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InfoQ Homepage Presentations Optimizing for Fast Flow in Norway's Largest Bureaucracy

Optimizing for Fast Flow in Norway's Largest Bureaucracy

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Summary

Audun Fauchald Strand and Truls Jørgensen describe how they have succeeded to align their teams by internal tech radar increasing communication between teams, and a weekly dive on a specific topic.

Bio

Audun Fauchald Strand is Principal Engineer @NAV. Truls Jørgensen is Principal Engineer @NAV.

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Transcript

Strand: Autonomy is the cornerstone of team based work. Teams should include all the competence and all the capabilities they need to solve the problems they own. When they have that, they should have the freedom and trust to make the decisions about their domain, without asking others for permission. We work at NAV, the largest bureaucracy in Norway. When you're that big, it's also valuable to have alignment across these teams. Most things should be done in mostly the same way.

Background

Jørgensen: My name is Truls, and the guy that just started talking is Audun. We are principal engineers at NAV. We have been working here for five and six years. Both of us have been working as software developers for over 15 years. Maybe it's because of that, or maybe it's because we are often seen together, colleagues tend to compare us to Statler and Waldorf, the silly old Muppets on the balcony of The Muppet Show.

Strand: Here we are, we are programmers working in IT. In this talk, we're going to talk about how we achieved alignment in the technology dimension. We think that the tools, techniques we've used can be useful for others in other dimensions as well.

Jørgensen: Let's start with a really short introduction of NAV. It's Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration. We got 20,000 employees across the country, making it the largest bureaucracy in Norway. The mission for NAV is to assist people back into work. We also provide benefits to Norwegians from before they are born until after they're dead. In total, it sums up to one-third of the state budget.

IT at NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration)

Let's talk about IT at NAV. Since NAV was established in 2006, IT was always slow. By slow, I'm talking four huge coordinated releases a year slow. As you know, slow means risky. By risky, I mean 103,000 development hours in a single release risky. It doesn't get more risky than that. That has changed. That changed in 2016, and what a change that has been. Instead of releasing four times a year, we now release over 1300 times per week. This has been a massive transformation. This transformation is the context for this talk. This graph is saying something about speed, but perhaps not much on flow. We have more graphs for you.

What happened in 2016, was that we got a new CTO, and he insisted that NAV should reclaim technical ownership, and start to insource. As you see, this graph correlates with the previous one. NAV used to think of IT as a support function, and as a consequence, NAV didn't have any in-house developers at all. Instead, NAV tended to lean on consultants to get that boring IT stuff done. In fact, I started as the very first developer back in 2016. Today, we have almost 450 internal developers. We think it's worth making a point there. If you want to optimize for speed and fast flow, you must leave behind the mindset that IT is a support function. In order to succeed with the digitalization, NAV had to consider IT as a core domain. This third graph shows a very similar curve, so absolutely no surprise at all. We didn't have any product teams at all before 2016. We used to be organizing projects, but today teams are considered the most important part of our organization, and by Conway's Law, the architecture.

What We Left Behind

Strand: These changes mean that we have left something behind. Basically, before 2016, NAV was organized by function. That is organized by function where each function is specialized and solves a very specific task. Such a design yields a busy organization but the flow suffers because of all the internal handovers. An organization that optimizes for flow should further aim to reduce the handovers and need to accept the cost of duplicating functions, reducing the handover risk by domain instead in the cross-functional teams.

What We Adopt and Prefer

Jørgensen: What we adopt and prefer when optimizing for fast flow. That's really the topic for the rest of this talk. As we have seen, we have adopted a team first mindset at NAV, but as we shall see, the surrounding organization struggles to figure out how we can set those teams up for success. While high performing cross-functional teams demand autonomy, it is also valuable for NAV to have alignment across these teams, but getting alignment in the age of autonomy, that's pretty hard work. We have come up with some techniques to achieve that alignment that we're going to share with you. First, let us start with the teams and why they demand autonomy in NAV. As we have seen, we have over 100 teams, and each team is playing a part directly or indirectly in the lives of the people of Norway.

Strand: We have one team working on the unemployment benefit, another with the parent key benefits. We have teams owning and coding the front page on nav.no, and the application platform that everything runs on. One team we worked a lot with lately is a team behind the sickness benefit. This doesn't really translate to relevant English, but the team is called team Bamble. Bamble is an island off the west coast of Norway, and one of the central team members of the team comes from that island. That's why they chose that name. Team Bamble is a proper interdisciplinary team. There's programmers, legal experts, communication experts, and designers, and other kinds of members. They're mature, having worked again for a few years, having practiced continuous learning for a long period of time. In theory, they know everything they need to know to figure out how to do this, how to solve all the problems that need to be solved to create a system that automates the full chapter of Norwegian law, controlling the payment of the sickness benefit to our users.

Jørgensen: People come to this team with different perspectives, with different voices. One voice, the developer voice suggests that the most important thing the team should deliver is a sustainable system. Because the system are modeling an important part of a welfare state that is constantly changing. The software we create should be adaptive to change. Another voice argues that the most important thing the team should deliver is a system that makes the case handling more efficient. Then we have a third voice that wants the team to focus on a more user friendly service for the sick. Finally, the fourth voice claiming that the most important thing that the team could do is to create a system that does a better job with compliance than the old system for sickness benefit. Coming to think of it, all of these voices make sense. Ideally, we want all of those perspectives implemented in the new system. These voices don't always form a beautiful choir. When push comes to shove, which perspective wins, which voice is the loudest? To top it off, when the team funding comes from one of the voices alone, that makes it even harder to balance their perspectives. Getting their perspectives is really important.

Let's run quick examples on why. Providing support for the sick. That's nothing new. The previous system is over 40 years old and tailored for a human caseworker. This new system is instead tailored for computers, and aims to do a fully automated calculation of the benefits. In some ways, this is where the human brain meets the machine. It's also where theory meets practice. Coming to think about it, the rule set is the theory, but those rules has been put to test by caseworkers for over 40 years. That raises some really interesting questions, such as the practice has in some cases served as a Band-Aid for inconsistencies in the rule set. How do we transform that practice to a new system? Also, during that time, different practices throughout the country has emerged. Which of those practices should be considered to be the correct one? What does that mean for the practices that we now consider wrong? These are indeed complex questions to answer. It doesn't matter how good you are in Kotlin. In order to be able to come up with answers to these kinds of questions, the team must be cross-functional: developers, designers, compliance experts, and legal experts must work together.

Strand: With all these people in the team, the team requires autonomy to function well. The essence of what Truls just said is that this is basically the job, but NAV wants to automate the sickness benefit. This is what this means. Navigating a long line of problems without a clear solution, but many different forces trying to shape the solution to the problem. This isn't really about how fast a programmer you are or how fast the team can produce code. It's about how fast the team can learn about the problems and the forces affecting them. Trying to find solutions that are sustainable, understandable, legal, and sound technical. For the team to be able to do that they need to work together over time. They need trust and psychological safety, and good relationships between the team members. Seldom has this quote by our hero, Alberto Brandolini, been more correct, "Software development is a learning process, working code is a side effect." After thinking about this for a little while, if you believe this code, how does that affect how you work? What's important if learning is more important than creating code? How should you change how you work? You need to put structures in place outside of teams as well as inside, that help the teams to learn as efficiently as possible. In such a team, with all these different team members from all these different departments, each team brings a different perspective to the table. The departments need to find ways to structure the learnings being done in the teams, and finding ways to get this knowledge back into all the teams that work at NAV.

The Surrounding Organization

Jørgensen: Let's talk about the surrounding organization. We had just briefly touched upon it. Remember those graphs earlier? What does the organization behind this change look like? Cross-functional teams demand not only autonomy, but they need that the surrounding organization operate as support. That is not how it really is at NAV. NAV is not just a system of teams. NAV is also Norway's largest bureaucracy, and we have two competing organization designs. Both are struggling to find a way to coexist. There's obviously a lot of tension between the cross-functional teams, and the traditional hierarchy, which is very much alive. Everyone agrees to some extent that cross-functional problems are best solved in cross-functional teams. In order to be responsible, teams need autonomy. Empowering the teams means that the different departments such as the IT department, legal, and the benefit departments are losing influence. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody really wants to die. In NAV, changing the formal organization to be a better fit for a system of teams is a really long running process. We cannot sit and wait it out, although this process is currently running. This is the reality. We have over 100 teams that is deploying to production all the time, and they are cross-functional, and they are competent. We have also this large bureaucracy surrounding those teams struggling with the question, what could the departments do to set the teams up for success? Now we will discuss what IT at NAV has done to set the teams up for success to increase the speed and flow.

Alignment in the Age of Autonomy

Strand: We really think that the other departments both in NAV and maybe even other places, can learn from what we have done. First, we need to talk a little bit about how alignment and autonomy comes together. Most of you have probably seen this drawing. It's from one of our software development process heroes, Henrik Kniberg. There's always a Kniberg drawing to visualize the concept you want to explain to someone else. It's easy from seeing this drawing where you want to be. It's a quadrant so we want to be in the upper right-hand quadrant, also there's a green circle showing the desired place to be. What is Kniberg saying here? He's saying that you need teams that have a clear understanding of what problems to solve, and the constraints and opportunities to connect it to that problem. You also want to give the teams a large amount of freedom on how to solve this problem. This is very easy to say, we need aligned autonomy, but getting there isn't necessarily as easy as just saying those words. How do you get there? What do you do differently tomorrow to get closer to the desired state and the best working? You really need a plan. You need people to work on the measures of that plan. Now we're going to talk about our measures, what our plan looked like. I probably like to say that we planned all the history before we started. We have tried things and we've tried to keep doing what worked and stopped doing things that didn't work.

Jørgensen: Something that didn't work was NAV's strategy for getting alignment in the years before 2016. That used to be, to write principles on the company wiki. In the age of autonomy, that's some crazy definition of done. You will write that principle on the wiki and then you can get frustrated over lazy employees not following what you just wrote. We have seen this strong indication of sloppy leadership repeating at several organizations, not just NAV. The message is the same. This isn't good enough. If you aim for speed and fast flow in your organization, writing stuff on the company wiki is not enough, if you want to direct the flow somewhere. Alignment in the age of autonomy needs another approach. You need to find each team and talk with them with respect for their autonomy. Make the team want to do it, and provide helpful guidance along the way. Always adapt it to their context and their abilities, and be aware to not exceed their cognitive capacity. You do this for each team.

Strand: What you're saying is you can just put this principle on the company wiki and then we'll be done.

Jørgensen: I guess we are done. No, we should discuss some examples instead. First, we will discuss two descriptive techniques, and then two normative techniques that we have seen work good together.

Descriptive Technique - The Technology Radar

Strand: The most basic technique that we have is the technology radar. This is an internal technology radar just for NAV. We want the teams at NAV to use this to share the technologies they've tried, and the conclusions or the learnings they've made from those choices. The radar has traditional categories, just like the Thoughtworks radar, of assess, trial, adopt, and hold, and also another one called disputed. It's implemented with a simple Slack channel, where anyone can make suggestions and attribute the discussions, and add that up in a database to show the conclusions and the data for what happened. If you really want to summarize our strategy with the technology radar in a tabloid way, you can say that when it comes to technology, everything is loud, as long as you broadcast your choices to the organization. This is basically our implementation of that principle.

It's sometimes misunderstood as a list of allowed technologies. We think it is a curated list of the technologies used. We have a small group of editors that collect the suggestions and moderate the discussions. Sometimes the discussions are basically as good as the conclusions. One of my hobbies at NAV is to, for instance, say that we need Gradle in adopt and Maven in hold, or the other way around, just to observe all the interesting discussion that comes afterwards. Or maybe just say something about the Spring Framework, it works the same way. Basically, our radar shows the breadth of the technology landscape, but it also gives teams insight into what other teams are doing. This insight has a real effect on alignment. Because when one team can see what another team does, it's easier for them to choose the same thing if the first team is happy with what they've been doing.

At the same time, this radar is very descriptive. It doesn't have any normal development. It doesn't say what's allowed and not. That has a really interesting and helpful side effect of reducing or maybe even removing shadow IT. Because when teams can publish the choices they made without being yelled at for doing something illegal, it's much easier for them to say what they have, and there's no reason to hide choices that I think others will not like. All in all, this has been a really good thing for NAV. Sometimes the radar isn't enough, we need to go into more depth on the topic.

Descriptive Technique - Weekly Technical Demo

Jørgensen: For this, we have the weekly technical deep dive. The weekly technical deep dive started small, back when we were less than 20 in-house developers. Now this arena serves as a weekly technical pulse throughout the organization, perhaps even more so during the pandemic. We're now using Zoom, and it attracts over 400 people each Tuesday, and the recipe, that's still the same. One team takes the mic and presents something they're working on, something they're proud of to all the other teams. The weekly demo is as the technology radar a descriptive technique for creating alignment. It's really efficient for spreading good ideas across teams. It's relatively low effort. It needs a dedicated and motivated group of people to arrange this every week. It's low effort, but really high impact. That group is doing an incredible important job. They're really changing the culture at NAV towards more openness, and more kindness, and more curiosity, and more learning each week. These are two descriptive techniques, time to discuss some more normative ones. This is the technical direction presentation, and we should spend a little more time on this one.

Technical Direction

Strand: This presentation is basically a complement to the more descriptive techniques that we talked about already. For those, the goal was to create more transparency and more discussion. With this presentation, technical direction, we want to be more normative and say what we as principal engineers believe to be the best way forward with different teams. This is perhaps a little more concrete things we do during [inaudible 00:22:21]. We spend a lot of time between the teams writing the architecture layer and translating between the layers. We also make it a target to spend some time coding in teams. Doing that makes it possible for us to aggregate and refine the experiences that teams have, as an input to our presentation. We also try to talk to and learn from other organizations, and have learnt a lot from people outside NAV as well.

Jørgensen: The presentation itself is a big Miro board, and each team gets their own copy of this, meaning that there are now over 100 copies of this somewhere. We usually start by telling why this presentation exists, and why we need a technical direction in NAV. It's basically the gist of what we have been talking about so far, starting with this graph. Then we move on to tell each team our plan. We have held this presentation for over 100 times now. It is in Norwegian. The presentation exists to serve as a discussion material for each team. If the team needs some time after this session to think, we are more than happy to come back to discuss more. We can also provide training material for each topic and provide courses or time with subject matter experts, if the team wants. If the team wants part, it's really important, because this is pull, not push.

Strand: NAV is very heterogeneous. We have teams with mostly new code, they've written all by themselves. We have teams that maintains almost 40-year-old code. It's quite challenging to create a document or an opinion even that's relevant for all of these different teams. Something that's been a part of the solution from the beginning for some teams requires an incredible effort and is almost impossible to implement for other teams. Our way around this has been to try to describe what we want to happen as arrows. What should the teams move away from and what should they move towards? Then we can use that set of arrows as a background for discussion with the teams. Do they need to start to move away from the left side or should they aim to get all the way to the right side? Also, by being concrete and talking about what the team should stop doing, it makes it much more useful for the teams. It's easier for people like us to create a list of good things, but actually saying what's bad and what we want the team to stop doing is more difficult, but also more helpful for the teams.

Jørgensen: There are four categories of topics. It is data driven, culture, techniques, and sociotechnical.

Data Driven

Strand: NAV has a really unique position when it comes to data. We have so much data about our users but we still have a great potential in how we actually use this data. We want to become more data driven, both in how the teams work and operate, but also in the products and services we provide to our users. To achieve this, we need to think differently when it comes to data. How can we keep sharing data between our large product areas in NAV without creating the tight coupling that makes it impossible for teams to change independently? We are basically saying that sharing of data between teams should be done using streams instead of APIs or even the database. For analytical data, we are heavily influenced by the data mesh concept by Zhamak Dehghani. We have created a new data platform, and try to encourage teams to see analytical data as a product instead of a byproduct of the application they own.

Culture

Jørgensen: We consider the team to be the most important component in our system architecture. The culture category is also really important. As Audun mentioned on the technology radar part, we don't want technology choices to lay in the shadows, we want transparency, and we want openness. We challenge the teams to try pair programming for internal knowledge sharing in order to not be dependent on the most experienced developers. Our point is that the whole team should benefit from knowledge sharing, even the most experienced developers. This is just our suggestion, and the team can come up with other ways to achieve that knowledge sharing goal, which is really the outcome. Also, we code in the open after great inspiration from Anna Shipman and government of UK. The last arrow is about sustainability. We have left a project mindset behind, and now we think that our projects are never done. Therefore, we shouldn't race to a finish line that does not exist. Instead we should pace ourselves for the long run, and do health checks in the teams on a regular basis.

Techniques

Strand: Now we come to more technical part. What techniques should be adopted to move forward as teams? Topically, this is quite broad ranging, from how to use Git, to how to use the cloud. The common theme is probably to increase the speed of development. We want teams to move away from feature branches and shared test environments, and toward trunk based development and isolated end-to-end tests. It's also really important for NAV to maintain technical quality, and keep the technical debt under control. We say that teams should spend at least 25% of their capacity to work protecting quality. This is the minimum. If you need to increase the quality you need to spend more than 25%. Lastly, we're moving to the cloud. We have multi-cloud and have done lots of security enhancements to be able to do that migration. We want to have security champions in every team, and we want to distribute the responsibility of security out to the teams that have more hands-on knowledge about what is going on.

Sociotechnical

Jørgensen: The last category is sociotechnical. That's a large one. First off, we tend to stress the point that we have a legacy that we should be proud of. NAV was established in 2006, but that was really a merge of three existing agencies. We have legacy software that has served the welfare state for over 40 years. We should think of that legacy code with respect, and as the code that won. It didn't get deleted, because it worked. That said, our legacy applications are system centric, and not suitable for a sociotechnical approach where we build teams to take on a problem and a solution to that problem. The sociotechnical approach has huge impacts on an organization. The team should be responsible for a full vertical, and a horizontal, convenient layered responsibility does not work. Also, teams should have a known way of interacting with each other in a team API. Teams should be categorized. Team topologies helps us establish a common vocabulary for naming those categories. The last two arrows are huge arrows, and essentially saying that Norway needs to rethink how public sector software is financed. These are long running processes and a way over what a team can decide. We have included them here for an aligned understanding of the larger picture, which is also important for the team to understand.

This is what we call the technical direction in NAV. The main thing is perhaps not the contents on each arrow, but more on the Meta level. We spend time on why this matters, and we are open about our plan. We discuss each and every arrow with each and every team. We communicate with each team by approaching them, using our trainers and walk the floors in the organization, and establish a really short feedback loop along the way. That allows us to tap into what works and what doesn't, and not least, which pain points exists in several teams. When we see those pain points, we have some teams that just love to tackle pain points that other teams have.

Golden Path Platform

Strand: There is actually even a more powerful force system of alignment in terms of walking around talking to teams and respecting their autonomy. This powerful force is what Spotify called the Golden Path Platform. We have multiple such platforms at NAV. We have our design system and a data platform, and our application platform called NAIS. It is open source, and you can learn about it at nais.io. All of these platforms have one thing in common, they strive to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing. We try to avoid the stick and focus on building an incredible carrot instead. By doing this, we hope to find the right balance between the innovative creativity of autonomous teams and the large scale efficiency of alignment. Most teams will find the best for the Golden Path, but from time to time, there will be teams that see that there are better alternatives for them. Sometimes that team will strike gold. They will find a better way of doing a thing and more teams will start doing it the same way, and we'll incorporate that as part of the platform. Thus these internal platforms need to have a proper product mindset and treat their internal users as their customers in the same way as other software teams treat their users. They need to talk a lot to their users and understand the needs. The point of NAV isn't to have a great platform, but to provide good services and good product to our users, inhabitants to Norway. This is important to always remember for a platform team. They are there for the streamlined teams not for themselves.

CAKE Driven Development

We even created our own buzzword, for NAIS and now also for the data platform, we've used some really innovative new techniques to pull the teams onto the platforms. If we can replace the question, do I want to really write my old JBoss application [inaudible 00:34:12] stateless application running in Docker on Kubernetes, with the question, do I want cake? We have seen that we have even more success with making teams take that first step into the future. We went out to all the teams and we said that every team will get a cake, and by this we mean a proper delicious chocolate cake when their first app is running in production. Of course, we weren't that sinister. We made all the teams that got a cake take a picture, and we posted that in our Slack channel. Then the other teams saw that more teams migrated and wanted to be part of this cool gang, and of course they wanted cake. They knew that they could ask other teams, and we built a community around these migrations. We saw that most of the support questions in our Slack channel about NAIS was answered by other users instead of the team making the platform, and that is what we got out of cake.

Jørgensen: It was not just cake. The first movers to NAIS got their own very limited edition of hoodies. Later we expanded the catalogs, created more hipster merch, such as socks with the NAV logo. This works not just into tricking people into using a platform but to build a community and a pride of working for NAV. Now, our cutest cats are using that merch and making that community feeling even stronger. That's cake driven development.

Recap

We think it's time to wrap up returning to the question, what do we adopt and prefer when optimizing for speed and fast slow in NAV? We have adopted a team-first mindset. That mindset has allowed us to go much faster than we used to. We have discussed why high performing cross-functional teams demand autonomy. In a large organization with over 100 such teams, speed and fast flow needs a direction. That direction must be understood by the teams. When they do, you are in the upper right quadrant of the Henrik Kniberg quadrant. It's easy to agree that aligned autonomy is desirable, but to actually get there is hard work. Our approach to achieve alignment in the age of autonomy is to interact with each team, respecting the team autonomy, and make the team understand why they should change something, and provide helpful guidance along the way. Always adapt it to their context and their abilities, and be cautious to not exceed their cognitive capacity.

Strand: Teams is basically our most valuable asset. In fact, it's the most important component in our systems architecture as well. In order to optimize for speed and fast flow, the surrounding organization should do their best to set those teams up for success, as we've shown you how we have managed to achieve that.

Jørgensen: We have shown you some techniques that we use to set the teams up for speed and fast flow. The internal tech radar and the weekly deep dives are descriptive techniques. They're used for knowledge sharing, to move technology choices out of the shadows. These techniques need a buy-in from the teams and some people that convert the process over time.

Strand: Then we have the normative part that complements the descriptive, a refined aggregated line of thought being both strategic and concrete. The trick lies in the communication. You won't get [inaudible 00:38:12], you have to get into your shoes. You walk two floors and talk to the teams about a team's context and the problems on their level, and understand they also have other problems, and other forces working them, and value their autonomy when it comes to that. We really need to respect that autonomy.

Jørgensen: The strongest form of alignment is achieved in a common platform. By talking to all the teams, the short feedback loop allows us to identify the common pain points. We can bring those pain points to a platform team, such as the application platform team, or design system team, or data platform team. The platform teams should make it easy to do the right thing, and also sweet because everybody loves cake.

Strand: That is how we got alignment in the age of autonomy.

Questions and Answers

Skelton: Looking back at the work you've done over the years, how do you feel about all the stuff that's happened?

Strand: I think the whole journey has been incredible, basically. The fact that we've been able to go from no developers to 400 developers, and everything is just great. I still think we need to really deliver. The problems we're trying to solve are so big. It takes time to deliver the actual results, but we managed to get all the correct pieces in place to be able to do that, I think.

Skelton: If another organization wanted to take some ideas from what you've shared, where would you advise them to start? Let's say they're a big organization, maybe it's a government department in another country, or maybe it's a large insurance company, something like this, where there's quite a lot of bureaucracy. What things would you suggest they start with?

Jørgensen: It turns out there, there's a lot of places that are trying to do that also in Norway right now. I think what happened at NAV was that we got this new CIO back in 2016. He articulated a vision for what we could be and what we should be. He told that story, in and out of the organization, and made the organization believe it. At the same time, there's also this movement, bottom-up as well. Audun and me, also worked there. We were squishing the middle management. We were really trying to disrupt from both top-bottom and bottom-up. I think that's necessary.

Strand: I also think that you need autonomy before you need alignment, you need teams having flow, and then you need to add the alignment to make sure you can scale it up. If you start with alignment, I'm not really sure you get anywhere you need to. You need to have fast moving teams. That's the main priority. Then you have to get the problem of all the teams running in different directions and try to solve that, but you have to wait for that problem to occur, I think.

Skelton: Maybe bring just enough autonomy back with all of these separate followers so that there's some coherence, rather than saying the most important thing is alignment and everyone doing things in the same way. Because that leads off in a different direction. If we had all the time in the world, then that approach could work, but we're thinking about fast flow, we're thinking about the need to get things done really quickly, so we have to use approaches which feel radically different from what we might have done.

Strand: Definitely, for us, we come from such a large and old organization, you have to go through 11 sometimes to reach 7.

Jørgensen: Also, from the first graph that's showing us this huge increase in deployment frequency, if we drill down to per week, you'll see that there's quite a high jump in the middle of 2019. What you'll learn there is that, that's because we removed the last part of the central coordination with deployments.

Skelton: Kind of release management, something like this.

Jørgensen: Yes. That was really just a click of a button that we just removed. That has huge impacts on the deployment frequency. Replacing bureaucracy with trust, that helps flow.

Skelton: You also need to take the time to build that trust and build that shared understanding of why it's now fine to have that automated, we can't just go straight there. That takes some time.

How do you convince senior technical leaders to create and support these different approaches? I've been having a problem getting alignment, how do you convince the technical leaders? What things have you tried that seemed to work well?

Strand: I think the whole presentation is about that. We tried to work it from several different angles. We really tried not to be the guy who makes every decision, but we want the teams to do it by themselves, the radar and the demo. We also want our voice to be heard. We're really focusing on them hearing that just as an opinion. It's not us just because we're principals, everybody has to do what we say. This is a suggestion. This is a direction we think it's good, but we understand that some of the teams have not come to it, at least not right away. It's ok for them to talk back, basically. We need to figure out what's the best way. It's difficult. Every time they don't listen to us, I struggle a bit, but I think it's better in the long run.

Jørgensen: We think of the technical direction as a discussion material with each team. Around each year, we do an iteration of that presentation to be updated from new learnings and insights. Then we basically talk to the teams again. We are constantly talking to the teams and listening to them as well. There's not us only getting our meanings true, but just getting that feedback loop. That's probably the most important thing.

 

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Recorded at:

Nov 11, 2022

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