World-Class Engineering Initiatives
It’s been one year in my current role at SafetyCulture. I feel proud to be working in an engineering group where we are encouraged to be part of different initiatives which will result in improving our teams across all the tribes to achieve World-Class Engineering (WCE) standards.
I have tasted the success of short and long term initiatives in the past as well. However, at SafetyCulture, I feel the initiatives are better structured and supported by the Engineering Leadership Team (ELT). There is a wide variety of initiatives to pick from for each engineer based on their interest areas.
Why do I like to participate in initiatives?
The word INITIATIVE means “the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do” or “ the ability to assess and initiate things independently”.
Our WCE initiatives allow me to stretch beyond what I usually do, revisiting things that have become too habitual. It gives me the satisfaction of contributing to build great teams and increase my knowledge. I believe —
“Engineers must know more than engineering in order to be good engineers.” (unknown source)
World-Class Engineering Initiatives
At SafetyCulture, our ELT ran a workshop to discover and align on five pillars to organise our initiatives to build a World-Class Engineering team.
- People,
- Simplicity,
- Productivity,
- Excellence
- Community
The People pillar includes initiatives around set clear expectations for each role in engineering, recognising individual efforts, mentoring and learning opportunities.
Under the Simplicity pillar, the key focus is to simplify choices for our engineers and bring in some consistency to our approach. We have initiatives to consolidate the technologies we support, establish standards and practices around architecture and design decisions going forward.
Productivity initiatives are seeking to build upon improvements to test automation, pull request review processes, simplifying test environments, refining the set-up experience for new developers, and creating comprehensive bootstrapping tools for new services..
The Excellence pillar has the most number of initiatives. For example — our Technology Strategy, improving our observability and alert processes, programs to build security awareness, and establishing delivery-focused metrics. I am running the quality dashboard initiative, another key deliverable. I will share my experiences with this project in another blog.
The Community pillar has initiatives that encourage engineers to contribute to external communities and build their network by hosting meetups, engaging with universities, attending conferences, and developing open-source policy.
All these initiatives have a common goal i.e., to consistently exceed our customer’s expectations in terms of quality, speed, and user experience. This is being achieved by continuously improving how we work.
Steps to run an initiative successfully
Based on my experience, I recommend the following
- Observe missing or broken processes.
- Identify these through finding common patterns that your team members may be complaining about, or things that everyone uses but do not consistently pay attention to (e.g. build warnings, or non-breaking monitoring alerts). List these out and look for improvement opportunities..
- Check the priority of the issues based on the overall vision of your group. Pick the top most prioritised problem to solve first.
- Frame your initiative — What is the problem you are trying to solve? Why is it important? What does success look like?
- Find a sponsor for your initiative from ELT.
- Identify people who can help or interested in the problem you are solving.
- Form a working group.
- Determine your roadmap and break the tasks down. Don’t forget to align milestones to celebrate along the way.
- Establish a communication channel and regular catch-ups.
- Lastly, there is no final step! This is a continual process of feedback and improvement…change takes time. The best thing you can do is to get started — Just do it :-)
