Finding business value, with Robbie Clutton

Episode 179 · 47:05 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, hey, it's another Tanzu Talk episode. Now, this is one that I originally did in our streaming Tanzu TV, Twitch, whatever you want to call it area, which you should totally go check out. It's at twitch.tv slash VMware Tanzu. You can also go to Tanzu.tv to get archives of everything, including the episodes I'm doing. Now, this one is great. It's all about what business value is and kind of walking through an example of it with Robbie up there in the UK area. He's always great at going over this stuff. I think you'll enjoy it. But I had two things, one to repeat myself. But, you know, I actually have a pretty big backlog of episodes because I've been focusing on streaming them and I've just been meaning to dump them. I shouldn't say dump, to put them in this feed here. Now, I know there's a lot of video things that I enjoy just being audio podcasts so I can listen to. So that's why I'm doing it. But if you want to catch those live or recordings, again, you should check out the Twitch stream that we have. Just go to twitch.tv slash VMware Tanzu or what was it? Tanzu.tv. But listen, listen. I'm also more or less doing a daily one. And if you're in Europe, it's daily at 11 a.m. Central European time. So far, it's pretty fun. It's nice. I don't think I'm really going to put those in the podcast stream. It would clog them up too much. So if you're interested in that, you should just go over there and check it out at Tanzu.tv. Now, also, this week, starting today on September 29th through October 1st, it's VMworld. It's free, all online. There's a lot of Tanzu-related stuff. Some of my coworkers talking there. I have a little cameo in one presentation if you can find it. But you should check that out. I mean, I think you just go to VMworld.com and you can check it out online for free. So with that, this is a really good conversation with Robbie. I had a great time going through it with him. And I hope you enjoy. And hopefully I'll get a little better about putting the episodes in here instead of having a backlog.

Bye-bye. Well, today, man, it was like this was a long time ago. You and I did one of these online executive sessions. Was this – and you – this is with a bunch of UK people, as I recall. And I was going over my usual shtick of how organizations change. And then you had this great actual detailed presentation with examples, sort of like going through how people think about product and how they make strategic choices. And I was thinking that should be a broadcast that we have. And now, two months later, because we both have lives and priorities. Because life, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think we find – in fact, I think both of us, we rescheduled because, you know, because of kids at some point. And, you know, it's – Yeah, I think mine was the return to school meltdowns. Yes. I often reference this in my own life. And it's the – it's like the – it's almost – what's the word? Like journey. What's like a perilous journey, a quest or a – you know, it's like the – it's like the quagmire in action of, like, just put your shoes on. Please just brush your teeth. Yeah, brush your teeth, put your shoes on. You know what? I think my kids are getting pretty good at putting on the shoes. And I think the next frontier we're going to work on is if you have dirt in your shoes, let's not dump it out onto our floor, right? Like this is a grand theory of parenthood and nurturing that I have called our house is not a garbage can. And I would just like to, you know, let's move forward with this principle and things – It's a good value to instill. It's a good value to instill on the kids, right? I'm not sure it's going to stick, but we'll see what happens. Anyways, the point being that I thought it would be great to go over some of the thinking that you had. And it's been a while, so always with you. I think your thinking is involved.

But I thought we would start with this idea of what exactly is business value? And my layup to this is this is a topic that people in our field, in our area, I think, talk about a lot, right? Because it's sort of like the reason that you're doing software and the reason you want to get better at doing software is because you should do things that are useful. I always say organization instead of business to sort of pull in the nonprofit-oriented people, but whatever. You can say business or whatever, but you want to improve the way your organization functions. You want to deliver business value. And I feel like – I'm of two minds. I feel like that phrase is like a phrase very much so like digital transformation where you're just like, oh, whatever. But then as I wrote in the opening to one of my books, it's sort of like, on the other hand, that's a very precise phrase that means exactly something that can be used. And it's also sort of like, you got anything better? And I think business value is one of those phrases where it's like it is a piece of jargon. And, you know, jargon is only bad if it's not for you, right? Right. Other people's jargon. Yeah, yeah. Whereas if it's your club's or your domain's jargon, then it's like great because it's like it's a shorthand for a whole set of predetermined things. So, anyways, I feel like business value can be a phrase like that if you kind of describe what it is. And I think that's what I wanted to talk to you about is like, so, Ravi, what is business value? But first, before we get to that, why don't you introduce yourself briefly? Yeah. All right. Great. Well, yeah, I've been sort of practicing for this. So, you know, it's like a long-time listener, first-time caller. Thanks for having me on the show. You'll do great. So, I'm Robbie Clutton. I'm a senior director at VMware, and I look after our Pivotal Labs organization for Europe and kind of beyond.

I've been with Pivotal in its kind of various incarnations for sort of eight years, and, you know, we recently joined the VMware family and, yeah, kind of helped run our consultancy business from the UK. Yeah. And back in the before times, we would see each other all the time, which was – Back when we traveled and, you know, you'd put 100 people in a tiny room and no one would think anything about it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I miss going up there. It's really nice. Yeah. Hopefully, that'll happen sometime soon. We'll see. We'll see what happens. I hope so. I hope so. So, let's jump into it. So, when – I mean, start however you think is best, but, like, for me, it's sort of, like, help frame up, like – You know, I've brought you in to talk about, like, you know, this agile software development. We're a product management or whatever. And, like, how do you make sure that we're, like, on the same page of, like, the point of all of it? What are we cruising into here? Start with the tip of the pyramid, the top of the iceberg, or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe this is the foundation of the conversation that we have. How does it go? Yeah. Well, I guess, like, I mean, maybe let's try and sort of define kind of business value or maybe some of the problems which we're seeing in the field with our customers. You know, I think a lot of our – a lot of people are talking about digital transformation, right? And it's – like, as you said, it's, you know, it's two words which are put together, which, hey, sounds great. But, you know, what does it really mean? And I think it does mean different things to different people. But ultimately, I think, you know, people are trying to do more with digital assets, you know, whether that is off-the-shelf software or custom software and being able to create their own software to meet the needs for their users, their customers, and their shareholders. And I think what we're seeing is a number of these initiatives are being spun up. And there is a detachment from the people who are doing the work and the way which they're working.

They're trying to work iteratively. They're trying to change and respond to user needs and research, which they're doing. And the people who are funding those investments, creating those initiatives, are sort of detached from sort of the realities on the ground. And in some ways, it's not to be unexpected, right? Like, someone, if you're funding it, you can't be intimately involved in a project. But I think there's – something is kind of missing from how to kind of link really what a, you know, a CEO or a founder or, you know, general manager or whoever that is kind of making those decisions, their goals, their priorities, and kind of trickling that down into, you know, what is someone doing, an individual or a team kind of doing, and how does that contribute to a larger picture? Yeah. I think we see a number of these initiatives which, you know, seem kind of rudderless, right? It looks exciting when you're in that bubble, you know, and I've been in these teams as well. It's like, hey, this feels great. We're being really productive, getting a lot of work done. But then if you kind of step outside of that bubble, you're like, well, how is this actually contributing to the business goals and the direction? So I think what we're trying to do is create some tools and processes to try and build a bridge between these, you know, the top level, the direction and the investment decisions and the team on the ground and get it so it's measurable. And you can say, hey, this team has made this change or they've done this release and here's how it contributes to, say, a larger team and a program and maybe a business unit and then the whole organization and of itself. Yeah. So how do these things kind of, you know, trickle down? So, you know, there's, I mean, there's lots of things you mentioned, but I think there's a little footnote that's worth kind of talking about that I think, oh, it gets talked about a lot. But I think in this context, like, what is the role of, like, metrics in making sure you're doing, like, good agile and product management?

Yeah. And, like, I guess why I ask is, like, metrics is this weird area. So there's a lot of, like, I think of there being, like, I don't know what you call them, but, like, technical metrics, like, you know, velocity. Do people still say velocity or is that, like, out of style? Like, what? Yeah, I don't hear that so much anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can tell it's been a long time. But, like, or, you know, uptime or performance or, like, you know, these kind of, like, technical things. But then there's this other set of metrics that are sort of, like, is anything we're doing worthwhile? And, like, tuning those metrics seems really difficult, right? Like, and it's almost the reason I'm always interested in this is the sort of advice on metric gathering. A lot of it comes from sort of retail examples and online, you know, of course, it's online. But, like, new retailing things where it's just, like, people buy more stuff, which seems, like, pretty simple, right? But I imagine in, especially a lot of the organizations we work with, like, it's not quite that straightforward to, like, find a metric, right? Like, if you're, there's, like, some militaries we work with and it's sort of, like, you know, made more profit isn't really a metric for them. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, many commercial entities, right? So, maybe, like, not the nonprofits, maybe not the government sector. Like, really, there's kind of, I think there's, like, really three kind of core metrics which people are looking at, right? So, one is, you know, increased revenue, right? So, like, I want to sell more widgets, right? Or, you know, I want to sell different widgets or high-value widgets that cost less to make. I want to reduce costs, right? So, I want to do that at a lower cost. So, whether that's improving efficiencies in operations or kind of, you know, scaling things out. Right. And I want to reduce kind of risk and sort of be, you know, increased security and governance.

But it all kind of wrapped up in, say, risk, right? The risk of doing business, right? And being compliant with any regulations. And those three levers, like, I think that they are big picture. But I think, fundamentally, most businesses will kind of say that one of their, if you look at their goals, they'll probably fall into one of those buckets. Right. So, it's sort of cost of operating, right? Which is… Yeah. So, it's like, give me more money. Yeah, yeah. I want to make more money. I want to spend less money and I want to do it, you know, safer. Yeah, yeah. And then there's that third category. And that's, like, the difficult, can be the difficult nebulous one. But it's the third category is, like, and I would also like to not blow up while doing it. Right. Right. Like, I want to monitor that bad things are not happening. Or that I'm preventing bad things. Or, like, whatever the bad thing is that would damage the first two, I need to keep a look on that. And I've kind of had a number of conversations with customers and I've kind of ventured this, right? And it may be one of the first meetings that we would have with a customer. I'm trying to define, trying to understand what their challenges are and how they measure their own success. I might kind of put this on a board and invite them to, you know, consider where they would put things, maybe use some post-it notes and kind of put some metrics into those buckets. And some of the interesting ones, we had a financial services company and they were like, we don't really care about cost, right? It's not about that one. We care about the revenue. But really, we care about that last one, about risk. And it's about kind of regulations and compliance. And in this case, it was a payments company. So it was about data loss, like, very high transaction, large volume. It's like we cannot lose data. Yeah. That was their key one. We've seen, say, you know, healthcare organizations. And again, like the revenue and cost, less relevant. But it's the third one. It's about kind of how do we, you know, make the patient experience work really well? Or how do we help kind of patients treat themselves before they need to come into, say, a hospital, right?

And maybe a bit more kind of stuff. So it kind of falls into that, right? And it's like, hey, we have an aging population and we need to make sure that we can scale to that. So how do we make that kind of interaction smoother, quicker, and, you know, people can do a bit more self-service? So maybe that's a way I can dig us back to the main topic. Because that, like, you hit on a type of metric that I always really like, which is, let me, I don't know if this is the right phrase, but it's sort of like customer experience. Which is another one of these phrases with digital transformation and business value that, like, is very, very jargony. But I think what customer experience means, I mean, it can mean just, like, you know, you can do your NPS thing, you know, copyright 2001 Bain or whatever. But, which is, like, I should have someone on to explain. Anytime there's some sort of weird logmarythmic thing, I'm just like, don't try so hard with a metric. Like, if you need to explain the scoring, something's gone wrong. I mean, they should just reduce NPS to sort of just, like, three to five things. And we don't need to worry about, like, running to a complicated, anyhow. That's a rant for another time. But that idea of looking at making better and more efficient the delivery of an outcome or a thing. And, like, patient stuff is really good because it's sort of like, that's a hassle for everyone, right? Like, you know, to know something's wrong, schedule an appointment, go wait there, make sure the paperwork's good. Depending on what country you work in, like, you live in, pay for stuff, actually see the chain of people that you see for a diagnosis, figure out what the remedy is, make sure the remedy's applied, follow up, and on and on and on. It's just like, now that I'm doing all these fingers, it's a disaster of a process, right? And there's all sorts of things, if you look through that, that you could just improve the customer experience of.

And that seems like those are the most interesting metrics that I see that we have, one, figured out that overall process, but we've gone through and, in a good way, locally optimized everything, whatever a good version of local optimization is. And those are especially good metrics. But tell me if this transitions back well. In order to even find those things, you've got to define what the business outcome you want is. So there must be some way of discovering that that lets you find that whole sort of process and focus on a thing like that. Yeah. So we've been trying sort of a number of different techniques and workshops and sort of interviews with business customers to try and define, try and extract some of this stuff. Unfortunately, you know, a lot of it is sitting in people's heads. You know, some of it might be in a PowerPoint deck somewhere. But a lot of it is really kind of, you know, boots on the ground, go and talk into people, or, you know, virtually, of course, now. And it's really trying to, you know, cover ground. And we'd look at, you know, trying to get a breadth of people which we speak to who have different roles, different responsibilities, different levels to try and kind of get an understanding about, you know, what do they think their problems are, their challenges? What are they, you know, trying to achieve? What's stopping them from being successful? To try and extract some of that and synthesize what we hear into patterns and try and, you know, group those and say, hey, here's where we think your challenges are or what your company thinks the goals are or what your business leaders thinks the goals are. And then, you know, start to put that into a format where you can start to try and hopefully draw, you know, good lines in between, you know, what is the, you know, what is, what are you saying on the street, right, to the market versus like what, what is someone or what is a team or what is a business unit actually doing? We're just going to positively contribute to that kind of higher level, higher order metric.

So there's a lot of, a lot of investigating and interviewing and kind of synthesizing, you know, listening and asking more questions and kind of coming up with, I like that distinction you made of, of not in like a sinister, like, you know, Nietzschean way where you're unveiling things, but like, you know, how do things actually work? Like, never minding like the, um, the calm exterior, if we peel that back, what's going on to deliver all that, that, uh, yeah, I mean, you know, organizations are ecosystems in a way, right. They have, um, you know, you've got different actors involved, uh, and, you know, maybe some good actors, maybe some bad actors, you know, uh, different interests, different motivations, different, um, different compensation. Um, I think, you know, generally most of the organizations know this all, they haven't necessarily done this kind of homework and this kind of research to kind of look out and, you know, look across and pull it all together to try and figure out what that, what that is and what people really think. And it's, it's, it's, it's kind of, it can be time consuming kind of work to do it thoroughly. We try and, you know, to have a very kind of thin, thin surface and pull, pull some insights out, you know, put that in front of people, try and validate some of that. Like, Hey, you know, does this sound right? Is this the direction which you want to be going in? Um, and then maybe kind of do some iterations on that, but try and get to some broad consensus. Um, you know, it's interesting work, but it's, yeah, it's really just going out and meeting people, talking to them and trying to get what's in their head onto a page. Yeah. You know, I've, I've been thinking a lot recently about, and I don't mean this to be like intentionally, you know, cutesy contrarian, but like maybe in the course of life and business, like. You don't, you shouldn't really be focused on changing all the time, right? Like, like you should sort of discover, like, I mean, there's like a little, a little, uh, airport book, uh, industry and like habits and like, you know, atomic habits and forming new habits and like all this stuff, which is, it's almost like you want to improve to a static way of operating, but it's really hard to move to change.

Right. It's hard to like move from one way of operating, operating to the other. And, and I think, you know, I was making fun of this phrase, local optimization. And one of the problems that, you know, an organization has is if they're re if, if one group is really good at their part out of 50 of doing something, but they don't pay attention or coordinate with the rest of the other, would that be 49 groups? Then you can get in a bad situation, even though they've locally optimized. And, and it's almost like, on the other hand, once everyone has locally optimized and therefore you're globally optimized to some extent, it'd be nice just to like relax. And, and, and, and like, you know, kind of, and, and kind of like deliver the same, you know, deliver the same thing for as much as possible. Right. Like, like, you know, uh, paperwork examples are always my favorite, but like, at some point it's like, like I went to go, uh, pick up my new residency card here in Amsterdam recently. And it's like, they probably didn't change how that operates like a month ago and it was fine. Right. Like there was no problem with it. And so at some point, right, like the whole system kind of is like, all right, well, I guess ironically they have all sorts of COVID related stuff, but you know, you know, they're just like, we're not going to change how this is working. And I think, I think the issue becomes exactly what you're saying is at some point you have to like have everyone decide that they're not going to, uh, stay static where they are. And, and I think, you know, there's another effect that comes up is people lose track of what everyone else is doing. And so you have to have that very intentional effort to go in and like, let's remap the entire value stream or the entire thing, because like, you probably don't know what's happened and everything was cool. You were doing great, but now we've got to go rediscover that and, and do that mapping. And I think, you know, I've been thinking about that kind of like rambling line of thought because I feel like a lot of the, the, the like change management and digital transformation talk is like, you know, change or die.

Whereas like, it's just a part of the healthy way of making sure you're operating well to constantly, not constantly, but every now and then go in and like, make sure you remember what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I read that, um, that atomic habits book quite recently. And I think one of the things which I really liked about it was this kind of the 1% concept where, you know, where the author talks about, uses a lot of kind of sporting mechanisms, but trying to, you know, everyone wants to win a race, right? If you're, if you're, he talks about kind of cycling team or you want to win the game or you want to win the championship, right? Yeah. Everyone's got, everyone's got that same goal, but it's the process in which you, which you try and achieve that goal is, is how it's going to differentiate you from competition. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, you know, um, the author talks about this kind of 1% improvement, right? And it's, if we're always trying to be 1% better over time, like every day, every week, that is going to compound into significant improvements. Um, and if we focus on our process and the system and the global system, not the local system, you know, we, we will kind of start to start to get there. I think what's really interesting is when, when we hear about digital transformation, people talk about, you know, wholesale changes, right? We're going to change everything, right? We're going to restructure, we're going to create new business units and some companies have been successful in that. And some companies haven't, you know, I think we've seen, we've seen examples where companies, you know, create new, new units, um, and they are separated from the rest of the business and actually kind of creates division, right? And not kind of a unity between these two, these two parts of an organization. It creates an unhealthy kind of relationship between the two. Um, and you know, in many cases they, they don't thrive, right? Maybe they, they'd release some things, but again, they're not really hugely beneficial to the organization, but maybe because there's that kind of tension there. Um, but I think if we, if we take digital transformation and apply sort of that, that kind of 1% mindset, like how can we get a little bit better, you know, today than we were yesterday and, and keep applying that mindset.

I think hopefully and be, uh, have a retrospective mindset and always look to be improving, um, the global system and not that local system. You know, I think we can, we can get to a much, much healthier place and it's going to take a long time. And I think people also, they want huge change and they want to see results right now. Yeah. That's really like, it takes a long time. All right. And we're really talking about small daily improvements over a long, long period of time. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I've, I've been, I've been thinking through like, like a, a, a new book to write and it just called exactly that. You said the word a lot called mindset. And, and like, I think I wanted to like catalog mindset changes that, that like necessarily don't, that, that don't have like a logical proof to them or a bunch of like case studies that just hammer you with like, like in contrast, it's like, you know, pair programming. You can sort of like lowercase empirically prove that pair programming can be better. Right. Uh, but I, you know, there, there's, that's a really good one to say. Like one of the mindset shifts you have to make is that a 1% change is okay. It doesn't have to be giant. And in fact, like if you've ever calculated how much money you actually pay, when you get like a 5% mortgage over 30 years, it's actually a ton of money. And so like, yeah, and it's, it almost like sometimes more than doubles the amount of money that you pay. And so like, even if you're doing 1%, that might seem small, but it's going to be huge, like over, over a short amount of time. So anyways, so I keep distracting you from getting to the, this is, this is great conversation to the meat. So, so we were going to, we're going to go in and discover this end to end thing right now. Now I know that we're going to have, first, we're going to need a big room and a box full of sticky notes and markers. Like what are we, what are we going to do to kind of find that big, that big chain, that big thing, the, this thing that we're describing? Yeah. I mean, I think, so first of all, for us to be successful, kind of going into this, we, we typically would need a sponsor within the kind of the client organization, right?

So someone who's going to be high up to say like, yes, like we are, you know, we are open to change, right? And we don't know what that is. And I'm going to open doors, right? I'm going to advocate for you and I'm going to make introductions. So generally we would kind of start with a, you know, pre-COVID times, it's like, can you give us a meeting room for three or four days, block book it out, help us schedule, say 30 people, right? And we're going to do 30 minute interviews. So we'd say, you know, 30 people, 30 minutes, three days, right? It's pretty intense, but, you know, that gives us, it gives us a, you know, that first line kind of picture of what the organizations are. Yeah. And we, we might focus on certain activities, right? So I think one of the, one of the real challenges, which we see our customers having, which I think we really want to be supporting our customers to get better at, is their path to production. It's getting software, it's not just building software, it's getting into production, right? Yeah. It's, you know, I think Josh Long talks about like production is the favorite place in the world for him, right? Like that's his happy place, right? So like, how do we help our, get our customers into production? So we might spend, you know, more of that time there, right? Like, hey, how, tell me how you go from code complete to production. What's the process there? How do you go from a concept to, you know, people writing code? So we, we're talking generally about these processes, right? Or kind of value streams. And we're trying to, you know, map the, the way that value is created in the organization. And ultimately, you know, hopefully that being production software being as where value starts to actually be realized. And we can kind of start to see that return on, on any investment. So, so you, you've identified an end point, which, which is sort of like the deliverable. I mean, there's, there's a, there's a bunch of things there, but it's like beyond just you to be really small, small about it. Beyond just you, like adding a container to a registry, right? Like, like let's, let's ask, you know, you can always start with the five whys or whatever, right?

But let's, let's ask like, then what happens? Then what happens until we finally find like, okay, now this is where the real action starts happening, right? This is where like something is happening beyond you sort of like filing something away, but you've got to identify that, that end point. Which I think you're right. When it comes to software, it's sort of like you've deployed to production, which is not the end, but it's a very, it's a good start, so to speak. It's a good start for finding an end. I had one of my first bosses, I started my career at BT, which is telco here in the UK. One of my first bosses said, you know, there's really kind of three metrics or three cycles to be interested in. And it's something which has stuck with me throughout my career. Like the first one is concept to market. So what's the process, what's the timeline, that cycle time from like, I've got an idea to there's something in production. The second one is a lead to cash. Like, Hey, someone is interested in buying that widget. How long does it, what's that cycle time from that widget being in their hands and cash in your, in your bank. Yeah. And that third one is trouble to repair. Right. So when there's an issue, what's the cycle time and the process from the issue being issue occurring for through to a kind of a full resolution. And now you could apply that to, you know, to containers, right? Like this container has gone down, right? Or my, my logging is showing some incident, how, what's my process to, to go through it. Or you could apply it to, you know, kind of high concepts, you know, you know, it was a BT. So a lot of this was about, you know, coming to, to home, residential homes and installing phone lines and internet services. Right. So it's not a, you press a button on the website and, you know, you've got a download, right? It's a physical, physical installation. So that, that measurement, you know, was in days and weeks, right? Cause you'd have to schedule those things. But I really think that those are kind of three kind of core high level value streams, which you can kind of map, right? What does it take to go from idea to production? What does it take? What's that process from like, whatever that task is, whether you're selling widgets, whether you're, you know, doing, doing a tax return, you know, whether you're, you know, whatever that is.

It's like, what's that process from start to complete? And then what's a process from issue to, to resolution? Yeah. Yeah. I like that last one. Ask these, yeah. Ask these questions, you know, find out more. And then you could do the five whys, right? Yeah. And what next? What next? What next? What next? Yeah. That last one is good. Cause it's kind of an example of the, you know, the three types of metrics we were talking about earlier, where it's the, that third metric, like the, how do I do risk management? Right. And, and, uh, you know, the, the, I don't know if it's the modern way, but, but a fun way, novel way of thinking nowadays is you want to measure how fast it takes you to fix stuff instead of how often things go wrong. And so I don't know, that's, that's an interesting one. Okay. So, so we've kind of dug around for the path to production and, and I think, I think we've kind of like, we've gotten a room full of people and we've had them all kind of talk about, here's my part of that. And, and then, and then I think we like basically visualize that, right? Like you kind of draw it out so you can see the whole path to production there. Yeah. In an ideal world, you can, we can show that and we can show kind of really where, like how long each step, how many steps there are, how long each state, each step takes the complete, and then what's the wait time, um, in between each step. All right. So this is, and then you can look at the total time and this is kind of where you start to see the local versus global optimizations. Right. Um, I think a lot of these ideas were, um, put forward, uh, in a book called the goal, which has written, you know, I think a few decades ago. And it's talking about really manufacturing, right. And that value stream of moving, say, if you're building a car, like you're moving metal sheets, you know, through, uh, through machinery to build like a side panel. Right. And then that goes into a car and then the car rolls off, uh, off the line and kind of, it can be sold to, sold to someone. Um, you know, and if you've got one of these things, which is pressing it, you know, pressing a, uh, an aluminum sheet, um, and, you know, trying to make a side panel, uh, and then you've kind of got them stacking up and you can only do one every, every so often. Um, but your, your, your next, your next piece or the preceding pieces is putting things out, you know, once every, you know, 10 seconds or so, you're going to get to a point where you start to create bottlenecks.

And that, that one part, which is working really well. And it's like, Hey, I'm great. I can do one every 30 seconds. It's kind of, it doesn't matter because the one behind you, the one in front of you can only do one every five minutes. And you're just adding the backlog to, to this, you know, to this process and this, and this thing can't do it fast enough. So it's kind of looking at this. Once you kind of step back and you can look at these things holistically, then you can kind of say, stop optimizing this thing. Right. And start optimizing that thing and start to try and, uh, level things out. Um, I've got someone at my door and you want to go check it. Yeah. Can we just take a, yeah, I even have, I even have a, we'll be back thing. All right. Oh, except it doesn't really work. But that's okay. How about, let's see. I will just talk and we'll check out that awesome looking pillow. See what's going on over there. All right. I'm back. Perfect. Right. Did you get an exciting delivery? Uh, probably an unexciting delivery. Oh yes. Those are, that's, that's sad. The best kind. The best kind. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's, so that is how you start to, uh, discover the, uh, the local optimism. Yeah, no. And that is, you know, from, from the world of, of, you know, gold rat and, uh, and lean and stuff, that idea of wait time. It's a, it's like the, the hidden waste. And, you know, I, I'm pretty sure the goal came out in like the early eighties. So that was like 40 years ago. That's like, it's still, it's still relevant. It's kind of, it's one of those books which I have, you know, within arm's reach wherever I am. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So then what, what are we going through next? What's, what's our further general journey to finding the business value and how to, how to, uh, how to optimize for it? Yeah. So I think, um, you know, there's a couple of models which have come out recently, which are, which have been quite helpful. So there's a model by McKinsey called the three horizons where they talk about, um, you know, things which are, uh, you know, what, what are the, you know, what the money makers, what's

the things which you're, you're making money, you're being productive about today. Um, that's the kind of the, uh, you know, defend that business, optimize that business. There's that second kind of horizon, they call it, which is about nurturing emerging businesses. So it's like, Hey, we've got something, you know, it's in a market or maybe it's in one market, but not everywhere. It's like, how do we nurture that and grow that? And last one is kind of truly innovative. Like, Hey, how do we create this like new, new concepts, right? So there might be different operating models for each of these, right? And different values, which can be applied and probably different governance for all these things. So we might kind of start to map some of these things into these, into these buckets. Um, Kent Beck has got a very similar model called the three, the three X, who talks about the first thing about exploring, right? And I'm like, I'm looking like, what, where's the next opportunity I'm expanding in the second one. So it's like, I found something let's kind of, let's make it big. And the last one of extract, right? So I've got something that's really high value. How do I, how do I make, you know, small optimizations where, you know, the volume is so big, it's going to have these big, big pieces. And again, trying to map say applications or portfolio of, of applications within our customers to try and identify where, where these things are and looking for like, you know, are there different governance, different rules that would apply to, um, would apply to these bits, these applications. And so trying to kind of look at that, we might apply kind of what, what we developed to five S model. So looking at, you know, speed, stability, security, uh, scalability and savings. And again, try and bucket applications or processes against that. And then try and kind of play some of that back. And so this is what we've learned. This is how we've, we've, we've synthesized what we've learned and we've put it against some of these models, right? And then we think this is where your challenges, or this is what you've told us, right? This is not necessarily us making this up. You've told us this, this is how we've mapped it to these models. This is where we think where you should be spending time, where your challenges are, where

you can optimize, like, and, and where, you know, hopefully some of your, your value is going to come through from. So, so let's, let's go over, uh, do you have an example we can kind of give, given that, like, is there an example you can kind of walk us through? Yeah. So one of the, one of the models, once we've kind of broken that down, you know, probably to the next level and we understand, you know, what are the outcomes of, you know, large pieces of work, which we, which we want to do, um, you know, we might apply, so we've got a framework, which we use, which is the outcomes, goals, strategies, and metrics or the OSGM framework. Is this like, we talked about share, sharing something. You want to put, put this up on, on screen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk through it. Let's do it. All right. I think it'll work. I'm going to click on transition. Now everyone will see your, your big head, uh, you know, a big version of your head, not your big head. And then once you share your screen. That's fine. Right. Wait, why are big heads like a pejorative term? It's okay to have a big head, isn't it? Like, I don't know. Big head, big brain. I don't know. Fair enough. Hopefully, hopefully there's nothing just rattling up, up there. Can you see, can you see that? All right. So. All right. Next slide. Okay. So we might try and break some of these things down into, uh, into this, this framework, right? So we might take something and say, Hey, what's the outcome? What's the vision that you want to achieve? Right. It's very high level vision. Um, we might break that down into like, how do we articulate the new numerical aspects of that? What are the goals? You know, we'd look into going back to that conversation we had earlier, right? More revenue, less cost, you know, safer, safer way of doing business. Yeah. Um, and then we might devise a number of strategies, which we think are things, uh, initiatives or features, right? Or projects, which we think are going to make a numerical difference to the goal in, in service of this outcome. Right.

And then what are those metrics, which we're going to measure to make, to see if that strategy is being successful. So we can walk through, we can walk through an example. So this is kind of a retail example. I know like maybe these are less relevant. Now we're kind of not going to the store, but, um, or as much. It's still fine. It's still fine. It still applies. We all remember going to what the shops used to be like. Right. Um, so, you know, here we might say, you know, we want to deliver a best in market customer experience to grow revenue market share. Right. And we want to grow by, uh, by numerical amount by certain year. And we want to make it faster and easier to shop with us. Right. And the metric is going to be, you know, how much people are spending in stores. Right. We can kind of start to break these down as a very high level goal. It's a big number. Right. How can, how can I, or how can a team make meaningful progress on that? Right. It's difficult. Let's kind of break this down. So what we're going to do is take a strategy and turn it into a next level of an outcome. Right. So maybe we've got, maybe that's our corporate goal. Right. Maybe that's what we tell the street. And then we might have business goal. Right. So we want to see improvement in, in sales. And we're going to, our strategies here are frictionless shopping experiences, um, where we want to see the metric about the time in store. And this is going to probably be a metric, which might be a bit unusual. We want people to spend less time in store. Right. Right. Because we want, because they have a goal. They want to buy something. They want to go in, get the thing, give their cash and get out. Right. Um, and improve, uh, associate interactions. Right. So making sure that when they're talking to one of the store staff, you know, it's a very positive, smooth trans, uh, transaction and interaction. And then we're going to break those strategies into, into two. Right. So we, we might have here like reduce the average time in store by 10 minutes. And here we've got some strategies like, Hey, we might want to improve our buy online pickup in store. Actually, that's kind of pretty relevant right now. Right. Um, faster, faster payment and, and speedy returns. Right. Obviously from a business, maybe you don't want the returns, but you want that customer experience to be positive so that returning is an easy experience. So they'll kind of come back and buy it by the next time. Um, and then equally on this kind of other strategy, kind of looking at, you know, customer

satisfaction with, uh, associate interactions. So maybe looking at, you know, tooling that those associates have, right. Or personalized recommendations, which we can, which we can teach to that, you know, thinking in this example, the retailer, you know, hired a lot of, um, you know, summer kind of casual workers, students and so forth. Right. So they wouldn't necessarily have in-depth product knowledge. So how can we, and they're hired for a couple of months. Right. And then they go back to, back to school. So how can we kind of give them tooling so that they can, you know, have smoother interactions, even if they don't have that depth of, depth of knowledge. So kind of starting to kind of break these things down into, you know, more actionable pieces of work. Right. And then we can start to see if we do this, this is our leading indicator against this goal and its outcome and how it kind of cascades, uh, cascades up. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example. Like it, it, it, it shows that. You know, it, it shows, it shows even from a high level, like we would like to make more money. How are we going to make more money? Right. And, and then it goes all the way down. And, uh, I, I think, I think it would allow like individuals working on things, definitely a team to kind of like know why they're doing stuff. So, so one, that's good for morale, but also it allows them to like focus decisions that they make and prioritize things. And yeah, absolutely. If, if you could say, you know, if you're working on this one of the far left, right, the improve the buy online, pick up in store when you're doing, working on that, whether that's code, whether it's user research, you can see that, you know, our goal is to reduce the time in store. Right. And that is, um, you know, we want more sales because people are going to have like, they want to buy that. I want to go and pick it up and get home. Right. Buy my thing and bring it home. I don't want to mess about. Um, so they can see how, you know, what they're working on has a very meaningful impact to a bigger goal and a big goal in a, and ultimately, you know, the top level goal. Yeah. Yeah. And also like, I mean, tell me if this is true, but it seems like it's pretty, well, I don't know, pretty easy, but it's, it's definitely possible to like measure your, your hypothesize

your theories about each of these metrics, right? Like you, you can, you can kind of constantly tune these and see if it actually makes sense. Like the, the, the somewhat counterintuitive one you were pointing out. I mean, the whole basis of this is that the, the faster people can get what they want in a store, the, the more, yeah, yeah. The more, the, the, basically the more money we'll make, which is probably because they'll return, return more frequently. They'll have better customer satisfaction. Like, you know, it won't be a hassle so that they'll, they'll have more loyalty to getting stuff like, you know, when I'm, uh, when I'm over here instead of going somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Like when I'm over at, uh, whenever, uh, you know, when I've been in London, like I'll be at King's cross and there's a, there's like a boots there. And like, if I have some problem, you know, if I need some shaving cream, I'll go there. Cause I know I can get it really quick. Cause it has, I do this, I do this at the local Albert Hein grocery store. Like one of the main reasons I go to that grocery store above all the other ones is they have self-service checkout and it's just like so much nicer than like going through a, uh, you know, I guess it's kind of sad, putting it all on the belt, talking to a human being. Yeah. Yeah. It's so, and, and you can also like put stuff in the bag while you're shopping and then you just like are done. Like there's no anyways, but like, you know, it's, it's nice that you can kind of like make those metrics clear and then also constantly, uh, be rechecking, rechecking them. Yeah. Yeah. And we might get to the point here where we're, now we're working at a product level. We might show improvement or we might show that, you know, we're not getting the improvement that we want. And then the kind of the next level, um, is going to be, well, how do we, how do we feed back the, those metrics, those improvements kind of up the chain so that we can make investment decisions about whether to continue further investing in, in that product, right. In that portfolio or, or not. And I think there's a fear about stopping, right.

And I think we kind of, if we can make it easier just through very clear and transparent metrics and these kinds of cascading goals, if we can make it easier to make, you know, know and stop, you know, an easy decision, a good decision, um, I think we're going to get somewhere as well. Right. So if we get one of these products and say, we're not having, you know, we could spend millions on this thing. It's not driving the metrics that we want. Let's spend those millions somewhere else. Yeah. All right. Well, if you unshare, we can wrap up here and we'll go back to two heads. Your regular size head made big. Regular head. Well, yeah, that's a good, that's, that's a good kind of, uh, traipse down to, you know, I like, I, I'm glad you shared that chart at the end cause it shows a good, it explains everything we were saying coming up there. Right. And, and I think, yeah, hopefully you can kind of start seeing it, you know, come together. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, good. We'll have to, uh, we'll have to figure out a time and you can come back on and show us what happens after that. Yeah. I would love to, yeah. What, what, how we do things. It'd be nice. It'd also be fun to talk through just some of the, uh, like I referenced pair programming earlier, but we can go on the exact opposite end and just talk about, uh, lower level, uh, tasks. Lower level in that they're lower down the chart. Not, not that they're, uh, that's where the, that's where the real work happens. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, well, uh, thanks for being on. Do you have any, uh, any, any Twitter places or things you want to refer people to? Uh, so I'm, I'm on Twitter. Um, so it's Robbie with a one, so R O B B one E. Um, that's probably where I'm, where I am the most, um, but not that frequently. All right. Well, that sounds good. Well, uh, we'll talk to everyone later. Bye bye. Thanks very much.

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