Interview with Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan

Episode 44 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan, a veteran agilist, lean practitioner, DevOps leader and co-founder of Industrial Logic Canada. Jeff describes the fabulous Lean/DevOps transformation he’s led with teams in a conservative Canadian bank. The teams used to only do 4-5 deployments per year. They now do 4-5 deployments per day! The teams used Scrum and had many QA people to help test software. Through Cheezy’s work, they eliminated all QA staff, got rid of all ScrumMasters and switched to a lightweight, Kanban approach. Cheezy describes the agility of his teams as they’ve had to release emergency features related to the Canadian government’s response to COVID-19. Allowing individuals who badly need money to survive during the crises to use a direct deposit service, rather than waiting for a check in the mail, is an example of a feature that Cheezy’s teams were able to get into production within 2-3 days of getting the requirements. This Lean/DevOps work has dramatically reduced the time from Concept to Cash, a particularly important metric during a pandemic. The improvements have also allowed the business to perform hundreds of feature experiments in production, gather data from those experiments and make better decisions about what will most help users. Cheezy discusses how risky traditional deployment is for most organizations and how modern practices reduce so much of the risk. Cheezy describes the technical safety his teams have put in place to allow for safe, continuous delivery of value to production. Finally, Cheezy describes how he’s been educating remote technical teams via effective, online training, with the help of Industrial Logic’s Agile eLearning.