Adaptavist’s Podcast – Value Streams & Vulnerabilities

Will Lytle:
Well. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me along. So Plandek is a SaaS analytics platform which looks across a variety of different tools that engineering and product teams use to deliver software. And so some people, I think, can best equate it with almost like Google Analytics for software delivery. We hook into the workflow tools such as Jira and Azure. We look at repositories, and we look in your pipeline CI/CD tools to be able to do two things. One is to provide a central place where organizations from the C-suite all the way down to the team level, particularly focused on the team level, can really understand and interrogate what their end-to-end delivery process looks like. From ideation all the way through to deployment to production.

And the other element that we’re constantly challenging ourselves with here at Plandek is how we cross-reference data from these different tools to further enhance the value that the insights can provide the teams and the organizations that use Plandek. So, for example, being able to follow tickets all the way through a system like Jira, and even if it’s closed, you can continue to track the life cycle of that ticket as it moves through different testing processes, repositories and pipelines that are eventually deployed into production. So, really finding useful ways of bringing that data together, cross-referencing it and finding new unique ways for teams to drill into their delivery process in ways that historically they haven’t been able to, or at least it’s required a tremendous amount of Excel work.

Romy Greenfield:
So where did the idea come from? How did you join the company, and…

Will Lytle:
Yes. So Plandek started its infancy… It was actually born out of a software delivery company. And like many of our clients, the company that preceded Plandek had some questions around, how are we delivering software, are we even good at this, what are we bad at, what we improve and so on. And back then they were using, as many teams were back in the day, Excel spreadsheets. Downloading CSV files from Jira and pulling a bunch of data together and trying to see what they can learn from it and thinking, okay, well, there’s got to be a place for a product that does all of this for you. And so that was the infancy of Plandek.

Will Lytle:
And it’s grown over a couple major iterations over the last couple of years. We have a number of clients globally that use it a number of different sectors. But yeah, it was really born out of the idea that it’s trying to solve and still to this day is, from a product strategy and, and engineering perspective, developed by the same people who were dying to have a tool like this in the first place. So there’s a real strong feedback loop, not only from our clients, but also from our actual engineers in how they use it, the value they get out it, what they put back into the tool for our clients.

Matt Saunders:
I think that buzzword there is… Sorry, go on Jobin. Go on.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
No, that’s great. I can instantly see the value in there Will, because DevOps probably is not the fancy word in town anymore, but value stream management is. And Matt, when we were talking about the transfer 2022, great place in there, probably up there on the list. So I can see how Plandek is probably helping companies adopt because one of the challenges had been you can’t really see what is happening across your enter tool set. And I can see how Plandek is helping with that. Is it really your USP or are you trying to achieve something more than that or is that the main thing?

Will Lytle:
Our strategy as a small business over the years has always been really focused very deep in the SDLC process, right. Be able to cover that ideation to production space of value stream management, and to really focus our efforts on delivering insights within that space. As we look forward as a business, the next couple of years, there are two areas in where we’re going to be progressing. One very imminently in a new product that we’re launching in the next couple of months is going to be taking all of that data that’s coming from this system on a real time basis and almost flipping things on its head.

Will Lytle:
So rather than people coming to Plandek, looking through a variety of different charting technologies and seeing how are we trending in this area, in this area. It actually is going to be a proactive stream of listen in this particular sprint, here’s what you’re working on. Here’s what anomalies are happening in the data you. Is born from a basic fact that our customers are busy, right. The team leads, scrum masters, the teams are very busy. They don’t have the luxury sometimes of taking a step back and really putting the intellectual effort into thinking about the data.

Will Lytle:
So we wanted to provide an element to the product that did the thinking for you, right. So you wake up in the morning, you have a cup of tea or you have a cup of coffee and you say, “Okay, Plandek, what do I need to worry about today, what’s going wrong?” and it surfaces things that, for instance, this poll request hasn’t been sorted yet, or this story has a disproportionate amount of lines changed for a normal eight point story. So it starts to flag either risks or specific alerts in what the team is working on, that’s going to help you meet that end goal, whether it’s a sprint or an epic or something of that nature.

Will Lytle:
It’s taking all of that data that we’re pulling through together and doing a lot more proactive analysis so that we can help teams navigate some of the delivery challenges that they have and really find the answers in a much faster, effective way. The second area that the product is going to develop, I think over the next couple of years, and you’ll see this quite predominantly is extending broadly more broadly out across value stream management. So there’s a lot of great tools in the market today that are doing more business strategy and portfolio alignment, which we’d like to bring in and include in that conversation.

Will Lytle:
There’s obviously the IT operations side of things and cybersecurity side of things, which we’ll have something to say about in the upcoming months. And then lastly the big question is what about value realization. What is all of this actually generating in terms of improved NPS scoring or the results on revenues or so on and so forth? So, we’re not necessarily there to be a massive data lake of all information across to your business. That’s not the market we’re trying to target. I think for us, it’s still… Our DNA is still about engineering delivery within the context of value stream management. But what we want to be able to do is to be able to tie the strategy with the realization a little bit more tightly in that particular context.

Will Lytle:
So that people can kind of see some of the tight correlations that we know exist in the data, but just aren’t always able to flush out. We know that for instance, looking at there is a tight correlation between cycle time and NPS scoring, we know that there’s correlation between NPS scoring and revenues, right. So to be able to bring that picture together in a much more direct way, I think, increases the value that Plandek can offer to our clients organizations.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
I just want to clarify one more thing. So when you say, definitely in the morning coming with a cup of coffee, I want to see what is going wrong and where I need to pay my attention, that’s really great. Obviously that brings a lot of value to the engineering teams, but just want to clarify that it also tells me over the span of six months or one year, this is what your cycle time is, this is what an average of your cycle time is. Plandek does set too, right?

Will Lytle:
Oh, a hundred percent. That is what Plandek is today, first and foremost. It is a historical trending tool that helps you analyze exactly how well you’ve been delivering over a period of time, what improvements you’ve made, where things have dropped off, why that’s happened, what you can do to add some change about that. We just want to turn that on its head a little bit and have Plandek also be able to offer you more of a forward looking risk management element tool as well. You’re aware of the risks that we need to be aware of and concerned about, what can we best spend our time doing this morning.

Will Lytle:
That I think will have a big role to play in standups, right. If you can give people a couple meaningful things to bring into a standup say, okay, where’s this, where’s this, where’s this. You can already see how that’s going to be transformational for a lot of teams.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
Awesome.

Matt Saunders:
Yeah. I can see how, the thing about not wanting to be like the massive data lake is a benefit because I guess it’s not easy, but relatively straightforward to collect a whole load of data out of these tools. But the big thing is finding out the bits that are actually important. And I guess once you’ve got a number of people using this, you can start to see those trends right. And see really what the two or three things that are really good data driven indicators of success. Would that be kind of true, yeah?

Will Lytle:
Yeah, it is true. And I think with the data lake concept in the BI area, those are particularly well serviced areas of the market. I’m not going to plug any brands on this podcast, but we all know the big players in the BI space out there and they’re particularly. So we’re not necessarily interested strategically in going to that space. Again, our DNA is particularly with engineers and so we want to help them understand how those trends are looking, what they can do about it.

Will Lytle:
And then also start to bring a little bit more referenceability across our client base as well so that people can get a good indication, as and where appropriate of how do they compare to similar teams working on similar technology stacks with similar constraints, when it comes to things like your deployment frequency and your lead time and your cycle time. How do we sit against our competitors, how do we sit against the market.

Matt Saunders:
Great. Are there any particular constraints that come up frequently? Well, I don’t know if you’re allowed to talk about.

Will Lytle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Saunders:
Constraints that people maybe artificially put on themselves or have put upon them that cause particular problems that Plandek highlights?

Will Lytle:
You talking from a metrics perspective or generally just going in?

Matt Saunders:
Yeah.

Will Lytle:
Yeah. The first phase of most of our customer engagements is getting to know your own data and getting to know what you can learn about your own data. Which is kind of a cheeky answer to that question. But I’ll elaborate a little bit more in the sense that clients have a pretty clear view, for the most part, of the headline metrics that they want. We want to be able to measure our lead time. We want to know how long it takes from idea to production. And it’s no surprise, it’s a kind of a well known, probably the most well known indicator in agile delivery. The first phase that they learn, it’s not necessarily a constraint, but they learn a lot about how they deliver software and whether or not the way that they deliver software, enables them to get the most robust view of that.

Will Lytle:
And, the easiest comparison I have that in some ways is we’ve seen some clients where the data’s quite simplified and therefore the first insights that they get are quite limited simply because they’ve got various streamlined workflows. And so they start to then build a case in their own minds where we don’t want to add more statuses for the sake of adding statuses, but hey, if we added a couple more things that would help us understand a little bit more how do we connect and how do we collaborate between development and a QA process or how do we hand over from a design into a development process. So connecting of these dots, they’re not necessarily constraints that they put themselves under. But I think a lot of teams are…

Will Lytle:
Other clients that we work with are just starting to really think about data and as such, that are starting to think about data points and all of the… Your workflow, the events in your Jira and your Azure, all of this, those represent points, events that in the day that you’d never think about like that. So in some ways it allows them because start to think about how they work in a way that enables them to get better feedback on it. We see a lot of common constraints just generally from methodology, in terms of what impact kanban has on particular statistics, what impact scrum has on particular statistics. What trade offs are what from a data perspective.

Will Lytle:
So for instance, if you’re trying to optimize your lead time as a scrum organization, well, we know that one of the great benefits of scrum is that it allows you to time box and structure your delivery and internally and externally communicable bunches, right. Whereas kanban allows and optimizes the continual flow of work. But of course, part of the scrum methodology, you’ve got these starts and stops every, roughly two weeks, sometimes three weeks, which then adds a little bit of an additional time as things are queuing up between a design and actual development process. So you’re making certain sacrifices for that.

Will Lytle:
So they’re not necessarily overall constraints, but things that teams are starting to be more well aware of and thinking about actually, why do we do kanban and why do we do sprints and what is the value of doing these things and then that then starts a conversation, right. Well, how do we measure that. So I think one of the things that we see in a lot of clients is a evolution of understanding of the objectives of their agile delivery. What are we actually trying to accomplish and what are the, but what are the key results they’re trying to measure. What are the outcomes that they’re trying to realize as part of that continual improvement initiative.

Will Lytle:
And that’s where Plandek sits, just to help them think through, articulate and then measure those key results and outcomes.

Matt Saunders:
That’s awesome. Especially when you start to get into being able to judge which methodologies are going to work for you, because so often you’re working teams who are working either in a scrum fashion, maybe doing sprints, maybe doing kanbans and you’re like, well, why are you doing it that way. Yeah. It seemed like the right thing to do. And yeah. Actually put me some numbers around that feels really, really powerful. That’s cool.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yeah. Now you have the data to support the thinking or maybe contradict what you’re thinking right.

Will Lytle:
It’s good. It really forces people to think in a slightly different way about methodology, what’s useful, why it’s useful and how to measure it. I think maybe just speak to one of the constraint questions you asked or one of the things that we see a lot with scrum teams is just basic execution of the scrum methodology as it relates to sprints. So basics around planning, starting a sprint, closing a sprint, and the retro helps… We think Plandek helps a lot of it. Even the feedback we do get is that Plandek helps them to rethink and restructure just the fundamentals about delivering sprint in order to become more consistent or reliable in terms of what they’re delivering as part of their sprint targets for instance.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
So Will, that all make sense. And I, I think there’s already a good list of top players in the market with whom Plandek integrates very well. If there is a product out there that’s not yet integrated with Plandek, so how easy see is it to integrate that? Does it take a long time to integrate it with Plandek or is it fairly easy?

Will Lytle:
It’s a good question, quite a broad question. The way that we conceive, if it’s a tool out there that fits with an existing type of data that we’re dealing with, so say a new CI/CD tool, because we already have the facility to ingest process and present data related to your CI/CD processes. So if we’re looking at a new tool out there, say reasonably short period of time, I feel like I’m going to get calls now from people saying, okay, great, you said you can do this in three weeks. But, it’s reasonably straightforward in terms of… because the existing infrastructure is there in terms of the processing and the metrics.

Will Lytle:
If we’re looking into completely new spaces, which as I said, it’s something that we’re doing a lot part of our strategy this year next, obviously the lead time is going to be a little bit different from that because there’s a whole different conversation. It’s not so much about the taxonomy of the tickets and structure of the API, it’s more about actually the insights itself so what information do you need to see and then subsequent to that, part of what Plandek does… Part of the value of Plandek is that it really allows teams to customize the view. So we don’t just say here’s lead time, here’s a chart, good luck. Know where you go.

Will Lytle:
We provide for the fundamental which you then build, you can change the issue types. You can configure it, there’s a lot things you can do, which is great. But obviously that those BI functionality that presents its own different set of challenges because with every KPI we bring through, we need to think about, okay, let’s take this KPI on a journey. What’s the first thing you want to ask and then how would you drill into that then, what would you ask on the back of that. And then all of that starts to feed into one of the fundamental BI thing… What is the BI experience we need to be able to provide that, because again we’re not trying to build a big BI tool.

Will Lytle:
But to a certain extent we want our customers, their teams, individuals, to be able to feel like they can take something off the shelf and tweak it so that it’s relevant to them. Because even if you standardize all your share workflows and all your work item types guarantee, no two teams operate the exact same way. No two teams use a story or a task or a sub task the exact same way, right. Everyone has their site nuances. And so the product has to be able adopt to.

Will Lytle:
So, in terms of the integrating with brand new data sets, that’s probably something we have on a roadmap, quarterly releases we do on those. But one with an existing is a bit shorter of time. But you’re not going to get a firm date out of me on this. Because somebody’s going to pull this up for six months from now and be like, but you said, it was normally…

Jobin Kuruvilla:
That’s a great answer though, because we work with customers all the time and everybody has a different tool they’re using for so it makes sense for us to know how long it going. I can see that all the major players are already integrated with Plandek, so I’m not overly concerned about that. But at the same time I had this question because there’s so many players out there in the ACAC space or project management. Thank you.

Will Lytle:
Yeah, no. And we take a pretty pragmatic approach. If there’s a lot of market consolidation in area, like workflow tools there’s pretty high level consolidation, Jira and Azure control a big part of the market, there’s all the smaller players in there as well so we look to rely on direct integrations because that simplifies things. But there’s also not a huge competition. Whereas with circles, sorry… CI/CD tools, pipeline tools, there’s a plethora of them, right. Between commercial and open source products, there’s hundreds of them out there.

Will Lytle:
So that’s where we’ve built APIs where you can actually push data, which allows us to minimize times which clients can come on the product much faster. So where there’s more tools, we have a tendency to have a push API pattern to just bring people on board a little bit more faster and make it easier.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
Does Plandek also offer any APIs using know, inject data into Plandek.

Will Lytle:
Yeah. That’s the push API. So on the CI/CD side, if you’re using a tool… We have a few integrations that connect directly with some of the big name CI/CD tools in the market. But if you’re using a smaller one or maybe you’ve customized one, we have a push API where you can send us the data directly for every deployment with a few parameters behind that and that feeds directly through to that for a lot of.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
That’s perfect. Yeah. Thank you.

Romy Greenfield:
Thanks for that, Will. That was really interesting, great insights there into what Plandek does and what’s coding the future. So thank you for joining us. If you are want to say, thanks.

Will Lytle:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Matt Saunders:
Thanks Will.

Romy Greenfield:
And then thanks from Matt and Jobin as well.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
Thanks Will.

Will Lytle:
Cheer guys. Pleasure to speak with you again.

Jobin Kuruvilla:
Thanks for it.

Romy Greenfield:
That’s all for today’s episode. Episode seven, value streams and vulnerabilities. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks Jobin and thanks Matt for joining us. Thank you to our guest interview, Will Lytle as well.