Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20 The importance of the Team Retrospective

"It was amazing to talk with Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY, they are truly leading the way in sustainability" - Rebecca Griffith

Rebecca and Caitlin are talking with Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY, about big picture sustainability and the role of business in supporting sustainability initiatives.

🌍 Implementing sustainability in daily business operations
🌍 The role of technology in advancing sustainability
🌍 Ensuring your sustainability & DEI report doesn't turn into a stagnant document
🌍 Framing challenge in a way of opportunity
🌍 Getting the whole team on board

An important listen for everyone, enjoy!

📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.

Transcript

Caitlin Mackie:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, marketing coordinator at Easy Agile.

Rebecca Griffith:

And I'm Beck, team and operations assistant at Easy Agile, and we'll be your host for this episode. Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the worthy, worthy people of the Tharawal nation and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. We extend that same respect to all aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people joining us today.

Caitlin Mackie:

Today, we're joined by Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Thank you so much for having us.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Thank you.

Rebecca Griffith:

It would be great if we could start with some introductions. Ida and Ulrika, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourselves and your role at TietoEVRY?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes, of course. I'm Ida and I'm heading up the sustainability team at TietoEVRY since four years back. And Ulrika?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. I work within the sustainability team as a sustainability manager also here at TietoEVRY.

Rebecca Griffith:

Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for the introductions. Let's jump in. For our listeners who might not be familiar with TietoEVRY, can you give us a bit of an overview about what the company does?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes. Sure. We are a company based in the Nordics, like very, very far away from sunny Australia. We are a tech company. We provide different solutions. For instance, in software, cloud and infra and also business consulting. I think nowadays, we are the biggest tech provider in the Nordic, at least.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sustainability is a huge part of TietoEVRY. You really have a robust sustainability game plan and your strategy for 2023, which highlights your key priorities for ethical conduct, climate actions and creating an exciting place to work for your employees. Can you elaborate on the sustainability game plan for 2023?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah, we would love to. The sustainability game plan is our long term plan that we created last year. We were actually two companies merging into one last year. We had different legacies. X Tieto were good at some things and X EVRY were good at some things, but of course, we had lots of challenges too. We had to sit down and really try to find out what should be our focus going forward and not only actually to build upon what we already have, but also look at the major challenges out there to see like, where do we want to be and what role do we want to have? We created a game plan that is two-folded. We have like the responsible operations that is the traditional sustainability work that you would find at any organization that takes sustainability seriously.

We have the ethical conduct where we have business, ethics, and the corruption, cyber security, privacy, human rights, responsible sourcing, for instance. Then, we have exciting place to work, which is more like HR related because we're people companies, we have to be very good at this in order to attract the right talent and also to keep the talent that we have. We have major challenges when it comes to bringing in and keeping women in our sector, for instance, so we have to be very good at diversity and inclusion and also employee experience, of course, to make this a fun place to work at. Then, of course, climate action may be the one thing that people think about most when they think about sustainability due to the emerging climate crisis. We work a lot with that, of course, and also circular economy and our take on that.

That is like the foundation for us that we have to be very good at like our license to operate, and we work throughout the value chain with these topics, but then because we are a tech company, we also wanted to see what can we do to not only improve our own sustainability performance, but foremost our customers? What's due, I think, and what really stands out for TietoEVRY now is that we have this really, really strong business focus going forward for this sustainability game plan. I was thinking maybe Ulrika could take over and explain and elaborate a little bit about the upper half of the circle.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah, exactly. What we identified when we were developing this strategy or long term plan was that some of our biggest impacts also actually resides among our customers. We have a lot of capabilities and we have a lot of customers, so why not combine those and see where do we have the biggest opportunity in terms of actually helping our customers to become more sustainable? We developed a methodology where we investigated our capabilities, our customer pain points, our customer opportunities and landed in four broad impact opportunities. That's where we have business opportunities in making our customers sustainable. Those are new focus areas within our sustainability long term plan, where we engage with our own business to drive these areas and develop together with our customers to create positive impact on people, planet and societies.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

I think also if I may add to that, Ulrika, so we set the plan to do that, and we had of course, a lot to build upon. We had lots of good reference cases, but of course, we needed to pin it down to get the buy-in from management. Also, of course, get the resourcing. We started with identifying those areas where we think that other people have, or other customers or stakeholders have impact opportunities, which means a business opportunity for us. We must not forget that, but in order to actually deliver in a good way and at the speed that our customers require, we also had to create a consultancy team that could help in the delivery organization because the customer requirements become... The pressure was so high.

For our little team group sustainability, we couldn't really handle everything, so we created something that we call the sustainability hit team, which is a consulting team consisting of consultants that knows data and sustainability within business consulting. Ulrika, you have been given also... You have the role of leading this group, perhaps you would like to say something more about that group?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Well, this is a group of people that, just as Ida said, they have this kind of expertise, combining sustainability knowledge with IT and technology. We work together to identify both ongoing projects that might be related to sustainability in one way or the other that we perhaps can scale and create synergies, but we also work to identify new opportunities, having our ears towards the ground and listening into what do the customers actually want to have. Then, we take in these opportunities and try to see how we can develop them to actually support our customers. Hopefully, this team will just continue to grow and us with our other efforts, become very integrated in all our business operations. That is at least our aim, so the responsibility lies where the responsibility is sort to say.

Rebecca Griffith:

That's wonderful. Now, I think you've kind of touched on this in a broader sense, but in the TietoEVRY annual report, you talk about implementation of sustainability into daily business operations. What are some other key ways that you're doing this?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. If I can start, Ida?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Sure.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think one of the most important things is to involve everyone from the beginning in what we actually should focus on and what are the most important topics in terms of sustainability, both for all our stakeholders, but also for our business, so that we actually give the ownership of sustainability to the organization. Not so that they feel it comes from the side or from above, but it's actually something that is relevant and that the organization owns. That means that each and everyone has the responsibility to also contribute to our joint targets that we also have involved the different business leaders and parts of the organization in setting. I think that ownership is a keyword here to actually enable integration of sustainability in the operations. Ida, do you agree?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. No, but the group sustainability, our group, we are a small team consisting of specialists with long experience, but we are only so many, so we have to have a very integrated way of working in order to make this fly. What we've been focusing on a lot since many years back is to get it integrated. For instance, if we look at responsible sourcing, which is crucial how we handle our supply chain. We work closely together with a chief procurement officer. The sustainability goals that we have that are public and that we disclose every year in our annual report is just as much his goals as it is our goals, so we really get some power behind driving it and we get the results that we need in order to move forward. That is one thing. Then, as Ulrika explained earlier in the last question about the sustainability hit team, how we also now have taken this step further to really approach the business in a more structured way that we have done before. As I said, we had very good reference cases and we have a portfolio of sustainability related services, but now we're doing this in a much more structured manner because of the market, the demands that has increased so much.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. That's great. I think what you mentioned, having that structure helps with that company buy in and getting everybody on board and realizing that it's everybody's commitment and it's like a journey you're all on together. Yeah. I think that's great. Something that's often talked about is the overlap between business and sustainability and the role of the business in addressing some of the major challenges we face as a society. I think so many look to clearly distinguish their responsibility and draw a line somewhere, but I'm not so sure that's the right approach. TietoEVRY certainly recognizes they have an important role to play and really pave the way towards carbon neutrality. What's your approach to this?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Okay. First of all, I think there must be an overlap or there must be like, if you are a company like we are, we cannot do things that we don't think also is good for us, like financially long term. That is the beauty of sustainability. If you have good and long term targets, it's also support the growth of the company in financial terms, so we always have both those perspectives in mind, creating strategies going forward. For us, we work both for our own operations when it comes to climate change to decrease our carbon footprint, obviously, so we are changing. We have renewable energy in all our data centers and offices. We are now currently at 80% and approaching 100. It's going to be difficult. The last percent is always the most difficult ones, but we have a good development as for now.Then, of course, we work super hard because this is the, I think number one question that our customers is asking for, ways to manage their own carbon footprints. Here we are strong in data, of course. Do you want to add something around that?

Caitlin Mackie:

No, but I think that the first reflection that you had that we have this financial perspective also when developing the sustainability plan, it's important because I think that what we see is that... Our business is doing business. Yes, of course. But if you don't do it right, there will be no business on a dead planet, right? So that you have to have the long term perspective where you take into account all the different aspects. It's not only the financial, because they're also interlinked. I think that also the risks that are connected to, for example, climate change for business operations, so the inbound risks that the surrounding is posing to us are becoming more and more clear. I think that it's also becoming evident that if you don't have sustainability integrated in your operations, you will no longer have a license to operate in 2021 and beyond. I think it's just a smarter way of doing business, to be honest.

Rebecca Griffith:

We can all acknowledge that climate action is one of the biggest global challenges for our generation. In recognizing that this is one of your key priorities to address, how do we take these challenges and frame them in a way of opportunity?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Well, this is the beauty of being a tech company. We have the luxury of not having lots of goods that we need to take care of cotton or food or so, so we can go straight to the point, I think, and start to listen to what our customers need and create services and solutions that support them in their journey to decrease their carbon footprint. It sounds very easy when I say it like this. It's not that easy, of course. It requires a lot of hard work and everything, but that's what we should do. I think that when you look at the crisis that is emerging, the tech industry is also seen by the other industries as the great enablers. I think that we have a key role to play. I think that we have a responsibility to our stakeholders to be there and to be in the forefront.

I think that's what we've been doing. For instance, for the last year, the guest team has been working on a very interesting solution called the sustainability hub, which actually addresses this spot on. Would you like to...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I totally agree with you, Ida. The tech industry, it's really an enabler and that also means that there's a lot of business opportunities. As you said, the sustainability data hub voice, one of our responses to these kind of business opportunities that we see out there, so what happened was that we were sitting and discussing and realized that one of the biggest obstacles for companies to actually integrate sustainability into decision making, into risk management analysis, et cetera, is the lack of data as you have now produced your own ability report, the big hurdles that comes with actually collecting the data for that report, it sits in shattered data sources.

The collection is often manual. The data might not be in the right shape. Most companies actually collect the non-financial data once a year for their annual sustainability report. That means that when you have that data, you are actually steering through the rear view mirror because you are not steering proactively by taking fresh data into account when you take your decisions or plan your operations. What we did was that we started to develop a solutions, which builds on automating the data collection of sustainability data by helping customers to identify where does the data sit? How can we actually automate it? Is it via automation, via IoT solution? Who will use the data? Which KPIs and metrics do we want to map it against? How often do we want the data to be updated? Then, visualize it in real time? A modern way of an ERP system for ESG data, you could say, so that it is actually possible to equate non-financial inform and with financial information.

That should give the opportunity for companies to treat the data in the same manner and actually integrate sustainability into the decisions that they take. For example, let's think about the impact of us going from working at the offices to now working hybrid. What are the actual impacts? Can we see that the sick leave has increased or decreased? How has the carbon emission been impacted by us not traveling back and forth to the offices? If we have that data, we could also use that to decide whether we should continue with hybrid working, or if we should force our employees to come back to the office, or if everybody should be working from home. If you can get hand of that collective view of the activities that you take, you could also make more holistic and informed decisions. That's one response kind of how we try to treat sustainability as a business opportunity and identify which are the pain points that our customers have in terms of co-creating a sustainable future, and where can we tap in into that? That is the kind of beauty, as you said, our industry.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It is.

Rebecca Griffith:

Really interesting looking at it in real time, as you said, as opposed to a retrospective assessment of the data, which really, you can't change.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah.

Rebecca Griffith:

What's the point in waiting another 12 months to then look at it again when you have completely done [crosstalk 00:18:32]?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. Both sustainability.... Yeah. Sorry. Both sustainability and tech is moving extremely fast. I think we need to work like this. I think customers are going to require... We see more and more before they wanted us to report once a year, but now so many of our customers, they want us to report different types of data related to the solutions or our delivery to them on a quarter basis. The more we can have real time data, I think it's going to be the new normal very soon.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Me too. That will be a huge game changer for companies. When the data is there, you can get it black on white. There is no excuse for taking bad decisions, right?

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Griffith:

Quite exciting.

Caitlin Mackie:

Exactly. I don't know about you, Beck, but I'm definitely sitting here being like, "Wow," at all, like this would've been super handy 12 months ago.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It's out there. Yeah.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It's on the market, so you're more than welcome.

Caitlin Mackie:

All right.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think that's also typical from sustainability that you have to understand that the solutions to all of these kind of complex problems, they can't be solved by any actor. We need to work in ecosystems and everybody will have to bring their expertise to the table. Then, we can get things to actually be solved. I hope that that logic will also impact other areas so that we more try to cooperate instead of having the cake ourselves, because then there will be no cake left over. That would be sad.

Caitlin Mackie:

It's so, so refreshing to hear you say that. I think for so long businesses have always had this idea about, "Oh, competition," and like, "Keep what's yours. Keep it to yourself. We're going to succeed in this area." But moving into this space, it's just not about that anymore. It's about how we can collaborate together to reach those solutions. I think that's so powerful.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

For sure. No. Sustainability is horizontal work. As an organization, as an entity, as a company, we are not stronger than our closest stakeholders anyway. Our performance is very much reliant on their performance.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think it's so interesting also because since we come from that kind of background, Ida and I also always working across all silos, across all kind of company functions. We also get a special role in our company because we don't have the legacy of working in silos, so we just totally break them all the time because we're not aware of them. That's just what is needed to be able to get the job done. I think that it's really interesting to see how the organization actually appreciates that.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes. Sometimes, they don't.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Sometimes, they don't. Exactly. Sometimes, they don't. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

But we have our battles internally. If you're a sustainability professional working in a big organization, you must be very prepared to have those tougher discussions as well, but we all get there, not always on time from our perspective, but that's the way it has to be. Fearless and just...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Stubborn.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Stubborn, and don't be too bothered about silos or hierarchies or so, because then you will never get anything done.

Caitlin Mackie:

I wanted to highlight or expand on the idea of opportunity and the fact that we constantly need to be exploring new and better ways of doing things so that we can move forward. It would be great to get your thoughts on the role of technology in advancing sustainability. I know you've touched on it, but it'd be great to elaborate.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

If I start, then you can build on it.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Sure.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think that some of the business opportunities or the solutions that we can develop are cross industrial. For example, the need for data and the need to get hold of it and to visualize it and to be able to act on it, is of course, something that all companies in all industries could make use of. But then, I think that for many solution, they are industry specific. For example, logistic. They need certain solutions to be able to optimize their logistic, their rooting, or to better pack their lorries and trains, et cetera. But I think that... There are both this industry specific solution and this cross sectional business opportunities stuff that you have, and also one of the hidden gems within the IT sector is the side effects of digitalizing services or solutions.

It's also important to understand that even though a solution might not be developed and deployed for the use of mitigating or climate change, for example, the actual impact of its implementation might lead to less carbon emission. Let's think about we have a solution that is called patient engagement. It means that you could engage with your doctors and nurses over your phone, which means that you don't have to take the public transportation or your own car to the hospital or to the medical clinic, which of course saves that transportation and in turn, saves carbon emissions if you travel with something except for an electric car. Many of the digital solutions actually have that positive hand print impact or effect, I would say. Of course, the opportunity of expanding on those is also massive and to identify them, perhaps it's the possibility. If you have a patient engagement app, could you use it for other purposes for other users to increase the impact.

Rebecca Griffith:

At Easy Agile, one of our goals was to establish a baseline and publish our very first sustainability and diversity report, which I believe we've shared with you. We'll also share that report as well as the TietoEVRY annual report in the show notes for our listeners. But what advice would you give to organizations to ensure that these kind of documents don't turn into a stagnant document or a mere check of the box exercise? How do we use these reports to encourage conversation and continually seek ways to improve?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Okay. I get so many thoughts now. First of all, keep up with an upcoming frameworks. Don't get stuck in all the good old GRI for instance. In the European Union, so we are now approaching the taxonomy reporting or TCFD or so on. Go for those new ones. Also, of course, everybody has to do the ground work. You have to do your stakeholder engagement, the dialogues, the materiality analysis in order to know that you focus on the right things and so on, and you have to have really concrete goals and action plans and KPIs and everything, so you can measure your performance against the goals that ultimately what sustainability reporting is about. But then, I think the opportunity with reporting, because reporting can be a little bit boring too, in a sense, and it can feel stagnant in a way. It is that it's such an important tool in the strategy work.

This is where you get the attention from the leaders like, "What goals are we going to have and how did we do and so on?" That's where you can have the good discussions or you can also raise the ambition level as you go along. That I think is really crucial. Use it as a strategy tool as well, and then never get stuck in like, "Oh, yeah. It's good. We met our targets. We moved 3% forward or whatever." Don't think so much about that. Think about lie what are the major challenges right now? What is your role as an organization? No matter what organization you are, find your way to be part of the solution instead. We have that discussion sometimes internally. People are like, "Oh, but you're doing so good. You have a good results and so on."

But for me and Ulrika and our sustainability professionals, we're like, "Yeah. Okay. We move forward. That's good." But from a greater perspective where we are reaching the tipping point for the planet, so we feel other pressure in order to move forward faster. Don't end up in like, "Yeah. We move forward. We're keeping the pace." Full on power ahead, and speed is of essence going forward.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. No, I fully agree. I think that's really good reflections to hook the sustainability reporting up on the challenges to understand. What are the purposes? What are we actually trying to achieve by this report? We are trying to contribute to minimize the negative impact and to increase the positive impact, and the sustainability report is a tool for that. I think another thing that is really important is to actually also engage with the organization to get them define their own targets and their own metrics to report on, so that they feel ownership. For some of the areas that we have in our sustainability report, when we have an engaged partner within the organization that themselves have ideas on targets, we develop their own KPIs.

They feel that, "I really believe in this. I want to work with this." Then, the follow up and the continuous reporting is much easier than while we have perhaps other parts of the organization where there isn't so much clear targets internally, so that the sustainability report is more felt like something that is done on an annual basis just collecting the data, but not making use of it actually. Just create that commitment and build on the company's own targets and own KPIs that are useful. Then, of course, sometimes if you do report according to a sustainability framework such as the GRI standards, which is commonly used in Europe, then you, of course, need to report according to some of the metrics in that standard, but then add your own key guides, your own metrics, because that will make the organization feel engaged, I could say.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. Yeah. Basically to summarize that, so three things, do the groundwork according to the upcoming and fresh frameworks, and then two, use it as a strategic tool to have those important discussions with management and make it a part of the overall strategy, so you don't end up with the sustainability strategy and an overall strategy. Then, three, be bold. Look at the challenges and not only what's doable or keeping the trend or whatever. Those three things, I think is important to have in mind.

Rebecca Griffith:

Spot on.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I love that. I think that's great advice, especially the idea of you're mapping out what you're doing internally and what that looks like, but being able to take that step back and say, "Okay. But what does this contribute to in the big picture? What are we actually helping and what are we doing to move in the right direction?" Something that I often think about is things like the UN sustainable development goals and looking at those and being like, "Well, what can we do to of map where we are at and where can we offer? What can we be doing in this space that helps reach those targets?" Yeah. Great advice. I love it. But I think just to wrap us up, our last question for both of you is looking forward, what keeps you hopeful?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It keeps me hopeful. Well...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

For me, I think the younger generation, to be honest. I think that seeing my brothers' daughters that are teenagers, or to see [inaudible 00:31:19] and the commitment that she's able to steer up, I think that gives me hope that things will move faster in the future. I think that's positive.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. I also second that. I think I visited the school last week with students like 18, 19 years old, and I've been doing that every year for a couple of years now and I always ask them, "What do you know about sustainable? What do you think about it?" Before, it was like, "Yeah. The environment or recycling maybe," but now they were like, "Yeah. The UN SDGs..." So the level of knowledge has increased so much. There is huge interest and when I gave them, "What can you do on a practical level if you want to live a more sustainable life?" They were like, "Yeah. Don't buy a new party cup for the Friday night. Borrow from your friends, or there are these sites. I can text you these sites where you can borrow dresses and stuff like that." They are doing it in real life in such a good way where they combine technology and sustainability, so they're much more tech savvy than we are. I was very inspired by that.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

They're also willing to actually sacrifice stuff. It's like, "No, we don't fly. We don't do this because we would like to have a future to live in." I think that that is something which we are so comfortable and so used to having a certain lifestyle, but they are perhaps not and they are challenging that lifestyle that we have been having, which has also led to where we are today.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

I think also to add to that, I think that finally the leaders of our countries are getting it, at least getting close to getting it. I think things are changing, so that's good, but my hope stands to the young ones still.

Rebecca Griffith:

It's nice to feel that it's becoming a normal part of consciousness for the newer generations where it's something that we had to learn to appreciate and respect and to take action on, but it seems to be a part of their upbringing and a way of life now, which is great.

Caitlin Mackie:

Well, I think that's great. I think it's great to leave the episode on such a high and leave the audience with a bit of inspiration moving forward. Thank you both for taking the time to chat with us and sharing your expertise with the Easy Agile audience.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Thank you so much for having us. It was fun to talk to you, and it's nice also to talk about the perspectives from the Nordics and from the tech industry. Thank you very much.

Rebecca Griffith:

Thank you.

"I really enjoyed speaking with Melissa Reeve, VP of Marketing at Scaled Agile about how non-software teams are adopting a new way of working."

It's more important than ever to be customer-focused.

We talk about the danger of 'walk-up-work' and how to avoid this through proper sprint planning.

Melissa also gives an update on how agile is spreading to non-technical teams.

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Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello everyone. And welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. We have a really interesting guest with us today. It's Melissa Reeve, the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile. We're really excited to have her on today. Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework. In other words, SAFe and its mission. She also serves as the practice lead for integrating SAFe practices into marketing environments. Melissa received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and she currently resides in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, chickens, and dogs. Melissa, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Melissa Reeve:

It's such a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it.

Sean Blake:

Great. That's great. I really like your enthusiasm straight off the bat. So what I'm really interested in hearing about, Melissa is a little bit about how you got to where you are today. What have been the highlights of your career so far and how as a marketer, did you find yourself in the Agile space?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, thanks for asking. And I have to tell you, but just before the podcast my husband knocked on the door and he was all proud because we just got a new set of chickens and one of the chickens had laid its first egg. So that's been the highlight of my day so far, not necessarily the highlight of my career.

Sean Blake:

So you'll be having scrambled eggs and eggs on toast probably for the next few weeks now.

Melissa Reeve:

I think so. So back to the career, I really fell into marketing. My background was in Japanese literature and language. And I had anticipated this great career and international business in Asia. And then I moved out to the Navajo Indian Reservation and just pivoted. Found my way into marketing and found my way into Agile right around 2013 when I discovered that there was an Agile marketing manifesto. And that really was a changing point in terms of how I thought about marketing. Because up until that point, it really considered marketing in what's termed waterfall. Of course, marketers generally don't use the term waterfall.

Melissa Reeve:

But then I started to think about marketing in a different way. And when I came across Scaled Agile, it brought together so many elements of my career. The lean thinking that I'd studied when I studied in Japan and the lean manufacturing, it was Agile marketing that I'd discovered in 2013 and just education and technology have always been part of my career. So I really consider myself fortunate to have found Scaled Agile and found myself in the midst of scaling Agile into both enterprises, as well as marketing parts of the enterprise.

Sean Blake:

Oh wow, okay. And I noticed from your LinkedIn profile, you worked at some universities and colleges in the past. And I assume some of the teams, the marketing teams you've worked in, in the past have been quite large. What were some of those structures that you used to work in, in those marketing teams? And what were some of the challenges you faced?

Melissa Reeve:

Yes, well, the largest company was Motorola. And that was pretty early on in my career. So I don't think I can recall exactly what that team structure is. But I think in terms of the impediments with marketing, approvals has always been an issue. No matter if you're talking about a smaller organization or a larger organization, it seems like things have to go up the chain, get signed off, and then they come back down for execution. And inherent in that are delays and wait states and basically waste in the system.

Sean Blake:

Right. So, what is Agile marketing then and how does it seek to try and solve some of those problems?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, I'm glad you asked because there's a lot of confusion in the market around Agile marketing. And I can't tell you how many news articles I've read that say marketing should be Agile. And they're really talking about lowercase Agile, meaning marketing should be more nimble or be more responsive. But they're not really talking about capital-A Agile marketing, which is a way of working that has principles and practices behind it. And so that's one aspect where there's confusion around Agile marketing.

Melissa Reeve:

And then another aspect is really how big of a circle you're talking about. In the software side when someone mentions Agile, they're really talking about a smaller team and depending on who you talk to, it could be anywhere from five to 11 people in that Agile team. And you're talking about a series of teams of that size. So when you're talking about Agile marketing, you could be talking about an individual team.

Melissa Reeve:

But some people, when they're talking about Agile marketing, they're talking about a transformation and transforming that entire marketing organization into an Agile way of working. And of course, in the SAFe world, we're really talking about those marketing teams that might be adjacent to a SAFe implementation. So, I think it's a good question to ask and a good question to ask up front when you're having a conversation about Agile marketing.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay. And for those people that don't know much about SAFe, can you just explain, what's the difference between just having a marketing team now working in a capital-A Agile way, and what's the difference between an organization that is starting to adopt Scaled Agile? What's the difference-

Melissa Reeve:

Sure.

Sean Blake:

...between those?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So what software organizations found is that Agile teams, so those groups of five to 11 people, that way of working works really well when you have a limited number of software developers when you started to get into the world's largest organizations. So I think of anybody on the Global 2000, they might have tens of thousands of software developers in their organization. And in order to leverage the benefits of Agile, you needed to have cadence and synchronization, not only within a team, but across multiple teams up into the program level and even the portfolio level.

Melissa Reeve:

And the same holds true with large marketing organizations. Imagine you're a CMO and you have 6,000 marketers underneath you. How are you supposed to get alignment to your vision, to your strategies that you're setting if you don't have a way of connecting strategy to execution. And so the Scaled Agile Framework is a way of taking those Agile practices across multiple teams and up into the highest levels of the organization so that we're all moving in a similar direction.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, I think that makes sense. And from a software team's point of view, one of the benefits of Agile is that it helps teams become more customer focused. And many would argue, well, marketing has always been customer focused. But have you found in your experience that maybe that's not so true? And when marketing teams start to adopt Agile, they realize what it really means to become customer focused.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. I mean, you raised another great point because I think most marketers think that they're customer focused. Like many things in the world, the world is a relative place. So you can, in your mind, in theory, be thinking about the customer or you can be actually talking to the customer. So I just finished what I call the listening session. And it was during our hackathon, which is our version of an innovation, couple of days worth of innovation. So it was eight hours on a Zoom call with somebody South Africa. Just listening to her experience and listening to her go through one of our courses, slide by slide, by slide, explaining what her experience was at each step of the way.

Melissa Reeve:

So if you think about somebody who is sitting in a large enterprise, maybe has never met the customer, only knows the customer in theory, on one end of the spectrum. And you think about this listening session on the other end of the spectrum, you start to get an understanding of what we're talking about. Now, your question really pointed to the fact that in Agile practices, you're thinking about the customer every time. In theory, every time you write a story. So when you write a story, you write the story from the perspective of the customer. And I would just encourage all the marketers out there to know the customer personally. And I know that's not easy in these large organizations. It's sometimes hard to get face time with the customer, but if you aren't speaking directly to a customer, chances are you don't actually know the customer.

Melissa Reeve:

So find a way, talk to the sales folks, get on the phone with some of your customer service representatives. Go to a trade show, find a way to talk directly to the customer because you're going to uncover some nuances that'll pay dividends in your ability to satisfy the customer. And when you go to write that story again, it will be even more rich.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good advice, Melissa. I remember from personal experience, some of these large companies that I've worked in, we would say, "Oh, this is what the customer wants." But we actually didn't know any customers by name. Some of us personally were customers, but it's not really the same thing as going out and listening to people and what did they find challenging about using that app or what do they actually want out of this product? So there's a huge difference, isn't there, between guessing what a customer might want or should want? And then what their day to day actually looks like, and what are the things that they struggle with? That's hugely important.

Sean Blake:

For someone who's in one of these big companies, they're in a marketing team, perhaps they don't have the power or the influence to say, "Okay, now we're going to do Agile marketing." What would your advice be for someone like that, who can see the upside of moving their teams in that direction, but they don't necessarily know where to start?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, there's a philosophy out there that says take what you can get. So if you are just one person who is advocating for Agile marketing, maybe that's what you can do is you can advocate. Maybe you can start building alliances within the organization, chatting casually to your coworkers, finding out if you have allies in other parts of the organization and start to build a groundswell type movement.

Melissa Reeve:

Maybe you can build your own personal Kanban board and start tracking your work through your own Kanban board. And through visualizing your work in that way, it's a little bit harder now that we're all remote, but should we get back into offices somebody could in theory, walk by your cubicle, see your Kanban board and ask about it. And now you might have two people using a Kanban board, three people. And really start to set the example through your mindset, through your behaviors, through your conversations in order to start getting some support.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good. So be the change that you want to see in the organization.

Melissa Reeve:

Exactly.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, that's really good. And when these companies are moving towards this way of working, and then they're looking to take the next level, let's say it starts in the software development teams and then say marketing is the next team to come on board. How does it then spread throughout the whole organization? Because I know from personal experience, if there's still that part of the organization that's working anti-Agile it actually still makes it really difficult for the Agile teams to get anything done. Because there's still the blockers and the processes and the approvals that you need to go through with those other teams. And I guess SAFe is the answer, right? But how do you start to scale up Agile throughout the whole organization?

Melissa Reeve:

Sure. And what you're talking about is really business agility, is taking the whole business and making the business Agile. And you pointed out something that's key to that, which is once you solve the bottleneck and the impediments in one area of the business, then it'll shift to another area of the business. So the advantage of business agility is that you're trying to keep those bottlenecks from forming or shifting. But what a bottleneck essentially does is it creates what we call a burning platform. So it creates a need for change. And that's actually what we're seeing in the marketing side is we've got these IT organizations, they're operating much more efficiently with the use of Agile and with the use of SAFe. And what's happening is the software teams are able to release things more quickly than the teams that are surrounding them, one of which could be marketing.

Melissa Reeve:

And so now marketing is incentivized to look at ways of changing. They're incentivized to take a look and say, "Well, maybe Agile is the answer for us." So let's just say that marketing jumps on board and all of a sudden they're cranking along, and except for that everything's getting stuck in legal. And so now legal has a case for change and the pressures on legal to adopt it. So there is a way to let it spread organically. Most transformation coaches will understand this phenomenon and probably encourage the organization to just go Agile all in, obviously not in a big bang kind of way, but gradually move in that direction so that we're not just constantly shifting bottlenecks.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, that makes sense. And when these companies are trying to build business agility across the different functions, are there some mistakes that you see say pop up over and over again? And how can we avoid those when we are on this journey of business agility?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So I feel like the most common mistake, at least the one that I see the most often in marketing, although I've seen it in software as well, is people thinking that the transformation is about processes or tools. So for example, in marketing, they might adopt a tool to "become more Agile." Maybe it's a Kanban visualization tool, or maybe they're being suggested to adopt another common ALM type tool. And so they adopt this tool and they learn how to use it, and they wonder why they're not seeing big improvements.

Melissa Reeve:

And it's because Agile at its heart is a human transformation. So we're really taking a look at in trying to change the way people think. One of the topics I speak on is the history of management theory. And while it sounds pretty dry, in reality, it's eye opening. Because you realize that a lot of the habits that we have today are rooted back in the 20th and 19th centuries. So they're rooted in assembly lines. They're rooted in French management theory, which advocated command and control.

Melissa Reeve:

They're rooted in classism. There was a management class and a laboring, and the management class knew the one best way of doing things. So more than a process, more than a tool, we're talking about transforming this legacy of management thinking into a way that's appropriate for today's workers. And I feel like that's the number one mistake that I see organizations making as they're moving into transforming to Agile, an Agile way of working.

Sean Blake:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Yeah, that's really interesting. And it really is eye opening, is it? When you look at how the nine to five workday came about, because that's the time when the factories were open and all the history around how organizations are structured. And it's really important, I think, to challenge some of those things that we've done in the past that worked back in the industrial age. But now we're moving into the information age and into these times of digital transformation. It probably doesn't work for us anymore, does it, some of those things? Or do you think some of those things are still valuable now that we have distributed teams, a lot of people are working remotely? Are there any things that come to mind that you think actually we shouldn't get rid of that just yet?

Melissa Reeve:

Oh, I'm sure there are. John Kotter has presented in his book, Accelerate, this notion of a dual operating system. So that you have the network part of the organization, which moves fast and nimble like a startup and then you have the hierarchical part of the organization. And the hierarchy is very, very good at scaling things. It's a well oiled machine. You do need somebody to approve your expense report. You do need some policies and some guidelines, some guard rails. And so we're not actually saying abolish the hierarchy. And I do feel like that's part of this legacy system. But what we are saying is abolish some of the command and control, this notion that the management knows the one best way, because the knowledge worker oftentimes knows more than his or her manager.

Melissa Reeve:

It's just too hard for a manager to keep up with everything that is in the heads of the people who report to him or her. So that's a really big change and it was a change for me. And I think why I got so fascinated in this history of management theory is because I came across some notes from my college days. And I realized that I had been taught these historic management theories. I'd been taught Taylorism, which stems from 1911. And I realized, wow, there's a lot of undoing that I've had to do in order to adopt this Agile way of working.

Sean Blake:

Well, that's great. Yeah, that's really important, isn't it? I've heard you speak before about this concept of walk-up work, especially in the realm of marketing. But I suppose, well, firstly, I'd like to know what is walk-up work. Why is it so dangerous, not just for marketers, but for all teams? And how do we start to fight back against walk-up work?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So, marketers in particular get bombarded with what I like to call walk-up work. And that's when an executive or even a peer literally walks up, so think again about the cubicle farm, and makes a request. So how that looks in the virtual world is the slack or the instant message, "Hey, would you mind?" One is that it results in a lot of context switching and there's time lost in that context switching. And then the other part is rarely do these requests come in well-defined or even with any sort of deadline detach. In marketing, it might look like, "Hey, can you create this graphic for this email I'm sending out?" So now you've left your poor graphic designer with this knowledge that here she has to make a graphic, but they don't really have any of the specs.

Melissa Reeve:

So it's very, very helpful to put these things into stories, to follow the Agile process, where you're taking that walk-up work to the product owner, where the product owner can work with you to define that story, keep the person who's doing the work on task, not making them context switch or do that. Get that story in that acceptance criteria very well defined and prioritized before that work then comes into the queue for the graphic designer. And this is an anti-pattern, whether you're talking about an organization of 50 or 5,000.

Melissa Reeve:

And what I've found is the hardest behavior to change is that of the executives. Because not only do they have walk-up work, but they have positional authority too. And it's implied that, that person will stop working on whatever they're working on and immediately jump to the walk-up work being defined by the executive. So I feel like it's really dangerous to the whole Agile ecosystem because it's context switching, it interrupts flow and introduces waste into the system. And your highest priority items might not being worked on.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So how many people do you have on your marketing team at Scaled Agile?

Melissa Reeve:

We're pretty small, still. We've got about somewhere in the 20s, 23, 25, give or take or few.

Sean Blake:

So how do you-

Melissa Reeve:

I think right now we're three Agile teams.

Sean Blake:

Three. Okay. So those 20 something is split into three Agile teams. And do they each have a product owner or how does the prioritization of marketing work in your teams?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, it's a good question. So we do have individual product owners for those three product teams. And what's fascinating is the product owners then also have to meet very regularly to make sure that the priorities stay aligned. Because like many marketing teams, we don't have specialized skill sets on each of those teams. So for the group of 23, we only have one copywriter. For the group of 23, we have two graphic designers. So it's not like each team has its own graphic designer or its own copywriter.

Sean Blake:

Yes.

Melissa Reeve:

So that means the three POs have to get together and decide the priorities, the joint priorities for the copywriter, the joint priorities for those graphic designers. And I think it's working. I mean, it's not without its hiccups, but I think it's the role of the PO and it's an important role.

Sean Blake:

So how do you avoid the temptation to come to these teams and say, "Drop what you're doing, there's something new that we all need to work on?" Do you find that challenging as an executive yourself to really let the teams be autonomous and self-organizing?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, I think the biggest favor we've done to the teams is really, I don't want to say banned walk-up work, but the first thing we did is we defined it. And we said, "Walk-up work is anything that's going to take you more than two hours and that was not part of iteration planning." And iteration is only two weeks. And so, in theory, you've done it within the past 10 days. So if it wasn't part of that and you can't push it off to the next iteration planning, and there's a sense of urgency, then it's walk-up work.

Melissa Reeve:

And we've got the teams to a point where they are in the habit of then calling in the PO and saying, "Hey, would you mind going talking to so and so, and getting this defined and helping me understand where this fits in the priority order." And really that was the biggest hurdle because as marketers, I think a lot of us want to say yes if somebody approaches us with work. But what's happened is people have, myself included, stopped approaching the copywriters, stopped approaching the graphic designer with work. I just know, go to the PO.

Sean Blake:

That's good. So it's an extra line of defense for the team so they can continue to focus on their priorities and what they were already working on without being distracted by these new ideas and new priorities.

Melissa Reeve:

Yes. And in fact, I think we, in this last PI reduced walk-up work from 23% down to 11%. So we're not a 100%. And I don't know if we'll ever get to be a 100%, but we're certainly seeing progress in that direction.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good. Really good. And so your marketing teams are working in an Agile way. Do you feel that across the board, not only within your organization, but also just more generally, are you seeing that Agile is being adopted by non-technical teams, so marketing, legal, finance? Are these sort of non-technical teams adopting Agile at a faster rate, or do you feel like it's still going to take some years to get the message out there?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. And I guess my question to you would be, a faster rate than what?

Sean Blake:

Good question. I suppose what I'm asking is, do you feel like this is a trend that non-technical teams are adopting Agile or is it something that really is in its infancy and hasn't really caught on yet, especially amongst Scaled Agile customers or people that you're connected to in the Agile industry?

Melissa Reeve:

I would say yes. Yes, it's a trend. And yes, people are doing it. And yes, it's in its infancy.

Sean Blake:

So, yes?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So all of those combined, and I'm not going to kid you, I mean, this is new stuff. In fact, as part of that listening session I mentioned and we were talking about all these different parts of the business. And there was mentioned that the Scaled Agile Framework is the guidance to these teams, to HR, to legal, to marketing could be more robust. And the answer is absolutely. And the reason is because we're still learning ourselves. This is brand new territory that we're cutting our teeth on. My guess is that it'll take us several years, I don't know how many several is, to start learning, figuring out how this looks and really implementing it.

Melissa Reeve:

Now, my hope is that we'll get to a point where Agile is across the organization, that it's been adapted to the different environments. When I've seen it and when I've thought through things like Agile HR, Agile Legal, Agile procurement, the underpinnings seem to be solid. We can even things like the continuous delivery pipeline of DevOps. When I think about marketing and I think about automation. And I think about artificial intelligence, yeah, I can see that in marketing and I can see the need for this to unfold, but will it take us a while to figure out that nuance? Absolutely.

Sean Blake:

Okay. And can you see any other trends more broadly happening in the Agile space? You know, if we're to look forward, say 10 years, a decade into the future, what does the way of working look like? Are we all still remote or how are team's going to approach digital transformations in 10 years time? What's your perspective on the future?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, I mean, sometimes to look to the future I like to look to the past. And in this case I might look 10 or 12 years to the past. And 12 years ago, I was getting my very first iPhone. I remember that it was 2007, 2008. And you think about what a seismic shift that was in terms of our behavior and social media and connecting and having this computer in our hand. So I ask myself, what seismic shift lies ahead? And certainly COVID has been an accelerant to some of these shifts. I ask myself, will I be on airplanes as frequently as I was in the past? Or have we all become so accustomed to Zoom meetings that we realized there's power there. And we don't necessarily need to get on an airplane to get the value.

Melissa Reeve:

Now, as it pertains to Agile, I feel like in 10 years we won't be calling it Agile. I feel like it will look something more like a continuous learning organization or responsive organization. Agile refers to a very specific set of practices. And as that new mindset, well, the practices and the principles and the mindset, and as that new mindset takes hold and becomes the norm, then will we be calling it Agile? Or will it just be the way that people are working? My guess is it'll start to be moving toward the latter.

Sean Blake:

Well, let's hope that it becomes the normal, right? I mean that it would be great to have more transparency, more cross functional work, less walk-up work and more business agility across the board, wouldn't it? I think it would be great if that becomes the new normal.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, me too. Yeah. And I think, we don't call the way we manage people. We don't say, "Oh, that's Taylorism. Are you going to be practicing Taylorism? It's just the way we've either learned through school or learned from our bosses how to manage people. And that's my hope for Agile, is that we won't be calling it this thing. It's just the way we do things around here.

Sean Blake:

Great. Well, Melissa, I think we'll leave it there. I really enjoyed our conversation, especially as a marketer myself. It's great to hear your insight into the industry. And everything we've discussed today has been really, really eyeopening for me. So thank you so much for sharing that with me and with our audience. And we hope to have you on the podcast again, in the future.

Melissa Reeve:

Sean, it's been such a pleasure and I'd be happy to come back anytime.

Sean Blake:

Great. Thanks so much.

Melissa Reeve:

Thank you.

"Having gone through a cloud migration at Splunk, Greg share's some insightful key learnings, challenges and opportunities" - Chloe Hall

Greg Warner has been involved with the Atlassian ecosystem since 2006 and is a frequent speaker at Atlassian events. Greg has worked as a senior consultant for a solution partner, supported Jira and Confluence at Amazon, and in his current role at Splunk, executed a cloud migration to Atlassian Enterprise Cloud for over 10,000 of his colleagues.

In this episode, Greg and Chloe discuss the cloud migration journey:

📌 The mental shift to cloud migration and how to think beyond the technical side

📌 How to navigate the journey without a roadmap to follow

📌 The four pillars to success for your cloud migration journey

📌 Finding the right time to migrate & thinking about future opportunities    beyond your migration

📌 The unexpected value that can come from a cloud migration

+ more!

📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.

Thanks, Greg and Chloe!

Transcript

Chloe Hall:

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. So I'm Chloe, Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile, and I'll be your host for today's episode. So before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which I am recording today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal-speaking nation and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. We extend that same respect to all Aboriginal and to Australia Islander peoples who are tuning in today.

Chloe Hall:

So we have a very exciting guest on the podcast today. This guest has been involved with the Atlassian ecosystem since 2006 and is a frequent speaker at Atlassian events. He has worked as a senior consultant for a solution partner, supported Jira and Confluence at Amazon and at his current role at Splunk, executed a cloud migration to Atlassian Enterprise Cloud for over 10,000 colleagues. So welcome to the Easy Agile podcast, Greg Warner.

Chloe Hall:

How are you?

Greg Warner:

Good, and thank you for having me.

Chloe Hall:

No worries. It's great to have you here today.

Greg Warner:

This is one of my favorite topics. We talk about cloud migration and yeah, I hope I can explain why.

Chloe Hall:

Yes, that's exactly what we want for you because I remember when we met at Team 22, you were just so passionate about cloud migration and had so many insights to share and I was very intrigued as well.

Greg Warner:

To give it a bit background about myself.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah.

Greg Warner:

I haven't always been a cloud person. So you mentioned before about being involved since 2006. I was involved early days with when Jira had the several different flavors of standard and professional, when you'd order an enterprise license for Atlassian and they'd send you a shirt. That was one of the difference between one of the licenses. So based a lot in the server versions, over many years. I looked at the cloud as being the poorer cousin, if you like.

Greg Warner:

I'd been to several Atlassian summits and later Team events where there was always things of what was happening in cloud but not necessarily server. I participated in writing exam questions for Atlassian certification program for both server and DC. For me, in the last 18 months, two years now, to make this fundamental shift from being certainly a proponent of what we do doing on server in DC to now absolutely cloud first and that is the definite direction that we as a company have chosen and certainly why I'm so passionate about speaking to other enterprise customers about their cloud migration journey.

Chloe Hall:

Wow. So what do you think it was that you were like, okay, let's migrate to the cloud, as you were so involved in the server DC part of it? What was it that grabbed your attention?

Greg Warner:

I joined Splunk in 2019 and it wasn't all roses in regards to how we maintained Jira and Confluence. It wasn't uncommon to have outages that would last hours. For two systems that were just so critical to our business operations to have that, I was kind of dumbfounded but I thought, hey, I've been here before. I have seen this. And so it was a slow methodical approach to root cause our problems, get us to a version that was in long-term support, and then take a breather.

Greg Warner:

Once we got to that point where we didn't have outages, we kind of think of what the future would be. And for me, that future was exactly what I'd done before, what I'd done at Amazon, which is where we would move all of our on-prem infrastructure, Jira, Confluence, and Crowd to public cloud, whether it would be a AWS or GCP, something of that flavor. I'd done that before. I knew how we were going to do that to the extent that I'd even held meetings in my team about how we were going to stand up the infrastructure, what the design was going to be.

Greg Warner:

But there was probably one pivotal conversation that was with our CIO and it was in one of those, just passing by, and he's like, "Greg, I've seen the plans and the funding requests." He's like, "But have you considered Atlassian Cloud?" Now, the immediate personal reaction to me was like, we are not going to do that because I'd seen the iterations. I'd seen it over time. I'd worked for a solution partner. I'd worked with customers in cloud, never really thought we could be enterprise-ready. So my immediate reaction was not going to do that. I said, "I'm not going to answer that question right now." I said, "I don't know enough to give you an answer."

Greg Warner:

And I'm absolutely glad I did that because I would've put a foot in mu mouth had I given the immediate response that was... So yeah, I took that question, went and did some analysis, spoke to our technical account manager at the time, and really looked at what had been going on and where was cloud today? Where was it in its maturity? And the actual monumental thing for me was that I think it's actually ready. People make excuses for why they can't do it, but there are a bunch of reasons why you should. And if we look at us as a company, with our own products that we are moving our own customers to cloud, and we are using cloud services, like Google Workspace and Zoom and a variety of SaaS applications. What was so different about what we did in engineering that couldn't go to cloud? And that was like, okay, I think the CIO was actually asking me a much bigger question here.

Greg Warner:

So the result of that was yes, we decided that it was the right time for Splunk to move. And that is a monumental shift. And I know there's a lot of Jira admins out there that are like, if you do this, you're putting your own jobs at risk. The answer is no, you're not. And even within my team, when we had we'd discussed this, there was emotional connection to maintaining on-premise infrastructure and were we giving our own jobs away if we do this? There's all those... No.

Greg Warner:

And there have actually been two people in my team that got actually promoted through the work of our cloud migration that otherwise wouldn't have because they could demonstrate the skills. But that's kind of like the backstory about how we decided to go to cloud. And I think as we are thinking about it, there is a mental shift first. Before you even go down the technical path about how you would do it, change your own mind so that it's open so that you're ready for it as well.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, I love that. It's so good. And I think just the fact that you didn't respond to your CIO, did you say that?

Greg Warner:

Yep.

Chloe Hall:

That you didn't respond to your CIO straight away and you weren't like, "No, I don't want to do that." You actually stepped away, took that time to do your research, and think maybe cloud is the better option for Splunk, which is just so great and really created that mental shift in yourself. So when you say that your employees, like everyone kind of has that beef that, oh, we're going to lose our job if we move from on-prem to cloud and those employees ended up getting promoted. How did their roles change?

Greg Warner:

When we moved from on-prem to cloud, you no longer have to maintain the plumbing, right?

Chloe Hall:

Yeah.

Greg Warner:

You no longer have to maintain all the plumbing that's supporting Jira, Confluence, BitBucket, whatever is going to move. Now we thought that was the piece that's actually providing value to the organization. And it wasn't until we went to cloud, we actually realized it wasn't. Like what we can do now is different. And that's what my team has done. They've up-leveled.

Greg Warner:

So in the times since we moved from Jira, Confluence on-prem to cloud, we now get involved a lot more with the business analysis and understanding what our project teams want. So when someone from engineering is requesting something that has an integration or a workflow, we've got more time to spend on that than are we going to upgrade? Are we on the current feature release? Is there a bug we have to close? Log for J as a prime example where the extent of where we covered was logging a call with the Atlassian enterprise support and then telling us, "Yep, it's done."

Greg Warner:

Whereas other colleagues within the ecosystem that I spoke to spent a week dealing with that, right? Dealing with patching and upgrades. So the value for our team in the work we do has shifted up. We've also done Jira advanced roadmaps in that time. So we've been able to provide things we would've never got to because we're too busy to the plumbing, to the extent now that we have a very small footprint of on-prem that remains and that's primarily FedRAMP and IO5. It's not quite certified yet. It's going to get there. So we have a very small footprint and I'm the one who has to do the upgrades and now you look at it like, oh my god, that's going to be this couple-week tasks we going to do where I could do all this other better work that's waiting for us in cloud. You don't realize it until you have it removed how much you used to do.

Greg Warner:

And so we used to do two upgrades of Jira year and two upgrades of Confluence a year. We put that down to about a month's work of each. By the time you do all of your testing and you're staging and then do that. So you're really looking at four months of the year you were spending doing upgrades. We don't have that anymore. It's completely gone. And so now we make sure that we do things cloud first. We don't bring across behaviors that we were doing on-prem into cloud. So that's probably one thing we learned was that don't implement server DC in cloud.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, that's so great. It seems like it's opened up a lot more opportunity for you as well. So I think something that I kind of want to look into and understand a bit more is that people focus a lot on the technical aspect of the cloud migration. What other aspects do you think need to be considered?

Greg Warner:

Certainly people. I mentioned at the very front here the mental mindset and that really started with my team, to get their mind around how we're going to do this cloud migration. There isn't necessarily yet a roadmap that says these are all the steps need to take to get ready for your cloud migration. So we had to invent some of those and one of those two was, what did we want to get out of the cloud migration?

Greg Warner:

I speak to other Atlassian customers. You talk about they're running a project, the project is the cloud migration, the start and the end is the cloud migration day. No, completely wrong. The cloud migration actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What you're talking about here, about this first changes is in the beginning, and that should be we're moving to cloud because it should be fundamentally better than what we have today.

Greg Warner:

If it's not better, there's no value in doing the activity. So we started with a vision and that vision was that all of the core things had to work from day one and they had to work better. So create issue, edit issue, up to issue, that just needs to work. There should be no argument whether it does or does not. That needs to work and work better. Create a page, edit a page, share a page. That stuff needs to work in Confluence without any problems. We also need to make sure that there are people in the organization who this could be a fundamental change of how they work, depending on how much they work with Jira and Confluence. So appreciating that there is some change management and some communications that needs to be ready as you do your cloud migration to ensure that your vision is going to work, but also acknowledging you will break some things. You're not going to be able to do a cloud migration and shift you from A to B without nothing.

Greg Warner:

It will go wrong. So we were aware of that and for that, what I would always tell people was that we're really fixed on the vision of making it sure it's better than it was today, but flexible on the details, how we get there. We will probably find different ways as we go along because things will change. Cloud changes itself. You'll discover things you didn't know before. There was a Jira admin that made a decision 10 years ago, you now found that. So yeah, very, very fixed on that vision that day one that we had to have this unboxing experience that when people got to use Jira and Conference Cloud for the first time, they could see why we'd spent so much effort to make sure it was polished and things just worked. And as you went a bit further out, there might be things to do with apps that might not be quite the same.

Greg Warner:

That's okay. And then further out, things you just ultimately can't control. And for that, we had 76 integrations of teams that had written automations from all over the company. We're never going to get to find out what they do, but we knew that some of those would probably break. And so just dealing with some change control and allowing those people to know this is coming, what the rest endpoints will be, how to set up their API keys. We did a lot of that, but we did have one integration that broke and that integration broke because the entire team was on PTO or leave that week. We can't avoid that one. But it was good to see other teams actually jumped in because they'd been involved in updating theirs to go help fix that. So that was okay. We had one integration that we really gave the white glove support to and that was for... We have a Salesforce to Jira integration that's a revenue-generating integration.

Greg Warner:

We gave that a lot of attention to make sure that just worked. But the 76 others, we provided a runbook. The runbook was essentially teams, you do things like this. So they knew how to change and update to the new system. But yeah, certainly the beginning, middle and end. The beginning is all those shifts that you're going to have to change and probably some history about design decisions. The middle is in fact your cloud migration and the end, middle to the end is everything you do with it afterwards. So that's where the real value comes from in your cloud migration. It's once you're in, what can we do with it?

Greg Warner:

And we are towards the end of that now. There have been things that I couldn't have planned for that people have done. So we did your advanced roadmaps, saving the forest there, but also we're encouraging our staff to extend the platform. That used to be really difficult and we've worked with Atlassian to understand what should that look like? And we've settled on using it Atlassian Forge. And so now we have our first app this week, in UAT, in Atlassian Cloud to solve business problems that we have. That's a custom Atlassian Forge app. And we're encouraging our engineers to build those and so they can extend and get that real value through the cloud migration.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, wow. You've come so far and it's nice to hear that you're towards the end of it and all the opportunities are coming with it and you're seeing all the value. It's all paying off as well. I think I just want to go back to that moment where you talk about there isn't essentially a roadmap outlay. There isn't someone or something to follow where it says this is where you need to start. These are the steps to cloud migration. And I think a lot of people, that's what they fear. They're like, we're not sure exactly where to start. We're not sure what roadmap we'll follow. How do you navigate that in a way?

Greg Warner:

So I get back to that when I talked about the vision. We said we're fixing the vision flexible details. Early on when we signed for cloud migration, it was in the first week after we'd signed for it, that same CIO asked me, "Greg, what's our date? When are we moving? Because you've sold me that this is so much better. Where's the action? When are we get this?" And we took a good six weeks after we signed to actually understand the tooling that's available. So for Jira, there's really two options. There's the Jira site import and the Jira cloud migration assistant. And on Confluence side, there's one that's called the Confluence cloud migration assistant. Better kind of understand how those technologies work. And for a couple weeks there, my team actually considered if we did the migration ourself, we could probably save the company a bunch of money and we would own it.

Greg Warner:

We would know how this thing worked. We got about four weeks in and decided that was a terrible idea. Do not do that. Any enterprise customers I talk about that say we're going to do it ourselves, do not do that. Do not do that. And part of the reason is that there's really four pillars to success for your cloud migration. Jira migration, Confluence migration, apps, and users. And we did not know how to do apps and users and we probably could have gotten away with Confluence and Jira. But we said, look, this is something that we actually need to have a partner involved. And so we did ask for partners to provide their way of doing it, knowing what they knew about us. And we did provide as much detail as we can. We had two partners actually provided completely different methodologies how to get there.

Greg Warner:

So this is that flexible on the details, but we really had to make a decision on what worked for us. So when it really came down to Jira, would we do a big bang approach and just switch it over in the course of a weekend or did we want to do cohort by cohort over time? And we decided for us, because we are a 24/7 organization that's supporting our customers, doing the big bang switchover, that was the best way to do it. So that's one of the reasons we chose the partner we did. But that partner didn't necessarily have a roadmap of where they want to go. But we did then explain what we want to get out of this. That was the first thing, was about it needs to happen on a weekend. So that then filters down what your choices are. The ecosystem apps part is really important to make sure that one, there may have been apps installed in your system that have been there for 10 years and you're not sure why they're there anymore because it was four Jira admins ago.

Greg Warner:

Nobody knows what's there. But if they don't have a cloud migration pathway, you really should consider they're probably going to hit their end because there is no equivalent. So you can rule them out. Identify the ones that do have a business process with them. And for that, Salesforce for us, we had to find a cloud-first connect that would work. So that meant that we knew that was going forward. But really, I think the key thing that we invented that we didn't know about was that we created this thing called an App Burn Down. And that's where we looked at all the apps we had. We had about 40 apps. We said, okay, which ones are not going to go to cloud? Which ones don't have a migration pathway? Which ones are going to replace something else? And so we started to remove apps over the course of about three months.

Greg Warner:

So people would see that we're starting to get away from on-prem design decisions and old ways of doing things. But we also said, but once we get to cloud, this is the pathway out of it. So that we said, look, we're going to turn this app off but you're going to get this one instead, which is the cloud-first app. So people could see how we're going to make the jump over the river to get there. But it meant that we would, over time, identify apps that weren't used. If we turned them off and nothing happened, it's fine. But also we did come across some where they were critical to a business use. And so if we didn't have an answer for those yet, it gave us time to find one. And with your user base, typically it's your colleagues, that's going to be your most critical customers. They're going to ask, okay, you're turning it off. When do I get the functionality back?

Greg Warner:

And by doing that App Burn Down over time, that does buy you time to then have that answer. So it's a much easier conversation than I'm simply turning off functionality, I don't have an answer for you yet. There are things like that. It wasn't necessarily a roadmap, but working with a solution partner is absolutely the right way to go. Don't try and do it yourself. They also work with Atlassian and they have far better reach into getting some of these answers than you can possibly ever have. And I have on at least three different occasions where our solution partner did go and speak directly with an ecosystem partner to find out what's the path forward. How can we make this work? So it is good. The migration is really a three-way collaboration between yourself, your solution partner, and Atlassian. And you all have the same goals. You want to get to cloud and it does work really well.

Chloe Hall:

Wow. Yeah. So sounds like hope everyone got that advice. Definitely don't take this on your own. Reach out to solution partner. And I really like how you said you went to two different solution partners and you found out what their ideas were, which ways they wanted to take you, so you could kind of explore your options, work out what was the best route for Splunk. And it's worked very well for you as well. Having that support I think as well. Yeah. Sorry, you go.

Greg Warner:

The choice of the partner is really important and it's probably one of the earliest decisions that we made to get that one right. And I remember several times thinking about, have we got the right people on board? Did we speak to... And it was an interview process to the extent that when we had our final day after we'd been working with Atlassian and with our partner for six months, one month after our migration was completed and we're all done, we had one final Zoom call with all of us and took a photo and did that. But it kind of felt like a breakup, to be honest, because we'd been in each other's faces for six months and working. We're now all saying goodbye. We might not see each other. It was like the weirdest feeling. But it did work. And so yeah, it is a real fundamental choice.

Greg Warner:

Just take the time, make sure they understand what we want to do, make sure you understand how they're going to do it. But yeah, if we have done it ourselves, we would've got ourselves all caught up in knots, wouldn't have been a successful migration or so. I'm a technical guy. I want to solve it. I want to be like... But I think the actual right answer was no, you don't need to know how this works 100% because you're going to do this hopefully just once. And so focus on the real business value things about dealing with stakeholders and the change and making design decisions that are really important for you because you're going to own those probably the next decade rather than worrying about how do I get my data from A to Z?

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. It definitely would've felt like a breakup for you because you would've been working side by side for so long, dealing with so much. Are you still in contact with them or...

Greg Warner:

Yeah, we had this fundamental thing we always said is we're always, if there's a problem, we're always cautiously optimistic, we're going to solve it. We did engineering challenges that we went through, but I did say right early on is, the ecosystem is only big and we're all going to bump into each other at some point. So yeah, let's make sure that we're still friends at the end of this. And I didn't realize how important that was until later when I was in New York for Christmas and I arranged to meet the project manager that worked for us. She lives in New York, so how about I meet you so... So we met each other at the hotel and she's like, "I have never met a customer outside of work to do this." Yeah, I gave the story about it felt like a breakup, but she did say that at the beginning you said we'll be friends after.

Greg Warner:

Yeah it is because it can be really hard. I've been on the consultant side where you kind of have to have some hard conversations and sometimes... You want to make sure that everyone understands the problem. You're trying to make it better so that at the end of it, you can still be friends like that. That is the thing. There probably will be engagements later on that you might need them again. So you want to make sure that you have your choice of best in breed partner to choose from. You have those relationships. They understand what you want to choose. So yeah, it is really important to choose the right partner. Don't necessarily based on price but choose the partner that's going to work for you, understands what you're trying to get out of your cloud migration and they'll be there in the future when you need them for another cloud migration or a much more gnarly project. Try and be friends at the end of it.

Chloe Hall:

And definitely it's good that you have that friendship now because they have that understanding about your business and what you want and the value of it. So if you do need help again, it's a lot easier to bring them on board straight away. So now that you've performed a cloud migration and you're coming towards the end of it, do you look at the process any differently to when you were at the very beginning?

Greg Warner:

Yeah, I thought we were just executing a data migration just yeah, on-prem to cloud.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah.

Greg Warner:

Pretty straightforward, nothing big. I was pleasantly surprised as we're making some of these decisions as we went along, that it was more than that. There were business processes that we could improve. There was the beginning, the middle, and end. I didn't realize that until actually after the end. So when we did our cloud migration, it was actually the week before Thanksgiving in the US. It was November 19. And even that decision was made in just going for a walk at lunchtime. When should we really do this? And I kind of came down again, spoke to my project manager and said, "How about we do this in the cloud migration the week before Thanksgiving?" Because 50% of our workforce is located in the US and a large proportion of that will be on leave or PTO before.

Greg Warner:

So by doing it over a weekend before then we're ensuring that... Like when you open a new restaurant. You don't want to have all of your tables full on the first night. We knew that we were going to have everybody using Jira and Confluence day one after a migration because we're going to break some stuff. They actually turned out to be really exceptionally good idea. And I encouraged people to find... Look at your data and work out when is low time to do this? I've been involved in Jira and Confluence for a long time and just thought it's task tracker and it's a wiki. There's nothing there that I don't really know about. But one of the decisions we made was actually that when we completed the data migration and it was ready to go, I always said if we waited, do we get a better result? And the answer was no.

Greg Warner:

We should make this available to people now. And so we opened it up on a Sunday morning in the US, which was starting to be business hours in Australia. We started making teams aware that they can now go ahead and use Jira and Confluence. And it was the feedback that we immediately got from those teams that were starting to use Jira service management in cloud for the first time, about, "Wow, this is so much better than it was on-prem." And people said, "I can actually see the attention to detail you've made on fields and descriptions and the changes you've made." And it started to impact people's workday that this was better than it was. I didn't expect that to come back. And so I have a montage that we share with the team of all these Slack messages from people saying, "This is really good. This is much better than we had before."

Greg Warner:

What I didn't also realize is that when we moved from on-prem to cloud is the data that we had became more usable and accessible. Hadn't planned that. It seems obvious now, but when we put it in cloud and it has all the security controls around it and now no longer has the requirements of things like VPN to get access to it, people could build new things to use it to be able to interact with your issues, to interact with pages. And so we started with 76 integrations and over space of three months now we had this big jump in the first three months up to about a hundred something and now we're going to Forge And what it means is people who have had this need to be able to get to the data can now get to it. I didn't see that coming. I just thought we were just server cloud. But yeah, having a more accessible has led to improvements in the way that our teams are working but also how they use it in other applications that just simply wasn't available before.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. Wow. That's great. And it's good that you were able to receive that feedback straight away from the teams that you had in Australia. I think that's really good and it sounds like it's created such a good opportunity for you at Splunk as well now that you're on cloud.

Greg Warner:

Yeah, it's certainly a business leader that can propel you forward and I eagerly come in now and look at what are other teams going to do with it. And so when we had the first team that said they want to build a Forge app, I'm like, Sure. We should not discourage that at all. Extend the platform. That's why we spent the money and time to do it. What can you do with it now? And we did certainly make Atlassian aware on the product side, like how we're using it and where we'd like to see improvements. If you look at the server DC comparison, I used to be that person that would look at the new features in cloud and ask that question about, when is that new feature coming to on-prem? To going to being that customer who's now, I have that feature today, right? And I'm using it because we don't wait for it.

Greg Warner:

So you mentioned about things you didn't plan from the roadmap. There are design decisions that I talk to enterprise customers that I need to make aware of about. One of them is to do with release tracks. In enterprise cloud, you can choose to bunch up the change to cloud and then they get released periodically every two weeks, every month. When I looked at that, came back to one of our principles about don't implement server in cloud, why would we do that? Atlassian has far more data points on whether this works for customers at scale than we do. So why would we hold back functionality? So as a result we don't do release tracks. We let all of the new functionality get delivered to us as Atlassian sees fit. And the result of that is our own engineering staff, our own support staff who use Jira, get the notifications about new products and features and this is fantastic.

Greg Warner:

Again, why would we implement server, which is where you would bunch up all your changes and then go forward? The other thing too about our cloud migration journey is don't be blinked that you're just doing a cloud migration today and then the project ends. There are things you need to be thinking about as you go along, but what's the impact in the future? So for us, we have multiple sites. Enterprise customer have multiple sites. So there are design decisions that we've made so that we can, in the future, do cloud to cloud migration. You will move sites. Your organization could be bought or could be buying companies. So you do mergers and acquisitions. And so as part of that, we have some runbooks now that talk about using the cloud-to-cloud tooling so we can move a Jira project from a site here to a site there, how we'd move users here and users there.

Greg Warner:

And that actually came about through the assistance with our TAM, not focusing just always on the cloud migration date but also what's that look like six months later? What's it look 12 months later? So that you don't perform your cloud migration and then lock yourself in a corner that later on now I have to unwind something. I had the opportunity to fix it. So yeah, I do encourage migration customers to also think six months, 12 months beyond their cloud migration. But what could also happen and then speak to your solution partner about design decisions today that could affect you in the future.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. So you definitely need to be thinking future-focus when you're doing this cloud migration. I know you've addressed a lot of the opportunities that came out of the cloud migration. Was there anything else that was an unexpected value that came from it that you wanted to share?

Greg Warner:

The other value is make it more accessible. We have seen people use it in different places that we hadn't thought about. So some of the things that we were doing before, we had to have a company-owned asset to get on the VPN and just things like that. That actually restricted people in where they could do work. Whereas now we've, as long as you've got a computer or mobile device connected to the Internet, absolutely you can use a mobile device support, you can get access to it. Approvals that used to be done on a computer are now done on a mobile device. Those things. But I think the integrations has been probably been the one thing I'm most... We're not the catalyst. We kind of pushed it along but seeing people get real use out of it and using the data for other purposes. We have seen people build some microservices that use the data from Jira that we couldn't do before. Again, you're just unlocking that potential by making it more usable and accessible.

Chloe Hall:

After going through the whole migration journey and, like you said, you're coming towards the end of it, what were the things that stood out to you that you're like, okay, they didn't go so well? Maybe if I was to do this again, how would I do this better next time?

Greg Warner:

So I get back to that day one unboxing experience. You know you want to give it that best experience. And we delivered that for people in Australia and APAC as we opened it and they got to use Jira for the first time and it worked fine. And that is mainly the result of a lot of emphasis on the Jira piece because we said, we know this is going to be hard. It's got workflows, issue schemes, notifications schemes. This is going to be hard.

Greg Warner:

So we started that one really early and then probably about 60% down through our migration journey, we started on Confluence. We thought how hard can Confluence be. It's a bunch of spaces and pages. It can't be that hard. We actually hit some migration challenges with the engineering tooling with Confluence, which meant that the Confluence UAT was delayed. The Jira UAT was fantastic. Ran for a month. We found some problems, got fixed, got answers. We were really confident that was going to be fine.

Greg Warner:

And then we hit this Confluence piece. We're like, wow, this is going to be a challenge. And there was at least one time I could think of. It was a Saturday morning at breakfast where our solution partner sent me a Slack message about, I think we've got a problem here with some tooling. What are we going to do? Towards the middle of the day, I was kind of scratching my head. This could be a real blocker. We actually worked with Atlassian, came up with the engineering solution, cleared that out. That was good to see, like in the space of 12 to 24 hours, there was a solution. But what it meant was that it delayed the Confluence UAT and it made a week. And there was something we found to do with the new Confluence editor and third-party apps right at the end of that week. And we had to really negotiate with our stakeholders to make this go ahead.

Greg Warner:

Because again, if we'd waited, we'd get a better result. No, we really should go. We know that there's this problem. It's not system-wide but it affects a small group people. So we did it. But for about a hundred people they have this really bad Confluence experience because of this thing. And so for me, I couldn't deliver on that thing I promised, which was a day one experience that was going to be better than what it had before.

Greg Warner:

Now we did work with Atlassian and app vendors to get some mitigation so it wasn't as bad on day five. It wasn't day one but it wasn't perfect. But I would certainly encourage people to make sure that you do treat Jira and Confluence with as much importance as each other. They do go together. When I did our cloud migration, we did it on a weekend and I remember coming back after dropping my kids at school on Tuesday and sitting in the car park. I was like, wow, we actually pulled that off.

Greg Warner:

If we'd propose to the company to move your company email system and your finance system on a weekend, the answer would be no because it's too big a hat. But what we'd said is we're going to move all of our Atlassian stack in a weekend, which really is two big systems, Jira and Confluence. So if I had the time again, we would've started Confluence much, much earlier and then we wouldn't have the need to rush it at the end. And that really did result in a bad day one experience for those people. We have worked with Atlassian since then. We're getting that resolved. We know other Atlassian guys have the same problem. I would start early and don't underestimate the complexity that could happen. There will be some things outside of your control.

Greg Warner:

I talk about this Confluence problem and the migration tooling, which is actually do at scale. Not every customer will see it. We saw it, I conducted customer interviews when we were doing our solution partner decision and the customer actually told me this. Like I should have started Confluence because we had this problem, we wasted some time, and we did it. I even have my notes. But it wasn't until later, same problem, you even had the answer and they told you and you still waited. So I'm spending a few minutes on this podcast talking about it because it happened to me. It's probably going to happen to the next person. So if I could do one thing and that is just encourage you to start it earlier. You're going to end up with a much, much better migration and hopefully can deliver on that day one experience that I couldn't do.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, no I'm so glad that you've shared that with the Easy Agile audience as well because now they know and hopefully the same mistake won't keep getting repeated. Well, Greg, my final question for you today, and I don't know if you want that to be your answer, but I think it's really good just for the audience, if there's one key takeaway that they can go away with them today from the podcast, what would be that one piece of advice for everyone listening to start their migration journey?

Greg Warner:

The first thing to do is to prioritize it. So if you're an Atlassian customer that's using on-prem Jira or Confluence and you don't have a timeline and you don't have a priority to your cloud migration, start there. Open up the task, which is start to investigate Atlassian Cloud and choose a date. Because yeah, there will come a situation down the track where you might be asked by your CIO and so it's better to have an answer prepared already. I would encourage people to start to look at it because it is the future. If you look across the industry, people are moving to SaaS. It's really a question. Do you want to maintain and be that customer wondering when that feature's coming to cloud or do you want to be that customer in cloud who has it today? We have seen a monumental shift to when we moved to cloud in functionality, availability, all the good things that cloud delivers. And it's one of the biggest promoter... The person that used to write exam questions for servers now saying go to cloud.

Greg Warner:

Absolutely. So when I've spoken to other enterprise customers, particularly at Team, I said like, when do you plan your cloud migration? I was like, wow, we're going to start it in three years. I'm like, three years? You need to go back to the office next week and start like 12 months because yeah you will... There is absolutely a competitive advantage to doing it. And it's not just me being now as biggest cloud opponents. We see it, we see it every day and for me, this is one of the most influential projects I've been involved in with Atlassian since 2006. This one here is going to have a long-lasting effect at Splunk for a long time and I'm happy to speak to yourself at Easy Agile and others about it and here at their cloud journey because I want to go to Team next year. I want to make sure we have these conversations in the whole way about, I got that one thing. It's either I started my Confluence migration earlier or I actually put in a timeline of when we should start our cloud migrations.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, beautiful. That is some great advice to take away, Greg. And so honestly, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. You have provided some brilliant insights, takeaways, and also because there is no roadmap, I feel like your guidance is so good for those who are looking to start their cloud migration. Yeah. We really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

Greg Warner:

All right. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening.

Chloe Hall:

No worries.