It’s my 5th year speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. I’m inspired more than ever after last weeks event in Las Vegas. We learned how a couple of IT leaders collaborate with business leaders in Legal and Product to address obstacles preventing IT from taking advantage of open source and fixing technical debt. We learned from repeat experience reports on what’s working and what’s not working inside large enterprises. And Lean Coffee rocked again with over 100 participants discussing everything from “Agile PMO” to “Transformational Leadership”.  

There were so many great talks. The three most ingrained in my brain one week after DOES are ones that I think will have a big impact on how we think about the way we work in the future.

Past Success Doesn’t Matter

In his talk, Supercharging your career and how transitions produce new winners, Jeffrey Snover says, “It doesn’t matter how much success you’ve had in the past. What matters is, are you great at something that moves the biz forward now?” This resonates with me because it validates the fact that everything is always changing. If you attempt to stay the same, you actually fall behind. To remain relevant, one needs to continuously learn and adapt. This is why feeling uncomfortable is normal – it’s so easy to fall behind.

Jeffrey goes on to say that the only way to succeed with Digital Transformation is: 1) Create bandwidth from existing work, and 2) Invest in innovation. Jeffrey suggests leveraging cloud, DevOps and SaaS to free up talent. To this list, I’d add – improve the flow of communication, because the hardest thing we do is communicate across teams.

Working Late Every Night Doesn’t Improve Quality

Dr. Christina Maslach presented her research on burnout and job stress in her talk, Understanding Job Burnout. The number of employees inflicted with work related burnout and chronic depression is increasing – especially for people with a passion for solving problems, such as in healthcare, social justice and IT. No matter how hard we work, we never get enough done. The price people pay is high in health problems and loss of self-worth.

Dr. Maslach’s workplace burnout interventions include a supportive work community, choice & control, and something near and dear to me –  a sustainable workload. High utilization levels don’t enhance productivity or the bottom line. When people are loaded to maximum capacity, it opens the doors to more dependencies, more interruptions, and more conflicting priorities. With a sustainable workload, people can get a sense of focus, flow and joy from creating and finishing something important – a job well done does wonders for self-worth.

Project Oriented Management Doesn’t Cut it

It wouldn’t be a DOES conference without the unveiling of a new book. Attendees stood in long queues to get a signed copy of Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework.  

In his talk, How Value Stream Networks will transform IT & Business, Mik Kersten describes how fragmented value streams kill productivity. When team X is unaware of impacts from team Y, the results are expensive. As mentioned earlier, the hardest thing we do is communicate across teams. Essential communication of mutually critical information between teams’ plummets when handoffs are invisible – or lost in email.

A software value stream with connected handoffs speeds up the flow of work on its way to production. These value stream connections are nourished by a product-oriented management model, where IT is considered a profit center (not a cost center), where funding is based on value streams (not projects), and where options remain open (not slashed upfront).

The Learning Continues

The DOES community loves to learn and share ideas. I am so lucky to have had another chance to visit with speakers I admire and attendees who make their workplace better. I can’t wait to hear what Gene and Margueritte have in store for us next year.