Narrator: You're listening to the Humans of DevOps Podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SKIL framework.
Marco Gianotten: So, it's like yin and yang. But there's Yang,
but there was no yet so excellent is the Yang into this
funny, crazy world. Perfect example, if you have a first
full resolution, you also need a first class experience.
Eveline Oehrlich: Welcome to Humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm
Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Officer at the DevOps Institute.
Our title for the podcast today is "How to Master the Art of a
Perfect Experience". I'm hoping that this title is making you
curious. Well, I'm curious I'm very curious for the upcoming
conversation and I'm excited to have a fantastic guests today.
Today, we have with us Marco Gianotten . He is the founder
and CEO of Giarte. Hello, Marco,
Marco Gianotten: Yes, well, thanks for having me. I'm really
looking forward to this podcast.
Eveline Oehrlich: Again, I am excited to speak to you today.
Let me give our listeners a little bit of a background on
you. So I'll talk to you about you in third person. I hope
that's okay. So Marco's badge of honor in the C suite is the
friendly insult and I love that Marco is well known for outside
in market views and creative problem solving. He's also seen
as a thought leader in experience management and
axillae. We'll get to that in a little bit later. His favorite
saying Do or do not. There is no try. He's very sharp,
disruptive, a pioneer of the experience revolution likes to
speak at home and abroad and pushes change into overdrive
with compelling arguments to act. I love this description. I
hope Marco This is a compliment, of course to you. Is there
anything I have missed?
Marco Gianotten: No know, well, that I want to be a chef. But
I'm a failed chef. But that's for the aftermath of this
podcast. No, it makes me very humble, and also very proud. So
thank you for being on this podcast.
Eveline Oehrlich: Well, thank you again, welcome again. And
how I found your micro was I did of course research in and who I
would want to bring in to talk about service level agreements
and all of those wonderful topics. And I found a I think it
was on LinkedIn where you said that SLA stands for secret lies
and assumptions, which really caught my attention. As we are
in the month of February during a lot of conversations and focus
on the topic of Site Reliability Engineering, we, of course, are
very interested in the topics of SLA s KPIs and OKRs. And that is
really, why I thought I have to talk to you. So tell me about
the statement secret lies and assumptions. What made you say
that?
Marco Gianotten: Well, I love it. I love DevOps in ITIL. They
have many descriptions, starting with the word service, like a
service level report, or have a service level objective, or a
service level agreement or service manager or service
designed but actually, it's not about service. It's about
process. So to Beatty, business managers an SLA stands for
secret license assumptions. For example, at a large retailer,
all the it suppliers all the outsourcing the whole landscape,
everybody was protecting the SLA but the shelves were empty. So
system availability was their truth but shelf availability was
the truth of the business. So if the shelves are empty in the
basket size is empty and your customers are in a happy I don't
give a crap about an SLA. You don't do a good job. So this is
I wanted to reinvent the word SLA it's still a service level
agreement with for to the business when it doesn't work
when it's a watermelon so it's green inside all the metrics are
green in the service level report. But actually the
atmosphere the surrounding the emotions are in the red zone.
You have a watermelon and then when I came over and did
something else so it was secret life and assumption and and
outsourcing I call it sore loser agreement to catch my drift it's
it's something okay, what's the truth? What's reality and you
can you don't hide behind your own reality and claim I do a
great job as it you don't do a great job. But it is so
important to the business that we're not able to talk mumbo
jumbo Tech, we have to talk the language of the business.
Eveline Oehrlich: Beautiful. Let's explore a little bit about
Giarte. You're the founder of Giarte. I'd Love for you to
share with our listeners a little bit about what what you
all do at Giarte.
Marco Gianotten: So we're, we're focused on bringing touch into
tech. So, for true nerds were like, We're called the cities of
it. And we're proud of that we bring into touch normally, when
you say the word empathy in a software company, you get fired.
We bring empathy, we bring experience to the world of tech.
So you have the general trend of experience management, that's,
that's real big that we bring experience management into the
world of tech, and technology and outsourcing an ecosystem. So
we focus on the X. And that's about three things that's about
customer experience, or employee experience, or developer
happiness. So the human, it's about business impact. And the
funny thing is, if systems go down, the word outreach and
outreach, outreach, different one letter. So that's the
business impact. And the third one is about collaboration,
about Win Win by design. So these are the three value
drivers. And we put it into a concept and that concept evolved
into a framework. And we call that now XLH, the experience
level agreement. Very good help large, we sell we help large
companies with Well, let's say Steve thinks it's a mindset. So
flip thinking, great example is there was a famous German, or
there still is famous German carmaker in Bavarian, and they
claim for damn file on there, enjoy driving, but they use 853
KPIs just for workplace management. So there was no
emotional or experience metric included. So that was a typical
Secrets, Lies and assumption that was not actually the
reality. So helping those companies to get into the
mindset. And having the skills like for example, Experience
Management, what kind of capability is that? And also,
what kind of tools do you use, to measure to monitor to
optimize and use experience because from experience
everything that's digitally related.
Eveline Oehrlich: So something caught my attention on your
website. And again, this is related to our months of Site
Reliability Engineering, and I'm going to quote from your
website, it says, excellent is a powerful new addition to the
traditional IT service level agreements, or SLA is one that
builds on the SLA concept by measuring human sentiment and
using this to break down silos, and think and act from the
perspective of a user. So I have a three prong question. First,
explain to us what are x delays? Second, how different are they
from service level agreements? And can I if I am in that, for
example, company you were talking about or any others if
I'm managing SLAs? Can I move from SLA s to xls? And how would
that look?
Marco Gianotten: Oh, great questions. Okay, the first one,
okay, what's an excellent, it stands for experience level
agreement. Actually, it's a framework, but also a commitment
to apply Experience Management in organizations and ecosystems,
for example, outsourcing relationships. So it's a
framework and a commitment. The second question is, okay, you
have the world of azules and ITIL. And we're, we're agnostic.
So you have to rethink about it. And it is left brain oriented.
So it's about the details. And if we look to SLA, it's about
the important details. It's about process. First, it's about
tangible outputs, like the efficiency of freight or of
surfer so uptime, or availability. So it's technology
centric. So actually, it's about the bigger picture. It's about
the impact you have on the business and especially human
beings. So it's like yin and yang. But there's Yang, but
there was no Yang. So excellent is the Yang into this funny,
crazy world of tech. For example, if you have a first
call resolution measurement, well, you also need a first
class experience. So you can look at incident management, but
also okay, what was the impact on lost productivity? You can
focus on problems but also prevent them because you're
repeat. It's the same difference between if a product is not
available on the shelf because of an IT problem. That's
reality. And if you claim that the system is still up, that's
not reality, because the business is hurt, and people are
not happy. So at klm they started rethinking about their
metrics. And eventually they are in business so flying planes Got
it, but they need it to support their main business. So if you
have a flight delayed due to it, because above and below the wing
IT systems fill, then you have flight delay due to it. And our
goal as it is to have no flight delays due to it. Because if I
have a flight delay, that's costing you money, you have to
pay a penalty, your net promoter score will go down. Because if
I'm there, you know, I'm not able to fly as a customer, I'm
not happy, I wouldn't recommend you and you have to change the
crew. So finding out where we go, key provenance indicators,
what actually makes the business or the customer or the ecosystem
tick and focus, and focused on the things that really matter.
So that's why we introduced key proud indicators, because they
motivate you to do the right thing and you know, you do the
right thing.
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Eveline Oehrlich: I was just traveling across to the US at
Christmas time, and of course, there was a huge challenge from
one particular flight provider travel company, who, yeah, we
did not, we were not delighted. And what really made me a little
bit upset was when I was sitting at the airport. The news hit
that it was infrastructure, and it who was responsible for the
outage because they had aging systems. Of course, I wasn't an
I am not part of that company. But I felt a little bit offended
that their IT department is blamed for this situation, and
they make it very public. So an excellent example. And I am a
KLM flier, lucky me that you guys have worked with them. But
I felt really, really sad for this IT organization who gets to
who is blamed for all this mess happening over Christmas in the
US, anyway, sorry.
Marco Gianotten: And that's also what happens to it. People don't
celebrate success or no product, because they're always on the
wrong end. You know, they always get the blame, and they accept
the blame. It's the same as it starts reporting, oh, my
metrics. I don't celebrate success. You know, I know. I
don't know if I report metrics. And I think could do a good job.
But actually the business is going down, for example, these
IT guys working very hard. But actually, there's inter
investment, or they don't have the wrong metrics. So they, for
example, they don't have the backup procedures, because well,
they didn't have enough money. But if you don't have the backup
procedures, and you have an outage, your recovery time goes
up. So your recovery time objective, you know, that's
really key. So, if we're down for 10 minutes, that's okay. If
we're down for three hours, okay, that's totally wrong,
because then the system will collapse and we have to replan
everything but those kinds of discussions are not business it
alignments of I don't know what they're talking about, because
we invested a lot of money in business it alignment and I
don't know what they're doing. There's only one language in
this the language of the business and the customer do if
it starts talking about business. For example, I also
make a joke that's EBIT earnings before interest in tax so most
IT guys it just means earnings before it. talk the language of
the business and I really help those people but even at klm
people within it, they weren't very happy, you know, and they
started outsourcing and instead of helping the service providers
there were blaming them because they were bullying them because
they were bullied by the business. That was so so about
you know, when you're doing a great job, I don't have to be
managed by someone if I have no flight delay due to it. I know I
did a great job when the answer is zero when the Friday because
then we have celebrate and we have drinks because I know I did
a great job because it's my impact on the business. So
Heineken invented the beer KPI on the impact of SAP hosting on
on the on the production and especially the selling of beer
in Asia and Africa. Because you don't want to do with change
just prior to the end of the rainy season Africa because then
they celebrate and appear. Yep. So being in the mind and being
thoughtful and understanding the business because the business is
very tricky because they have the money so the relationship
would do between IT and business or the doesn't work. If they
speak different languages and having a service level
agreement, it actually is a watermelon. So it's called
secret lies and assumptions to the business. That's, that's not
good for it. Because it's, it makes you depressed even. Yep.
Eveline Oehrlich: As an IT person I am. This is music to my
ears because I would love to have a proudness indicator,
which helps me to share and celebrate what I've done. But
here's another question. You guys talked a lot about the
human experience and tech. And I think you talked about left
brain, right brain. Many of our listeners are developers site
reliability engineers, DevOps and team members. If it did,
they don't really do a lot of you know, thinking in terms of
human experience and technology, maybe it's user experience. But
again, if you're an operations or in DevOps, not too much
concerns about that. Give us a little bit more insight on your
guys's thinking in terms of human experience and technology.
How can our listeners start such new thinking?
Marco Gianotten: Yes. Okay. For first, for example, like user
interaction or user design, that's the settle. Excellent is
the horse. So holistically, it's bigger. And most people the most
important word in DevOps, or in Agile, the Agile Manifesto is
the word valuable. They made money mistake. They named it
valuable software, but it has to be value, anything you do. Value
is very abstract to understand as a human being, it has to be
valuable for me, like an end user or a business, but it has
to be valuable, or has to be valued as a developer. So if I'm
a developer, and I make coat not only makes that makes the
product owner happy, but the customer happy, because it's
easy for them to adopt, they love the software, they love the
feature, the usability goes up and user adoption goes up that
makes me proud to and especially in in the DevOps way of working
in releasing software, it's very important to understand what the
end user what the customer, what the employee is actually doing
with that software. And we have product owners that decide on on
the priorities. They have their own KPIs key value indicators,
and that's the first thing that goes wrong, that KPI is focused
on the customer. It's focused on the value is not a traditional
KPI like uptime, or availability or whatever. So if you start
changing from a KPI to a KPI in DevOps, that's a good thing. But
actually, you need something overarching, because you have
multiple teams and they don't really work together and the end
up, it's a bad customer experience. So a key proudness
indicator works very well as the mother of all key value
indicators. So I think in the DevOps community, in the
software engineering community, that they will adopt, excellent
thinking to, for example, they start thinking about experience
engineering, like they do in Product Engineering. If you go
to a carmaker, if you go to Boeing, if you go to any company
that makes great products. In product design, you also think
about experience, the famous book, emotional design by Don
Norman. That's a classic book. And it's well known in product
management and product design and designers. But actually, no
one almost no one in IT. And especially DevOps knows that
book. This guy, both two great books about the about design.
And I love the book, emotional design, because that's part of
the nature that's part when Boeing developed the Dreamliner
it was about emotion because this was the first airplane they
ever designed with a human being in mind. The previous edition
when there was designing a plane was about safeness. And then
they came up with a jumbo jet, it has to be cheap. And the
third real third generation in designing an airplane was about
human experience. And then you the first problem they
encountered at Boeing was when you start talking to people like
I'm in a focus group together with you, Evelyn. And you say,
Well, what do you want this I want more legroom and engineer
really understands that. That's a functional requirement. So I
say, I don't want to feel locked up. What happens with
traditional engineer? They say, my God, he's an idiot. Well,
should we make it into inconvertible? This sucker will
freeze to that because 10,000 meters minus 50 Celsius degrees,
something like that. That's not empathy. That's apathy. So they
change the design team also with social engineers, and now they
understand so the Dreamliner and the Airbus 350 are about the
human being and it's about humidity. It's about light. It's
about It's about the experience and you feel more refreshed
after a flight with a Dreamliner than a triple seven. So in car,
a in airplay in electronics in the iPhone, what Apple that's
all about design, emotional design, people have to love it.
But in software, we still have to embrace that thinking.
Eveline Oehrlich: I love that. I love that Dream Lighter example,
absolutely right on having that design for the relaxing journey
to your destination. Fantastic example. Just something for the
listeners, as you mentioned that Marco Don Norman, if anybody
wants to do some research in that he is a very famous thought
leader and is actually working on another book at this point of
time, I think it's called the Digital Transformation
experience. But I was fascinated by some of his writings and
actually have pre ordered his his book on this digital
experience. So just for our listeners, again, Dream Lighter
is an excellent example. Now, you are releasing an excellent
pocket book, I think, yeah, pretty soon. Yeah. Tell us Tell
us. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Marco Gianotten: Okay. When we started this, I was like, we
were like a lowly nut. So there's a famous YouTube footage
over like a video and the videos by a guy dancing on his own. And
then people start following. So we did a lot of good practices
already, for a lot of large companies in the US in Europe,
even in Japan, and we were infusing our thoughts with game
design or product design. And then you have to come up with a
glossary. And then we said, we're going to share this with a
lot of people we want, we want to have an academy, we want to
develop the skill sets for people. So now you have to start
codifying your knowledge. And we started with a pocket book, it
will be published in three weeks from now, the US version,
together with fan Hara publishing, I'm really excited
because we're now into the open. And then that will be followed
by something more spectacular in the summer that call to ritual
book this because the great thing about agile or especially
DevOps is about the ceremonies, it's about the sprint planning,
or a daily standup, or a sprint review, or sprint retrospective
keep ceremonies are like rituals. So we developed a lot
of rituals, like the key proud indicator, or the or the KPI,
stress methodology, or a lot of great things that could be
applied. And also law firms love this, to put it into the
contract. Because the spirit of the contract is really important
if you start collaborating. So we work to get other people, the
book, that book will be out there. And when this possible
will be there, people hopefully will look at it and they can
order it. And we have a lineup of great products, books
eLearning video content to share this. And we train people in
Lesotho. And my team is now working in Portugal and in Spain
and in France, and we're very proud with people start stealing
stuff from us. And we have that makes us very proud like because
if you're good artists copy great artists, you still go, we
help this community and a lot of young people and old people with
the spirit, the people from the title community, people from the
DevOps community, the people from any community, even with
people with Lean. And so we had to discuss what's what is so
great about this. And they said, well, like lean, we started all
about Lean thinking when I was in university, but was no waste
and lean it is there. So lean is about no waste. ITIL is about no
chaos. Agile is about no delay. And while we needed a fourth
one, we call it axillae. And it will be about no frustration.
And if we have no waste, no chaos, no delay, no frustration,
I think we'll all be happy with the digital transformation. So
we're on a mission, we love to share. And we love to hear and
it's great that sometimes we people send as well we apply
this in a way and when the most one of the most funny things is
that at the ditch we're way they launched applications on time on
budget like prints too. And people were actually crying
because I'm not able to work with this release. And they say,
well, well how can we celebrate success when the customer is not
happy? So on time on budget was not complete. So they said it
has to be on experience. So that's Oh x so it was on time on
budget on experience, and now it's called auto boxing. It's a
vert and we have to out Robots, it's in their nature in their
DNA. So the developers and the business are extremely happy and
only happy when the customers happy.
Eveline Oehrlich: Wow, fantastic. You know, after,
let's say 40 years, and it the no frustration is very, very
motivational, because I have done all kinds of work design
development, support, I carried a pager in the early stages. And
that was the most frustrating time of my IT career. So this is
absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much. For those who are
listening, the XLR pocket book, I will make sure that I will
share with you the website, it's actually pretty easy.
giardia.com Go look there. If you have specific questions,
reach out to me. I know where to find Marco. Now, Michael, I have
one more question. This has nothing to do well, slightly. It
has to do with experience, but not necessarily with tech. What
do you do for fun?
Marco Gianotten: Well, I do a lot of things for fun. I like
read but especially I am ambidextrous golfer, so I play
left hand the right hand. So I'm a masochist, that plays against
himself. So I do nine holes left hand and line holes, right
handed so and it's a very interesting way. It's also
related to Chinese sword fighting. So that's a very non
traditional way of playing golf. And a second I love cooking. I
started cooking for toddlers cooking classes and, and read
the thing because taste is so important for people healthy
food. But also if you have people only or maybe with
dementia and you you start to taste of your youth that's
really important. So I wanted to be chef my life I turned out to
work in it. But I still I started working as a teenager in
the kitchen. And that's still one of my biggest hobbies and
making people happy with food is also a passion.
Eveline Oehrlich: Fantastic. We have more in common than you
think. I also play golf but only right hand. So when you come
down to where I live, we can go and you can teach me the other
way. I love to cook. I always pride myself with that I'm the
best cook in in my family. And when I go to a restaurant, I
always say I can cook better than I can make this better than
these people. So I can cook for you. So come on down. Well,
yeah, thank you so much for this very, very enlightening
conversation. We have been talking to Marco Gianotten and
founder and CEO of Giarte Marco again, thank you for joining me
today on the Humans of DevOps Podcast. Again, for our
listeners, if you'd like to learn more about the axillae
pocketbook keep checking@yahoo.com And last but
not least humans of DevOps has is produced by the DevOps
Institute. Our audio production team includes Julia Pape, my
good friend and Brendan Lay, my good friend as well. I'm Humans
of DevOps Podcast Executive Producer Eveline Oehrlich. If
you would like to join us on a podcast in the future, please
contact us at humans of DevOps podcast at DevOps institute that
calm Boy, that's not a good name. It's a mouthful. Thank you
again, I'm Evelyn earlyish. Talk to you soon.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Humans of
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