout the world, right,
and over time.
But what's probably mostrelevant to the audience is like
the flow of value throughout anorganization, from its raw
materials, like ideas andproblems to solve, and customer
opportunities and needs anddesires, all the way to
(07:04):
satisfying those desires.
So whether they are forcustomers or for the enterprise
itself or its employees, and soflow is like value.
It kind of applies to differentstakeholders and different
perspectives, in different waysand at different levels, but I
(07:26):
think that for an enterprise,what they're really trying to do
is reach this extremely highlevel of performance and then
sustain it over time, whichhistorically, has been a
humongous challenge, right?
This is why we have digitaltransformation as such a problem
throughout the world is becausewe haven't had that flow.
We haven't had that adaptationand that evolution over time of
(07:49):
flowing from.
Okay, well, this was thebusiness model of the time, when
these pieces were placed inthese positions and the world
was a certain way.
But once you unlock, differentcapabilities and new conditions
arise, you have to flow todifferent ways of working,
different ways of satisfyingyour customers.
(08:12):
And so the other major factorthat probably most people are
familiar with is personal flow,like the idea that we get into
the zone and we kind of flow,like the idea that we get into
the zone and we kind of narrowour focus to exactly what we're
working on and the rest of theworld falls away.
And that is the reason why thathappens is because all of the
(08:34):
friction goes away, right, likeall of the things that stop us
from staying focused andconsistently making progress
have been sort of removed fromthe situation, and I think that
that is something that resonateswith all of us, like hopefully,
we've all experienced it,hopefully we experience it on a
(08:56):
regular basis, because it reallyis a wonderful thing to make
progress in that way and toreally enjoy our work and
hopefully, you know, it's pairedwith a sense of clarity and a
sense of value, so that you'renot just getting in the zone and
(09:16):
flying off in the wrongdirection.
So I think when I talk aboutflow these days, I'm talking
about flow in the context ofclarity and value and pulling
all three things together,because I think that without any
one of those three, or withoutthose three together, you really
(09:38):
run the risk of not making theprogress that you hope to make
and not really reaching yourfull performance potential.
Fatimah Abbouchi (09:49):
Yeah, absolutely, and there's a lot of
research around flow.
I've read a lot of books sortof around time management and
getting into that sort of flowstate.
For some people it might be,you know, 90 minutes, others
might be three to four hours.
I find that for me, the flowstate for me is mostly
applicable on the weekends,where I don't get distracted by
emails and messages and WhatsAppand phone calls and things like
(10:11):
that.
Have you found any particularyou know techniques, very
helpful, that you couldrecommend to people to get into
that flow state?
Things like, for example, oneof the ones that I've heard
about recently is you know, putyour mobile phone in another
room as an example.
Is there anything that youwould recommend to listeners
that maybe that can help them bebetter in flow?
Steve Pereira (10:32):
yeah, I think.
Well, one thing about me is Itend to spend much more time on
the macro than the micro, sowhat I'm what I'm going to talk
about is kind of the patternsand the principles around it,
because, rather than a specific,you know you should do X.
I think that, in terms of themajor factors that affect flow
(10:58):
are things like friction andwaste and delay, and waste and
delay, and so the way that thosethings sort of manifest
themselves in individualworkflow is looking at things
that can interrupt you.
And one of the ways to discoverthat is not necessarily in the
(11:20):
moment, because usually we'retrying to do something, we get
interrupted, but then we'retrying to do something, we get
interrupted, but then we'retrying to get back to the thing
and we don't actually take thetime to say why was I
interrupted?
What is this part of a largerpattern?
And so I'm a big fan of kind ofstepping away on a regular
basis and looking at how are weworking, how am I making
(11:45):
progress on a regular basis, andwhat is the distribution of my
time right?
How often am I gettinginterrupted over the day, over
the course of the day?
There's apps that you can useto monitor that.
But you could also just use apost-it note and you know like,
mark a line for every time youget pulled out of what you're
doing it out and mark a line forevery time you get pulled out
(12:08):
of what you're doing.
Another big thing that I'm a bigfan of is blocking out time
right, so not just kind of goingwith the flow in terms of
scheduling, because if you justgo with the flow it's very hard
to measure right, and I thinkmeasurement is very key to
realizing what's happening andto understand what's happening
so that you can makeimprovements.
So things like blocking out timein your calendar, for instance,
(12:30):
is almost like a hypothesis.
It's almost like saying I willspend this time doing this thing
and when it comes time to dothat, you can then look back and
say well, I plan to spend twohours on this.
I only got 15 minutes worth ofwork done.
I actually had to move and dosomething else, or I got a phone
(12:52):
call, or this, this and thishappened.
So out of that two hours, Iactually only got 15 minutes of
value out of it.
That, I think, is at the microlevel, what I often look at at
the macro level inside oforganizations.
So the same sort of principlesapply what were you planning to
do and what actually happened?
(13:13):
And what can we do, what can wesort of discover about what's
happening in order to design amore bulletproof system, a more
or a less fragile system, or aless interrupt driven system?
Fatimah Abbouchi (13:29):
Yeah, absolutely, and I think on that,
like you know, as at anindividual level it's, you know,
an hour and 45 minutes of timewasted in that example.
But now, thinking about it froman organizational perspective,
the bigger organization, themore the way.
So I want to circle back to youknow you mentioned before
around value, so value streamsis another term that for many
(13:49):
people may be not familiar with.
We're doing some work in thatspace at the moment.
Could you help our listenersunderstand what a value stream
is and how that connects to flow?
Steve Pereira (13:58):
Yeah, well, it's great that you introduced flow
first, because I think flow ismuch more familiar to people and
value streams really kind ofbuild on this concept of flow,
in that they are the way thatvalue flows through a sequence
of activities.
So at an organization levelyou're probably thinking of
(14:24):
value streams in ways that thecompany delivers its products
and services from that initialneed or desire or idea all the
way out to customers, and thosecustomers again can be internal
customers or external customers.
And really the reason that wecall them value streams is very
(14:45):
deliberate because obviouslystream you want flow involved in
this process.
We're not doing anything onceanymore and we don't want to do
things in large batches or witha defined start and end point.
Everything has to be continuous.
So the stream aspect, the flowaspect of value streams, is very
(15:09):
intentionally part of the termand value really is the reason
why we're doing any of this.
And I think that you know whenwe talk about process a lot of
people will recoil.
There's a bunch of processnerds who love the topic, but
most people, I think, have thiskind of knee-jerk reaction that
(15:33):
process is bad and process isthe thing that makes me
miserable in my work.
It pulls me out of my flow.
It's the thing that keeps mefrom doing my job, and so adding
value to value streams andadding, replacing process or
process improvement with valuestream management and value
(15:55):
stream improvement means thatwe're focusing on value and flow
right, rather than just doingthings for the sake of doing
things or doing things for thesake of standardization or
consistency, efficiency.
We don't care about thosethings as much as we care about
value and flow, and I think thatthat's really important when it
(16:18):
comes to defining what we'retalking about when we're talking
about value streams.
Fatimah Abbouchi (16:24):
Some people would say, or I've heard them
say oh, value stream mapping isjust another word for automation
.
What's your thoughts on that?
Steve Pereira (16:35):
I think the wonderful thing about value
stream no-transcript, but youmap out that entire process and
(17:17):
you measure it so that you cansee where are things potentially
slowing down, where can weimprove.
And what's most common and, Ithink, most relevant to the
software world in the modernworld is a little bit lower
level.
I mean, we don't we're notshipping tomatoes around the
world and this sort of likedelivery aspect of software is
(17:41):
very trivial.
It's the easy part, thedevelopment.
That's hard, which is verydifferent from manufacturing,
right, manufacturing.
You spend a little bit of timeon development and then you're
just delivering all the time.
You're just constantly crankingthings through the factory.
But the idea behind valuestreams and value stream mapping
is let's look at this flow ofvalue and measure how it gets
(18:06):
from one end to the other end.
And what's really common forfolks in the agile space and
software space is something likethe release process, right, the
release process, where youmight have multiple products
that each have their ownindividual value stream coming
together and flowing into eachother and out to customers, and
(18:30):
that can be really challengingin terms of understanding what's
happening but also measuring itso that you can improve it,
because we don't often we justlike to work.
We don't usually like to stepaway and say, like how is any of
this working and where shouldwe be improving?
And that's where automationcomes in.
Like, the idea of value streammapping isn't to automate
(18:53):
everything.
It's to automate the biggestopportunity that you have or the
biggest risk that you have inyour value stream, because
automate everything is terribleadvice.
If you have any kind ofpriority which we always do
there's always something that'smore important than something
(19:13):
else.
So if we say, automateeverything, you're probably
going to start with the thingthat's not going to make much
difference or you run the riskof not targeting your biggest
opportunity.
So the way that I like toapproach value stream mapping is
let's look at the entireend-to-end process and measure
it so that we can make very gooddecisions about.
(19:35):
Let's focus on A, then B, thenC, because A is going to be the
fastest thing to fix and it'sgoing to give us the best return
on investment and it's going tohave the highest impact for
customers.
We have ways of prioritizingwhen we measure, and without
measurement we just have a bunchof people's opinions, and that
(19:58):
is where we are right now.
And that is the differencebetween a value stream map and a
process diagram or a flowdiagram or a flow chart.
Without that data, you justhave everyone's opinions
battling it out and people canargue all day and you might have
productive arguments, butyou're not going to be as
(20:18):
effective as using a valuestream map.
When you use a value stream mapand you're seeing the
measurement of each activity inthe process, you have your
biggest opportunity just popsout, right, and it just
instantly becomes obvious toeveryone that spending 20 hours
on this one activity is a moreimportant focus for us than this
(20:44):
two-hour activity over here.
Right, and that's reallyimportant.
When it comes to the fact thatwe have cross-functional teams
and we have diverse teams and wehave big teams.
These are not two people teams,right?
If you've got eight people on ateam, you have eight different
opinions on what we should bedoing, and so we need ways of
(21:09):
taking those eight separateopinions and bringing them
together into alignment so thateverybody can agree or at least
disagree and commit.
Right, at least they havesomething concrete and clear so
that they can say yes, you knowthis by the numbers that make
sense.
I might not be supercomfortable with it because it's
(21:29):
not my area of expertise, but Iunderstand.
Everybody understands numbers,everybody understands that 20 is
more than two, so it simplifiesa lot of decision-making and it
can really target yourattention so that, instead of a
huge backlog of 50 things and nopriority, you've got three
(21:51):
super high priority initiativesthat you could probably start
tackling today and that, I think, is super powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi (21:59):
I think you touched on a really important
point.
Obviously, value streams isquite horizontal, but then
you've got all of these verticallines of business and divisions
and departments and things likethat.
Something we've seen well, I'veseen quite a lot of is the
disconnect between your verticaldivisions of HR or finance, et
cetera that traditionally it canbe quite controlling in the way
(22:22):
that they like to deliver workand manage work and oversee work
.
And then I'm seeing theorganisations now introducing
horizontal value streams and thetwo.
The way that they connect, orrather disconnect, at the moment
is becoming quite problematicbecause they're not used to
going from doing things one wayto a new way which is going to
(22:42):
be more efficient.
And although you're talkingabout departments like finance
or legal or HR that typicallyuse data for a lot of different
purposes, they're struggling toget on board, I find, in some
places with the value streamconcept.
So what's your advice for thosethat are involved in developing
out the value streams andgetting those stakeholders on
(23:03):
board who maybe are not used toworking in delivery?
Steve Pereira (23:07):
Yeah, well, I think that that's a really
important point.
Where the rubber meets the road, any of these things that we
want to do to improve flow andto improve value delivery in the
organization become likethey're confronted with reality.
Right, and, and we can talk allday about moving to more
(23:29):
streamlined teams and movingtowards flow, but the reality is
that you have to convince theorganization that this is worth
the trouble and worth realigningthe way that they think about
business, because this is not atrivial change for a siloed org
chart driven organization.
(23:50):
And I would say that what'sreally valuable with starting
with value stream mapping, isthat you can really measure the
performance of the organizationas it is today.
So instead of saying we have todo this, it's going to be
(24:14):
better, just take my word for it, which is what happens with a
lot of agile implementations anda lot of transformation efforts
.
It's like this will pay off.
Just trust me, or you know itworked for all these other
people.
I hate that approach.
I don't think that that iscompelling.
I don't think that peopleshould have to put their
(24:34):
reputations on the line.
They shouldn't have to take arisk.
They shouldn't have to take arisk.
They shouldn't have to askpeople to blindly trust them,
and you know I put that.
I think that puts a lot ofstrain in an organization and it
doesn't encourage a data-drivenculture.
It doesn't encourage a culturewhere we are doing our work
(24:58):
based on a qualified hypothesis.
You know a hypothesis isn't.
Hopefully this works out, ortake my word for it.
A hypothesis is, we believe,based on, you know, some form of
evidence or something thatwe're basing our hypothesis on,
that this will happen in youknow some boundary of time, not
(25:20):
eventually and not hopefully insix months.
We're going to measure this inthree months and we're going to
find out if we were right or notand then we're going to adjust
and have a new hypothesis.
I think for a modernorganization, that's how you
have to run things.
You can't just say take my wordfor it, and these other folks
are doing this and it worked forthem.
(25:41):
So the first starting point isreally drawing out that value
stream map with whateverparticipation that you can get,
and hopefully you've got someexecutive sponsorship for this.
That will help actually makechange once you reveal the
opportunities, because nobodywants to come up with a bunch of
things that look superpromising and then drop it on
(26:04):
someone's desk and have them say, well, this is not my focus,
I'm off doing what I'm doing andI don't want to be interrupted
with this.
Thing Pulls them out of theirflow, right?
So you have to be consideringall of these things when you try
to make these moves, and so, byincluding the right
stakeholders, by including theright perspectives, you can
(26:24):
create this value stream mapthat shows here's the cost of
the siloed operations that wehave right now.
You can see as we try to getthings done it's got to go
across here and then up, andthen over and then down and then
back and then all over theplace before it gets to the
customer and all of a sudden,you will have these really
(26:49):
valuable insights that you canbring to these separate
departments and say is it like,do we really need a 10-day SLA
on this?
Are you guys?
Do you have so much of abacklog for work that it needs
to take 10 days to get us anapproval for this?
And maybe that's true easier?
(27:11):
What if we could make sure thatwe check these three boxes?
And that reduces the work thatyou have to do by 50% or 80%,
because a lot of the cases wherewe have these complex value
(27:32):
streams, where there's a lot ofgates and there's a lot of
different silos and things goall over the place, there's a
simple answer.
There's a simple opportunity totake something that requires,
you know, a big meeting orconsensus, or you know some
complex decision-making, likethere really isn't super complex
(27:54):
decision-making that we need todo on a regular basis.
Right, most of our decisionsare like if this, then that, and
because it's that simple, itcan be almost automated.
And when it can't be automated,we can enable and empower
people to make that decisionvery quickly because you can
provide them with enoughinformation to say yes or no.
(28:16):
And a lot of times, when we lookat large organizations, they're
happy to get rid of thesestupid decisions that don't use
their brains.
Like nobody wants to be agatekeeper and people would
always rather be working onsomething that's more creative,
more valuable, that allows themto feel a sense of flow in their
job.
And so I think that we'relooking at the same sort of
(28:58):
motivations, the same sort ofsudden.
You know we have a very strongcase in an organization that is,
you know, cares about evidencewhich is not everybody but in an
organization that is reallycommitted to better and
improving their performance.
A value stream map gives youjust an incredible tool to
(29:22):
surface these opportunities andmake them very clear and very
easy to act on, compared withanything else I've ever seen and
it's really interesting becauseyou know I haven't asked this,
but I think it's a.
Fatimah Abbouchi (29:35):
It's a you're going to probably going to say
yes now, because we've usedvalue stream mapping in our
business and we're a 10 personbusiness, so the size of the
business doesn't matter.
It's actually easier to do itin a small business because, for
obvious reasons but you can useit, you know, in your
day-to-day as a small businessone of the things that I've I've
read and also learned a littlebit more from your work is
(29:58):
around value streams andcapability mapping.
So one of the things thatyou've talked about in the past
is collaborative mapping.
So you briefly just touched onit.
I think we didn't spend muchtime on.
But I'm interested to know.
You talk about crowd.
You know like crowdsourcingdata.
Can you talk a little bit moreabout that?
Steve Pereira (30:16):
yeah to me, I mean inside of an crowdsourcing
data is all about aligningperspectives, right?
I think that this idea ofperspective alignment is so
critical because we spend somuch time in our own heads.
Usually, when we get theopportunity to collaborate with
(30:42):
people or share or discussthings with people, it's
happening verbally or it'shappening over increasingly over
text, like chat ordocumentation, and there's so
much that's lost, right Cause Ican.
We all had experiences wherewe've had a long conversation
with someone and we come awayand we think that was great.
It's like we covered everythingthat I wanted to cover and the
(31:03):
other person walks away and theythink that you covered
completely different materialand they have a completely
different understanding of whatyou just talked about.
And now you're actually worseoff because you think things are
better, but you've actuallyleft with a bunch of assumptions
that you didn't have before.
But you've actually left with abunch of assumptions that you
didn't have before.
(31:49):
And to me, this idea of mapping,especially collaboratively, in
a way that's very clear and veryeasy to understand, ideas.
You're connecting concepts,you're connecting notes and
pieces of information togetherinto networks and into clusters,
and you're able to zoom out andzoom in incredibly effectively,
(32:12):
like literally, but evenfiguratively, you're able to
zoom out and zoom in and you can.
You have such a strongerability to make sense of things
together, and that isincreasingly important because,
(32:32):
as we have more diversifiedteams and we have more in terms
of cross functionality so peoplewith different expertise, but
also people with differentexperiences, but also people
with different experiences anddifferent perspectives Bringing
them together withoutcollaborative mapping means that
you're probably missing a lotof information, right?
(32:54):
There's probably a lot ofthings that are being
interpreted differently byeverybody, and it's very hard to
come to agreement on thingswithout doing this step of like
pulling things out, connectingthem together and then allowing
people to either comment onthings directly or copy that and
(33:14):
change it based on someoneelse's perspective.
Like, I've been in a lot ofreally productive meetings where
we map something out andsomebody has been silent
thinking about something forlike half an hour and they just
say, like, while you guys weretalking about that thing, I just
(33:34):
made a copy of this and Irearranged it because, like,
this makes sense to me and thiswasn't making sense to me, but
what do you think about this?
And it's totally changed theconversation and in some cases
we're like, oh, that's, that'stotally right.
Or in some cases you can be,you can, you can, uh, encounter
(33:56):
that situation and think, Ithink I know where you're, you
know where you're coming from,and what if we just what if we
just looked at it this way?
Or what if we connected thesetwo things together?
Or what if we split thedifference?
There's so much that we can dowith this and I just think we're
just scratching the surfacewith it right now.
But that kind of talks aboutthis perspective alignment thing
(34:22):
.
It doesn't talk about yourcapability thing.
But capabilities to me arereally important when We've
revealed opportunities.
So once we've done some mappingand we've highlighted some
risks or opportunities orinsights, how you actually act
(34:47):
on those really depends on yourcapabilities right,
(35:18):
no-transcript?
Or that you know we'vediscovered as opportunities.
So capability mapping for me isa way of taking just the most
important things that we'vehighlighted in the value stream
(35:39):
and examining our ability toimprove those things.
So we're not looking at everycapability.
We're not looking at somethinglike a maturity model where
every possible capability isbeing analyzed and picked apart,
because that's a lot of effortfor things that might not even
matter to our current scenario.
(36:01):
So what we do with capabilitymapping is look at, okay, of the
three opportunities that wesurface that are super high
priority, the most importantthings that we could be doing,
what are the capabilities thatare going to enable those
solutions and get us to where wewant to go?
And usually that's a list oflike eight to 10 things.
So all of a sudden, of all thethings that we can be focused on
(36:24):
and worried about, we have thisnarrowed list.
And then we pick it apart andlook at what do we have to
support these capabilities?
Who owns them right now?
Does anybody own them?
Do we have a backup for thatperson?
You know, if that person has togo and work on something else
or they have to take a vacation,who's going to make sure that
(36:46):
doesn't fall through the cracks?
And we look at things like do wehave documentation for that
capability?
Are we using a service toprovide that capability?
Maybe that service needs to bereplaced with something better,
or maybe we need to figure outhow to use it better.
And we also look at comfort.
I think that comfort is a veryvaluable thing in a team,
(37:11):
because people don't like doingthings that they're
uncomfortable with but they'realso not going to do a great job
when they're not comfortable.
So if we're asking people toperform at a higher level, to
improve the performance of aspecific capability, we want to
(37:31):
make sure that it's notsomething that is totally
panic-inducing or that they feellike is going to fall apart at
any moment so they don't want totouch it.
So looking at all thesedifferent dimensions for each
capability means that we canscore these things and now,
instead of just three thingsthat we need to focus on, we
(37:53):
know how to focus on thembecause we know what is actually
going to make them happen.
Fatimah Abbouchi (37:58):
What's actually going to make a
difference I think, um, you knowyou touched on a really good
point.
You need to get stakeholderbuying.
So the people that are going tobe working within these streams
, um, they need to have thatmindset, mindset shift.
You know agile, everyone talksagile, I talk mindset.
You know the two, the you knoware one and the same.
But actually getting people tonot only do the crowdsourcing
(38:19):
part, which you mentioned, whichis really important, but then
it gets buying as well, becauseone of the things that we seem
to find a lot we do a bit of areview for organizations and
identify, you know, hundreds ofthings that they could address,
but you're right, you can'taddress them all.
They have to then map those totheir capabilities and then
they're going to decide whichone, which ones of those are
priorities.
And you're right, at any pointin time, you might only be able
(38:41):
to work on eight or ten items,depending on the size of your
team and the size of yourorganization.
That's been one of the thingsthat we've personally seen being
a really small, a smallbusiness as well.
So I think that you need to getthat stakeholder buy-in and I
think I like what you saidearlier about actually getting
measuring measuring first andthen putting that in front of
them then to get thatstakeholder buy-in.
And I think I like what yousaid earlier about actually
getting measuring first and thenputting that in front of them
(39:01):
then to get their buy-in,getting them to be part of the
crowdsourcing, and then it's upto the organisation to then
therefore prioritise whatthey're going to focus on so
they can then help their teamsto uplift their capabilities in
general.
Where do you think the valuestream mapping fits within an
organisation?
Is there a particulardepartment or function, or do
you think it could be happeningacross an organization in every
(39:23):
area?
Steve Pereira (39:25):
That is a question that I love and I think
that we are figuring this outvery much at the moment.
I'm not sure if the audience isfamiliar with a book called
Team Topologies.
That's a wonderful book that'stalking about how we organize
teams and using specificpatterns to really break down
(39:53):
how we structure organizationsand the interactions between
teams and the work that flowsthrough these teams in different
ways.
I would love to see teamsreally examining their
performance on a regular basisfrom the inside, which is to say
(40:16):
, like every three to six months.
Which is to say like everythree to six months.
But the challenge with that isthat you can't see things that
are happening to you veryeffectively.
Right, we're not very good atstepping out of our bodies and
considering where we couldimprove.
Right we're.
We have very powerful biasesthat are affecting us all the
(40:39):
time we're busy doing the workand it's very hard to say well,
I'm going to step away tosharpen the saw before I go back
to sawing things.
So, although I feel like it isa very powerful capability to
leverage inside of teams and Ithink there are opportunities to
(41:00):
do that, if there's no buy-into have an external party do
this work, you will get betterresults by having an external
party do the work.
So the way that a lot oforganizations will start with
this is hiring someone likemyself to come in and be that
external party.
But what I ultimately want tosee over time is something that
(41:22):
Team Topologies calls anenabling team, and an enabling
team floats around theorganization and works with
teams to unlock higher levels ofperformance.
Higher levels of performance,and that can be through
providing coaching, doingassessments, doing things like
value stream mapping or outcomemapping or capability mapping,
(41:55):
and that means a few things.
So it means that that teamdevelops expertise in terms of
every experience from every teamin the organization, so they're
able to find patterns andcommon challenges, which means
that they'll be able to suggestsolutions that might level up
everybody right.
They'll be able to see well, ofthe 10 teams that we dealt with
(42:15):
, eight of them are encounteringthis one common problem, and if
we were to solve it, it wouldlevel everybody up.
That's a wonderful thing, andit's something that I don't get
to do very often, becausethere's very few organizations
who want to hire me to gothrough eight teams, but what we
often do is we'll go through acouple of teams, you usually
(42:37):
will find these commonchallenges and you'll find these
common opportunities.
And then what we do is we provethe value of investing in
something like an enabling team.
I train the team, get the teamrunning and then they scale it
to, you know, 50, 200 teams inthe organization.
It becomes a capability of thecompany to constantly be
(42:59):
sharpening the saw andconstantly leveling up, and that
, I think, is a superpower thatdoesn't exist right now.
You know, right now we haveagile coaches.
It's really hard to say whatthey're doing, that's measurable
, that's data-driven, that isreally leveling up the
organization and improving theflow of value, but because
(43:24):
they're usually locked intoframeworks that are working
against that.
But you know, I think that withthese collaborative mapping
techniques, with thesecollaborative mapping techniques
, it's beyond getting data andbeyond surfacing these
(43:44):
opportunities.
You're also doing team buildingexercises at the same time.
Right, you're bringing peopletogether who don't have
conversations very often, whodon't really understand each
other's work otherwise, and withsomething like a value stream
map or capability mapping,you're able to reveal what's
happening to everyone and whatactually goes into delivering
(44:07):
value, and that builds a senseof empathy in people.
You know, I've worked with a lotof teams where, after doing the
mapping, we have people frommarketing say I had no idea that
that's how we develop software.
I didn't understand any of itand I you know I have a new
sense of appreciation for that.
And likewise we have a lot ofengineers who say, like you know
(44:30):
what?
I finally understand whymarketing wants mock-ups early,
like I understand why we need tohave conversations earlier in
the value stream, because we getto this point at the end and we
throw them a bunch of code andsay, well, like the deadline's,
monday, go ahead and write upall your documentation and get
your press release ready.
(44:51):
So it's a tool not just forfinding opportunities but for
truly building teams in the mosthuman sense, in the most
collaborative sense of the word.
Fatimah Abbouchi (45:05):
So enabling teams would be where your
continuous improvement sits.
You're helping the organizationto continuously improve, being
one of the core components ofthat.
I think you're right around.
You know organisationstypically don't want to, you
know, pay an exorbitant amountto have an enabling team, but
they need to start somewhere.
So by bringing someone in andwe find typically bringing in
(45:27):
that external perspective mostteams within an organisation,
particularly working, you know,in the past as a contract
resource, we can be very, youknow, tunnel vision on what
we're doing and not reallyseeing how, particularly in
governance, in the space thatI've sort of spent a lot of time
, we might make a change thatimpacts all of the delivery
teams down the line but notactually think about it from
(45:48):
their perspective.
So that value stream actuallyenables the linkage between the
governance activities and theproject delivery activities and
so forth.
So I think I agree with you.
I don't want to circle back onthe Agile Coach piece.
Agile Coaches are everywhere atthe moment.
They're one organisation thathas hundreds of them at one
particular point in time, and Ithink the part that they need to
(46:09):
also have to be optimal intheir roles is not just
understanding the Agileframeworks or tools or methods
that relate to Agile delivery,but actually also having that
continuous improvement lens,having that delivery lens,
having this you know some ofthese the ability to tease out
from stakeholders across theorganisation and bring that
(46:31):
insight together and thenmanaging that and then uplifting
people.
So there's so much more to itthan just knowing how to use
Scrum or Kanban or any of thoseparticular frameworks, and I
think that's missing for someagile coaches Not all of them,
of course but yeah, I think it'snot always.
I find organizations sometimesgo let's just bring in an
enterprise agile coach.
And that isn't always the onlyanswer.
(46:53):
It's actually a lot more aboutlike sort of what you've
mentioned.
You actually need to understandwhat you're trying to fix
before you bring in someone tohelp.
You know, improve it if youlike.
So, I do want to bring theconversation around to something
that you're also verypassionate about, so correct me
if I'm wrong, but you run thebiggest DevOps community in
(47:15):
Toronto.
Is that correct?
Steve Pereira (47:18):
In Canada actually.
But, but uh yeah, I think we'reprobably like third in North
America, but that might havechanged um that's amazing yeah
it's, it's a big, it's a biggroup.
Fatimah Abbouchi (47:28):
Yeah so do you want to just just really help
listeners that are not familiar,just understand what DevOps is
and then just tell us more aboutyour group and what you guys do
, guys and girls.
Steve Pereira (47:38):
Sure.
So I mean this is a greattransition from Agile, and part
of where I see challenges forthings like roles, like Agile
coaches and Agile frameworks isthat the reason that DevOps sort
of arose as a popular topic anda popular focus was that Agile
(48:01):
actually got really good atdelivering software, really good
at creating code that wasvaluable to customers Quickly as
it was moved from a bottleneckto a capability and it started
(48:22):
to do a really good job.
The bottleneck moved, theconstraint moved to deployment
and operations.
All of a sudden you have a lotof great code, you have a lot of
valuable features that you candeliver to customers, but how
are you actually getting them tocustomers?
Valuable features that you candeliver to customers, but how
are you actually getting them tocustomers and how are you
making sure that they run andthey stay performant and you can
(48:44):
scale to actually meet thedemand of all of these the great
benefits that you're deliveringwith your agile software
delivery?
So DevOps arose because weneeded to literally bring Dev
and Ops together.
So we had IT, we had operationsteams making sure that nothing
(49:07):
fell apart, but they were, asAgile became more effective.
They were just constantly beingburied by new code changes,
things that developers wanted todo, tools that they wanted to
leverage, new capabilities, anduntil we brought the groups
(49:28):
together to literally eliminatedthe space between dev and ops,
there was this huge adversarialrelationship, because they have
totally different incentives andanytime you have separate
incentives you will haveconflict.
So the software developmentteams were focused on creating
(49:48):
and shipping as quickly aspossible right Velocity, getting
fast feedback and theoperations teams so, in short,
they were focused on change.
Change as much as possible, asoften as possible, and the
operations folks.
Change is the worst thing thatcould possibly happen, right?
(50:09):
The best case scenario foroperations is that nothing ever
changes because nobody getspaged, no one has to fix
anything, nobody has to changeany of the working system to
accommodate new requirements andnew demands.
So of course they were at odds,of course they were butting
(50:30):
heads.
They would never talk to eachother because they had in a
siloed organization.
Dev is doing its thing, ops isdoing its thing, and so it arose
as a set of principles andpractices and supporting tools
(50:53):
and services that facilitatedand enabled close collaboration
between these groups, and that'sreally what it's all about.
There's a famous acronym calledCAMS for DevOps, which is
Culture, automation, measurementand Sharing, which kind of sums
(51:14):
it up.
And later, very soon after thatcame out, it was changed to
comms, which includes lean.
So culture, automation, lean,measurement and sharing.
And the reason that lean wasintroduced was because of flow
and value streams and the ideathat we have to look at the big
(51:39):
picture.
Lean is all about looking atsystems and looking at the big
picture and understanding theflow of work through the entire
value stream, and that isactually a level above DevOps.
Because when you really thinkabout lean and you really think
(52:00):
about the big picture and thisis why I don't really focus on
DevOps anymore and I focus moreon value streams, because the
real boundary for value streamsis upstream of dev and it's
downstream of ops.
Right, it is a much biggerpicture.
It's the real end-to-endprocess of delivering value and
(52:23):
that means that it involves, insome cases, portfolio planning,
in some cases, legal compliance,it involves HR, it involves
marketing, it involves sales, itinvolves everything that it
takes to deliver value, whichmeans when you're looking at
everything it takes, you findwhere the real problems are,
because all of a sudden, youlook for them and you see them.
(52:47):
You have a way of seeing them.
If there's a lot oforganizations that are super
fixated on DevOps and theywonder why they can't move
faster, and it's because there'ssomething upstream or there's
something downstream thatthey're not looking at and you
can automate everything aroundsoftware development and
delivery and still miss agigantic bottleneck.
(53:08):
That's somewhere else and it'sthe things that aren't automated
that are the biggest problem.
Fatimah Abbouchi (53:14):
Yeah, absolutely.
And if you think of the size ofa DevOps team in an
organization in comparison toeverybody else, you need to get
them on board, you need to get,like you said, finance, you need
to get HR, you need to get theregulatory.
You need to get all of that intune.
And I definitely agree.
I think the value streams isthe way to go about it and it's
not about I think earlier wedidn't actually land on where do
(53:34):
we think it sits, which is areally good case in point,
because DevOps typically sitswithin an IT department for the
most part, whereas value streams, for example, in our business,
is at the top layer, juststrategic layer.
So in other organizations it'sacross the whole breadth.
It should be across the wholebreadth of an organization.
Maybe it sits up with strategyor whatnot.
(53:56):
But so, steve, how can peopleget involved with what you do?
Where can they find moreinformation about you?
Because you're a wealth ofknowledge and I think people
would definitely want tocontinue following you on your
journey.
Steve Pereira (54:09):
Well, I appreciate that.
I hope I haven't rambledeverybody to death, because I do
get overexcited about this.
This is the challenge withsomething like value streams,
because it covers every part ofevery business in such a deep
and profound way.
I end up talking abouteverything everything involved
in software and technology andbusiness, but that's what I love
(54:34):
about it.
So it's been a pleasure talkingabout it with you and I hope I
haven't led the audience on toomuch of a winding road.
But if anyone is interested inasking questions about this or
finding more information, we canput the link to my website in
the show notes.
I have a resource page that's alot of content around what?
Fatimah Abbouchi (54:55):
are value streams.
Steve Pereira (54:56):
What is value stream mapping?
I go into a lot of contentaround.
What are value streams?
What is value stream mapping?
I go into a lot of detail there, and there's the ability to ask
questions there as well, ifyou're looking for answers from
me or other people who areparticipating in this, because
it is an open dialogue.
I have also recently publisheda book that I call Flow
Engineering, which is a focusedversion of a book that I told
(55:17):
you about earlier.
So I've also recently publisheda book that I call Flow
Engineering, which is a focusedversion of a book that I told
you about earlier.
So I've recently sort of paredit down and focused it directly
on the idea of collaborativemapping, and I'll share the link
for that as well.
That's just flowvisibleis.
My website is visibleis and myemail address is stevevisibleis.
(55:37):
My website is visibleis and myemail address is steve at
visibleis.
So for anybody who can't lookat the show notes because
they're driving or whatever andthey just want to get the
details without digging into theshow notes, or if they don't go
everywhere that the podcast isgoing, feel free to reach out to
me there.
I love to hear from anyone whois thinking about this, debating
(56:02):
it wondering how it differsfrom other different approaches
or different ways of looking atthings, or if they've hit a
roadblock or they're strugglingto convince their boss.
These are all things that Ilove to talk about, and I'd love
to hear from anyone who wantsto chat about any of that.
Fatimah Abbouchi (56:18):
That's amazing .
I can definitely vouch for.
You are obsessed, which is good.
It's always good to be obsessedabout what you do.
It makes work a lot of fun, soit's been an absolute pleasure.
Before we let you go for theday, is there anything else that
you'd like to share with ourlisteners?
A call to action, a piece ofadvice or a question to ponder?
Steve Pereira (56:39):
listeners a call to action, a piece of advice or
a question to ponder.
Yeah well, that's a greatopportunity.
I would say that people canstart with this a lot sooner
than they think, and I wouldn'tsay that the best approach is to
build out a value stream map ontheir own and really start to
go to work with it.
But I think it's reallyvaluable to just take you know
you could take the next five, 10minutes and really think about
(57:03):
the start to finish of how yourteam does what it does and
consider whether your focus isthe true value stream or some
small piece of it and what youunderstand about the big picture
.
So that can mean drawing twoendpoints and a bunch of cloudy
(57:29):
areas that you don't understandand maybe some information about
what you do understand, andthen that gives you something to
pull your understanding out ofyour head and really start to
think about.
What does it take for me tounderstand this and to have a
conversation with someone elseabout it, so you can take that
(57:51):
cloudy illustration of a valuestream where there's a ton of
question marks and you can bringit to someone else and say does
this make sense?
Do you know any of thesequestion marks.
Do you know what these are anddo you think it would be
valuable for us to do thistogether, to map this out, to
see what this looks like, and tochange all those question marks
into information and change allthose question marks into data
(58:14):
that you can use?
So I think that wherever we arein an organization, wherever we
are in a journey towardscontinuous improvement, we can
do something today with this,and that's something that I
really think is powerful, andit's rare, because a lot of the
stuff that we deal with it's,you know, we're looking six
(58:35):
months.
Six months from now, things willbe great because we'll have
that automation, or we'll havethat thing, or things will be
different, or it's, you know, 12months or 18 months.
We've got this big roadmap thatstretches off into the distance
.
There's not much that we can dotoday or tomorrow, and
collaborative mapping is one ofthose things, and that's what I
find is so powerful about it andgets me so excited to share it
(58:58):
with people, because it reallyis something you can do.
That's really going to make adifference for you immediately
and it's going to not only payoff right away, it pays off
forever.
Every three to six monthsyou're going to get this sense
of clarity and alignment and itcan keep you on the right track
(59:19):
but also keep you constantlyleveling up, and I think that's
so powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:23):
That's amazing and I think, unlike you know
transformation programs or othertypes of things once you set up
the value stream, you've gotthe opportunity, just
continuously improving.
You've done the hard work tostart off.
Steve Pereira (59:32):
Right.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:33):
It's about improvement, so it's a win-win
when you think about it.
That's amazing.
It's been such a pleasuretalking to you and I hope to
visit you in Canada one day.
So I really appreciate yourtime and I'll make sure I
include all of those notes inour show notes as well.
And, yeah, look forward tohaving future conversations, for
sure.
Steve Pereira (59:52):
Likewise, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you for the time.
You're very welcome.
Fatimah Abbouchi (59:55):
Thank you for the time.
You're very welcome.
Thank you so much for listeningto this podcast.
Please share this with someoneor rate it if you enjoyed it.
Don't forget to follow us onsocial media and to stay up to
date with all things Agile Ideas, go to our website,
wwwagilemanagementofficecom.
I hope you've been able tolearn, feel or be inspired today
(01:00:18):
.
Until next time, what's youragile idea?
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