Steering Engineering Excellence - In context of Agile & DevOps

 Many organizations are undergoing digital transformation and one of the activities targeted by leadership team is improving “Engineering Excellence”. This becomes paramount in current context, as current state of practices is not aligned with objective and vision of transformation.

Traditional organizations are working hard to improve and change the current practices to provide a smooth user experience to their development and engineering community. In this blog, will be trying to highlight some of practices should be considered by leadership team to focus to bring engineering excellence within the organization.

 Let’s try to understand this with the help of below framework with five key pillars that need to be focused to improve Engineering Excellence. These pillars are based on four key foundation elements – Flexibility, Visibility, Standardization and Autonomy.

Engineering Excellence Framework

 Improving User Experience of Engineering Community

a.      Ironed out process

b.     Smooth access to required Tools, Library, Systems

c.      Common understanding of Architecture Guidelines

d.     Visibility enabled through tools

e.     Fast and Instant feedback enabled through tools and process

 Road-map for Architectural Runway Implementation and Simplification

a.      Minimum available architecture runway

b.     Architecture flexibility at Unit / Team level

c.      Availability of Right Agility with supporting Infrastructure and Platforms

d.     Additional intentional intervention as per enterprise need w.r.t Architecture

e.     Visible plan for legacy systems w.r.t Architecture simplification and support needed

 Right set of Agile, DevOps and Quality Practices

a.      Implementation of Right set of Agile practices

b.     Availability of DevOps culture, tool set and platforms

c.      Established Quality guardrails using tools and process

d.     Common understanding of Engineering and Business metrics

e.     Impact on Business metrics due to stability of System

 Product vision with system thinking

a.      Product mindset – Lean startup culture of development

b.     System thinking and understanding of big picture

c.      Organization enabled with Lean HR, Finance and Portfolio Management Levers

d.     Integration through communities and events

 Understanding of Maturity status

a.      Visible Value stream and impediments

b.     Availability of common maturity model

c.      Understanding of Critical path to move from one maturity state to another

d.     Availability of necessary coaching and training to move fast with Transformation

 Definitely the above are not exhaustive list of suggestions to cover entire Engineering excellence in context of Agile and DevOps, but it broadly covers fair ground and if applied through the lenses of foundation elements, it will bring a definite change in current ways of working and improve the culture to expedite transformation. Further leaders can track all or any of the above using simple score card driven tracking system to keep tab on the state of change.

 If you have read so far, hoping, you must have liked the thoughts and pointers. Please do like, comment and share.