Heather Mickman, Senior Group Manager, Target Ross Clanton, Director, Target This talk will largely be a reflection on the DevOps journey at Target and the focus on (re)building an engineering culture at Target. In the DevOps community you hear a lot of talk about whether you should drive DevOps in to an organization tops down or bottoms up. Well, we did a hybrid of both. It definitely started at Target as a grass roots movement in a few small teams and started to gain broader grassroots momentum when we kicked off our first internal DevOps Days in February 2014. This enabled us to start engaging a community, finding out who had passion for this across our IT organization, and providing them a forum to connect, share, and learn about DevOps awesomeness. We fostered and grew this community by leveraging social media and guerilla marketing to start driving the conversation across our organization as well as demonstrating the success that teams were having. We then leveraged some of this early energy to engage more leader champions to start building the tops down support for DevOps. Now, having completed four DevOps Days conferences at Target, we will share more details on our approach, results, speakers, and topics. We did much more than just hosting DevOps Days. We tapped in to that growing community to start testing and learning some different approaches and we have lots to share, both in terms of results we’ve achieved and how we’re focusing on changing culture and mindsets. From a technology perspective, we will discuss how we rapidly drove momentum on our automation toolchain across our IT organization. Our vision was to enable and empower all technologists to automate the things that they were accountable for. We pursued this vision in many ways, including Automation hackathons, establishing an embedding/coaching model for our deep SMEs to help teach, open labs, community based support, and even schemed some creative work models that we will share. The end result of these various activities is driving full stack ownership that will ultimately enable the expansion of CI/CD across our Enterprise. This is the overarching theme and next step in our enterprise transformation. It is through this foundation we are building around culture, tooling, collaborative and flexible work models that will enable our acceleration in 2015. Moving forward, we are leveraging these learnings to shift to more of a full-stack product model for our technology delivery and management. We’re also transforming infrastructure from a model based on technology silos to an end to end infrastructure service model focused on enabling business agility. These changes haven’t been easy. In fact, we’ve already had a lot of learnings on our journey. We will share some of those key challenges and lessons learned, specifically on talent, culture, and leadership.

1. DevOps@TGT
Heather Mickman
@hmmickman
Ross Clanton
@rossclanton
(re)building an engineering culture

2. #DOTGT
a bit
about us
53 years of service
347,000 team members
1,799 stores
Target
Omnichannel Retailer
Fortune 50
source: abullseyeview.com
7 HQ locations
38 distribution centers
3 data centers

3. #DOTGT
our story
involves two
important
sets of
people
people who consume technology solutions people who create technology solutions

4. #DOTGT
and how we
navigated
culture organization system complexity

5. #DOTGT
engineers feeling
devalued, frustrated
to overcome
some not so
unique
challenges
zombie projects consuming
time, money, and people
loss of agility
focus on siloing + local optimization

6. #DOTGT
the first
thing we
knew we
had to do
was …

7. #DOTGT
so far our
journey
has
involved
enabling, unleashing
cultivating, growing a movement
getting alignment
figuring out how to across the enterprise

8. #DOTGT
so Target
wanted to
create cool,
digital guest
experiences

9. #DOTGT
multiple “sources of truth”
connected by unique
point-to-point integrations
but getting
the data
needed was
easier said
than done

10. #DOTGT
shared
services
queues
having to
in addition
we had a
matrixed
operating,
delivery
model that
moved
slowly
NOW SERVING
938 12541253
1252
1251
which led to
which led to

11. #DOTGT
discovering
the power of
APIs
that would be the
API I’ve almost
finished coding …
there’s got to be a
better way to get to
our data!

12. #DOTGT
“alien” concepts new tools simplifying
to solve
meant
listening to a
radical
group of
change
agents (aka
engineers)
have you heard about
CI/CD? Agile?

13. #DOTGT
and the
results
speak
volumes
53x
business
capabilities
enabled
including
we continue to focus on enabling new business capabilities
our focus: enable market, not business, disruption
we aren’t driving the increase but our APIs have to be ready
source: comScore Key Measures, October-December 2014
> 90 API products
> 80 deployments per week
> 17 billion monthly API calls
< 10 incidents per month
in 2014
traffic up
42%
280k
orders fulfilled 2014
Black Friday weekend
APIs built
to handle
serious
traffic
holiday 2015

14. #DOTGT
we had to
transform
pockets of
change
agents
movement using
internal in-conferences
into a BIG
internal social media
monthly share-outs quarterly hackathons

15. #DOTGT
bringing in
outside
voices, we
made it fun
Just heard the news.
#DevOpsDays
is on Thursday, October 2
(Got so excited she spilled Starbucks on her laptop.)
Rob Cummings
Fletcher Nichol
Michael Ducy
Jeff Sussna
Ian Malpass
Andy Domeier
Sean O’Neil
Jez Humble
Tom Duffield
Matt Konda

16. #DOTGT
sharing our
story,
nurturing the
grassroots
to grow
500
1000
February
2014
June
2014
October
2014
February
2015
June
2015
October
2015
community members
internal event attendance
37
975
target.github.io

17. #DOTGT
and
connecting
with larger
issues
facing
company
under pressure to fundamentally change our
approach to technology delivery from the
most important, demanding, savvy people in the world
ourselves
internal customers
competitors
Target Guests
we needed engagement to move forward

18. #DOTGT
direction
course
and align
executives
to set
direction,
course
CI/CD maturity framework, assessment toolkit
identified, aligned champions to work with senior
executives to:
• establish DevOps and automation goals and
priorities
• drive continuous delivery maturity assessment
• champion DevOps and Automation within their
portfolio
≈
engineering
practices
Continuous Integration
4-8 weighted
data points
per practice
to assess maturity
Configuration Management
Quality Assurance
Data Management
Deploy
Environment & Infrastructure
scoring
0 = This practice is not followed at all by the team
CI/CD
adoption score
calculated
using data points
1 = The team has started to learn this practice but is not yet applying it
2 = The team has started to apply this practice but has little experience with it
3 = The team is applying the practice at least 50% of the time
4 = The team applies this practice most of the time but has some notable
exceptions5 = The team applies this practice consistently

19. #DOTGT
then align
our peers by
drawing on
external
expertise
Brooklyn Park, MN • March 19, 2015
Keynote
• Gene Kim
Speakers
• Jason Cox
• Scott Prugh
TTS Leadership DevOps Summit
• Jonny Wooldridge
• Courtney Kissler
• Nicole Forsgren

20. #DOTGT
thus
combining
tops down
support with
a strategic
focus
the
BIG
question
“How in the hell are we going to scale?”
modernize tools,
methodologies
adopt Agile and DevOps
increase speed, agility
pay down tech debt

21. #DOTGT
operating
model
• simplify structure, accountability
• enable full-stack product
ownership
• standardize services
• establish practices area
delivery
model
• shift to product focus
• drive end-to-end accountability
• adopt Scrum framework
modernization
strategy
• loosely coupled architecture
• APIs
• cloud ready
• self-service, lightweight tools
1. make
structural
changes
Financial Prioritization
Financial
Appropriation
IT Strategy &
Benchmarking
Emerging Technologies TTS Comms
Mergers & Acquisitions TTS OCM
IT Ops & Process Enterprise Governance
Financial Prioritization
Financial
Appropriation
CDCI

22. #DOTGT
converge
movements
grow pool of
coaches
converge
movements
grow pool of
coaches
connect experts
drive learning
align priorities
maintain laser focus
2. connect
important
dots

23. #DOTGT
3. build an
internal
incubator
environment

24. #DOTGT
4. develop,
expand
learning
service
offerings challenges 30+ day experience introducing, leveling
up Agile Scrum, DevOps, Lean skills
flashbuilds* 1-3 day events to create a usable
feature, solve a problem
open labs 90-minute sessions twice weekly for
questions, answers, and good old
fashioned inspiration
*check target.github.io for details
immersive learning

25. #DOTGT
aligned
with
strategic
priorities
and folks
ready to
#DO
5. prioritize
demand
based on
constraints
key partners include coaches working with teams who
are able to connect the Dojo with teams …

26. #DOTGT
which has
helped move
fast
and a first round of immersive learning for our senior executives
results
so far
(since April 2015)
throughput
outcomes
personal
14 6 200+
challenges flashbuilds learners
building team
from delegating tasks to individuals to
get things done
to working as team to come up with the
best solution, one that all supported
lead engineer
confidence
from worrying about calls in the night
during production deployments
to being able to go to bed knowing what’s
ready for deployment works and there will
be no calls
senior engineer
collaboration
from environment not conducive to real-
time collaboration
to environment that enables face-to-face
communication, progress
scrum master
consistency
from 3-month process involving 2-3
dozen requests to other teams with
inconsistent results
to 30-minutes to deploy consistent full-
stack environment
velocity
from single person spending 6-12 hours
to merge/promote code every 2 weeks
to everyone being able to merge/promote
code in minutes
foundation
from having an idea that sounds really
great in theory
to being able to use new tools to be
successful in reality (including
uncovered unknown required work)

27. #DOTGT
what have
we learned
in 6 months?
expect the
unexpected
befriend your
landlord
don’t
overly
focus
on one
area
a successful
Challenge needs
a good charter
MVPs rock

28. #DOTGT
next step in
scaling
taking
the
global

29. #DOTGT
be exclusively
inclusive
our advice
to others?
unlearn what you
have learned
empower your
change agents
don’t wait to
connect with broader DevOps
Enterprise community

30. #DOTGT
here’s
what we’re
looking for
help with
how do you scale
across an enterprise?
and follow our journey
Target Tech Blog
http://target.github.io
The Goat Farm
http://goatcan.do
tweet us
@hmmickman @RossClanton