How to Navigate the Sea of "No"
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SpringOne Platform 2017 Jon Osborn, Great American Insurance; Brian Jimerson, Pivotal This session will present how the Great American Insurance Group was able to navigate a sea of "no", to build sponsors and champions, and transform software delivery through cloud native technologies and culture.
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How to Navigate the Sea of "No"
- 1. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company The following presentation is for information and discussion purposes only. Any views or opinions expressed are the speakers’; shall not be construed as legal advice; and do not necessarily reflect any corporate position, opinion or view of Great American Insurance Company, or its affiliates, or a corporate endorsement, position or preference with respect to any contractual terms and provisions or any related issues. If you have any questions or issues of a specific nature, you should consult appropriate legal or regulatory counsel to review the specific circumstances involved. Any examples contained in this presentation are for illustrative purposes only and do not necessarily reflect all aspects of a business case and related investment, profit and savings. The Great American Insurance Group eagle logo and the wordmarks GREAT AMERICAN ® and GREAT AMERICAN INSURANCE GROUP ® are registered service marks of Great American Insurance Company. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company. All rights reserved.
- 2. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Navigating the Sea of “No’s” Jon Osborn josborn@gaig.com @jonnio20
- 3. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO You Goal Culture ChangeThe Plan
- 4. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company • We can’t do that here • We already do ‘agile’ • I’ve scripted everything, why do I need PCF? • I don’t have the budget for that • My business is too highly regulated to go faster • All of our people are so busy, they can’t possibly have time to go faster The Usual “No’s”
- 5. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Sisyphean Shuffle
- 6. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company
- 7. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Business Engagement Language and Marketing Building the Plan The ‘Pitch’
- 8. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company What’s a good business case? MARGIN TOTAL Annual Backlog Value $8,125,000 INVESTMENT Licensing ($84,000) Infrastructure ($500,000) People ($898,733) SUMMARY Total Savings $8,125,000 Total Investment ($1,482,733) Net Cash Flow $6,642,267 IRR 7.8% Discount Rate 7.50% NPV $5,255,597 Payback Months 20.9
- 9. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company
- 10. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Business Engagement Language and Marketing Building the Plan The ‘Pitch’
- 11. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Language and Marketing Matter! the word ‘agile’ 0 5 10 15 Option A Option B Option C Option D My Game Changing Project Business IT Customer
- 12. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Business Engagement Language and Marketing Building the Plan The ‘Pitch’
- 13. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Building the Plan
- 14. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company ‘Long Held Beliefs’ =
- 15. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Dig! Chris Wimbush [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
- 16. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Be Data Driven
- 17. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Don’t Fight the Data 220% ≠ 215% My bad.
- 18. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company
- 19. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Gated Funding Risk Threat
- 20. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Career and Skill Diverse (pairing will fill the gaps) The Team Avoid Naysayers (pairing can’t help them) Use the Volunteer Model (pairing with excited people is fun)
- 21. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Business Engagement Language and Marketing Building the Plan The ‘Pitch’
- 22. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company The ‘Pitch’ • Risk • People • Measurement • Budget Key Topics:
- 23. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company The ‘Pitch’ Don’t underestimate the Elevator Speech!
- 24. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company
- 25. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Plan for Success • Measure Everything • Don’t underestimate difficulty of change • Involve Senior Leaders
- 26. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company
- 27. © 2017 Great American Insurance Company Thank You! Some Homework: • Study ‘loss aversion’ • Read about Lean Startup • Know the ‘Law of Holes’ • Be an expert in Conway’s Law • Read this: Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior • Don’t buy cheap ping-pong paddles
Editor's Notes
- Hello. My name is Jon Osborn and I work for the Property and Casualty Division of Great American Insurance in Cincinnati, Ohio. We are a Fortune 500 company with a long and successful history. My title is enterprise architect but I’m actually a Change Agent. We combine the CIO and CTO roles in our organization so we don’t have a separate CTO at Great American but I like to joke around (sort of) that I work out of the Chief Troublemaking Office.
- I titled this talk ‘Navigating the No’s’ because I discovered that change is hard. There are usually more reasons NOT to change than reasons that support the change effort. I prepared this talk in the hopes that I could give you a recipe for how to do the very hard work of changing your company. This is an open-source recipe so you might need to adjust it so it fits into your particular situation. I have found that changing culture is by far more complicated and difficult than any software project I have ever worked on. Great American IT wanted to adopt a new software development process. This is where things get difficult because the real work is chancing the culture and people. Technology is the easy part. Every company is different and there was certainly no roadmap for how Great American should proceed. Cultural Champions and Change Agents are rare and I learned on the fly so I wanted to give back to the community with this talk, if I could. Thank you to Pivotal for inviting me to share part of our early experience. Also thanks to Pivot Brian Jimerson who hit me up with the idea for this presentation and many thanks to all of my team members who helped out over the past few months. I’ve tried to assemble the learnings from our work into this presentation in a way that I hope you can take away something useful and that will save you some time or help to navigate around a ‘No’ you might be struggling with. The No’s are all over so getting hung up on one can be quite challenging. In retrospect, I wish I had the insight I have now but hindsight is always 20-20. During my experience, I discovered that I needed a plan to help navigate the No’s and give a pathway to the goal. A plan helps because it lends structure so you can get to the important stuff of guiding culture change and delivering value. Today, I’d like to cover four aspects of a plan that might lead you to success: Business Engagement, Language and Marketing, building your plan, and, of course, the Pitch.
- This strategy is more like a journey than a plan but never the less, when working on your Plan you will start having to navigate the no’s. What I mean is get used to hearing the word ‘no’. In fact, it’s not just the word ‘no’ you have to contend with. You’ll also hear Any of these sound familiar? :And my personal favorite: “All of our people are so busy, they can’t possibly have time to go faster”. A well-structured plan will help you setup for success, deliver some real business value and, as much as possible, smooth the culture change journey.
- Sometimes, I refer Navigating the No’s as the ‘Sisyphean Shuffle’. If you remember, Sisyphus was a Greek King punished for deceitfulness and self-serving craftiness for all eternity to push a rock uphill only for it to roll back and hit him. I’m not suggesting that you be deceitful or self-serving, but you will need to be crafty. Also, I promise it’s not for ALL eternity. Just some of it. Find some comfortable shoes with great traction. The hill is steep and the rock you are pushing uphill is going to be heavy. (click) If you feel like this guy, you’re probably on the right track. Speaking of shoes you use to push your rock up the mountain, PCF can be a platform that can solve many problems, even problems you didn’t know you had. I wanted to spend just a minute talking about the technology platform.
- I had no idea when we first installed PCF that it is the running shoes you put on before the marathon. You don’t really think about them but if you tried to run without shoes, you’d be slow, it would hurt, and you’d wonder “why am I here”? Not using PCF is like running without shoes. We had no idea we were not wearing shoes until we did a PCF installation. We started to realize, in a real way, how much it held us back to not have a platform. It is difficult to accept that weeks of work on our traditional infrastructure could, in a very literal way, but completed in a couple of hours on PCF. Incidentally, if you do a project or two at Pivotal Labs, as we did, you will realize they have mounted spikes on your shoes and, maybe without realizing it, you are now a track star breaking delivery records. I’m not going to cover any technical PCF stuff in this talk. There’s more than enough of that to go around at this Conference. But Please do realize that to get the most benefit out of the platform, we need to stop talking about the platform. The platform enables speed, it doesn’t directly deliver on speed. PCF is container technology so I guess this is a more accurate picture of what the platform is doing.
- So, getting back to change, the four aspects of The culture change Plan I’m going to focus on are: Business Engagement Language and Marketing Building the Plan And The Pitch There are many other aspects of change but these are topics I hope you can relate to in the few minutes we have. So, Let’s start with business. The first thing to do is, Learn how to do a business case. A REAL, authentic, business case. They are not easy and you will struggle to create one. If you don’t fail a few times, you are not creating a REAL business case. They never happen on the first try.
- Here’s an example: (here) (yes, you need the pretty charts and graphs). Don’t discount the fact that your business and CIO understand the concept of Net Present Value and Internal Rate of Return. Speaking of that, ask someone in finance what discount rate to use when calculating internal rate of return. Make a friend or two in the business. Get them to tell you what the business really cares about and figure out what projects make sense. You will probably learn that there are hidden gems of projects that haven’t made it on any real priority list or projects that are taking forever to deliver. You’re going to need to feed your new business case skills with some actual business value. Your business friends are key advocates to help you figure out how you are going to fund your project. A solid business case is based on something the business actually cares about.
- Remember that lunch you had with your newly found business friend? Find a way to write down how much benefit the business would get if you solved their problem. Be creative and crafty but make sure when the business is asked to validate the benefits, they don’t hesitate to say that the benefit is real. Make sure the business really believes the savings exists…hopefully, someone will check up on your findings. If they do, this a good sign. If no-one is interested, move on to another problem. You may be misaligned with business priorities. The best business cases focus on business benefit NOT IT savings. Make sure the business benefit is more than enough to fund a pilot then cut it in half. Don’t over commit to the value else risk failure because no-one ever really believes you can earn 100% of what you say. Do not fail because you committed make $10 and only made 8 dollars. Try for 5 dollars and be a hero for making an extra 3 dollars along the way. Finally, Add in ALL the costs. Check nothing at the door. Detractors of your Plan will immediately key off of ‘missing’ information and use that to argue that the approach will not work. If you missed some costs that you should have identified, your CIO and middle management, of course, will think that there is no possibility of success because of all the missing costs. Don’t let this happen to you. Also, don’t despair if the costs seem high or the benefit isn’t quite as large as you thought. Sometimes, business leaders invest money into experiments because they care about the outcome more than the return.
- Language and marketing are critical parts of your Plan that should not be overlooked. The words you use and how you communicate can make or break your journey so develop a ubiquitous language for the re-culture-fying you will be driving. Find terms that your organization can understand but are different what they use today.
- People and middle management, in particular, will want to use the same words that you use when driving the Plan and culture change. This is a strategy that minimizes the impact of the change. It is also a way to deflect the uncomfortable conversations about uncovering ‘waste’ in the system and not having to answer to why the waste wasn’t previously identified and removed. Language matters. Do not use the word ‘agile’. Ever. Everyone is doing ‘agile’. The point is the word agile means so many different things to different people, I can almost guarantee there will be some level of miscommunication. Become a powerpoint master. Make sure when people see your slides, they know it came from you. Get some help if you struggle with it. I’m totally not kidding. Distilling a complicated project into a few slides that are easy to understand is what you are after and it is very difficult to do well.
- Let’s shift gears now and talk about actually building the plan to execute on your goals.
- You will need a list of Projects with authentic business cases, gated funding plans, and a way to staff the work. You know you need a business case that includes some value and some expenses but where are you going to look for the value part?
- I like to look around, with my business partners, of course, for those Long Held Beliefs that are hiding so much value. Long Held Beliefs are the paradigms that have been in your company for many years. So many years, in fact, that these beliefs are simply not questioned. Some of these are supporting large expensive processes, or are driving extravagant complexity, or continually keep the business out of a particular market. These are the situations to look for where you can simultaneously gain broad alignment on a project but also unlock the funding your Plan will need.
- If you can’t find a business case right away, don’t despair. Dig. Keep looking and don’t give up. Just don’t be like this guy. Significant savings exist everywhere. Most senior leaders want to believe their organization is perfectly efficient and there is no more value to eek out. This is simply untrue. Digging like this probably won’t work for you.
- Data driven decisions are the ‘safest’ ones to make so go after any and all data that can help OR hurt your case. Make the data transparent and publish it. Try to limit your bias as much as possible. Ignoring data that doesn’t support your plan might lead you to a blind spot that detractors can use to their advantage. Stay in-front of it. Write the data down so people can argue about it. This is critical. I distinctly remember a meeting talking about how much more code our Cloud Native developers were writing.
- My colleague was adamant that it wasn’t possible that the developers wrote 220% more code. They argued it was really only 215% more effective. You’re right, I told them. Sorry. My bad.
- The project you choose as your leading candidate needs to be meaningful BUT choose wisely. Being meaningful allows you to avoid scenarios where people look at the outcome and say “that was easy, I could have done it myself”, or “you didn’t prove anything”, or “you were only 10% better” Be aware that ANY type of failure will be used by detractors to validate that ‘this can’t work here’ or ‘See, I told you we are good at what we do. We don’t need to change’. Do keep the project small enough that 8 or so people on one team can do it in 3-6 months. These projects will be easier to staff and you can, hopefully, demonstrate results in a single budget cycle. This is something your senior leadership will love. Finally, YOU don’t get to pick the project. That is up to the leadership team. You are just providing options…but you’ve already made it clear which project is the best one to start with (hint, hint). And Be prepared that they might pick a project you were not anticipating for reasons you don’t quite understand. Don’t fight it. Just go with it.
- So, we have done some homework and a list of projects. Let’s spend a minute on the ‘gated funding’ plan concept. Gated Funding or Evidence Based Funding is a way of dividing the project up into 3-5 chunks of spending and the team agrees to move to the next phase if the current work is successful. The ‘gates’ will serve two very useful main purposes: Your CIO’s risk is lower because they can stop the project at any gate, limiting losses but also validating that things are going well if you are passing the gates. Be sure to transparently communicate what the losses would be at each phase if they actually do stop the project. CIO’s care about that information. Detractors will feel less threatened if the ‘pilot’ might be cancelled after the first gate and things can go back to normal. These people will tend to stand back because they might not see an immediate challenge to their work. Give them hope of cancellation with gated funding. Finally, be OK that your CIO might want to stop the effort after one or two phases…but do an outstanding job delivering your project so this is not an option. Done properly, a gated funding plan should make the project FEEL less risky and will help navigate a significant No.
- So, we have a funding plan, what about the people who will actually execute on the work for your Plan? For the best chance of success, in my opinion, you need people who are excited to take on a new challenge and change their company for the better. If you find the right people, your culture change army will run through walls for you. It is my belief that a career-diverse (early, mid, late) army who are not all ‘top guns’ is your best bet. When you get to the end of the Pilot, you want their coworkers to look at your team and see someone they can relate to. Don’t give detractors a way to say ‘it worked but only because you built a team of rock-stars’, or ‘your team is all recent college grads’. Incidentally, from personal experience, and don’t tell this secret, your team WILL be rock-stars at the end of the journey. Keep that one to yourself. For the same diversity reasons, try to find people across the organization from various teams. Who says there’s no one in operations that can’t be a developer? Don’t pre-filter skills for your team. You want and need a wide range of experience and skill. I took a .NET developer to a Spring Boot project and he is awesome. If you select the team from a list of randomly available people instead of using the volunteer model, you risk having naysayers on the team. They will only serve to reinforce detractor assertions that this project is no different than theirs. The detractors will gossip to coworkers about the problems the team is having, how useless pairing is, and that the breakfast is terrible. They will focus on the negatives instead of the successes. Avoid this at all costs. Incidentally, adding skeptics to the team can pay off. Skeptical people can just be delaying their approval of a change until they fully appreciate the change. These people can often turn into you biggest advocates. On my team, our intentionally selected pairing skeptic is now the pairing culture champion for the entire Lab. He is all-in. Just be careful with skeptics because they can also do the exact opposite and backfire on you. In my opinion, it’s worth the risk. Recognize that what people do is WAY more important than what they say or how they answer questions. Volunteering is a simple way to know that your team has self-selected into something new. Personally, I’m much more interested in who actually applies than what their manager says about whether they should apply or not or whether they are qualified. Whatever that means. Needless to say, people with energy will only help to power your journey. Finally, you, Change Agent, do NOT get a spot on the team. Trust me, I get it. I’m a coder too. I really want to pair and write some tests. I want to push awesome software and watch green Concourse pipelines. What you actually need, more than delivering the next Pivotal Tracker story, is to be able to step aside and let the results speak for themselves. You are the leader but setting up the perception of the team winning without you is a very powerful outcome. Change Agents who eventually stop talking about change are winning.
- Now we have a list of projects, Business Cases, gated funding plans, and a way to assemble a group of excited team members. How are you going to pitch the plan to your CIO or leadership team? After all, gaining approval is the last No you need to navigate. I’m not an expert, but I’m going to throw out my $0.02.
- These are the 4 concepts I recommend bringing forward in your pitch. Including these will help to avoid questions from detractors and skeptics. After all, we are navigating the no’s, right? Risk – what bad could happen? What if it doesn’t work? What if the project is over budget? Will I lose my job if we fail? People – Where can I get people for this project? What will happen to existing work if I divert them to this effort? How many business partners will complain when we reassign a developer that everyone likes? Do I need rockstars or just any old java developer? Measurement – how will I know if the project is successful? What am I measuring? Are the results meaningful or easy to blow off? What’s the total business value? How long will it take to realize the return on investment? Budget – Do I need to ask for incremental dollars for this project or can I recover dollars from somewhere else to keep the budget flat? Do I have to ask the Board for more money? Is this a onetime charge or am I raising my budget forever? Keep your pitch to a few points. Remember, you are a powerpoint master. A few main slides, and an appendix with as many slides as you like is the key.
- Senior Leaders need a way to repeat the project plan to other senior leaders so don’t under estimate the elevator speech. If you can’t communicate the plan on a few pages, or in a 30 second elevator ride, you are not ready to communicate. Senior Leaders need sound bites to sell your ideas to other leaders. If you feel like you’re ready to do your pitch and gain approval for the project, it’s time to find out how many meetings it will take to gain approval. Make sure you know where each leader stands and what their concerns are. Write them down so your leaders feel heard. Don’t feel the need to address all of the concerns unless you feel it affects the business case or staffing model. Let the hard work stand on it’s own. Be prepared that you might have to iterate a few times. I think I had 6 versions of a business case and plan before gaining approval. And we approved a completely different project on the spot. Expect the same and don’t get discouraged and remember that each iteration informs your next effort. Some of your ideas will be so unbelievable that they will take some time to sink in. Don’t rush it. I continue to say my team is only writing twice as much software because the true statistics are still unbelievable to most.
- Finally, enjoy the feeling of being in the final meeting and Leadership says ‘OK, let’s move forward’ and you say ‘wahoo!’ immediately followed by distress and the thought of ‘Oh, No! Now I have to deliver!’
- Now that you are on the hook, be careful to pave the way for success. Make solid choices as to what success criteria you are using to measure yourself. I was fortunate that we could take an existing legacy plan, convert it to a cloud native plan and have something to directly compare when the team started to produce results. What is your comparison criteria? Are you saving money? Are you going faster? Are you improving quality? There’s no wrong answer here except for not having one. Planning for success means, for example, if you send a team to Pivotal Labs, be sure PCF is setup before they go and be planning a workspace to ‘catch’ them when they return. What are you going to do about ping-pong, breakfast, and other cultural legs the team stands on? What about tooling like workstations, software development tools, and other not free things? Are you going to go all-in or a-la-carte the model? When I took my leadership to the Chicago Pivotal Lab, I included HR, real estate, and interior design people on the trip. It was fun to watch the space designers break out their tape measures, run around the Lab and measure it up. While watching them, I felt that we were validating our direction, taking the project seriously, and were going to fully invest in our journey. Take your senior leadership along for the ride. Have them make appearances and talk with your people on a regular basis. Let them talk to the team. I was caught off-guard by one of my senior leaders when visiting the Denver Lab during our last project. After a morning of interacting with the team, he approached me and said that this team is happy, high energy, and clearly loving what they were doing. His point was that this was amazing to watch. I had simply because I had not considered that a drastic morale increase is just as important as writing more high quality, value driving software. I guess Onsi was correct last year, let developers do what they love.
- In conclusion, culture change is hard. There are so many No’s to navigate. We’ve covered some ways to engage your business, talked about why language and marketing are important, built a plan, and delivered a successful pitch. I hope you have some insight into learnings I have accumulated while driving change at my company. I’m sure your situation is different in many ways. Maybe you are just starting out or maybe you started some time ago and are struggling with how to proceed. In any event, embrace the Sisyphean Shuffle, get moving, and navigate the No’s.