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The team looks at clarity of purpose and the North Star Framework and why orgs don't understand the reasons behind transformation or trying to improve and the fact that it's not based on core understanding of purpose for why you doing the things you're doing.  

Businesses talk about wanting to corner the market or drive up the rate of business. But the broader organisation doesn't feel part of it, or doesn't understand the mission. 

A lot of teams or development squads don't understand how they're going to contribute to that mission and how what they're doing is having an impact on the overall mission. 

A big part of the problem is that successful transformations need to involve everybody in the company. 

We've run North Star exercises and the North Star playbook. It's a phenomenal practice or tool for getting that level of understanding for where you are in the overall transformation.  The framework is brilliant because you find the one metric that matters, and then you work at how you can work backwards from it. And for many companies, the one metric that matters is not 'making money'. Every company will have some kind of goal for profitability. 

A lot of the time people are trying to chase the lag metrics. They don't think upstream. They don't think about the North Star or the input metrics that actually make a difference. There's a detachment from the people on the ground doing the work, trying to work as hard as they can with the best intentions. Because they don't have that purpose or that alignment to the actual real purpose or the real North Star. And their efforts are in vain. They're not actually influencing any of the input metrics that could affect the real North Star.

Metrics are important to the organisation from a financial perspective. But what are the lead measures that have a proper influence over those lag measures. What sorts of things could we be doing more effectively, how do you instrument your transformation and how do you know that those lead measures are having an impact on the overall 'money in the in the bank' or core outcome.  We can move the needle on this North Star metric and that should result in successful outcomes. But the interesting pieces out on the left of the North Star are the lead measures. If you don't have those metrics, and that team doesn't understand how it's playing into the overall big picture, the management side can become really difficult. Whereas if you've got those lead measures, and the teams know what they're trying to do in relation to the influence of the overall North Star, it becomes very easy to pivot or understand the impact that a squad has in terms of customer value. It's very odd that a lot of organisations don't operate that way because it's super efficient and effective. It gives you a lot of opportunities to crack.

Organisations need to be brave with discussing Purpose on their North Star. Once you make this visible, make metrics observable, start talking about the North Star and important metrics, and start to align your teams, the teams then become engaged with making a difference and seeing the benefits of the work. Then the teams will go out and start challenging the rest of the organisation by saying: 'that doesn't quite make sense, I don't think that input metric is quite right, can we change that to something better?'.  

You can Wardley map your market to find out which capabilities should be your differentiator. What's your IP? And what do you not need? What is your competition? Decide what you're going to get rid of because it's not a differentiator. And what you're going to hang on to because it's core to your clarity of purpose.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Dave, Mark and Mike talk about Rapid Delivery this week:

There's been a lot of chat recently about serverless and speed. And something that we've been talking about for many years is Rapid Delivery.  Serverless isn't faster, but Serverless First feeds rapid delivery. A lot of people, when they hear 'Serverless' just think 'Function'. But Serverless First is a whole mindset.

Our experience has always been around discipline. We always used to say: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Serverless isn't faster, but Serverless First feeds rapid delivery. What I mean by that is we take our time, we'll design systems that get into the well architected side of things and the five pillars. So before we go into production, we're looking at our observability, we're looking at what we're doing around performance and we're looking at resiliency and reliability.  All that takes a lot of maturity and engineering rigour. 

With a lot of our squads, the first thing they do is assemble their observability and dashboards to get in front of their metrics and begin that iteration process. When you get through this, that can take a number of weeks to just get up and running. But once you get through that process, and you've got that rigour, and you're actually in the environments, that's the rapid delivery piece. You can rapidly increment, you can rapidly experiment and you can get instant feedback on what you're doing. 

And the good thing is with serverless is that cloud providers have observed a lot of common patterns and abstracted them up into managed services. So Amazon API gateway is a gateway managed service and a gateway pattern.  

So if you give them the time and the psychological safety, then any developer could be very effective in a serverless first team. That being said, you are shifting a lot of stuff left onto that team. So the team is now responsible for security, for performance,  for testing and for their CI CD pipelines. So in many cases, there's more responsibility. But that burden is lessened by those building blocks under managed services. By using that severless first mindset you are offloading the liabilities as much as possible. There's probably a lot more concerns that they're dealing with as a team so they need to be able to do that, be adaptable and have that mindset. But the actual liabilities that they're looking after are probably less than for a traditional team

I think it takes less developers to do similar things, but the idea would be to use your developers on new emergent stuff. I've liked working with squads in this capacity over the last 20 years because there's more capacity to learn in these environments and be creative in new ways. Serverless has brought life back into architectural design again that we hadn't really seen in enterprises over the last 10 years.

There's a different set of skills that you're starting to see in teams. Collaboration is a big requirement. They need to get into product development mindset. The most senior person on the team is making sure we're following certain processes, keeping our quality reasonably high, making sure that our well architected reviews are done and managing relationships with the product owners. Use their experience to help prioritise as opposed to being the smartest person in the team.

That well architected, serverless first structure and that discipline gives you greater freedom. It gives you freedom to go fast It gives you that autonomy that you want to give your squads. We've seen this time and again. If they're delivering a well architected solution, and they can demonstrate that to us, then you can gain a lot of autonomy.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly chat to Dave Anderson about AWS re:Invent 2021.

Watch to find out their take on Matt Coulter's speech as part of Werner Vogels keynote, how Serverless and CDK is becoming part of the mainstream as well as the announcement on CDK Patterns Version 2.

Sustainability has been the hot ticket item o AWS re:Invent - you saw that prediction here first!  AWS have announced their Carbon Calculator.  And sustainability is now another pillar in the Well Architected framework.

There was more news on AWS Amplify and great dialogue on the Data Driven Enterprise as well as the Goldman Sach's Financial Cloud for Data. 

Some of the new pieces were incremental and the team were spotting how machine learning is being integrated in many of the developer tools.

Don't miss out on Serverless Craic's unique insight and perspectives on this years re:Invent!

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge
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Dave Anderson, Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly about sustainability. After doing a lot of reading and writing about sustainability and cloud compute and through the influence of COP 26 the team discuss the how sustainability is now at the top of the agenda.  Even Simon Wardley is calling for AWS to bring out carbon cost per lambda execution. Will this be announced at AWS re:Invent 2021?

Mark feels it's one of the big wins that all Cloud Providers can easily put out there especially with Microsoft Azure calculator and GCP and their carbon footprint capabilities.  Mark sees cost as a proxy for carbon footprint up to now, but it's a big assumption. 

But with a serverless first approach, sustainability is not for free, but you're getting it as a side effect. 

Dave talks about the 4 basic models of compute and how hard it is for Cloud providers to report on all cases. But the first step is to get to the cloud and the second step is to think about your energy utilisation. 

They also discuss the report from AWS this week, that AWS is around 80% more efficient than running your own data centre

Mark also talks about  teams who have delivered solutions in a serverless first way will be able to adopt any new carbon footprint features that within minutes or hours to satisfy Board/C Suite Level mandates. And they discuss the UK government sustainability guidelines for the Central Digital and Data Office.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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We are delighted to welcome our guest, Matt Coulter @NI Developer, recently awarded the 'Now Go Build' award by Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent 2021.  Matt is founder of CDK Patterns and published author of the CDK Book available on thecdkbook.com.  He is an Architect for Liberty Mutual, an AWS DevTools Hero and Serverless Architect sharing reusable, well architected, serverless patterns over at cdkpatterns.com or behind the scenes bringing his flagship event: 'CDK Day' to life.

Matt Coulter and the Serverless Edge guys reminisce about bringing serverless to life at Liberty Mutual and how CDK patterns was a key part of the journey.  They talk about the challenges they encountered and the approaches that brought them success such as gaining external validation from the pioneers of serverless to enable them to get the internal support needed to start serverless at a 100 year old global insurer.

Learn from the experts on how to get started on your severless journey using tools such as Wardley mapping to get your situational awareness and find your next best thing to do.  Find out about the importance of building a developer community to maximise the fast flow efficiencies from CDK patterns.  And how combining that with well architected and serverless first principles will build momentum into a self sustaining Value Flywheel.  This unlocks your clarity of purpose and gives your org long term value.

Listen to Dave, Mark, Mike and Matt talk about their experiences of taking cognitive burden from developers to allow them to experiment and collaborate in the wider community leading to even greater efficiencies for their teams and organisations.

Notes:
Matt Coulter: @NIDeveloper, CDKpatterns.com, https://github.com/cdk-patterns, thecdkbook.com

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge
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Dave, Mark and Mike discuss Dave's 'Adaptation - the Value Flywheel' talk at Map Camp 2021.

In this episode they work through Wardley Mapping as a concept demonstrating an example that Simon Wardley uses when mapping serverless as a concept.

They then move on to Dave's talk at Map Camp which develops the concept further through the use of the Value Flywheel.  This sets the context of how Wardley Mapping works in the practical implementation of ongoing technical strategy. 

https://www.mapcamp.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/MapsAsCode
https://onlinewardleymaps.com/
https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1436280981087047682
https://twitter.com/davidand393/status/1448260882350346242
https://architectelevator.com/
New Book from David Anderson itrevolution.com

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge
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Dave, Mark and Mike discuss their best bits from the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021, IT Revolution. They also review their talk on the Serverless Value Flywheel.  Overall the talks were practical with participants describing their digital transformation journeys in an open way, revealing the lessons they have learned. 

Here are quick links to themes, tools and techniques that the guys covered in their talk on the Value Flywheel and picked up in other talks and discussions:

https://learnwardleymapping.com
https://doctrine.wardleymaps.com
https://medium.com/wardleymaps
https://list.wardleymaps.com
https://github.com/ddd-crew/ddd-starter-modelling-process…
https://amplitude.com/north-star

Our Talk: 'The Serverless Edge, Using Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel fro combined Business and Technology Evolution'

Transcript: https://www.theserverlessedge.com/wardley-mapping-with-the-value-flywheel/
Slides: (including ours under Dave Anderson): https://github.com/devopsenterprise/2021-virtual-us
Slack: https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/

New Book announcement https://itrevolution.com/announcing-new-book-from-david-anderson/

Dave and Mark also give a behind the scenes view of their talk: The Serverless Edge, Using Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel for combined Business and Technology Evolution which previewed their book due to publish next year with IT Revolution: https://itrevolution.com/announcing-new-book-from-david-anderson/

In their talk they explained what a 'value flywheel' is and they did a live demo of a Wardley Map to show the technique in action.

There are 4 stages of the 'value flywheel':
1. Clarity of Purpose
2. Challenge
3. Next Best Action
4. Long Term Value

The transcript for talk is available on: https://www.theserverlessedge.com/wardley-mapping-with-the-value-flywheel/

Dave and Mark hosted a Lean Coffee on 'Building internal capability, not consultancy dependency', which prompted a good debate. Mike also picked up on themes around value streams and flow efficiency with Mik Kersten from Tasktop - tasktop.com,  and similarly with Bank of New Zealand - bnz.co.nz.  The guys felt that Wardley Mapping is very complimentary to those themes and is rising in popularity.  Mark picked up on an increasing evolution towards product centricity, meaningful work and socio technical practice.

Mike attended a session looking at ubiquitous language tying in with the need for visibility/observability to make decisions in DevOps organisations which Mark also picked up on in the talk on 'shifting left with product excellence' with Liz Fong-Jones with metrics being used in right way being key. 

Mike also picked up a lot of SRE themed talks including one by Michael Winslow from Comcast.  Courtney Nash from Verica and Troy Koss from Capital One did a 'Chaos and Reliability: A Surprising Friendship in the Enterprise' talk that Mark enjoyed.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

https://www.theserverelssedge.com
@ServerlessEdge

Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
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