DOES 18 London: Day two and it’s a wrap!

What an amazing conference! With two days chock-full of informative programming and hallway conversations designed to help our ~1,000 attendees (a significant increase from ~650 last year) to move the ball forward on their DevOps journey, this years’ DOES18 London was the best one ever! Day two included (even more!) fantastic programming content from new (and previous) speakers. The sessions I attended focused heavily on the cultural changes required to successfully navigate a digital transformation. Jonathan Smart and Morag McCall, of Barclay’s Bank, shared the important lessons learned as they “shifted left,” including the application of Lean portfolio management practices, and the evolving role of the PMO. Mayank Prakash, UK Department for Work and Pensions, emphasized their successful transformation and the effect it’s had on their business – namely, that “8MM people using UK’s fastest digital financial service… and 94% of citizens love it.” Jayne Groll, co-founder and CEO of DevOps Institute (DOI) addressed the alignment and reconciliation of Agile with ITIL, telling the audience that to be successful with ITIL “you have to go on a process diet! ” Jason Cox, of Disney, brought his perspectives and “Digital Magic” to the stage, and shared with the audience how they are creating a culture of continuous learning centered around communities of practice (as well as his beloved Star Wars references!)

Another great talk was by Shaun Norris, previous c9d9 panelist and Cloud Infrastructure team lead at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore. Shaun talked about how his team are setting the pace for software delivery in the bank with new standards for development pipelines – adding that a few things still on his wish list to accomplish are the automation of the last mile to production, and providing self-service capabilities to his entire team. I wasn’t able to see many talks, because I was manning our booth! Speaking of which, while other attendees weren’t listening to the amazing programming, they were filling their bellies and having meaningful conversations with all of this year’s sponsors in the larger, more spacious expo hall. And what conversations!

Over the course of the two days, more than half of the attendees stopped by the CloudBees booth to learn more about CloudBees Flow DevOps Insight and our new DevOps Foresight capabilities, designed to help teams understand (and mitigate!) the risk involved in enterprise software releases. With all of this success - what’s next for DOES London ? DOES has grown in popularity so much since we pioneered this conference with IT Revolution in 2014 that the agenda will span three full days next year, and we’re expecting a huge audience at DOES 18 Las Vegas .