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Enabling market-oriented outcomes through more effective col-
laboration between functions throughout the value stream
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Protecting and enabling our teams
Beginning any transformation is full of uncertainty—we are charting a journey
to an ideal end state, but where virtually all the intermediate steps are unknown.
These next chapters are intended to provide a thought process to guide our
decisions, provide actionable steps we can take, and illustrate case studies
as examples.
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Selecting Which
Value Stream
to Start With
Choosing a value stream for DevOps transformation deserves careful consid-
eration. Not only does the value stream we choose dictate the difficulty of our
transformation, but it also dictates who will be involved in the transformation.
It will affect how we need to organize into teams and how we can best enable
the teams and individuals in them.
Another challenge was noted by Michael Rembetsy, who helped lead the
DevOps transformation as the Director of Operations at Etsy in 2009. He
observed, “We must pick our transformation projects carefully—when we’re
in trouble, we don’t get very many shots. Therefore, we must carefully pick
and then protect those improvement projects that will most improve the state
of our organization.”
Let us examine how the Nordstrom team started their DevOps transformation
initiative in 2013, which Courtney Kissler, their VP of E-Commerce and Store
Technologies, described at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014 and 2015.
Founded in 1901, Nordstrom is a leading fashion retailer that is focused on
delivering the best possible shopping experience to their customers. In 2015,
Nordstrom had annual revenue of $13.5 billion.
The stage for Nordstrom’s DevOps journey was likely set in 2011 during one
of their annual board of directors meetings. That year, one of the strategic
topics discussed was the need for online revenue growth. They studied the
plight of Blockbusters, Borders, and Barnes & Nobles, which demonstrated
the dire consequences when traditional retailers were late creating competitive
e-commerce capabilities—these organizations were clearly at risk of losing
their position in the marketplace or even going out of business entirely.
†
†
These organizations were sometimes known as the “Killer B’s that are Dying.”
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52 • Part II
At that time, Courtney Kissler was the senior director of Systems Delivery and
Selling Technology, responsible for a significant portion of the technology
organization, including their in-store systems and online e-commerce site.
As Kissler described, “In 2011, the Nordstrom technology organization was
very much optimized for cost—we had outsourced many of our technology
functions, we had an annual planning cycle with large batch, ‘waterfall’
software releases. Even though we had a 97% success rate of hitting our
schedule, budget, and scope goals, we were ill-equipped to achieve what the
five-year business strategy required from us, as Nordstrom started optimizing
for speed instead of merely optimizing for cost.”
Kissler and the Nordstrom technology management team had to decide where
to start their initial transformation efforts. They didn’t want to cause upheaval
in the whole system. Instead, they wanted to focus on very specific areas of
the business so that they could experiment and learn. Their goal was to
demonstrate early wins, which would give everyone confidence that these
improvements could be replicated in other areas of the organization. How
exactly that would be achieved was still unknown.
They focused on three areas: the customer mobile application, their in-store
restaurant systems, and their digital properties. Each of these areas had business
goals that weren’t being met; thus, they were more receptive to considering
a different way of working. The stories of the first two are described below.
The Nordstrom mobile application had experienced an inauspicious start. As
Kissler said, “Our customers were extremely frustrated with the product, and
we had uniformly negative reviews when we launched it in the App Store.
Worse, the existing structure and processes (aka “the system”) had designed
their processes so that they could only release updates twice per year.” In other
words, any fixes to the application would have to wait months to reach the
customer.
Their first goal was to enable faster or on-demand releases, providing faster
iteration and the ability to respond to customer feedback. They created a
dedicated product team that was solely dedicated to supporting the mobile
application, with the goal of enabling that team to be able to independently
implement, test, and deliver value to the customer. By doing this, they would
no longer have to depend on and coordinate with scores of other teams inside
Nordstrom. Furthermore, they moved from planning once per year to a con-
tinuous planning process. The result was a single prioritized backlog of work
for the mobile app based on customer need—gone were all the conflicting
priorities when the team had to support multiple products.
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Chapter 5 • 53
Over the following year, they eliminated testing as a separate phase of work,
instead integrating it into everyone’s daily work.
†
They doubled the features
being delivered per month and halved the number of defects—creating a
successful outcome.
Their second area of focus was the systems supporting their in-store
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