How we kicked off our engineering transformation
I’m Nainesh, the Director of Engineering at BPP Education Group. I oversee architecture, site reliability, cybersecurity, and software engineering functions across our digital product estate.
In this article, I’ll share how our engineering team is evolving in the midst of substantial growth, transitioning towards a product-led culture.
If you’re curious about BPP and our tech transformation, check out this article by our CPTO.
Setting a mission
As a self-proclaimed “People First Leader,” I believe that our greatest asset is our people. In my early days at BPP, I crafted a mission statement that set the tone for our journey:
“Our mission as the best engineering team in the higher education sector in the UK is to deliver innovative and user-centric software solutions that enhance the academic experience for students, faculty, and staff!”
This mission statement laid the foundation for the significant changes we were about to make in how our team operates. From restructuring the team to introducing product and design disciplines, we aimed to reshape our approach in every aspect.
Building the Strategy
With a mission in place, we needed a strategy that would keep us focused on our goals. The strategy centres around three pillars: People, Engineering Excellence, Data-Driven. It was key to get this right in order to build the capability that we needed to succeed.
1. People
To gauge the team’s skills and abilities, I introduced a competency framework aligned with a transparent career path. The competency framework provided insights into our current capabilities and guided the creation of an effective and scalable engineering organisation structure.
The competency framework was developed to reflect the skills and behaviours we value in our engineering team. We believe software engineers should take ownership of their work from localhost all the way to production. That means software engineers need to have a devops mindset, to write clean code, release in short cycles and pair and collaborate with their team to drive successful results.
New roles, including SRE Engineers, Cyber Security Engineers, Principal Software Engineers, and Engineering Managers, were identified to meet our growth needs. As of this month we have almost tripled the size of the engineering team, hiring talent from all parts of the country.
Hiring in a product and design function introduced a product-led mindset. We introduced cross-functional teams to collaborate on solving problems for our customers and creating value for the business. We defined clear roles and responsibilities for engineers and introduced RFC (request for comment) and ADR (architectural decision review) processes to make team wide decisions. RFCs play a big part in our onboarding process as they provide the guidelines within which we build products.
We also introduced a hybrid working model that allows for maximum flexibility whilst providing plenty of opportunities for social interaction. It’s important that we have fun whilst we work so we introduced monthly socials and every Friday we have a quiz — which is gets more and more competitive every week!
2. Engineering Excellence
In order to move fast, we needed to make strategic technology choices. Our criteria included the ability to hire within the UK, open-source with community support, fit for purpose and cloud-native compatibility. Rapid decisions led us to embrace:
- Typescript: Widely supported and enhancing developer experience.
- Next.js & React: Open-source, well-supported, and enabling high-performing web products.
- Node: Open source, well-supported, and ideal for building performant server-side applications.
- Python: Open source, well-supported, and best in class technology for data analysis and data science.
- GraphQL: Open source, well-supported, and would allow us to have high performing data-fetching.
- AWS: A market leader in cloud infrastructure, providing a comprehensive suite of services.
- GitHub: The market leader for code repository & version control, supporting CI/CD through GitHub actions.
- Terraform: Widely supported, modular, infrastructure as code (IaC) platform that allows us to provision our infrastructure in AWS.
Making these fast decisions gave us a platform upon which to start architecting and building our products & services. Of course, we continue to introduce more tools whilst consciously seeking to keep our digital estate as simple as possible, avoiding over-engineering and being mindful of choosing the right tool for the right job.
3. Data-Driven
To drive continuous improvement we needed to introduce tools that would help us measure everything from ways of working through to application and infrastructure performance. We chose the following:
- Jira: Essential for tracking work, analysing cycle time and burn-down data. This data helps the team continually improve the way they work.
- New Relic: Monitoring application performance and infrastructure, allowing proactive issue resolution.
- Ops Genie: Managing incidents, providing key data for learning and improving our systems.
Using the above tools has allowed us to make informed & fast decisions. This includes being able to quickly identify customer impacting issues in our products that we have resolved in a matter of minutes and making improvements to our ways of working by recognising bottlenecks in our delivery pipeline.
This strategy laid the groundwork for our ongoing transformation. Stay tuned for the next part of our journey as we delve deeper into each pillar and the impactful changes they brought to our engineering team.
