King Ranch Chicken, talk ideas for agile, dev_ops, and DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
I’ve read that you’re not supposed to complain about travel if you’re in the thought lord and lady racket. This is fine. I must say though, when the Fall rolls around and the Western world wakes up from summer, there’s lot of travel. If you ask me where I’ve been and where I’m going, I will have to look at a large, massive spreadsheet to tell you. Sometime soon I’ll be in Austin. I plan on gaining 20-30 pounds eating tacos, proper BBQ, steaks, graham crackers, ranch-style beans, King Ranch Chicken (MY GOD HOW I MISS IT! MY MOM UNKNOWNING MADE SOME FACSIMILE WHILE SHE WAS VISITING US AND I SAID, “MOM, THIS IS LIKE KING RANCH CHICKEN. LIKE, THIS THING YOU MADE HEARD A STORY ABOUT KING RANCH CHICKEN AND WAS LIKE ‘I’MMA STUNT AND TRY THAT ON’ AND SORT OF GOT IT RIGHT BUT IT’S LIKE WHEN YOURE TRYING TO LEARN DUTCH FROM PIMSLEUR AND YOU THINK YOURE NAILING IT SO YOU SAY TO YOUR KID WHO TAKES 4 HOURS OF DUTCH A WEEK YOU SAY YOU SAY ‘WAAR IS DE KERKSTRAAT?’ AND THEY JUST ROLL THERE EYES AT YOU. ITS LIKE THAT AND IM THE KID WHO EATS KING RANCH CHICKEN FOUR HOURS A WEEK I MEAN DONT GET ME WRONG GOOD EFFORT WHATEVER THIS IS YOU MADE I GOTTA GO FIND DE KERKSTRAAT” AND SHE SAID “Michael, what is King Ranch Chicken?” AND I SAID “ITS DIOS FOOD! (BY THE WAY DID YOU KNOW IN THE NORTHWEST THEY CALL A BURRITO WITH SAUCE POURED ON TOP A “WET BURRITO” WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON UP THERE? I GET THAT WEED IS TOTES LEGAL BUT THE A’DAM PEOPLE ARENT THAT FUCKED IN THEIR FOOD NAMING - IN SO MUCH AS I KNOW - I CANT EVEN ASK WHERE THE CHURCH STREET IS AND FORGET ME PRONOUNCING ‘PLEIN’ - ‘this sound does not exist in the English language’ THE PIMSLEUR GOD VOICE SAYS) YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ITS SO GOOD!” ALSO YESTERDAY SHE WHATSAPPED ME THIS: “Have you read Vladimir Nabokov? He had an interesting life!” RETIREMENT IS AWESOME I CANT WAIT!), Shiner, Fireman’s #4, ice tea, fresh tortillas from HEB, cheddar cheese, and, hopefully, daily, a margarita. Also I’m gonna use all the napkins, and drink all the free refills.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: I love the food in Europe.
Next week I’ll be in Hamburg, and it’ll be all I can do to not ask the obvious of all the locals.
Let’s go eat some King Ranch Chicken
Come to my company’s conference in Austin, SpringOne Platform:
SpringOne Platform, Oct 7th to 10th, Austin Texas - get $200 off registration before August 20th, and $200 more if you use the code S1P200_Cote. Come to the EMEA party if you’re in EMEA.
There’s no accounting for taste
People really liked this Tweet:
After five years of closely studying how organization do digital transformation, I’ve come to one conclusion: No organization wants to actually change. Which makes it pretty hard for them.
Quotes from a book
A popular IT metric is the percentage of its spending used to create or acquire new capabilities (“ innovation”) versus the spending necessary for “keeping the lights on (KTLO).” This metric is often promoted by CIOs and IT leaders to explain the constraints they face in a statement like, “Well, we couldn’t accomplish that much this year because we needed 70% of our budget just for keeping the lights on.”‡
KTLO is assumed to be something akin to waste; it is the remainder of the budget that is not thought to be adding business value. I have trouble accepting this. KTLO generally includes items such as maintenance of existing software systems, licensing or maintenance fees for using off-the-shelf software and hardware, network and telecom costs, and cloud computing charges. These are the costs of actually doing the company’s work—a good thing! Existing systems account for the company’s current revenue and operations—they run the company day-to-day. Paying for them is a joyous thing; we know they work (the company is running today) and we can use them as a springboard for new capabilities.
- War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age , Mark Schwartz
IT spending cannot be considered in isolation; it affects other budget categories and depends on an organization’s strategic intentions. A marginal dollar spent on IT might result in more than a marginal dollar of revenue in one business unit or cost reduction in another. Dollars spent in IT might also have consequences for future revenues and costs. A marginal dollar to reduce technical debt or build some other kind of agility might create an option that has much more than a dollar of impact later on.
- War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age, Mark Schwartz
14 talks on Agile/DevOps/THE_DIGITA_TRANSFORMATION
A co-worker asked for topics people I talk with are interested, for putting together talks:
- How to change “culture” - that is, people know they need to do software, project->product, but there’s little to no organizational or people support. [Here, I talk about building up a small series of projects, business-facing projects to prove that it works.]
- What “product management” actually means. This isn’t so much as a question as something people don’t seem to understand too much.
- Kubernetes. Just anything on that.
- Customer stories - everything needs to have customer stories, even if anonymized. Follow this arch: the business wanted something/there was an opportunity to grow revenues/create a better product for existing customers, they did some agile/product/Pivotal thing, the business improved in a dramatic way, this proved that the new way was good and management took notice. [I think here, you could talk about a lot of first-hand, or very knowledgable second-hand, knowledge about projects. Like, how did they get REDACTED in place, like, as an actual business - what’s up with how REDACTED is thinking about using software and what are they are doing.]
- Changing up the organization - do you run a Center of Excellence, create a new organization that works on actual projects like Allianz/Thales/Duke Energy/Allstate, etc. How to you re-incentive people to behave in the good way.
- Hiring people and retaining your existing people. How do you attract people with the skills you want (I find this kind of eye-rolly, why don’t you just:) and how to “re-train” existing people.
- Product management techniques.
- Building up confidence, team morale, and all the “soft stuff.” Lower-level agile-curios people are always interested in this topic. And, if anything, people who pick talks seem to love this shit out of this topic: every single conference I go to has at least two talks on this, all the DevOps reports say it’s important, etc.
- Multi-cloud as in “I need to run my own private cloud for regulation, government, blah blah” and want to figure out what that looks like.
- Security.
- SRE, DevOps - people sort of know what these are, but they tend to want to understand how to shift to doing them. Fun hot-take: DevOps is dead, long live SRE.
- Measuring culture transformation, and other KPIs - how do you measure, track, and report on all this stuff?
- Another one I think would be helpful: from a strategic level, explaining the whole discovery, framing, actually coding part of Pivotal Labs think. I would do this from the view of an executive, but going over the actual tactics and what it looks like. [REDACTED]
- Scaling agile/Labs stuff to the entire organization - this, really, the nut of all things execs want to talk about - and the point of topic #1!
Relative to your interests
People moving to Texas might be slowing down - as the owner of a house in a popular part of town: Californians! Get your shit together, keep moving to Austin! Twitter lets authors hide replies behind an additional click to view. Just gotta go print some of these up for my next meeting. One for the road, Netherlands edition.
(FOR REAL, THO! KING. RANCH. CHICKEN.)
