- [Brad] It's lunch time,
and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break.
Two of my favorite things about Microsoft
are the smart people that constantly visit campus
and the great fleet of shuttles.
Whenever I can I try to take advantage
of both of these things, and grab lunch
with some of the tech industry's best and brightest.
Today I'm driving around with Dr. Nicole Forsgren,
a researcher, DevOps expert,
and CEO and Chief Scientist at DORA.
(jaunty music)
- Hey
- [Brad] How's it goin', Nicole?
- I'm good. Sweet minivan.
- You know, I wanted to harken back to the early days
when we needed to have a minivan
in order to put our kids in it.
It's like a walk down memory lane here for me.
In software, we're all about data
and we all use data to make decisions,
and you've brought this uncanny academic rigor
to how you use data.
In fact, you have so much passion
you formed your own company.
So tell us a little bit about the company,
your background and this passion on data.
- Sure.
So DORA is DevOps Research and Assessment.
We've been doing research looking at how
organizations can use so many fantastic capabilities
to drive improvement in their ability
to make software with both speed and stability.
That's really the key central component
in helping organizations perform amazingly well.
And I say perform, so that's
profitability, productivity, market share.
- Yeah so it's both internal and external
because a big part of performing is
employee satisfaction, employee passion.
- Also, decreasing employee pain, decreasing burnout.
- Because we talk about this in-depth DevOps approach
to IT and to Dev.
How does that impact morale?
- When we study DevOps or technology transformation
we take kind of a holistic approach
and it includes culture, it includes technology,
it includes Agile in measurements,
and the piece in Agile includes
how you develop software and team experimentation.
And so the way it affects morale and team culture
is we see greater communication,
greater information flow, risks are shared,
novelty is encouraged and implemented,
morale is improved, and that ends up feeding through
and having a positive impact on
the entire organization's performance.
For so long, have you heard before,
'IT's a cost center, IT's a cost center,'
- That's definitely transitioned
but that's the way it's been talked about for years.
I'm tired of it.
- Right? Seriously.
But what we find is that it's really an investment.
If you see it and if you view it as an investment
it pays back dividends tenfold,
because it makes your technology better.
It makes your employees better.
It makes your employees happier.
It delivers value to your business.
Again, profitability, productivity, market share.
- [Brad] What's the most common pitfall
organizations fall into in this area?
- So there, I think there are a couple.
So one is not measuring the things that matter.
Right, so we have, sometimes it's just local optimizations.
Right, sometimes people are like
'I'm gonna do CI, Continuous Integration,
or I'm gonna do Continuous Delivery,
because Continuous Delivery,'
and then they just get spun up on something.
Right?
Or they'll measure something because it's convenient,
or easy, and then it shows up on a report
and that's all they pay attention to.
And I'm sure you've seen that.
- Oh, a hundred times, and then there are even things
that I've asked to be measured
and then realized it was the wrong things.
- Which is fine, because it's continuous improvement,
continuous learning, so then
you could still keep it if you want,
but at least pull it off the report.
- Yeah, but start measuring, and then
you're gonna realize that you're gonna get better.
Just the numbers, when you first start
doing the measurement the numbers are gonna be dirty,
they're not gonna be clean.
- Realize the power of an honest baseline.
If it's bad, that's even better because
you have nowhere to go but up.
- At least you got a place to start from.
That has been this journey, I think,
that many of us have gone through.
That it is all about getting started
and then constantly learning, constantly getting better,
constantly refining, but you gotta start.
- And it gives you something to talk about
and communicate about.
Suddenly, if you're on a different team,
I can talk to you about it.
And, if I think your performance or your metrics
or something sucks, that's okay
because I have something to talk about
instead of yelling at you, we can yell about the thing.
- That makes it tangible and real.
You can have a conversation and then say
'Okay, now how are we gonna go get better on this?'
- Exactly
- Next time on Brad Anderson's Lunch Break:
- If you wanna be super capitalistic about it,
we find so much research everywhere
showing that diversity of background,
diversity of thought, diversity of gender,
diversity of race, diversity of all the things
leads to better outcomes.
You make better products, you build better software,
you get better outcomes.
It's worth the investment.
(jaunty music)