Kevin Fisher, Nationwide Insurance Associate Vice President, Lean Process Management (Lean, Agile, DevOps) sat down with Bob at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018. Connect with Bob on Twitter. Transcript Bob Payne:  "The Agile Toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi. I'm your host, Bob Payne. I'm here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 and I'm here with Kevin Fisher from Nationwide. Kevin, we worked together an awfully long time, back from the early days of Agile, at Nationwide. I remember, actually I Tweeted, because it was in the talk with a couple of gentlemen that were from Nationwide. They were talking about the DevOps roll out that they're doing and they had this sort of Sherpa chart. It's always great to see how far you guys have come from the early days. I was impressed by their talk. Unfortunately, I didn't get to your talk, but I hear you had some pretty interesting things in your talk around metrics, and measuring flow, and that sort of thing. Maybe we can chat about that? Kevin Fisher:  That's right, Bob. Bob and I worked together back in 2008 when we experimented with Scrum and XP. Bob and some other folks were our on‑site coaches. From those early days of having one Agile team, now we have 200 Agile teams. All of our work is done with those 200 teams. We think of our transformation in three distinct kind of bodies of work. The first one, obviously, is introducing Scrum and XP and then scaling that up. That took a long time, given our size of our organization. Now we're focusing on DevOps. You heard the talk from Jared and Jim. We're rolling out DevOps in a self‑service way. It's more carrot than stick. Bob:  It was great to hear, because all too often it is not implemented in a self‑service way. Kevin:  We want teams to figure out their local impediments and use these techniques to solve their local processing problems. We gamified the friendly competition between teams. We have a monthly DevOps challenge. All the teams can submit their progress against whatever that topic is of that particular month. We choose a winner, and they get custom stickers for their laptops. That's it. There's no monetary conversation. [laughter] Kevin:  When we were exploring and doing some experiments, we had two of our teams have a friendly competition against each other, and it was simple. We didn't give them extra time. They had to complete all their normal standard work. We said, "What can you do to go faster and get your work done faster? By the way, you have a colleague team over here that we asked the same challenge. We want you to attend each other's show‑and‑tells." It was fantastic to see the friendly competition in their eyes when they're attending their colleagues' show‑and‑tell and the colleagues talking about how they just pruned 2,000 automated tests that weren't delivering a whole lot of value to 700. Now they have it integrated into their build process. They feel real good about it. They have a big visible monitor that displays the health of the build on a real timestamp. Then you can see the other team thinking, "Wow! We could do that. We could beat that." It was very healthy, and that's how we came up with the idea. Then, when we heard about the Verizon cup...Verizon has a similar program, and we said, "That is a fantastic idea. We're going to leverage that idea from the Verizon cup. We're not going to make it quite as elaborate ‑‑ they actually give a trophy. We're going to scale it down and just give stickers," and it's been a great thing. Then the third avenue for us is this whole concept around changing the mentality of our senior executives in finance, from project to product. That's a difficult turn to make. Bob:  It's a huge turn. Yep. Kevin:  We've had many conversations over the years. We've made some changes in IT that are putting us in the right direction, but we can't go further without the business being side by side with us. Early on, attempts at forging that conversation with our business executives and the finan