In the following excerpt from Episode 19 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim and Steven Spear interviewed Trent Green, SVP and COO of Legacy Health, on how he and his team used iterative problem solving to vaccinate 8,000 people a day at Oregon's largest mass vaccination clinic. Key learnings from this excerpt include the idea that organizations are really a collection of interdependent microsystems, that you can't improve a process until you stabilize a process, and sometimes you have to slow down to … [Read more...]
Three Successes During a Pandemic: American Airlines’s DevOps Journey Part 3
In the first part of their journey, American Airlines set the stage for DevOps. Then they scaled across the entire business. In the third and final part of our American Airlines case study, we'll dive into three key success stories that exemplify what their transformation was able to accomplish. At the same time that America Airlines was scaling their transformation across the organization, the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the challenges they were facing, they were able to … [Read more...]
Scaling DevOps across the Business: American Airlines’ DevOps Journey Part 2
As we learned in Part 1 of the American Airlines' DevOps transformation, their journey spanned several years. By year three they had realized that DevOps was really a bigger transformation than just a way of working in IT, it was a business transformation. How to Scale DevOps Across the Business Their next challenge became how to scale these new ways of working across the entire business, to accelerate and further execute their transformation and their learnings. They brought in Ross Clanton as … [Read more...]
Approaching Cruising Altitude: American Airlines’ DevOps Journey Part 1
A few years back American Airlines started on a journey that was originally focused on DevOps transformation within IT, but has continued to build momentum and evolve into a product delivery transformation encompassing the entire business. This series of posts presents a case study on their journey, based on their 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit - Virtual presentation. Stop Making Excuses and Get Started In the beginning, American Airlines’ DevOps journey grew out of a series of questions. The … [Read more...]
Kessel Run: The US Air Force’s Digital Journey in 12 Parsecs or Less
Kessel Run is an effort of the US Air Force to build software using principles from DevOps, deploying multiple times per day to support the multiple people who depend upon them. At the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas-Virtual, Adam Furtado explored their amazing transformation. Their story begins in October of 2015 when the US military struck a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, believing it to be an enemy stronghold. Afghan commandos were under fire and the US needed to … [Read more...]
Better Ways of Working at Nationwide Building Society
Nationwide Building Society is the world’s largest building society, with 16 million members. In 2020, Patrick Eltridge, Chief Operating Officer, and Janet Chapman, Mission Leader, discussed their continued journey to better ways of working at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London-Virtual. As a larger, older organization, Nationwide faces a number of challenges. As Patrick Eltridge puts it, they are part of a “hyper fluid and hyper competitive environment.” Like many organizations, they started … [Read more...]
Project to Product Transformation Case Study: Fortune 100 Apparel/Sportswear Enterprise
This study focuses on a Fortune 100 apparel/sportswear enterprise that had success incubating their model and is currently in the scaling stage of enterprise product transformation. It follows the Seven Domains of Transformation as laid out in this previous post. Transformation Implementation This enterprise started incubating their transformation in their digital and customer-facing portfolios. They had strong leadership there that had previous experience moving to a product-centric model … [Read more...]
Project to Product Transformation Case Study: Fortune 100 Retail Enterprise
This study focuses on a Fortune 100 retail enterprise that demonstrated sustained progression through the three stages of enterprise product transformation. Transformation Implementation Their journey began with grassroots experimentation in a small number of technology teams within the digital and API platform organizations. As initial success was seen in this experimentation, they also spanned their new practices across a few mainframe and monolithic applications. The initial focus of the … [Read more...]
Project to Product Transformation Case Study: Global Media Service Provider
The case concerns a multinational corporation providing business support systems via a SaaS model (SaaS-based multi-tenant back end). Their most important product is customer care systems to large service companies in the healthcare and telecommunications markets. The company is by design product-centric (workforce management, customer care, billing, order management, messaging). It is heavily standardized, but products are customized for larger customers. This foundation made the scaling and … [Read more...]
Lack of Psychological Safety at Boeing
This post is an excerpt from the book Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, with Myles Ogilvie, Zsolt Berend, and Simon Rohrer. 787 Dreamliner Factory, North Charleston, South Carolina Cynthia Kitchens was a quality manager at the Boeing North Charleston factory, which makes the 787 Dreamliner. According to an investigation by the New York Times in 2019, Kitchens said that her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on … [Read more...]
