DORA Event 30 september - summary

The new DORA Metrics Report from Google Cloud is out, and Avisi organized its second DORA community event to explore this report. The focus is not only on the report, but also on how the insights from the report can be applied directly. Avisi's event emphasizes practical dialogue and real-world stories rather than complex transformation plans, with DORA metrics seen as a starting point for improvement rather than an end goal.

The second DORA event is already over and this time we went deep in the mud on how change success truly happens in organisations. A more inspirational angle was what Astrid Karsten and Dirk Groot brought with their talks. Nicely contrasting the ever so enthusing Nathen Harvey's talk about the amplification of AI and DORA capabilities.

Nathen Harvey has flown in for this event. He is one of the main authors of this report and shared insights about the report. Among other things, he discussed how DORA can demonstrate that AI is a magnifying glass for the functioning of an organisation.

He started by zooming on the popularity of AI usage but also highlighted that there is still much trust to be gained by using AI the right way. One thing is for certain. The impact can not be understated. The figure below clearly shows the estimated effects being a large net positive. Specifically, it’s important that burnout and friction are centred around zero effect. One interpretation of this data is that AI is not found as cumbersome or an obstacle, and once again that throwing tools at developers won’t solve their immediate burnout and or frictional issues in their current environment.

 

Especially the DORA AI capabilities came into view, showcasing how AI capabilities are related to factors such as team performance and throughput.

 

The best users of AI can repeatedly gain productivity from the proper use of AI. It felt very invigorating to have a nice clear view on what AI is offering to teams with qualitative research to back this up.

Dirk Groot, principal consultant at Avisi, then takes people through what is needed to implement change. He describes a “fictional” case study. In this case study, change at first seems possible. But as Dirk complicates the context within which the changes need to be implemented, more pessimism is echoed through the room. Together with the audience, slowly, more and more soft skills and hard skills are determined to make meaningful changes possible. Finally, Dirk takes the audience to a slide that concludes all the skills that they discussed were needed to make improvements a possibility. See the figure below for the result:

 

Dirk finished the talk with a familiar quote for fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide: “The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” - Douglas Adams

Astrid Karsten, Agile Enablement Lead at PGGM, describes a real-life story. A war story about implementing DORA across the entire PGGM organisation. How the company dealt with resistance to the decision to implement this and what she was able to achieve with the teams to arrive at a new status quo. Initially, buy-in started high, but as soon as any effort was required, motivation hit rock bottom. As the need was not determined, the why, so to say, lacked for the teams.

She then set the first step in motion. By measuring with the other agile/scrum leads in departments the reality of their software delivery. Shockingly (or not very if you have been in the industry for long enough ) they were performing worse than they thought they were. That helped among other things to get leadership further on board and also helped to get one team to start implementing improvements. From there, positivity started spreading and roadblocks became obstacles.

Astrid finished her talk by showcasing the current status of their DORA metrics: A 52% increase in deployment frequency and a 53% improvement on lead time to change (and what an improvement!) and started a discussion in the group that lasted through for more than an hour deep into the after-party.

For me, there are two main takeaways:

• We need to look at the AI capabilities and see how that maps to our current goals, to give us a direction to improve towards. First thoughts are to look at working in small batches.

• Secondly, our DORA improvement board will measure how strongly we rate on the skills needed to make organisational improvements.

I hope you found this summary interesting, and if you did, I assure you that the talks were much more compelling than my writing. Onwards to the next event, where we hope to see you sometime in March.