We are all pilgrims on a common journey with many shared paths on our way to improving our capabilities and helping our organizations create and deliver value.  Presented and discussed at Agile Cincinnati on June 11, 2020.

1. Convergence
Diverse Journeys to the Same Truth
Jack Maher
jack@StandingOnShoulder.us
Chat with Agile Cincinnati
June 11, 2020
This work is shared and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
We are all pilgrims on a common journey with many shared paths on our way to improving our
capabilities and helping our organizations create and deliver value.
For the past 75 years we've worked in silos, becoming competent in our craft. We're reaching a
common plateau, as marketers, analysts, developers and engineers all begin to realize a level of
competency that lets us look around to see what is happening in other domains. What we're
finding is that we're reaching common conclusions, including the power and value of team over
individual, value and values over promises, and the cumulative incremental improvement over a
"Big Bang" approach.
Let's consider how far we've come, where we have common ground, and look to how we can
leverage our common path to accelerate our shared future together with our collective and
concerted approach to creating and delivering value through our organizations.
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2. IT – It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride
Imposter Syndrome vs. Hero Complex
Over the past 50 years, IT has gone through a lot of growing pains.
We’ve gone from having no idea what we were doing, to micro-niche specialization.
But we’ve finally reached a level of conscious competence where we can step up
from keeping the systems running, to making step change improvements to the way
we create and deliver value through our organizations.
Now we can actually help the business with driving capabilities as defined by what
the business needs, and not by what we could deliver.
When we started this IT thing it was still new, and we were equal parts making it up and figuring it out as
we went along. It would be fair to say we started as unconscious incompetents – we didn’t know what
we didn’t know, until it crashed and burned. We learned many hard lesson that resulted in “guard rails”
like ITIL and RUP.
The reality was we were focused on our own lane for the most part, just trying to keep it all going. But
we’re past that now, and have lessons learned through conscious incompetence – the painful realization
and reminders of our limitations and mistakes. Today I think we’re generally in a conscious competence
state.
What I find to be most interesting is that we have reached an amazing convergence of concepts and ideas
across multiple domains. It’s not that professions aren’t completely unaware of the other professional
domains, but maybe more akin to the common and parallel developments of Edison and Tesla, or Bell and
Gray – a convergence of similar solutions to common and shared problems. Validation. Or at least
confirmation bias aligned.
And just like conceptual solution of the telephone has evolved since Bell - so have we in our technology
and capabilities. Becoming digital is the realization of business that is not defined or limited by
technology, but that leverages contemporary technology to synchronize with business capability.
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3. JourneyMilestones
Plan Build Run
Mainframes
& Apples
Engineering
& Software
Enterprise
Capabilities
The starting points were not random, they were the first pieces we had to play with. Usually some vendor
training and then off to the races. We figured it out.
We had “big iron” in the “computer room” and Apple computers at home. We were trying to figure it out,
having fun, building stuff, and learning as technology continued to change more rapidly and dramatically.
We did everything in production, because it was all we had. But we got better. We began to use
engineering approaches, and developed software that developed software. We got bigger; we clustered,
scaled, and distributed. We got ‘sophisticated’ with specialization, and we ‘grew’. We generally began to
build silos around capabilities or responsibilities, such as groups that did strategy and planning were
loosely connected to those who would build the solution(s). The builders would then usually “toss stuff
over the wall” to those who then had to run and support the solutions. It was frequently as bad as that
sounds saying out loud now.
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4. JourneyMilestones
Projects
Products
Agile
Lean
DevOps
SRE
BizDevOps
Digital
Transformation
Business Agility
ITIL & Cobit
Waterfall
RUP
PMI
IIBA
IEEE
We got better as we developed maturity. Learned hard lessons and took action to avoid reoccurrence.
This was generally within a functional organization with a command & control culture. As technical
domains and professions began to develop maturity and learn from experience our practices became
more predictable and consistent. Professional organizations that helped socialize “best practices” and
facilitated shared knowledge, standardized concepts & language, and certifications.
Increasingly apparent is that most technology “domains” are arriving at common conclusions about the
advantages of iterative over waterfall, of agile practices and thinking for most software development and
in business functions (see IBM CMO), and agile collaboration. We see more organizations reorient to a
product orientation, applying lessons learned and trails blazed by Google, Amazon with clouds and the
manifestation of things we now know as DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Infrastructure as
Code.
Agile is 20 something now (as defined by the Agile Manifesto). Lean is older, going back to the 1950s.
DevOps came along as part of how the development teams in this space could come together, sparked by
a guy in Belgium, in 2009 named Patrick Debois. He, Gene Kim, Jez Humble and John Willis were co-
authors of The DevOps Handbook. Humble’s Lean epiphany leading to the CALMS (or CALMR, if you’re
into SAFe) acronym for our shared values of Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing (or
Recovery) which then connects with SRE practices.
Most importantly we’re finding these ideas merging in concepts and directional thinking that are enabling
better synchronization between business and technology cycles and responsiveness, largely through
reducing silos and promoting culture and practices that are collaborative, iterative, and supported by a
generative environment focused on associate engagement in delivering on our core mission.
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5. So what are we converging on?
OK, that sounds great, but is kind of “blue-skyish”, let’s get more specific and realistic…
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6. So what are we converging upon?
Team
Iterative
Approaches
Focus on
Value &
Values
If we are to draw upon the lessons of high performing organizations, there are some very consistent traits
or behaviors.
We have so many examples of people in garages, and lofts, and late nights that were focused on a mission
with a shared commitment by an engaged and driven team. It’s no longer a rare case or uncommon
knowledge that a collaborative team in a generative environment will triumph over an individual
contributor in a competitive environment in almost every case. This is at the heart of Drucker’s famous
“culture eats strategy” quote.
The waterfall, serial, “try to figure it all out in advance” approach was fatally flawed from a customer
satisfaction perspective from the outset. Sometimes, the more closely the solution matched the
requested features and specifications, the less satisfaction derived by the customer. Partly because of
subsequent discovery and evolving understanding which have already been committed to because of the
serial nature.
Enabled with an iterative approach that is constantly and consistently delivering value and aligned with
our values as individuals, teams, and organization we now can be much more than order takers and
builders. As creators and deliverers of value, we now need to be a key player, with our ‘head in the game’
the whole time.
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7. The Next Convergence
People
Culture
Technology
Fully Digital
Process
Business
Looking at our business through the lens of value stream mapping is one of the best ways to determine
what your approach might be or look like. Value stream maps allow us to identify the activities in which
we create or deliver value in and through our organization. When we look at the bigger picture of our
organizations and cultures, we see that an alignment of these dimensions of our people, our culture, our
relationship with our associates, customers, and stakeholders, and aligning our business processes with
the flow and leveraging technology to be relevant in our immediate digital future. The COVID19 crisis has
accelerated adoption sufficiently to be a tipping point for many industries and organizations. Disrupt
yourself, be disrupted, or be one of the last standing “buggy whip manufacturers” (somebody is still
making for the equestrian markets and Amish).
BizDevOps, DevSecOps, Automation – these are the game changers that will harness IoT and other
fundamental changes that are just getting started today. Have a solid digital foundation will enable you to
plug in and turn on.
In today’s business leadership world, strategic capabilities will include application and full environment
monitoring with telemetry for observed outcomes, which now enables real-time performance monitoring
and value stream management. There is a strong promise for AI projections as guidance. We’re moving
from driving the bus by the rear-view mirror, to having a dashboard and windshield with a HUD (heads up
display).
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8. The convergence of these concepts is at the core of the Standing On Shoulders digital ecosystem.
Standing On Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation was designed for senior leaders, board members,
investors, owners, and executive management teams to inform strategy development and sufficient overview of concepts and
practical application to enable appropriate resourcing. It was first introduced at DevOpsDays and was immediately accepted
by practitioners as a succinct overview that helps them help their managers and leaders. As such it was called one of 7 “must
reads” for DevOps practitioners by Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute on TechBeacon.com.
Standing On Shoulders: The Digital Transformation Workbook then dives a layer deeper for VPs, Directors, Managers, and
teams for tactical approaches and operational implications. The Workbook leverages worksheets for reader application to
current state, real-world situations. The resulting collection of worksheets then represents the framework for your Digital
Transformation, not a cookie cutter or consultant definition.
Value Stream Mapping: The Secret to Successful Digital Transformation will be out in book form later this year and is
currently available as ½ day workshop / webinar or full day workshops for teams or facilitators-to-be. The ½ day includes 8
worksheets and multiple available download files including templates and shared content.
Focused Improvement: Innovation on Demand will be released Spring 2021 and is a deep dive into how to use a lightweight, 4
step design thinking approach. The book adds to the workshops and shared content, with additional facilitation and execution
ideas and approaches. For more information about Focused Improvement, and an overview of the 4 F’s and how this design
thinking model is used for product development and team retrospectives.
Focused Improvement: Innovation On Demand, to be released Summer/Fall 2021, expands on the workshops and team
coaching with a comprehensive look at the 4 step, lightweight but powerful design thinking approach. From its roots at
Stanford through Nordstrom’s masterful implementation, this purposeful approach to innovation is powerful in product
development and effective in team retrospectives.
Deterministic Process Design: The Secret Sauce, due in 2022, presents an approach to business process design that combines
micro services architecture with standard work with an outcome of automatable processes. Learn more at
https://DeterminsticProcessDesign.com
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9. Convergence
Diverse Journeys to the Same Truth
This work is shared and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
We are all pilgrims on a common journey with many shared paths on our way to improving our
capabilities and helping our organizations create and deliver value.
The more we share, the more we learn together.
The more we learn, the better we can do together.
Jack Maher
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