Engineering is a core business capability
Let’s start with a confession. I’m a coder, or was many moons ago. There, I’ve said it. Now, fast forward a few decades, I have the privilege of leading technology teams which include a few hundred engineers. We’ve still a way to go on our journey, but those engineers do great work, really excellent. As do all of our teams, it’s a real privilege to lead all of them.
So, in the debate about the relative merits of in-house development teams, I’m not objective. It’s a no-brainer. I’m hooked.
You want more detail and rationale ? OK, but first a bit more history…..
1. The Personal History:
Having joined Boots as an IT graduate, my first 3 months comprised intense training, mostly programming in COBOL. It was big investment by the company, there were over 30 IT grads in my year. “Computing” was taking off and everything was in-house developed and built from scratch. Lots of demand, huge value at stake, no packages, no services.
I joined the team which was developing accounting systems — developing and supporting, we built it we owned it. And writing excellent, efficient code was hugely important. First, there were no PCs, just a few “ROSCOE terminals” on which you had to book time, and there was no real-time compilation or testing. So, any jobs that failed overnight immediately added a 24-hour delay to the process while you re-coded and re-ran them. Secondly, inefficient code ate up resources on the mainframe which had as much grunt as the thing on your wrist now, at most. (Am I sounding old enough now ?)
However, I was a good programmer, I like solving puzzles. My first performance review was: “Richard writes elegant code”. That was it, in writing, delivered to my home, I still have it somewhere. Such simple days ! I also checked a couple of years ago and certainly then some of my code was still in production at Boots. Probably not so elegant now I’d guess !
So, a huge amount changes and some things stay the same. I’m definitely not saying that this qualifies me to understand the intricacies, thrills and challenges of the modern world of engineering. I do get the value though, completely, and it’s increasing month by month. Let me explain how and why.
2. The Caveat:
I’m going to talk about in-house engineering teams at Sainsbury’s now. But that is in no way to diminish the critical role of all of our teams. The combined contribution of engineering, product, service, security, architecture etc, when they work brilliantly together, far exceeds the sum of the parts.
Nor does this undermine the crucial role that many of our partners play, in coaching and augmenting our own teams, and in delivering and supporting business-critical solutions. Several of these won awards at our Partner Conference last November for exactly this reason.
3. The Founding Principle:
It is my heartfelt belief that the ability to develop, iterate and support solutions with innovation, pace, efficiency, agility and lean-ness, especially in UK grocery retail, has become critical for business success. In my opinion, the retailers who develop and sustain their systems and data assets, and turn those into value for their customers and colleagues, best and quickest will be the ultimate winners. And my absolute conviction is that Sainsbury’s is winning and will win !
This conviction underpins our technology vision, our strategy, the way we’re organised and the way in which we work with colleagues across the whole of our business.
4. The Value Statement:
a. Build v Buy. In a world of limited engineering resources, we will buy certain solutions. That will enable us to deliver and maintain industry-standard solutions that transform parts of the business. We are doing this with our HR platforms, for example. Ensuring that these solutions integrate seamlessly, now that might need some clever engineering. And at the other end of the spectrum, where we truly differentiate ourselves from our competitors, our in-house engineering capability enables us to build highly-tailored solutions that deliver unique business outcomes best and quickest. And we’re finding that this principle applies too in areas where historically we would have naturally bought product from the market. This is hugely valuable to our business — retail is detail and tiny enhancements can deliver huge scale benefit.
b. Agility in Action: Across our business, we want to deliver at pace. We want to build cross-functional teams and break down organisational boundaries. We want to empower those teams to deliver to clearly-defined outcomes. And we want to break the mould of large-scale, multi-year, high-risk change programmes. In other words, we want to embed the principles and practices of “being agile”. Our in-house engineering teams embody this, not just because this is their most naturally effective way of working, but because these are the skills and experiences that they bring to us from elsewhere. These are the skills that we are training in and developing, and recruiting for. To repeat: not only to enable the technology division to be agile, but to role-model that across the business.
c. Cost and Value: there is also a compelling economic case for an excellent in-house capability. We have many case studies to show that good engineering is more cost-effective than bought-in product. And as our capability, tooling and ways of working mature still further, this gulf will become wider. In addition, embedding good Dev/Ops principles and practice will provide more cost-effective, responsive support. But the even more compelling case comes as we build a set of highly-tailored reusable services within our unique solutions. Not only does this enable us to move at even greater pace, we will actually be building and controlling really valuable corporate assets and IP. Assets and IP to complement our stores, brands and products. That generates real long-term value.
d. Culture: I’ve already talked about “being agile”, and that’s quite a cultural transformation. We’ve also already established that I’m as old as the hills, so, let me embrace my age and be very subjective for a second ! I really really like the youth, energy, boldness and diversity that comes with many of our in-house teams. Not just engineering, but product, design, data science too. I’m veering towards outrageous generalisation here, but when brought together with the equal knowledge, discipline, experience, pragmatism and business savvy of our other teams and colleagues, wow that’s such a powerful combination, culturally as well as technically. I do like that enormously. This is why embedding agility and increasing colleague engagement are my top measures of success for the year ahead.
So, our investment in in-house engineering teams is here to stay, in fact our investment in all of our in-house teams. I truly believe that we have established a fantastic momentum across many of our teams in the last year. My role, and that of my leadership team, is to create the environment in which that momentum can accelerate still further. We have work to do, but a really exciting future ahead of us ! For those of you who are part of that journey already, thank you, I’m really inspired by what you are achieving ! For anyone reading this and wanting to know more, please be curious about opportunities to join us and look at http://sainsburys.work/, we have a lot to do !
