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The Checkbox Project

By Kamran Kazempour, Chris Hill, Steve Pereira, Dean Leffingwell, Amy Willard, Gene Kim

Learnings for Organizing for Outcomes

Winning organizations can do extraordinary things, more than anyone could ever do alone. A winning organization fully unleashes people’s creativity and capabilities. These organizations generate more value in less time, at lower cost, and seemingly with less effort.

Contrast that to an organization at the opposite end of the performance spectrum, which somehow constrains or even extinguishes people’s creativity and problem-solving capabilities. They generate less value over more time at a higher cost. And every activity, no matter how small, requires incredible heroic effort from many people.

What is remarkable is that the two organizations at the opposite ends of the performance spectrum can be the same organization. They are identical in every way except for how they are wired.

This paper presents a startling case study of how a seemingly small effort, one which should result in a huge amount of business value, is nearly impossible to complete. It requires an epic amount of communication, coordination, escalation, prioritization, synchronization, and deconfliction across almost every functional silo in the organization. And despite the heroic efforts across multiple quarters of effort, the results are still not of the best quality and do not deliver the value promised.

  • Publication Date September 26, 2023
  • Format PDF Download
  • Pages 23

Features

  • Clear Guidance

    The Fall issue of The DevOps Enterprise Journal collects guidance papers from the annual DevOps Enterprise Forum, which addresses the most pressing challenges facing the industry today.

  • Expert Authors

    The papers in this collection are written by teams of expert leaders, technologists, consultants, and more to provide proven solutions.

  • Business/Technology Alignment

    The DevOps Enterprise Journal shares evolving technology and architectural practices for better, safer, happier technologists and enterprises.

  • All Levels

    Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. These papers directly address how to lead and implement change no matter your role or title.

About the Resource

Winning organizations can do extraordinary things, more than anyone could ever do alone. A winning organization fully unleashes people’s creativity and capabilities. These organizations generate more value in less time, at lower cost, and seemingly with less effort.

Contrast that to an organization at the opposite end of the performance spectrum, which somehow constrains or even extinguishes people’s creativity and problem-solving capabilities. They generate less value over more time at a higher cost. And every activity, no matter how small, requires incredible heroic effort from many people.

What is remarkable is that the two organizations at the opposite ends of the performance spectrum can be the same organization. They are identical in every way except for how they are wired. This paper presents a startling case study of how a seemingly small effort, one which should result in a huge amount of business value, is nearly impossible to complete. It requires an epic amount of communication, coordination, escalation, prioritization, synchronization, and deconfliction across almost every functional silo in the organization. And despite the heroic efforts across multiple quarters of effort, the results are still not of the best quality and do not deliver the value promised.

Kamran Kazempour
Chris Hill
Steve Pereira
Dean Leffingwell
Amy Willard
Gene Kim
Kamran Kazempour

Kamran Kazempour

Kamran Kazempour manages the Software Delivery & Developer Experience team for the Wallet, Payments and Commerce group at Apple. For over a decade, Kamran has been a leader and advocate for DevOps best practices and Lean principles across his organization. A Canadian from British Columbia, Kamran lives in California with his wife and their two children.

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Chris Hill

Chris Hill

Speaker, author, leader, evangelist, engineer, researcher, and disruptor in developer relations and experience

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Steve Pereira

Steve Pereira

Steve Pereira has spent over two decades improving the flow of work across organizations. He’s worked through tech support, IT management, build and release engineering, and as a founding CTO for enterprise SaaS. He serves as lead consultant for Visible Value Stream Consulting, as a board advisor to the Value Stream Management Consortium, Chair of the OASIS Value Stream Management Interoperability technical committee, and co-founder of the Flow Collective to bring flow-focused professionals together. Since 2017, he has been developing and facilitating Flow Engineering to make flow improvement in large organizations accessible, collaborative, and actionable.

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Dean Leffingwell

Dean Leffingwell

Cofounder and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile, Inc.

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Amy Willard

Amy Willard

Amy Willard is an IT Director leading John Deere’s Agile Operating Model transformation.

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Gene Kim

Gene Kim

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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