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Agile Ideas
#153 | Throw Back Episode - #069 Steve Pereira - Defining flow, value stream mapping, capability mapping to transform your business
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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Learn more about podcast host Fatimah Abbouchi
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Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Agile Ideas. I'm Fatima, ceo at Agile Management Office, mental Health Ambassador and your host. This podcast is sponsored by Agile Management Office, providing high-impact delivery execution in an agile era for scaling businesses. On today's episode, we're talking to Steve Pereira. 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. His latest project can be found at wwwvaluestreamlink. Please join me in welcoming Steve Pereira to the show. Welcome, steve to the show.
Steve Pereira :Thank you for having me.
Fatimah Abbouchi:It's lovely to be here. You're very welcome. I know we had to do a little bit of finessing to get the time zones right, so where are you joining us from?
Steve Pereira :I'm in Toronto, Lovely sunny for once. Toronto.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Beautiful, beautiful. I've definitely got that on my bucket list. I would love to go there someday. The closest I got was when we went to. We went to the US. Well, we went to Hawaii, which wasn't, you know um the US mainland, but we did end up going there and it was amazing. But Toronto is definitely on our list, so I hope to get there one day, um, in the near future, if COVID persists, and doesn't persist, rather, and allows us permissions to go. So, um, maybe I'll see you in person one day. Fingers crossed maybe.
Steve Pereira :Yeah, you're welcome here anytime. You can uh, jump, jump out here for the devops toronto meetup or maybe devops days conference absolutely that sounds amazing.
Fatimah Abbouchi:I? Um have done some research and there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about and I think you're going to help educate our listeners on a few topics as well. But before we kick off, one of the things I wanted to learn a little bit about is I read in your submission around the fact that you know you're so obsessed with flow that you actually used to apply it when it comes to you know, when you were at home and basically in your bedroom, and you said something about your bedroom and flow, and I just want to understand that a little bit more, and if you could tell us the story, it would be great.
Steve Pereira :Yeah. So I was kind of a strange kid, I guess. I I mean strange and lazy at the same time. I hated cleaning my room, um, and I always just wanted everything to kind of stay perfect so that I could focus on other things, and I suppose that that's continued throughout my life to some degree, but particularly when I was a kid I just tried a bunch of weird experiments to try and save time and make my life easier. So and when you're a kid you know the most challenging things in your life are like cleaning your room right and getting to school on time. So that's where I spent, you know, quite a bit of time and attention with these experiments.
Steve Pereira :And so once I tried making my bed and sleeping on top of my bed so that I didn't have to make it in the morning. That was not ideal, not the best way to use a bed, obviously, but got the job done. So it was sort of like over rotating towards efficiency, of like I don't have to do this thing but at the same time, you know, not the most pleasant sleeping experience. Then the other thing was going beyond the bed to like the entire room. So if I don't touch anything in my room. If I don't use it, it stays clean all the time and nobody hassles me about cleaning my room.
Steve Pereira :So I moved into my closet for a while and luckily I had a closet big enough. It was not really I mean big enough, as it was not big enough to live in. It was not a room, but it was kind of a fun experiment to see. Okay, well, I don't have to clean my room, it stays perfect if I just live out of my closet for a while. If it works, it solves a large percentage of the problems that I have to deal with on a regular basis as a kid, and I spend more time playing and enjoying my life. So, yeah, I was just a strange kid in terms of experimenting with different ways of living and, I guess, ways of working, which is where all of my focus is these days.
Fatimah Abbouchi:It's actually a really interesting story, because what I take from that is a couple of key things. Well, one, you made sure your stakeholders were happy, which in this case, would have been family. Two, you also started getting used to the discomfort that comes with. You know entrepreneurship and projects and delivery, so you know you were learning that at a really early age, whether you knew it or not, that it would take you to where you are today.
Steve Pereira :You know what? I've never heard that perspective before and I'm inclined to agree with you. I think that, yeah, I had definitely an enterprise mindset from a very young age.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Absolutely. I remember as a very, very young child, sort of in the early years of schooling, I remember in the backyard creating garden cafes and selling bugs with leaves and mud, thinking that you know it was a store and I was trying to make money and it was just a little bit of a fun. But I think, you know, sometimes you have it when you're really little and you don't realize it, but then you obviously you spend a lot of time to empower yourself to, you know, play on that and actually expand into where you are today. So, yeah, very interesting story. Thank you for sharing that. Now I wanted to um help our listeners understand a little bit about something that you talk a lot about. We talk a lot about a lot of things. I've been looking at your profile. It's very impressive. But one of the things that you talk a lot about is flow, and I know we just touched on it briefly, but could you help describe what does flow mean for our listeners and why you're so obsessed with it?
Steve Pereira :Yeah, well, I think that one of the wonderful things about flow is that it means different things to different people and a different perspective.
Steve Pereira :So if you want to zoom out to the organization, or you know you can zoom, you can zoom flow to whatever level. It's one of those things that's kind of fractal in that the same sort of principles apply whether you're looking at the micro or the macro and at any stage. So that's one of the things that really captures my attention is this idea of what are the things that are true whether you're zoomed all the way in or zoomed all the way out, and flow is one of those things. And really, if we're talking about at the macro level, you can talk about the flow of value throughout the world, right, and over time. But what's probably most relevant to the audience is like the flow of value throughout an organization, from its raw materials, like ideas and problems to solve, and customer opportunities and needs and desires, all the way to satisfying those desires. So whether they are for customers or for the enterprise itself or its employees, and so flow is like value. It kind of applies to different stakeholders and different perspectives, in different ways and at different levels, but I think that for an enterprise, what they're really trying to do is reach this extremely high level of performance and then sustain it over time, which historically, has been a humongous challenge, right? This is why we have digital transformation as such a problem throughout the world is because we haven't had that flow. We haven't had that adaptation and that evolution over time of flowing from. Okay, well, this was the business model of the time, when these pieces were placed in these positions and the world was a certain way. But once you unlock, different capabilities and new conditions arise, you have to flow to different ways of working, different ways of satisfying your customers.
Steve Pereira :And so the other major factor that 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 narrow our focus to exactly what we're working on and the rest of the world falls away.
Steve Pereira :And that is the reason why that happens is because all of the friction goes away, right, like all of the things that stop us from staying focused and consistently making progress have been sort of removed from the situation, and I think that that is something that resonates with all of us, like hopefully, we've all experienced it, hopefully we experience it on a regular basis, because it really is a wonderful thing to make progress in that way and to really enjoy our work and hopefully, you know, it's paired with a sense of clarity and a sense of value, so that you're not just getting in the zone and flying off in the wrong direction. So I think when I talk about flow these days, I'm talking about flow in the context of clarity and value and pulling all three things together, because I think that without any one of those three, or without those three together, you really run the risk of not making the progress that you hope to make and not really reaching your full performance potential.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Yeah, absolutely, and there's a lot of research around flow. I've read a lot of books sort of around time management and getting into that sort of flow state. For some people it might be, you know, 90 minutes, others might be three to four hours. I find that for me, the flow state for me is mostly applicable on the weekends, where I don't get distracted by emails and messages and WhatsApp and phone calls and things like that. Have you found any particular you know techniques, very helpful, that you could recommend to people to get into that flow state? Things like, for example, one of the ones that I've heard about recently is you know, put your mobile phone in another room as an example. Is there anything that you would recommend to listeners that maybe that can help them be better in flow?
Steve Pereira :yeah, I think. Well, one thing about me is I tend to spend much more time on the macro than the micro, so what I'm what I'm going to talk about is kind of the patterns and the principles around it, because, rather than a specific, you know you should do X. I think that, in terms of the major factors that affect flow are things like friction and waste and delay, and waste and delay, and so the way that those things sort of manifest themselves in individual workflow is looking at things that can interrupt you. And one of the ways to discover that is not necessarily in the moment, because usually we're trying to do something, we get interrupted, but then we're trying to do something, we get interrupted, but then we're trying to get back to the thing and we don't actually take the time to say why was I interrupted? What is this part of a larger pattern? And so I'm a big fan of kind of stepping away on a regular basis and looking at how are we working, how am I making progress on a regular basis, and what is the distribution of my time right? How often am I getting interrupted over the day, over the course of the day? There's apps that you can use to monitor that. But you could also just use a post-it note and you know like, mark a line for every time you get pulled out of what you're doing it out and mark a line for every time you get pulled out of what you're doing.
Steve Pereira :Another big thing that I'm a big fan of is blocking out time right, so not just kind of going with the flow in terms of scheduling, because if you just go with the flow it's very hard to measure right, and I think measurement is very key to realizing what's happening and to understand what's happening so that you can make improvements.
Steve Pereira :So things like blocking out time in your calendar, for instance, is almost like a hypothesis. It's almost like saying I will spend this time doing this thing and when it comes time to do that, you can then look back and say well, I plan to spend two hours on this. I only got 15 minutes worth of work done. I actually had to move and do something else, or I got a phone call, or this, this and this happened. So out of that two hours, I actually only got 15 minutes of value out of it. That, I think, is at the micro level, what I often look at at the macro level inside of organizations. So the same sort of principles apply what were you planning to do and what actually happened? And what can we do, what can we sort of discover about what's happening in order to design a more bulletproof system, a more or a less fragile system, or a less interrupt driven system?
Fatimah Abbouchi:Yeah, absolutely, and I think on that, like you know, as at an individual level it's, you know, an hour and 45 minutes of time wasted in that example. But now, thinking about it from an organizational perspective, the bigger organization, the more the way. So I want to circle back to you know you mentioned before around value, so value streams is another term that for many people may be not familiar with. We're doing some work in that space at the moment. Could you help our listeners understand what a value stream is and how that connects to flow?
Steve Pereira :Yeah, well, it's great that you introduced flow first, because I think flow is much more familiar to people and value streams really kind of build on this concept of flow, in that they are the way that value flows through a sequence of activities. So at an organization level you're probably thinking of value streams in ways that the company delivers its products and services from that initial need or desire or idea all the way out to customers, and those customers again can be internal customers or external customers. And really the reason that we call them value streams is very deliberate because obviously stream you want flow involved in this process. We're not doing anything once anymore and we don't want to do things in large batches or with a defined start and end point. Everything has to be continuous. So the stream aspect, the flow aspect of value streams, is very intentionally part of the term and value really is the reason why we're doing any of this.
Steve Pereira :And I think that you know when we talk about process a lot of people will recoil. There's a bunch of process nerds who love the topic, but most people, I think, have this kind of knee-jerk reaction that process is bad and process is the thing that makes me miserable in my work. It pulls me out of my flow. It's the thing that keeps me from doing my job, and so adding value to value streams and adding, replacing process or process improvement with value stream management and value stream improvement means that we're focusing on value and flow right, rather than just doing things for the sake of doing things or doing things for the sake of standardization or consistency, efficiency. We don't care about those things as much as we care about value and flow, and I think that that's really important when it comes to defining what we're talking about when we're talking about value streams.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Some people would say, or I've heard them say oh, value stream mapping is just another word for automation. What's your thoughts on that?
Steve Pereira :I think the wonderful thing about value stream no-transcript, but you map out that entire process and you measure it so that you can see where are things potentially slowing down, where can we improve. And what's most common and, I think, most relevant to the software world in the modern world is a little bit lower level. I mean, we don't we're not shipping tomatoes around the world and this sort of like delivery aspect of software is very trivial. It's the easy part, the development. That's hard, which is very different from manufacturing, right, manufacturing. You spend a little bit of time on development and then you're just delivering all the time. You're just constantly cranking things through the factory. But the idea behind value streams and value stream mapping is let's look at this flow of value and measure how it gets from one end to the other end. And what's really common for folks in the agile space and software space is something like the release process, right, the release process, where you might have multiple products that each have their own individual value stream coming together and flowing into each other and out to customers, and that can be really challenging in terms of understanding what's happening but also measuring it so that you can improve it, because we don't often we just like to work. We don't usually like to step away and say, like how is any of this working and where should we be improving? And that's where automation comes in. Like, the idea of value stream mapping isn't to automate everything. It's to automate the biggest opportunity that you have or the biggest risk that you have in your value stream, because automate everything is terrible advice. If you have any kind of priority which we always do there's always something that's more important than something else. So if we say, automate everything, you're probably going to start with the thing that's not going to make much difference or you run the risk of not targeting your biggest opportunity. So the way that I like to approach value stream mapping is let's look at the entire end-to-end process and measure it so that we can make very good decisions about. Let's focus on A, then B, then C, because A is going to be the fastest thing to fix and it's going to give us the best return on investment and it's going to have the highest impact for customers.
Steve Pereira :We have ways of prioritizing when we measure, and without measurement we just have a bunch of people's opinions, and that is where we are right now. And that is the difference between a value stream map and a process diagram or a flow diagram or a flow chart. Without that data, you just have everyone's opinions battling it out and people can argue all day and you might have productive arguments, but you're not going to be as effective as using a value stream map. When you use a value stream map and you're seeing the measurement of each activity in the process, you have your biggest opportunity just pops out, right, and it just instantly becomes obvious to everyone that spending 20 hours on this one activity is a more important focus for us than this two-hour activity over here. Right, and that's really important.
Steve Pereira :When it comes to the fact that we have cross-functional teams and we have diverse teams and we have big teams. These are not two people teams, right? If you've got eight people on a team, you have eight different opinions on what we should be doing, and so we need ways of taking those eight separate opinions and bringing them together into alignment so that everybody can agree or at least disagree and commit. Right, at least they have something concrete and clear so that they can say yes, you know this by the numbers that make sense. I might not be super comfortable with it because it's not my area of expertise, but I understand. Everybody understands numbers, everybody understands that 20 is more than two, so it simplifies a lot of decision-making and it can really target your attention so that, instead of a huge backlog of 50 things and no priority, you've got three super high priority initiatives that you could probably start tackling today and that, I think, is super powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi:I think you touched on a really important point. Obviously, value streams is quite horizontal, but then you've got all of these vertical lines of business and divisions and departments and things like that. Something we've seen well, I've seen quite a lot of is the disconnect between your vertical divisions of HR or finance, et cetera that traditionally it can be quite controlling in the way that they like to deliver work and manage work and oversee work. And then I'm seeing the organisations now introducing horizontal value streams and the two. The way that they connect, or rather disconnect, at the moment is becoming quite problematic because they're not used to going from doing things one way to a new way which is going to be more efficient. And although you're talking about departments like finance or legal or HR that typically use data for a lot of different purposes, they're struggling to get on board, I find, in some places with the value stream concept. So what's your advice for those that are involved in developing out the value streams and getting those stakeholders on board who maybe are not used to working in delivery?
Steve Pereira :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 and to improve value delivery in the organization become like they're confronted with reality. Right, and, and we can talk all day about moving to more streamlined teams and moving towards flow, but the reality is that you have to convince the organization that this is worth the trouble and worth realigning the way that they think about business, because this is not a trivial change for a siloed org chart driven organization. And I would say that what's really valuable with starting with value stream mapping, is that you can really measure the performance of the organization as it is today. So instead of saying we have to do this, it's going to be better, just take my word for it, which is what happens with a lot of agile implementations and a lot of transformation efforts. It's like this will pay off. Just trust me, or you know it worked for all these other people.
Steve Pereira :I hate that approach. I don't think that that is compelling. I don't think that people should have to put their reputations on the line. They shouldn't have to take a risk. They shouldn't have to take a risk. They shouldn't have to ask people to blindly trust them, and you know I put that.
Steve Pereira :I think that puts a lot of strain in an organization and it doesn't encourage a data-driven culture. It doesn't encourage a culture where we are doing our work based on a qualified hypothesis. You know a hypothesis isn't. Hopefully this works out, or take my word for it. A hypothesis is, we believe, based on, you know, some form of evidence or something that we're basing our hypothesis on, that this will happen in you know some boundary of time, not eventually and not hopefully in six months. We're going to measure this in three months and we're going to find out if we were right or not and then we're going to adjust and have a new hypothesis. I think for a modern organization, that's how you have to run things. You can't just say take my word for it, and these other folks are doing this and it worked for them.
Steve Pereira :So the first starting point is really drawing out that value stream map with whatever participation that you can get, and hopefully you've got some executive sponsorship for this. That will help actually make change once you reveal the opportunities, because nobody wants to come up with a bunch of things that look super promising and then drop it on someone's desk and have them say, well, this is not my focus, I'm off doing what I'm doing and I don't want to be interrupted with this. Thing Pulls them out of their flow, right? So you have to be considering all of these things when you try to make these moves, and so, by including the right stakeholders, by including the right perspectives, you can create this value stream map that shows here's the cost of the siloed operations that we have right now. You can see as we try to get things done it's got to go across here and then up, and then over and then down and then back and then all over the place before it gets to the customer and all of a sudden, you will have these really valuable insights that you can bring 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 a backlog for work that it needs to take 10 days to get us an approval for this? And maybe that's true easier? What if we could make sure that we check these three boxes?
Steve Pereira :And that reduces the work that you have to do by 50% or 80%, because a lot of the cases where we have these complex value streams, where there's a lot of gates and there's a lot of different silos and things go all over the place, there's a simple answer. There's a simple opportunity to take something that requires, you know, a big meeting or consensus, or you know some complex decision-making, like there really isn't super complex decision-making that we need to do on a regular basis. Right, most of our decisions are like if this, then that, and because it's that simple, it can be almost automated. And when it can't be automated, we can enable and empower people to make that decision very quickly because you can provide them with enough information to say yes or no.
Steve Pereira :And a lot of times, when we look at large organizations, they're happy to get rid of these stupid decisions that don't use their brains. Like nobody wants to be a gatekeeper and people would always rather be working on something that's more creative, more valuable, that allows them to feel a sense of flow in their job. And so I think that we're looking at the same sort of motivations, the same sort of sudden. You know we have a very strong case in an organization that is, you know, cares about evidence which is not everybody but in an organization that is really committed to better and improving their performance. A value stream map gives you just an incredible tool to surface these opportunities and make them very clear and very easy to act on, compared with anything else I've ever seen and it's really interesting because you know I haven't asked this, but I think it's a.
Fatimah Abbouchi:It's a you're going to probably going to say yes now, because we've used value stream mapping in our business and we're a 10 person business, so the size of the business doesn't matter. It's actually easier to do it in a small business because, for obvious reasons but you can use it, you know, in your day-to-day as a small business one of the things that I've I've read and also learned a little bit more from your work is around value streams and capability mapping. So one of the things that you've talked about in the past is collaborative mapping. So you briefly just touched on it. I think we didn't spend much time on. But I'm interested to know. You talk about crowd. You know like crowdsourcing data. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Steve Pereira :yeah to me, I mean inside of an crowdsourcing data is all about aligning perspectives, right? I think that this idea of perspective alignment is so critical because we spend so much time in our own heads. Usually, when we get the opportunity to collaborate with people or share or discuss things with people, it's happening verbally or it's happening over increasingly over text, like chat or documentation, and there's so much that's lost, right Cause I can. We all had experiences where we've had a long conversation with someone and we come away and we think that was great. It's like we covered everything that I wanted to cover and the other person walks away and they think that you covered completely different material and they have a completely different understanding of what you just talked about. And now you're actually worse off because you think things are better, but you've actually left with a bunch of assumptions that you didn't have before. But you've actually left with a bunch of assumptions that you didn't have before.
Steve Pereira :And to me, this idea of mapping, especially collaboratively, in a way that's very clear and very easy to understand, ideas. You're connecting concepts, you're connecting notes and pieces of information together into networks and into clusters, and you're able to zoom out and zoom in incredibly effectively, like literally, but even figuratively, you're able to zoom out and zoom in and you can. You have such a stronger ability to make sense of things together, and that is increasingly important because, as we have more diversified teams and we have more in terms of cross functionality so people with different expertise, but also people with different experiences, but also people with different experiences and different perspectives Bringing them together without collaborative mapping means that you're probably missing a lot of information, right? There's probably a lot of things that are being interpreted differently by everybody, and it's very hard to come to agreement on things without doing this step of like pulling things out, connecting them together and then allowing people to either comment on things directly or copy that and change it based on someone else's perspective. Like, I've been in a lot of really productive meetings where we map something out and somebody has been silent thinking about something for like half an hour and they just say, like, while you guys were talking about that thing, I just made a copy of this and I rearranged it because, like, this makes sense to me and this wasn't making sense to me, but what do you think about this? And it's totally changed the conversation and in some cases we're like, oh, that's, that's totally right. Or in some cases you can be, you can, you can, uh, encounter that situation and think, I think 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 these two things together? Or what if we split the difference? There's so much that we can do with this and I just think we're just scratching the surface with it right now. But that kind of talks about this perspective alignment thing. It doesn't talk about your capability thing.
Steve Pereira :But capabilities to me are really important when We've revealed opportunities. So once we've done some mapping and we've highlighted some risks or opportunities or insights, how you actually act on those really depends on your capabilities right, no-transcript? Or that you know we've discovered as opportunities. So capability mapping for me is a way of taking just the most important things that we've highlighted in the value stream and examining our ability to improve those things. So we're not looking at every capability. We're not looking at something like a maturity model where every possible capability is being analyzed and picked apart, because that's a lot of effort for things that might not even matter to our current scenario.
Steve Pereira :So what we do with capability mapping is look at, okay, of the three opportunities that we surface that are super high priority, the most important things that we could be doing, what are the capabilities that are going to enable those solutions and get us to where we want to go? And usually that's a list of like eight to 10 things. So all of a sudden, of all the things that we can be focused on and worried about, we have this narrowed list. And then we pick it apart and look at what do we have to support these capabilities? Who owns them right now? Does anybody own them? Do we have a backup for that person? You know, if that person has to go and work on something else or they have to take a vacation, who's going to make sure that doesn't fall through the cracks?
Steve Pereira :And we look at things like do we have documentation for that capability? Are we using a service to provide that capability? Maybe that service needs to be replaced with something better, or maybe we need to figure out how to use it better. And we also look at comfort. I think that comfort is a very valuable thing in a team, because people don't like doing things that they're uncomfortable with but they're also not going to do a great job when they're not comfortable. So if we're asking people to perform at a higher level, to improve the performance of a specific capability, we want to make sure that it's not something that is totally panic-inducing or that they feel like is going to fall apart at any moment so they don't want to touch it. So looking at all these different dimensions for each capability means that we can score these things and now, instead of just three things that we need to focus on, we know how to focus on them because we know what is actually going to make them happen.
Fatimah Abbouchi:What's actually going to make a difference I think, um, you know you touched on a really good point. You need to get stakeholder buying. So the people that are going to be working within these streams, um, they need to have that mindset, mindset shift. You know agile, everyone talks agile, I talk mindset. You know the two, the you know are one and the same.
Fatimah Abbouchi:But actually getting people to not only do the crowdsourcing part, which you mentioned, which is really important, but then it gets buying as well, because one of the things that we seem to find a lot we do a bit of a review for organizations and identify, you know, hundreds of things that they could address, but you're right, you can't address them all.
Fatimah Abbouchi:They have to then map those to their capabilities and then they're going to decide which one, which ones of those are priorities.
Fatimah Abbouchi:And you're right, at any point in time, you might only be able to work on eight or ten items, depending on the size of your team and the size of your organization. That's been one of the things that we've personally seen being a really small, a small business as well. So I think that you need to get that stakeholder buy-in and I think I like what you said earlier about actually getting measuring measuring first and then putting that in front of them then to get that stakeholder buy-in. And I think I like what you said earlier about actually getting measuring first and then putting that in front of them then to get their buy-in, getting them to be part of the crowdsourcing, and then it's up to the organisation to then therefore prioritise what they're going to focus on so they can then help their teams to uplift their capabilities in general. Where do you think the value stream mapping fits within an organisation? Is there a particular department or function, or do you think it could be happening across an organization in every area?
Steve Pereira :That is a question that I love and I think that we are figuring this out very much at the moment. I'm not sure if the audience is familiar with a book called Team Topologies. That's a wonderful book that's talking about how we organize teams and using specific patterns to really break down how we structure organizations and the interactions between teams and the work that flows through these teams in different ways. I would love to see teams really examining their performance on a regular basis from the inside, which is to say, like every three to six months. Which is to say like every three to six months. But the challenge with that is that you can't see things that are happening to you very effectively. Right, we're not very good at stepping out of our bodies and considering where we could improve. Right we're. We have very powerful biases that are affecting us all the time we're busy doing the work and it's very hard to say well, I'm going to step away to sharpen the saw before I go back to sawing things. So, although I feel like it is a very powerful capability to leverage inside of teams and I think there are opportunities to do that, if there's no buy-in to have an external party do this work, you will get better results by having an external party do the work. So the way that a lot of organizations will start with this is hiring someone like myself to come in and be that external party. But what I ultimately want to see over time is something that Team Topologies calls an enabling team, and an enabling team floats around the organization and works with teams to unlock higher levels of performance. Higher levels of performance, and that can be through providing coaching, doing assessments, doing things like value stream mapping or outcome mapping or capability mapping, and that means a few things. So it means that that team develops expertise in terms of every experience from every team in the organization, so they're able to find patterns and common challenges, which means that they'll be able to suggest solutions that might level up everybody right. They'll be able to see well, of the 10 teams that we dealt with, eight of them are encountering this one common problem, and if we were to solve it, it would level everybody up. That's a wonderful thing, and it's something that I don't get to do very often, because there's very few organizations who want to hire me to go through eight teams, but what we often do is we'll go through a couple of teams, you usually will find these common challenges and you'll find these common opportunities. And then what we do is we prove the value of investing in something like an enabling team.
Steve Pereira :I train the team, get the team running and then they scale it to, you know, 50, 200 teams in the organization. It becomes a capability of the company to constantly be sharpening the saw and constantly leveling up, and that, I think, is a superpower that doesn't exist right now. You know, right now we have agile coaches. It's really hard to say what they're doing, that's measurable, that's data-driven, that is really leveling up the organization and improving the flow of value, but because they're usually locked into frameworks that are working against that. But you know, I think that with these collaborative mapping techniques, with these collaborative mapping techniques, it's beyond getting data and beyond surfacing these opportunities.
Steve Pereira :You're also doing team building exercises at the same time.
Steve Pereira :Right, you're bringing people together who don't have conversations very often, who don't really understand each other's work otherwise, and with something like a value stream map or capability mapping, you're able to reveal what's happening to everyone and what actually goes into delivering value, and that builds a sense of empathy in people.
Steve Pereira :You know, I've worked with a lot of teams where, after doing the mapping, we have people from marketing say I had no idea that that's how we develop software. I didn't understand any of it and I you know I have a new sense of appreciation for that. And likewise we have a lot of engineers who say, like you know what? I finally understand why marketing wants mock-ups early, like I understand why we need to have conversations earlier in the value stream, because we get to this point at the end and we throw them a bunch of code and say, well, like the deadline's, monday, go ahead and write up all your documentation and get your press release ready. So it's a tool not just for finding opportunities but for truly building teams in the most human sense, in the most collaborative sense of the word.
Fatimah Abbouchi:So enabling teams would be where your continuous improvement sits. You're helping the organization to continuously improve, being one of the core components of that. I think you're right around. You know organisations typically don't want to, you know, pay an exorbitant amount to have an enabling team, but they need to start somewhere. So by bringing someone in and we find typically bringing in that external perspective most teams within an organisation, particularly working, you know, in the past as a contract resource, we can be very, you know, tunnel vision on what we're doing and not really seeing how, particularly in governance, in the space that I've sort of spent a lot of time, we might make a change that impacts all of the delivery teams down the line but not actually think about it from their perspective. So that value stream actually enables the linkage between the governance activities and the project delivery activities and so forth. So I think I agree with you.
Fatimah Abbouchi:I don't want to circle back on the Agile Coach piece. Agile Coaches are everywhere at the moment. They're one organisation that has hundreds of them at one particular point in time, and I think the part that they need to also have to be optimal in their roles is not just understanding the Agile frameworks 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 of these the ability to tease out from stakeholders across the organisation and bring that insight together and then managing that and then uplifting people.
Fatimah Abbouchi:So there's so much more to it than just knowing how to use Scrum or Kanban or any of those particular frameworks, and I think that's missing for some agile coaches Not all of them, of course but yeah, I think it's not always. I find organizations sometimes go let's just bring in an enterprise agile coach. And that isn't always the only answer. It's actually a lot more about like sort of what you've mentioned. You actually need to understand what you're trying to fix before you bring in someone to help. You know, improve it if you like.
Fatimah Abbouchi:So, I do want to bring the conversation around to something that you're also very passionate about, so correct me if I'm wrong, but you run the biggest DevOps community in Toronto. Is that correct?
Steve Pereira :In Canada actually. But, but uh yeah, I think we're probably like third in North America, but that might have changed um that's amazing yeah it's, it's a big, it's a big group.
Fatimah Abbouchi: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 about your group and what you guys do, guys and girls.
Steve Pereira :Sure. So I mean this is a great transition from Agile, and part of where I see challenges for things like roles, like Agile coaches and Agile frameworks is that the reason that DevOps sort of arose as a popular topic and a popular focus was that Agile actually got really good at delivering software, really good at creating code that was valuable to customers Quickly as it was moved from a bottleneck to a capability and it started to do a really good job. The bottleneck moved, the constraint moved to deployment and operations. All of a sudden you have a lot of great code, you have a lot of valuable features that you can deliver to customers, but how are you actually getting them to customers? Valuable features that you can deliver to customers, but how are you actually getting them to customers and how are you making sure that they run and they stay performant and you can scale to actually meet the demand of all of these the great benefits that you're delivering with your agile software delivery? So DevOps arose because we needed to literally bring Dev and Ops together. So we had IT, we had operations teams making sure that nothing fell apart, but they were, as Agile became more effective. They were just constantly being buried by new code changes, things that developers wanted to do, tools that they wanted to leverage, new capabilities, and until we brought the groups together to literally eliminated the space between dev and ops, there was this huge adversarial relationship, because they have totally different incentives and anytime you have separate incentives you will have conflict. So the software development teams were focused on creating and shipping as quickly as possible right Velocity, getting fast feedback and the operations teams so, in short, they were focused on change. Change as much as possible, as often as possible, and the operations folks. Change is the worst thing that could possibly happen, right? The best case scenario for operations is that nothing ever changes because nobody gets paged, no one has to fix anything, nobody has to change any of the working system to accommodate new requirements and new demands. So of course they were at odds, of course they were butting heads. They would never talk to each other because they had in a siloed organization.
Steve Pereira :Dev is doing its thing, ops is doing its thing, and so it arose as a set of principles and practices and supporting tools and services that facilitated and enabled close collaboration between these groups, and that's really what it's all about. There's a famous acronym called CAMS for DevOps, which is Culture, automation, measurement and Sharing, which kind of sums it up. And later, very soon after that came out, it was changed to comms, which includes lean. So culture, automation, lean, measurement and sharing.
Steve Pereira :And the reason that lean was introduced was because of flow and value streams and the idea that we have to look at the big picture.
Steve Pereira :Lean is all about looking at systems and looking at the big picture and understanding the flow of work through the entire value stream, and that is actually a level above DevOps.
Steve Pereira :Because when you really think about lean and you really think about the big picture and this is why I don't really focus on DevOps anymore and I focus more on value streams, because the real boundary for value streams is upstream of dev and it's downstream of ops.
Steve Pereira :Right, it is a much bigger picture. It's the real end-to-end process of delivering value and that means that it involves, in some cases, portfolio planning, in some cases, legal compliance, it involves HR, it involves marketing, it involves sales, it involves everything that it takes to deliver value, which means when you're looking at everything it takes, you find where the real problems are, because all of a sudden, you look for them and you see them. You have a way of seeing them. If there's a lot of organizations that are super fixated on DevOps and they wonder why they can't move faster, and it's because there's something upstream or there's something downstream that they're not looking at and you can automate everything around software development and delivery and still miss a gigantic bottleneck. That's somewhere else and it's the things that aren't automated that are the biggest problem.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Yeah, absolutely. And if you think of the size of a DevOps team in an organization in comparison to everybody 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 the regulatory. You need to get all of that in tune. And I definitely agree. I think the value streams is the way to go about it and it's not about I think earlier we didn't actually land on where do we think it sits, which is a really good case in point, because DevOps typically sits within an IT department for the most part, whereas value streams, for example, in our business, is at the top layer, just strategic layer. So in other organizations it's across the whole breadth. It should be across the whole breadth of an organization. Maybe it sits up with strategy or whatnot. But so, steve, how can people get involved with what you do? Where can they find more information about you? Because you're a wealth of knowledge and I think people would definitely want to continue following you on your journey.
Steve Pereira :Well, I appreciate that. I hope I haven't rambled everybody to death, because I do get overexcited about this. This is the challenge with something like value streams, because it covers every part of every business in such a deep and profound way. I end up talking about everything everything involved in software and technology and business, but that's what I love about it. So it's been a pleasure talking about it with you and I hope I haven't led the audience on too much of a winding road. But if anyone is interested in asking questions about this or finding more information, we can put the link to my website in the show notes. I have a resource page that's a lot of content around what?
Fatimah Abbouchi:are value streams.
Steve Pereira :What is value stream mapping? I go into a lot of content around. 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, if you're looking for answers from me or other people who are participating in this, because it is an open dialogue. I have also recently published a book that I call Flow Engineering, which is a focused version of a book that I told you about earlier. So I've also recently published a book that I call Flow Engineering, which is a focused version of a book that I told you about earlier.
Steve Pereira :So I've recently sort of pared it down and focused it directly on the idea of collaborative mapping, and I'll share the link for that as well. That's just flowvisibleis. My website is visibleis and my email address is stevevisibleis. My website is visibleis and my email address is steve at visibleis. So for anybody who can't look at the show notes because they're driving or whatever and they just want to get the details without digging into the show notes, or if they don't go everywhere that the podcast is going, feel free to reach out to me there. I love to hear from anyone who is thinking about this, debating it wondering how it differs from other different approaches or different ways of looking at things, or if they've hit a roadblock or they're struggling to convince their boss. These are all things that I love to talk about, and I'd love to hear from anyone who wants to chat about any of that.
Fatimah Abbouchi:That's amazing. I can definitely vouch for. You are obsessed, which is good. It's always good to be obsessed about what you do. It makes work a lot of fun, so it's been an absolute pleasure. Before we let you go for the day, is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners? A call to action, a piece of advice or a question to ponder?
Steve Pereira :listeners a call to action, a piece of advice or a question to ponder. Yeah well, that's a great opportunity. I would say that people can start with this a lot sooner than they think, and I wouldn't say that the best approach is to build out a value stream map on their own and really start to go to work with it. But I think it's really valuable to just take you know you could take the next five, 10 minutes and really think about the start to finish of how your team does what it does and consider whether your focus is the true value stream or some small piece of it and what you understand about the big picture. So that can mean drawing two endpoints and a bunch of cloudy areas that you don't understand and maybe some information about what you do understand, and then that gives you something to pull your understanding out of your head and really start to think about. What does it take for me to understand this and to have a conversation with someone else about it, so you can take that cloudy illustration of a value stream where there's a ton of question marks and you can bring it to someone else and say does this make sense? Do you know any of these question marks. Do you know what these are and do you think it would be valuable for us to do this together, to map this out, to see what this looks like, and to change all those question marks into information and change all those question marks into data that you can use?
Steve Pereira :So I think that wherever we are in an organization, wherever we are in a journey towards continuous improvement, we can do something today with this, and that's something that I really think is powerful, and it's rare, because a lot of the stuff that we deal with it's, you know, we're looking six months.
Steve Pereira :Six months from now, things will be great because we'll have that automation, or we'll have that thing, or things will be different, or it's, you know, 12 months or 18 months. We've got this big roadmap that stretches off into the distance. There's not much that we can do today or tomorrow, and collaborative mapping is one of those things, and that's what I find is so powerful about it and gets me so excited to share it with people, because it really is something you can do. That's really going to make a difference for you immediately and it's going to not only pay off right away, it pays off forever. Every three to six months you're going to get this sense of clarity and alignment and it can keep you on the right track but also keep you constantly leveling up, and I think that's so powerful.
Fatimah Abbouchi:That's amazing and I think, unlike you know transformation programs or other types of things once you set up the value stream, you've got the opportunity, just continuously improving. You've done the hard work to start off.
Steve Pereira :Right.
Fatimah Abbouchi:It's about improvement, so it's a win-win when you think about it. That's amazing. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and I hope to visit you in Canada one day. So I really appreciate your time and I'll make sure I include all of those notes in our show notes as well. And, yeah, look forward to having future conversations, for sure.
Steve Pereira :Likewise, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for the time. You're very welcome.
Fatimah Abbouchi:Thank you for the time. You're very welcome. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Please share this with someone or rate it if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to follow us on social media and to stay up to date with all things Agile Ideas, go to our website, wwwagilemanagementofficecom. I hope you've been able to learn, feel or be inspired today. Until next time, what's your agile idea?