CEO of Tasktop Technologies Mik Kersten discusses his session "Project to Product: How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business" at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018. Connect with Mik and Bob on Twitter.   Learn more about AgileToolkit Sponsor LitheSpeed at lithespeed.com.   Transcript:  Mik Kersten ‑ DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018   Bob Payne:  "The Agile Toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi, I'm your host, Bob Payne, here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 with Mik Kersten. Mik, you gave a really great talk, one of the keynotes, and I really love the message that you were pulling in, bringing some of the Lean Manufacturing ideas. I know you've been working with BMW, so it's a pretty close call. This idea of looking at data visualization, flow metrics versus compartmentalized, "We've gotten 20 tickets done, but what sort of value have you captured?" I love the fact that you were mixing four different types of work so that you can visualize ‑‑ How are your investment strategies paying off? Are you investing in paying down debt? How does that, in the future, affect your ability to deliver feature flow? I just want to talk a little bit about your flow framework and some of the work that you've been doing. Mik Kersten:  Excellent. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, I think that's a great summary. Bob:  Great. [laughter] Bob:  Why don't you just give a little recap of the things that you were saying and some of the clients you're at? Mik:  I realized, like you, like a lot of us, having to live now through basically, a decade of large organizations trying to go Agile and seeing some repeated failures, knowing that the core practices make sense, yet these transformations tend to go sideways. I just kept asking myself, "Why do they go sideways?" I've witnessed some of the longest running ones, as closely...It's one of the things that I relayed in the book that we launched here, "Project to Product," which will actually be available on November 20th. That's still on pre‑order. Bob:  I don't yet have a copy of that. I went out to dinner at Lotus of Siam. [laughs] I didn't make the sign‑in. [laughter] Bob:  I wish I had. Mik:  There's a story in there of Nokia, who were a poster child of Agile transformation. They were, at a business level, incredibly motivated by this thing called the iPhone to succeed in that Agile transformation, and, yet, something failed. Stephen Elop, in, I think, 2013, sent that burning platform memo when he was CEO of Nokia, realizing they had not done the right things to allow them to become a software innovator, which when, screens get that large, you'd better be if you're going to compete with Apple. Somehow the business, the leadership at Nokia at that time, was doing the wrong things. I was speaking to technologists there who actually knew what the problem was. They knew that the Symbian Operating System ‑‑ they were in transition, going from Series 40 to Series 60 ‑‑ it was not going to be able to support the kind of features that you needed, things like building on an App Store, on top of the platform that was there. Yet those investments were not being made in replatforming. They were being pushed to go Agile and they were being tested, basically. The measurement for the transformation was the Nokia test, how agile these teams were. Whether they were trained on Scrum, that had nothing to do with how much more quickly, if you look at the end‑to‑end value stream of what Nokia was doing of delivering software, how they were actually optimizing or improving their ability to deliver the kind of platform features that you needed to survive and be a phone. Bob:  A local optimization problem rather than a system's. Mik:  I got this term from Carmen DeArdo. I think of it as 100 percent as a local optimization of the value stream. They were completely doing a local optimization of the value stream. Then you have to ask yourself, "Well, was it really the architecture that was a problem? Were their deployments that's still there