What is Engineering Operations?

Capturing the essence of operations can often be challenging. Serving as the oil between the wheels, engineering operations plays a vital role in ensuring the smooth functioning of the entire system. In the realm of today’s hybrid environments and complex systems, the significance of orchestrating the movement of the entire ship in the right direction is being increasingly recognized. This article aims to shed light on the role of engineering operations, particularly in the context of product development, emphasizing its importance in optimizing processes, execution, and ultimately driving engineering success.

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In December 2022, Linked In has enlisted the top 25 US roles that are growing in demand for 2023 (Article Source). Three of them were Operations related roles — Revenue Operations, Strategy and Operations Manager and Product/Engineering Operations. In today’s hybrid environment & complex systems, the job of getting the whole ship to move in the right directions is getting acknowledged.

From the insightful article I want to emphasize the 3rd one — Product Operations, which also relates to Engineering Operations and quote: “Product operations managers help optimize systems and processes across cross-functional teams to maintain quality standards and on-time delivery of an organization’s products”.

Let’s widen the definition in two aspects:

1. It’s actually Product and Enginering Opertaions: The art of improving the product processes can divided between the product teams operations and the engineering teams operations — each owns its own vast side of the role operations. Product and Engineering operations need to work closely together into bringing value as a company, but each has enough of its plate.
2. Connecting to input to the the impact: It’s not only about the processes— but about Execution: while larger companies do have a person for each role, having processes without its execution partners lack impact. Moreover people who stick to processes only sometimes get dragged to the beauty of overly engineered Processes. Teams of processes improvers go hand in hand or are one team along with the Technical Program Managers, PMO, Scrum Masters, Agile Coachers etc into implementing and creating impact.

I want to suggest a complementary definition to Linkedin that takes these two aspects and creates the definition for the Engineering Operations Roles:

Engineering Operations includes the building, improving, execution and measurement management of all the engineering related processes.

This definition connects the improving processes with the execution, the process improvement input with the impact through the execution management and the overall measuring.

Why is it so important in my view?

1. WIIFM (What’s in it for me): This definitions puts the Engineering Operations as a key role into engineering success, putting it in the right place for VP Engnineerings to see this role not only as “advisory”, but mandatory key factor to scaling the engineering departments.
2. Clearer KPI: How many projects did we deliver on time? How many red flags were raised on time? How many risks were mitigated? How did our thoughput increase? allowing the connection between the input and the impact at the end, creates easier straight forward KPI for the Engineering Operaions role.

In summary, engineering operations and product operations are both essential components in the process of delivering successful engineering outcomes. However, engineering operations brings a unique perspective and emphasis to the table, focusing on the end-to-end view of engineering improvement and execution. By encompassing the building, improvement, execution, and measurement management of engineering processes, engineering operations serves as a vital catalyst for engineering success in today’s dynamic business environment

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