Xellentro
 

Frequently Asked Question

Dojo in Japanese means “Place of the Way”. This comes from Marshall Art and later taken up by Target to be the place to Experiment and Practice. This is the place where practitioners come with their business problem, hypothesize the problem and experiment to prove the hypothesis with help of experts and coaches, the learning which they can take back to their projects/products to implement. Dojo is not a place to work on Project to deliver projects.

Playground is a virtual Dojo. Typically, Dojo is a physical place where everyone comes together under one roof. Post pandemic, this is not an option. with teams located at different geographies and working from home or in hybrid mode, this is not possible. The way to go is to be able to hypothesize and experiment in a virtual collaborative platform. People should be able to experiment from wherever they are in the world.

 Playground is the collaborative platform  which facilitates this option of being wherever you are and still can come together with your team and experiment to find solution to your own business problems under the guidance of global experts, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In Playground, the environment is created on the basis of the business problems that the customers come with. The situation is created in such a manner so as to help experiment the hypothesis created to solve the business problem. It is not a pre-configured sandbox.

Playground do not have any structured course or pre-set labs. Here the customers come with their business problems and based on the understanding of the problem, the setup is created and the experimentation is done by the customer team under the guidance of the global SMEs.

By coming to Playground, customers can try out new ways of working, without spending on capital expense for setting up their own Dojos. They get the guidance from global SMEs. They experiment on their own problems and take back the learning to implement in their own organization. This helps in:

  • Getting greater ROI on your Digital Transformation
  • Helps in Continuous Upskilling
  • Collaborative Experimentation with Customers to get better buy-in
  • Learn best way of implementing DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE and VSM
  • IT Teams from any organization
  • Teams who are part of Digital Transformation Initiatives in their Organization
  • Teams who are implementing or want to implement DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE, VSM
  • Organization or Teams who is willing to improve their ways of working fir IT practitioners.

The team comes with a business problem. We have an initial discussion to understand. Accordingly, we agree to the timeframe and the environment required. Based on the information, the pricing is decided. The customer pays for the subscription and they get the access to the Playground application. The VMs are setup and the engagement starts. There can be maximum 8 team members.

There is no ideal duration. It will be based on the business problem to be solved and what it takes to experiment. Playground is for experimenting and not for any delivery related work. Hence, at a time anything between 3 to 30 days will be required for each team.

The pricing is based on the resources required to experiment the hypothesis and the experts’ time required.

The Mentors are the experts in their respective areas. They will be guiding the team to build the hypothesis, create the experiment and guide the team in experimenting to get the result.

We are in the middle of the 5th Technology Revolution. The Customer Expectations and the Technology is evolving at rapid pace. Organizations need to deliver faster to keep up with the Competitors and grow. The traditional way of working is not suitable for the current evolutionary process of delivering Customized Servitized Products where there are no clear requirements. This needs change in the Ways of Working which in turn requires the mindset shift from “Building” to “Learning” to be Innovative.

Hence, we need to Hypothesize and Experiment. To enable highly evolutionary transformation, we need to use hypothesis instead of requirements. Decisions has to be data-based. We need to experiment early and often, get direct feedback from Customers through Collaborative working, and provide services that creates Value for the Customers.

One needs to go through the following steps:

  • Understand the Business Problem
  • Create the Hypothesis
  • Design your Experiment to get the expected MVP
  • Measure and Test with the Stakeholders
  • Validate the Hypothesis based on the experiment data
  • Refine and prove the hypothesis or Pivot

Example 1:

Problem: How do we proactively make our systems reliable?
Solution: Learn how to mature your system by practicing Chaos Engineering. In the Playground you learn the concepts of Chaos Engineering, set a similar environment like yours and see how to practice Chaos Engineering and what actions can be taken to resolve sample issues that comes out.

Example 2:

Problem: We have the Monitoring and Telemetry. We are Scaling. How do we ensure things will not fail in the scaled scenario?
Solution: Improve Monitoring to Observability. In Playground, get the concepts of Observability and then see how you can implement it in an environment like yours.

Example 3:

Problem: We are getting many False Positives in our Security Tools. What to do?
Solution: Experiment how to correlate the data from various tools and using an AI engine throw insights and even further enhance to orchestrate the DevSecOps pipeline.

Example 4:

Problem: We have Dashboards showing the SLOs and Error Budget. How do we improve our process to be able to deliver value more efficiently, faster in a secure and reliable manner?
Solution: Understand the concepts of SLOs, SLIs and Error Budget. Experiment on how to set up Observability throughout the pipeline. Based on the data, learn how to use Error Budget to have proper Risk Management and balance between Feature Delivery and Stability to generate better Business Outcome.