Agile Empowerment: Data-Driven Decisions, Continuous Improvement, and Cultivating Workplace Happiness

Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, Agile Empowerment, Data Driven Decisions, Continuous improvement and cultivating workplace happiness. Before we begin, I'd like to go over some housekeeping items. I would love to remind you that this is being recorded. So if you don't have access to, something with a screen or you want to share it with your co workers or peers, you're going to get a recording. It will also be on demand after the webinar. You'll get an email. Feel free to use the chat window to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties or any issues you need us to try to address. And, of course, we invite you to participate and ask questions via the q and a chat window. And we'll answer questions either at the end of the presentation or throughout the presentation. Our speaker today is Ryan LeMay. He has over ten years of experience in agile development spanning from founding startups to contributing to fortune five hundred companies, including Brightly and Siemens. He's played key roles such as scrum master, agile coach, product owner, product manager, and founder. Ryan has also taught safe and scrum courses, adding to his diverse agile background. Currently, he develops and leads a specialized agile course at Brightly aimed at refining agile practices within the company. His journey demonstrates a solid commitment to agile principles and effective team leadership. Ryan will lead us today as we look at agile practices and how they positively impact continuous improvement and create a happier workplace. And now I turn it over to you, Ryan. Go ahead. Thank you, Stephanie. So, first, I just wanna thank everyone for giving me their time today. We're gonna spend about an hour on this. And the the talk track itself and the presentation itself is gonna be about thirty to forty five minutes and hopefully lead time for questions. And, because I can't interact directly with the audience and I have to read the q and a, I think most questions will be safe for the end. But if I can see a question, pop up and it's relevant, you know, to to what I'm saying, I I will try to answer it. That being said, there there's a lot to talk about, and this talk track mainly is to keep me on the rails because I I could probably talk to week you know, talk in weeks about what agile development is and agile what agile is as a strategy. So that being said, I I'm gonna take a a lot of liberties here, with my terminology usage. I take a lot of broad strokes. I I can't get into every single detail. And just to give an example, the the agile courses that I lead for Brightly, are two full days. And so I'm presenting thirty or forty five minutes, you know, all those days and then the thirty five or thirty to forty five minutes. So you can imagine how I'm condensing the material. So that being said, please please ask questions. I I expect it. I I love participation, and I'm happy to, answer any questions. So today's agenda, what we're going what we're gonna be going through is, basically strategic agile principles, and it all centers around this concept of throughput. And and I think that concept is fundamental with any sort of agile strategy. And I I'll keep saying agile strategy because I personally, in my experience, especially when it comes to teaching frameworks is when we apply frameworks, we follow what the framework is telling us to do without an underlying intent of what the framework is trying to accomplish. And so, I'm I'm not going to teach any frameworks here. I'm not gonna talk about, Scrum or SAFe or Kanban. I might use Scrum as an example later, but I I I'm not here to teach scrum itself. I'm I'm here to provide a foundation of what agile is. And so we can make agile decisions regardless of the framework we're in, the agile decisions and when we're operating, within our work environment. So that being said, I'm also going to talk talk about work, the concept of work, and then processes within the concept of throughput, and then define what improvement is in in an agile lens. And that's where a lot of the data driven decision making is gonna come from. So my objective with that agenda is, you know, creating a sense of productivity that is client centric. And that's such a cliche word, but hopefully, I can, you know, demystify the cliches of it and and, you know, make it clear why it's client centric and why it's so important. Also with this means a united team. And so, you you know, you don't have to be a HR hierarchical leader to apply agile and to be a leadership within your organization. Leadership can come from anywhere, especially, I mean, you can connect it to the client or the people that we serve. Right? And and create a vision around that. That's all leadership in in my opinion, in my experiences anyway. Right? It is is it's connecting a vision to our work efforts, and we'll talk more about that later. And then like I said, provide a foundation to be agile. And I like to like I said, I like to use the the term strategy, because I see a a a lot of what I call cargo holding or frameworks. Let's just do what other people have done and maybe we'll repeat their success. Well, there's intent with their frameworks, and and we're gonna we're we're gonna go deep dive into that intent today the best I can with the time with the time that I have. Alright. So, we're working with a with a poll here. This is my this is my first time working with a poll. So, I would like to see, just to kinda gauge the audience real quick. I think this is the only interaction I'm gonna ask for besides the q and a. Please, answer whether or not you've worked in the agile environment. Just yes or no. And an agile environment can be, I've worked with the framework, something like scrum, you know, in the past or combine or something like that, or we've we've taken some sort of agile approach with our processes. And, I I I I'm indifferent to whether or not it's formal or not. And I'll I'll give this, about, thirty seconds to a minute, to to get everyone's answer in. I I can see who submitted it. But no no real need for deep thought. I just wanna see if it'll help me gauge the terms I can use, and I can decide on the fly whether or not, I I need to, elaborate more on some of the terms. Alright. So we have about fifty four percent of the people attending, have submitted, a yes or no answer. Oh, by the way, you can click your screen. I see some I'm just seeing stuff in the, the q and a that people are physically typing there. That's fine. That helps. But if you can click your screen, I think I'll just give that ten ten more seconds. Alright. I'm gonna be moving on. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Cool. That's a lot. That's a lot in the yes column. A lot more than I expected, and and that's great. Hope hopefully, though, I can provide some more insights for for a lot of that. For for the rest of you, I think it's great and hope what I hope to get out of this too is, maybe you are working in an agile environment. We're just not calling it agile, and that's fine. I I I I think that's that's beneficial because as we work through it, we'll realize it agile is a software term and there's a software component to this, but I'm gonna do my best just to to make it clear that this isn't just a software thing. This is this is a business thing. And, people in the software industry like to like to call it agile, but, you know, the the other terms for, I believe, like, lean, for example, but, but the new age term of it is agile. Okay. Great. Awesome. Thanks for participating in that. Okay. So this is a standard, slide that you'll see if you take any sort of agile certification course. And what I hear and, you know, we I think we use this in SAFe, and I've I've used this in scrum during scrum courses. And but I like to use it as an example, in in our internal courses here at Brightly. And the question is often pros is, why is agile not like the top row, and why is agile like the bottom row? And the answers I typically hear are well, the top row, you have to wait until step four to get user feedback. That's true. That's true too. Directionally correct, but not not the answer I'm looking for. And then why like this in in in the bottom row? And, typically, I hear answers like, well, you can you can instead of, like, let's just take four months, in the first month, you can deliver skateboard and get feedback from the users. And the and the feedback is like, well, you know, there's a frown face. Well, why don't why don't I like it? Well, I can't I can't balance on it. So give me give me a better way to balance to get feedback than you have the handlebars. Okay. Well, it's a little bit better, but it's not that you know? It's not you know, I wish I could not have to pedal. Okay. Then you put pedals on it or, you know, whatever that is. Right? And then that's the type of feedback I usually get. And, again, I I I can't argue with that. I I think it's those are good answers, but it's not the answers that, I'm looking for. And the answer I'm looking for really depends on the context of what are we trying to do. Right? What are we trying to do with the products we're creating? And so I think that can completely change the dynamics of not like this and like this. And for this example specifically, the example I like to use of what we're trying to do is we're trying to get to someone to point b from point a. Right? And when I approach a problem like this in an agile environment, I like to ask, okay. Well, how long were we trying to go? Maybe we're trying to get to work. How long is it taking now? Well, we'll be walking. It takes an hour. I like to understand what the problem is with that. Right? And then with the first iteration in a month, let's just say, how long now when she has a skateboard, how long now am I or or it does it take for you to get to work? And let's just say instead of walking for an hour, now it takes forty five minutes. Then I then I present, well, how how quickly would you like to get to work? Let's just say ten minutes. Okay. What's keeping you from going faster on the skateboard? I keep falling down. Right? I I I have to get my pauses. I have to get myself back up. Okay. Then we can add the handles. Okay. How long does it take now? Forty minutes. Are you saving the client twenty minutes of time, right, each way? But we can do better. But what's preventing you now? And the iterations are on feedback towards the the goal, the objective of the goal. Right? And so the difference between the two is a tire doesn't get you to your destination any quicker. And in fact, if you had to carry it, it might slow you slow you down. Right? Where the skateboard does. And then we can use that feedback of how at at the ease at which you can hit your destination as ways to improve you to get to your destination. And there's all other concepts we can dive into with this too. Like, just say for an example, by month three, if you're traveling to work every day, those time savings compound. So the first example was we're saving ten minutes each trip. It's twenty minutes a day, thirty days a month. And within the same month of the first objective, right, with with the with the top row, you're not saving any time. And then you get into the second month, and you're saving twenty minutes each trip. So now it's forty minutes a day. So month one plus two, how much total time saving that? All this is value added delivery. Right? And then you can get to concept three, let's just say, and this is where opportunity comes in. And this is why agile frameworks work so well is maybe when they're riding their bike, they they can see that they're passing traffic. And maybe by the time they're riding their bike, they're they're getting to work in fifteen minutes. About ten what they're looking for, but they realize when they get to work, they don't have to find a parking spot. Right? Then they don't when traffic, is happening, they can just ride through traffic. And then by month three, you're thinking, well, how how much have you spent on, you know, of the total budget? Let's say the budget was fifty thousand dollars. Like, we can build a car with that. Well, now we built a bike for five. Now we have forty five thousand dollars to do something else with, and then we can give that back to the to the customer. Well, what can we do with the money instead if the other the other investment is gonna is going to, you know, only reduce your your time to your your impact of the value, by five minutes and maybe even be slower in some circumstances. So it opens up opportunity, right, to put your money in other places to to to please a client. So, also, I've seen many times in my career is you deliver four, you put your all all your eggs in this basket, you use your entire budget, and it's and it's a manual car. And some of your clients says, what's a manual? So, you know, you can't drive the car at that point. Right? And they're they're not getting, anywhere to use all the budget. I've seen that. So, anyway, iterative feedback continues value delivery. That's how I like to use this example. So the number one step, I think, and if you're trying to spark agility in your workplace, is have a unifying purpose. Why are we here? Right? What are we trying to do? And how how do people who receive, you know, the the ends of our work, how do they benefit from that work? And unite people around that. I like to use sports as examples. I'm using rowing here because there's clear boundaries in sports. You can see the destination of where you're trying to go, and you could see the competition, and you can act within that. And it's clear when you're a rower, right, unifying and working together to get to your end goal and working as a team is gonna be beneficial. But if you don't have that unifying purpose and you have an all star in the center that thinks, oh, my objective, here's the row as fast as possible, and they're out of sync with the rest of the rest of the boat, you're not gonna be the team that wins. Right? And so if this unifying purpose is absent, I I don't see how you can successfully be an agile agile team. And this is this is what I see a lot with failed implementations of any sort of agile framework or agile mindset. Right? What's our purpose and how do we what's our role within that purpose, and how do we accomplish it together as a team? So that to me is the unifying step or is is the first fundamental step of of of working agile in your workplace. This is a slide I'm sharing more and more here because having that unifying step is very, very powerful. This is a, not this slide itself, but the story I'm about to share is is taken from Disney's management program. So when you become a manager at Disney Resorts, you go through their management training. And their unifying purpose at Disney is to create magical memories. It doesn't matter if you're working in a retail shop, you're a maintenance worker, or you're a face character. Your your job there is to create a magical memory for the guest. Your job isn't to serve soda or to be be aerial. Right? It is to create you use your your aerial to create a magical moment. Because Disney understands that their customers don't get in you know, don't buy thousand dollars in tickets to buy thousand dollars in tickets or pack their entire family in a car for eight hours to pack to be with their family in tight quarters for eight hours, right, that road trip or stand in line or buy sixteen dollar drinks to buy sixteen dollar drinks. They go there, especially parents, to to experience a magical moment and look back and see their their their children just in full wonderment, believing that they're in an enchanted castle. And so they're unifying everyone around this purpose. And a story that they like to share is a family that's looking for a parade and lost in the park. I approach a maintenance worker, where's the parade? And that maintenance worker knows their job, and they know their role in that job, right, is is to provide maintenance to the park because what enchanted castle is gonna have, you know, the shovel vegetation or, trash blowing about. It's gotta be perfect. But when their clients approach them and ask for directions, they know a Home Depot answer is not gonna, you know, is not gonna fulfill the purpose. Like, oh, have you tried plumbing or aisle thirty six? Right? The story that they use is this maintenance worker was holding a broom broom at the time, threw the broom in the air, started twirling it around, and let a percussion follow me and, you know, did a percussion of the with the family to the parade. And the the maintenance worker can look back and see the their their parents smiling because the child was smiling. And the child magical moment, an unforgettable moment for that child. And this eighty percent figure here is the number of Disneyland employees are proud of the work that they do. And this is this is this comes from an article, in the LA Times titled Disneyland workers are undervalued, disrespected, and underpaid. And I'm not condoning undervaluing under or undervaluing your workforce or, disrespecting, your colleagues or anything like that. I I'm not condoning that. I'm just showing how powerful it is to when you can connect your work efforts to a unifying purpose. At Brightly, we call that our product essence. Right? And so people can tie their work into that purpose. And that to me is where happiness comes from. And I know we've all experienced this in our personal lives as well. So an example I like to use is mowing the lawn. The thought of spending my free time mowing the lawn is dreadful. I that's not what I wanna do on it, especially on a nice Saturday day. Right? And I'd rather be on my motorcycle or hang out with my kid or something like that. What but when I'm actually mowing it, it's still not ideal, but it's not as worse as the thought. Right? And then but when I'm finished and I can see the cut lines, I can smell the freshly cut grass, the house looks good, that feeling makes all the proceeding work worthwhile. And I've worked at at organizations where we have no purpose and work just seems like this. There's no connect there's no feedback from my from the the effort that I'm giving. Right? Well, having this unified purpose helps create that effort, and then it helps organize our agility around it. And we'll we'll get into that in a bit. So that's when I like to bring in the concept of work. This is the second principle. Right? How do you get all the okay. So I have some questions. I can't keep up with it. But, work. So in an agile environment, what we try to do is tie making tying our work efforts into fulfilling the product vision. Right? Fulfilling our product essence or whatever it is that we do there and to create forward motion with the effort that we put in. You might have heard of a term called waste. I've seen it be confused with, like, a physical substance, like, you know, loose paper or whatever. But waste eventually or or inevitably is work that's performed that doesn't equal throughput. So it's like, you know, working as a face character at Disney without creating a magical moment for our guests. Right? It's working at a Chick fil A restaurant and deliver you know, creating a meal that no one eats. Right? We wanna make sure that every action that we take leads to a positive result for the product, right, from the from the point of view of of the customers. So with any agile framework, or any agile mindset, if I can boil it down to anyone, right, I would say they're the three concepts, inventory, throughput, and risk. Inventory is a term I like to use. Other people or other frameworks call, you know, work in progress or, you know, whatever whatever works for them in that framework. But for me, with inventory, I can physically see something. Like, I'm working at a brick and mortar something like that. I can physically see the boxes as if I was I was in Costco or something like that. But what inventory represents is investments made by the organization. And that investments can be material items like a trash can or raw material, but it's also in us as employees. Right? They're giving money to us. And then what we try to do with that with that investment is convert it to the purpose of why we're here. Right? So for Netflix, it's people watching shows. For Disney, it's creating magical moments. Right? For Uber, it's dropping people off to point b. So agile fundamentally is the rate at which we convert inventory into throughput. That and that's what this entire strategy revolves around. And that's how we we optimize any sort of business. And then we define risk as the amount of inventory that is yet to accomplish throughput. And risk is can be a a day's topic in and of itself. But that's, you know, if you you've ever had you know, you see a a deal on on some sort of food. Let's just for the sake of example, let's use, a bulk bulk meats. And you're like, oh, wow. It's only, like, three dollars for for, you know, for for each steak. Right? And it's usually when it's usually fifteen dollars, so you buy it, but it all goes to waste. It all rots. Well, the money you used to buy in bulk, half of it rotted. Right? And you can't use it, so it it's not fulfilling its purpose. And with forces, the money and I know this is a small example, but you can scale it in organization. What could have you have spent it on that could have gave you some sort of satiation? And this is the type of the judgment we do every day with our personal finances, but organizations do the same thing. That's called opportunity cost. So the more we convert our inventory, the less opportunity cost we go out there. And opportunity cost is really hard to pin down, but I just wanted to highlight it because it's it's cost not seen. Right? So inventory throughput and risk. An agile secret is is, you limit inventory, and you do that by time boxing. Right? And so what we wanna do is in any agile framework or any agile mindset, we wanna organize people's time around moving product from an idea or or demand or desire into reality. And what happens when you when you don't do that and you organize people about just doing work and and and aligning yourself with productivity just because I I I worked all day. Typically, you start working on multiple things at a single time. And while you while you can feel productive because you spent all day working, the moment you pause item one to do item two, from the perspective of the beneficiary of item one, that work has paused and slowed down. Right? And then the more this happens, you'll go from item two to item three, back to item one, then to item four, so on and so forth. You start all these obligations, and every time you move from them, work slows down. It's part of an agile strategy. There's some sort of maximum inventory level where we can keep things flowing to the beneficiary, and that's what agile is about. Right? And we use time as a as a way to judge the amount of of inventory we can carry at one time. And so we measure then, again, we measure progress not by the work we perform, but the impact our work makes. And impact is done through two ways. Right? It it's not just well, just one way. Right? Delivering, converting inventory into the end service that our that our clients are looking for. But in and of itself, delivering something isn't impactful, right, necessarily. It's not a one to one relationship. For example, if you ever been in a restaurant and ordered something and you've been delivered the wrong meal, typically, you don't say, oh, this this is fine. You know, what if you're a vegetarian, you would deliver meat. Right? Typically, you send it back. And you're you're as a client, your satiation has been delayed. And the time you're waiting for and we've all been in situations like that, I think, and the feeling you get with the longer time it takes. Right? So output in and of itself, I'm sure it was really you know, took a long time to make that state, but it it it it doesn't matter if we can't make impact. And so we wanna make sure that we're moving inventory forward as quickly as possible so that we know it's gonna generate intent that we have with our product. So we assume, you know, agile organization output doesn't equal throughput. And I know that's a lot there. And back to the multitasking, again, it's a good good example of the restaurant. If you've ever been in a busy, busy restaurant, it takes forever to get your meal, how do you feel as a client? Right? Typically, good businesses, they'll they'll they'll limit the amount of people that they can bring in at any one time. I remember during COVID, you know, some of you might have had this experience as well. You go into a restaurant and half the restaurant's empty, and they said it's gonna be a twenty minute wait. Well, why is that? I just have to I can just sit down right now at an open table. Well, they probably don't have the staff to support you. So what you don't know is if you, you know progress isn't made by sitting you at a table if you have an hour wait. And so that's why that's why they limit the amount of inventory they have on hand. So I'm gonna play a video for you of Steve Jobs talking, to his stakeholders. In this video, if you don't know the history of of Steve Jobs real briefly, of obviously, he he did Apple computer. He invented Apple computer with, Steve Wozniak, but he was never the CEO. He was just a product, you know, the product creator. And, when the company started growing, they hired an outside CEO, and then there was differences between, Steve Jobs and the CEO, and they gave Steve Jobs to boot. And then Apple started failing in the marketplace and started losing revenue, and they were months away from bankruptcy, I believe, and they brought Steve Jobs back as CEO this time. And this is one of his first, messages to his stakeholders. And this is him talking about the strategy they're going to employ at Apple. Think it takes a while to load. Okay. Let me try one more. Okay. Here we go. Sorry. We have not kept up with innovations in our distribution. Well, I give and give you an example. I'm sure it was talked about this morning, but, you know, we've got anywhere from from two two to three months of inventory in our manufacturing supplier pipeline and about an equal amount in our distribution channel pipeline. So we're having to make guesses four, five, six months in advance about what the customer wants. And we're not smart enough to do that. I don't think Einstein is smart enough to do that. So what we're going to do is get really simple and start taking inventory out of those pipelines. So we can let the customer tell us what they want, and we can respond to it super fast. And you're gonna see us be doing a lot of things like that. Today is is just the first of many things we're gonna be doing with you. Alright. Great. Let's see here. I think I'm on the next slide. I can't see it on the on the previous screen, but I'm I'm gonna talk anyway. What what Steve is talking about there is, obviously, that the inventory problem. And, they had so much work in progress, and they're making so many models at the time, different Macintosh models that, when an idea came to Apple to create something that they could deliver to a client, it took six months through all the work in progress to get that idea to the client's hands. And by the time but six months was too long. Right? Because by the time they could actually deliver it, some the the client base went went with another product. They went probably with PC. And and once a once the client converts to to a a different product, it's hard to get them back onto your product. It takes a lot more effort to do that. And then that's why they were losing revenue share. And so what what Steve wanted to do is let's just minimize our inventory and get people time to respond and time to focus around product flow. And he cut seventy percent of their product offerings and initiatives within Apple. And he made the world world's most valuable company with four products. And there's this famous diagram and and something like that. But that's all he's talking about. But let's get back to our roots. Let's make sure we accomplish throughput. Let's give people let's give our staff time to, you know, capacity to respond to client needs and to make sure that we can respond to med demands very, very quickly. So, I'm gonna bounce I'm gonna bounce back and forth on on slides because I can't see it in the preview. Okay. Can real quick in the chat, can you see the the picture of agile and the, the scrum board? The diagram? Okay. Great. So this this I I'm sure some of you have seen this before, but this is from a popular agile framework called Scrum. And this is typically when I say, have you done agile? People say, yeah. I've done Scrum. Let's see. Oh, I see. No. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Great. Alright. Thanks, guys. This is the answer I used to get. Yeah. I've done scrum. Agile and scrum are you know, agile, like we're talking about, is a strategy. Scrum is a framework to accomplish a strategy. So this is typically the answer I get. What this revolves around is this concept called the sprint. And the sprint is a time box period in which you can accomplish work. And, typically, that's anywhere from, one week to four weeks in a software environment. A sprint could be anything that we want. It all depends on when our clients expect delivery. But the the where I want us to focus here with the sprint is the sprint backlog and the product backlog. The product backlog is ideas. Right? Have you ever been working with a product and you're like, you know what they should do? You know, that that goes into the product backlog. And then you create a sprint plan sprint plan around it. And that sprint plan is you pull it from the top and you it's a limited number of product backlog items that you're going to put into a sprint. And the amount of items in there is dictated by the amount of time you have to accomplish the work. That's all the scrum framework is. Right? And I hardly ever see it taught that way, but it's all time boxed efforts. So every single work item has a time box associated with it. So if the sprint is two weeks, your sprint backlog is an additional two weeks worth of work outside of that, and then your product product backlog is some sort of maximum outside of that. And it's really important to have your backlog time box as well because at some point, you know, you don't wanna leave customers, out there. Some sort of resolution is better, you know, even if you can't do the work is better than if you've been waiting. But, anyway, it's all a tiny box exercise. And when I see people is go through these motions of, like, oh, let's have a sprint plan or let's do a sprint and let's do an increment, all without governing inventory, the govern the amount of inventory you have on hand. Right? So we can do continuous work and deliver continuous work, at a predictable rate. So, that being said, see here. Processes. All processes are are the means at which we achieve an end result. And we can adopt a a scrum process. That's fine. But processes exist just in general. Like, there's there's certain ways we do work and a certain sequence of events in order to accomplish that work. And there's two types of processes that I I personally like to focus on when when I'm leading a company on their agile journey is, the client value stream, what the processes our clients do in order to achieve an end result, and then what how do we deliver that end result to the client? Right? What's our development value stream, our development value processes? I recommend identifying your processes and then start time boxing them. And you can and I call those SLAs, you know, service level agreements. And part of the SLA is that time box exercise. And it's really important to know the work activities we do, the sequence of activities we do to get to done, and then we time box them. So for an example of, Steve Jobs at Apple, six months was too long to get from one end to the next. Let's let's let's do four months, right, as our as our time box exercise. And then, okay, how much inventory do we have to remove from the system in order to accomplish that? And then you start, process improvement from there, and we'll we'll get into that. The whole point of having a process is understanding what you do and then being able to time box each exercise. Right? We know how long it takes to make an order. We know how long it takes to pay. And this is a diagram, by the way, of, Chick fil A. Right? Using a restaurant as an example. And I did this because most of us have probably been to a fast food place. So this is your typical product flow. As a as a client. You stand in line. You do all those things. And then, you know, from a development flow, this is usually what you're perceiving as as an employee at at, at Chick fil A. And, of course, the preparing the food, there's all other process involved with that, but I I can't get into that. What I wanted to share too with Chick fil A is, and I'm sure you'll see this at most restaurants, is they have an SLA system where the red, right, the the the red is some sort of time box, how long the client is waiting has exceeded. And, yellow is in danger of exceeding that the SLA, the service level agreement, and the green is, we're we're we're beating it. We're we're we're meeting client, expectations. And this is important because when we're clients and we're wait there's a as soon as we start, interacting with the business or some sort of service, we do have a time box in our head. And part of your actions are really should understand what that time box is from the perspective of the clients and then judge your work efforts around there. And then that's where product, process improvement can come from because you can go from a thirty three percent success rate here to a hundred percent or eighty percent. You know, whatever that is, you can start seeing improvement. One thing I did wanna add here as well is I know different efforts take different lengths. We have, you know, in in our environment agile environment, you'll you'll see different work types. So we have sprint work types, which takes the, you know, one to four weeks, and it should just be your organization, something very, very specific so you can do improvement towards that, being successful within that. Then there's, larger initiatives that might, you know, we're gonna build a car, for example. That's gonna take a longer piece longer longer time. So we call those roadmap, and then we have bigger initiatives, which might take a year or more. We call those initiatives. Reason I'm bringing this up is different work efforts have different time scales. And, typically, they have different inventory amounts, where a sprint will have a lot more inventory than a road map. So for a sprint, we'll have, like, ten items. For road map, we might have two or three. For initiative, probably just one until it's accomplished. Right? So I just wanted to add that in there. Also, what I wanna add in here for for scrum, all it is is a development value stream. All of those things are time boxed. So you can apply scrum in this way if you wanted to, or you can do your own. But the essentials are the same. What's our time box? How are we judging success on that time? And how are we live what's our processes to limit inventory so we can focus staff around throughput? Right? Organizing efforts around the flow of work rather than the work that they're performing. Alright. So we'll get it warranted continuous improvement. I'm about to show you a video. It's it's two minutes, and it's something I cut myself. It's it's from the movie Founder, which talks about the the founding of McDonald's as we know it today. And what this video is gonna show is, in my eyes, true process improvement. I'm using it because, again, I could use it in software, but it's a bit esoteric. Right? And this is something we've all all experienced. So what I'm gonna show you is what the the what the staff did at the original McDonald's with the original founders and McDonald's brothers is they went to a tennis court and they drew their entire kitchen out. And then they started going through their work processes and then, drew their kitchen out with the top. But what what they're gonna start doing is seeing where delay occurs in their sequence of events of making a hamburger, and they're gonna reorganize the kitchen in order to speed that up. And we do this every day at at Brightly as part of what we call retrospectives is, okay, what's our success rate delivering within our SLAs? What can we try to do different? And let's see the result of that. And I'm gonna get more into KPIs a bit later, but this is a this is a demonstration of, what process improvement is. And then spliced into the end of the clip is the how the client experiences that process improvement. So let me let me play this real quick. He brings me up to this tennis court, and he's drawn this line, the exact dimensions of our kitchen. We bring out our whole staff, and we have him go through the motions, making pretend burgers and fries. Everybody stops. Let's let's clear off. It's time for the pink chalk. See see all this open space here now? We've rearranged the fry situation. So now, the stage left, the deep fryer stage right. Begin. That's great. Come on, guys. They're pretty tied up here. Yeah. Watch it. Lazy Susan. It's the timing of the Lazy Susan. Those are finished burgers. You can't hold it. I I still think there's a third version. What do you wanna move? I wanna move everything. Back to stage left, please. It all drawn. This is better. You done alright? I think so. I guess I guess, look, let's assume our battle station. Okay. Okay. Finally, after about six hours of this, we get it just right. It's a symphony of efficiency, not a wasted motion. A fresh delicious burger from grill to counter in thirty seconds. Good form, Jasper. Hi. Welcome to McDonald's. May I take your order? Yeah. Give me a a camera and French fries and a Coca Cola. That'd be thirty five cents, please. Fifteen senses you change. Here you are. What's this? Your food. No. No. No. I just ordered. And now it's here. Are you sure? Alright. Where are the, you know, silverware, the plates, everything? You just eat it straight out of the wrapper and then throw it all out. Alright. So I wanted to share that to show what process improvement look like from from both perspectives. And I know it's kinda cheesy now, at this day and age, but when in the nineteen I think it was nineteen forty when McDonald's invented what they called the speedy system, that was the first of its kind. And to deliver food with that speed was game changing. Right? And it's the they're one of the biggest companies in the world today, and everyone knows McDonald's today, one of the most recognizable brands, because they implemented that sort of process improvement. And sorry. I'm seeing questions come in. The, what I wanted to say and, you know, that it it it seems it seems funny, but I've experienced this type of process improvement from the client's perspective before personally. And I I I I would bet some of you have too, but Netflix is one of them. I remember visiting a friend. I think it was in college, and he was telling me about this website where you can rent any movie. You could totally bypass going to the movie store called Netflix, and you just they send you a DVD in the mail. Right? And it was a novel concept to me. I was like, really? You can just I was I had that kind of face and reaction to it if I'm being honest with everyone. And, of course, this this, is what it is today. There's no more Blockbuster anymore. Right? I back in the day, I remember being a kid. I had to convince them to take me to the Blockbuster store, and I could go drive down there. We'd browse. It take, like, an hour out of our day. And now it took five minutes on yeah. We have to wait two days, but it was a lot. I can do something else with that time back. Right? And that was not I remember that being novel. And then now it's just streaming. And there's no substitute for that anymore. Right? It's it's why would I spend an hour when I can start watching the movie instantly on Netflix or HBO or whatever, and, I can get through half the movie in the time it would take them to just rent the movie in the first place. Right? So that's that's process improvement. That's process improvement from both ends of the spectrum, from what the client experiences to get to the end result and then how we deliver our means of delivering that end result. And that's why agile is fundamental with any sort of business. Right? You're you're constantly trying to let's see if I'll I can jump to the slide here. You're constantly trying to shrink the value streams. Right? And this is I'm not trying to say you turn everything into a McDonald's because there's that value metric comes with some sort of intensity. Right? Personally, I don't go to McDonald's. Right? I'd rather go to, a nicer restaurant. It takes more time to cook, but the the quality of the food is better. And to me, it's worth the extra time. But if I'm a person that's not that, you know, I'm not into that. I I value other things in my life. McDonald's is isn't perfect or used to be. It's really expensive nowadays. The market's shifting a little bit. But just for sake of example, you can see, how the the the business calculation is done. But the point I wanna bring up is this concept of value added work that we take very seriously here at Brightly, but also, in the Azure world. But it's anything that increases the rate of throughput in both value streams from the client experience as well as our our ability to serve that that end value. And so that being said, there's many agile, key performance indicators or metrics, KPIs that we could use. But if I was gonna just share in two to get started with, fundamental, and I did the same thing when I was hired here at Brightly is, what's our value metric? Right? And what's our what's our lead time on on each of our value streams? How long does it take once we initiate a process to deliver that process? And then we enter process improvement from there. The value metric, to me, this is I saw a question, how do you how do you unite people around a product vision? But, typically, this this aligns with the product essence, and this product essence should be relatable to everyone. Right? Like, okay. Have you ever had to had like, go through a pile of documents to sign as if you're buying a home or taking a car loan or something like that. But how much more convenient was it for you to digitize it? You can save so much of your time from the you don't have to go into the dealership or whatever it is. You can do it from your from your home to DocuSign it. Right? So whatever product we're creating or service we're providing, whether like, it could be a maintenance service. When you're a a student in a a dorm room and your water is gone, the the how do you feel about not having water? Right? And then the restoration of that service, depending on how quickly it was done, how did that make you feel? Right? And then what could you do with that time back? Right? Now you can take a shower, you can go you can go to class and not think about it if you smell. Right? You can focus more on the education being provided at the school. Whatever it is, but it's all about establishing that empathy of how we're benefiting the people consuming our services. And to feed into that empathy and and and and elevate it, I think, is is where we can draw successes. Right? But if you have a value metric, you can orient people around, okay, how are we experiencing that value proposition? And, typically, the metric is something at the end of a consumer cycle of a of a value a consumer value stream. So for our food example, it'd be taking the meal, right, like we saw on the video. The picture here, something is a picture I took at, a supermarket called Wegmans. If you haven't heard about them, you will. They're take if East Coast, you definitely have, but they're taking the United States by storm. Their value metric is something called IPNs or items per minute. And what that is is And what that is is the amount of items that cash, a cashier can scan per minute because they know that's a summation of all their client efforts in their store. And they don't want all the, you know, the the the parking, the the card taking, the the perusing and the browsing and the the placement of items in the cart to be undermined by a long cashier line. And that's the endpoint in which the client experiences dying because they have they pay for their they have their items, and they can walk out and continue on to their journey home or or else where they need to be. So they wanna optimize that. And they align their team around that by rewarding, you know, and recognizing jobs well done there. And I was talking to a staff member there. We're talking about the concept that you wanna raise, you have a high items per minute. You want a promotion, you increase everyone else's. And that's a team effort. Right? And that's something you connect directly back to an end consumer experience because everyone knows what it's like to wait in the line at a grocery store. It is not fun because you're thinking about the other things you could be doing with that time. And I'm sure there's been situations where you've abandoned your food, right, or abandoned or because you have some place more important to be given the amount of time it's gonna cost you to to wait in that line. And Waybans knows this. Right? So they they they try to connect those actions to this throughput. And so without that, I I don't know how we could have an agile experience and how we can have continuous improvement if we can't initiate an experiment. Say, hey. I think we can improve our processes by doing this and seeing an uptick, on your your value metric. Your lead time, again, is that latency, but throughput at the end of the day is value, the intensity which someone experiences value over the time it takes to get that value. Right? So there's multiple ways to approach this. You can increase the intensity, you can decrease the lead time, or you can do a combination of both. It all depends on, you know, center efforts around meaningful impact to our clients. Right? And for me personally, and and and with our staff here at Brightly is when we're having our reviews or whatever it is, we did this, and we can we can, you know, we can connect our work efforts to to a value metric. And we know that value metric is indicative of the value received from our end clients. Right? And my personal goal here is to change our the conversations at dinner tables, whether it's with, you know, during the holidays with family. How is work? I don't want it to be, oh, busy or whatever, something like this. I want it to be a story. We did this today. Right? We saved people submitting work orders fifteen seconds work orders a day. Right? That's how much time we're getting back or whatever the story is, and that's a way to to draw that connection. Other metrics to use real quickly, I see I'm running low on time. Computer terms, something called release frequency, and that's the amount of code we're releasing into production. But in business terms, this is a rate at which we can do business. So this is the rate at which we're you know, putting the McDonald's bag out and for people. And so, typically, there's a rate at which people are queuing up or asking for new features, and there was a rate of releasing those features. And if we understand the two, any sort of discrepancy between intake and releasing, we're gonna start seeing more and more lines. And with the more and more lines, we're gonna start seeing, longer and longer lead times to get satisfaction. And so that's a way we can organize our work efforts how do we how do we bridge those two gaps. The other thing is change fail rate, and that's amount of, releases that degrade service or degrade throughput. In business terms, it's your leading indicator of throughput degradation. So we know, right, in software, when we get a client call, that that call is from someone who can't complete a process, who can't experience the value that they intend to experience with our software, and that turns into a bug. So if we can draw ways of, like, hey. I think this has caused a bug, and we can draw that down, we can connect our work efforts directly to our value metric. Right? So you want release frequency to go up. You want change fail rate to go down. And then we have MTTR, which is our mean time to restore failures that cut you know, those change failures. And this is very this one's very important to me and other organizations I've worked with. You know, I I butted heads here. People like, well, why can't we just put it into a sprint? I said, well, that's fine. What if you're at Starbucks and they give you the wrong order? And they said, no problem. Can you go wait back getting back to the line? How would you feel? And so we have a completely different metric in around that, how long it takes to restore the services. And you know a business like Starbucks, they respond to it very quickly. Right? And they they take it almost immediately. So we measure that in a completely different way. But, again, you know, and you wanna drive that down as low as possible. But what I'm trying to emphasize here is you can use these KPIs and when and and ask people to contribute to them, and they tie directly to your value proposition. And then you can tie that with any sort of effort. And to me, that brings, you know, in my experience, that brings a lot of gratification from work. More. You know, to harp back to the earlier slide, you can treat customer or your staff with respect. You can overpay them. You can do what but if they're if they don't see the results of their work effort, they're gonna burn out. I've seen that too. Right? So, you know, this is really how you can remain competitive in the the work environment. Right? Also, give something back to people. Right? Make them, you know, draw create a sense of connection about their you know, what they're providing here and what they're providing the world. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's true. And I take this very seriously. So Okay. And then in summary, sparking agility at your workplace, have a uniting purpose, Have a way to experience that purpose. Right? Usually through a value metric. And then align your operational behaviors and fulfillment. The entire team are on that purpose. Get everyone lined with that vision. Right? That's what our product vision is for, and that's where good leadership comes from. And you don't have to hierarchical be a leader there. It could be anywhere. And personally, my career, that's, you know, that's how I was recognized. What are we doing here? And let's let's accomplish that. And you can create that sense of purpose. And then you have to, measure have a a way to measure your actions that you're taking to fulfill that in the rate of of of throughput, purpose fulfillment. That's your processes. And then continuously improve those processes and invite anyone to contribute to that, and you can measure it as a result. So that's your data driven, decision making. So only five minutes for questions. I'm sorry. But that's that's my talk. So thank you very much. Ryan, it does look like there is a question from Richard. And he said, when talking about value metrics in the service industry, there's a clear goal with clear action. And then, I think he's asking, if that how that can apply to other industries. And that goes with Timothy's question right below that that asks if he's ever heard of government agencies being able to make this change successfully. Yeah. So I I I used to work in DC for some government agencies, and I think it can it can it's a broad spectrum of government agencies and the purpose that they're supposed to do. But the United States army is very, very good at this. They call it goal oriented autonomy, I think that's what they call it, or commander's intent, something like that where they so there's a lot of books and literature on that. I've personally experienced that in a lot of, like, the defense agencies. But let's just take your local library as an example, as a government agency. Their purpose is for people to read books. I would go out of my way then and orienting people around. People are here to find literature, right, to entertain themselves or to broaden their knowledge. Let's make sure they they can accomplish that as quickly as possible. But this is this definitely does happen in in in government agencies. It's hard of me to get specific because there's a broad spectrum of agencies and what they what they cover, but there has to be an underlying purpose. And usually, if there's not, there's an opportunity for leadership. So I I I hope that's a sufficient answer. But, but the yeah. There should be a unifying purpose. And I personally use government agencies to get a job done whenever renewing my license, you know, or whatever it is. The the means of which I can do that faster makes me feel good as a citizen. So we have to discover what that is. Here's another really great question. It says, when there's a there's a clear goal in service industries faster. Thus, we need to motivate employees to check groceries faster. How do you relate that to agile when other factors like user feedback being slow, iteration on designs, refocusing efforts, etcetera, impacts the process? So so yeah. So with with that's a great question. And so I I've seen organizations get hampered by, like, high fidelity, deliveries. So in concept, oh, oh, if we do this, it'll be perfect. But when you actually see it on paper, you're actually interacting with it in software, you can you get you start getting high fidelity feedback. Like, oh, that wasn't what I imagined it before. The trick I use is don't get bogged down to it into it. Right? Anyone can have an opinion on a high fidelity. What matters is how is it helping our clients accomplish their goal? Right? That's the metric that matters, and that's the feedback we wanna look for. And when we don't see it happening, we can ask the customer what's preventing you from accomplishing this. And then then we can incorporate that. And it might be along with, one of those high fidelity ideas we get from, you know, the the the delivery. But might it might not be. It might be something completely alien. It's something we didn't even think about. But the point is is don't get bogged down in that. Get bogged down in getting to point b. Right? Are we getting there? And let's let's put it out there first. So one thing with agile is we we limit our inventory. We release it as quickly as possible because we wanna make sure we wanna validate whether or not it it it's creating impact. Because anyone can have an opinion. What matters is is the client reaching their end destination, and we can measure that. That's why it's so important to have, a vision of your product, understand your processes, understand the client, value stream, because that that that puts things more objective, right, in a case opinion out of it, really. But then you can ask, your clients questions about, okay. Well, what's preventing you from accomplishing this? And I've done that personally, to to a lot of success. One thing I do wanna throw out there with, with state agencies operating in an agile way, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, to renew your license, you can do it through an interactive bot. And it's taking my renewal process. I don't have to change a single DMV experience I've ever done. Right? So that is a way that DMV experience I've ever done. Right? So that is a way that the agile and they there's someone there that understands this or a group of people most likely that understand this. And they're using that as a means to get to an end very, very quickly for their clients, and it's been very, very good. So I think any DMV experience like that is a good example. With that, I want to say this concludes the webinar. Thank you so much to everyone for coming. Thank you so much, Ryan, for putting on the webinar for us today. Again, everyone will get a recording, soon in the next few days. And if there's anything else we can do to help you, please reach out and let us know. We look forward to seeing you all at a future event. Thank you, and enjoy the rest rest of your day. Thanks, everyone.