Build Efficiently. A Builder’s Perspective on Delivering Software with Purpose
These are interesting times indeed. In a world where being the first to market makes a difference, where organizations are trying to balance their spend and budgets against their product, where technology is an enabler and those who know how to wield it effectively are poised to draw out the most to benefit their organization, there is a underlying sentiment that we need to do more with less. I’ve been working in technology for the last 15 years and spend a majority of my time solving some of the most complex technology problems for my clients. The one thing I see over and over again relates to efficiency.
Efficiency is such an understated success metric of delivery excellence. It’s an attribute that’s rarely talked about or directly measured, but behind the scenes, it’s critical in getting a project from point A to the finish line in a manner that is acceptable to everyone on board. In other words, our ability to eliminate wasteful activities and obstructive tendencies during the delivery cycle has a direct correlation to the success of a project.
To draw an analogy, those of you who have gone through a move know what I’m talking about — good movers are the elite of being efficient. Their jobs depend on it! The ability to pack your entire house in a 20-foot truck — beds, sofas, piano et al, within a time limit and budget — all while ensuring that your prized possessions are safe and secure — requires some serious planning and strategy. I moved to a new home last summer. Long gone are my university days, where I could enlist my friends help me move at the cost of pizza and beer, so I hired professional movers. As I observed how these seasoned professionals work, I couldn’t help but notice how eerily similar their job is to mine.
There are 3 key ingredients that allow us to push the boundary here:
A North Star
It all starts with a vision. Everyone needs to be on the same page on what the North Star is. Regardless of how you get there, it’s the end goal, and that serves as the most important thing. That being said, there are many ways to reach your objective — some being more efficient than others. In the case of our moving team, IF the North Star for them is JUST to move a home from point A to point B, and there are no constraints on how much it would cost, or how quickly it needs to be done (weather forecast for the next 3 days is sunny and warm), then the moving team could simply just put stuff into the truck, drive over to the new house, drop off the stuff, and repeat until the entire house has moved. A lot of times however, there are constraints that forces us to optimize our strategy — for example, the move must be done under 8 hours because the old house keys needs to handed over to the next tenants by then. Suddenly, the options on the table get limited, forcing us to re-evaluate options. Defining a clear North Star up front keeps us grounded in our decision making. It sounds so simple, but as I think back to my project delivery experiences, there are so many times where anchoring on the North Star has saved a project from incurring additional complexities, or taken on additional scope that is off the critical path. One of my first projects at Slalom had us building an MVP charting product for a healthcare technology company, designed to simplify a patient’s journey through a clinic visit. It had an aggressive delivery timeline and allowed little room for error. We frequently referred back to our North Star during scope discussion and technical approach meetings to ensure that we were focused and making balanced decisions that met the criteria for success.
A team that knows how to team.
Oftentimes, when we look to bring someone on board we try to find the smartest, most brilliant people available. While strong talent is important, a key ingredient (that sometimes gets overlooked) is how well the person will gel with the rest of the team. Project delivery is the ultimate team sport, and going back to our moving analogy, an efficient moving team has individuals who each play their part. Packers pack and make sure that our expensive furniture doesn’t get scuffed during the move. Lifters have the endurance to carry in and out hundreds of kilograms of stuff every day. And moving leads coordinate the tetris-ing of boxes inside the truck to make sure space use is being maximized to avoid making another trip.
Translate it to project delivery — every team member, from Scrum Masters, to Software Developers, to Quality Engineers, to Product Owners all have a role to play. When they clearly understand their position on the field, and have established patterns to work with each other, incredible things happen. Couple all of this with passion and desire to advance their craft, we then find ourselves in fortuitous cycle where efficiency increases, skills evolve, happiness overflows, and results follow.
In the summer of 2018, Slalom engaged work with a large loyalty player in Canada to help modernize and migrate their core platforms to the cloud. We landed three cross-functional development pods over a course of 6 weeks and had them collaborating with the client development teams and building out critical services against a complex microservices-based architecture. While the Slalom pods brought strong technical chops to the table, it was their ability to synergize as a team, and their effectiveness at partnering with the client development teams that stood out. This ultimately led to a successful delivery effort.
Proven, consistent, re-playable approach.
The vehicle in which all of this translates to project delivery success is the process. Everyone who’s looking to extract a bit more efficiency falls back on a consistent, proven process. If you’re able to sprinkle in some automation, even better! During the summer of 2019, when I observed how the movers were able to pack my house, store all my possessions in a truck, then deliver and offload it into the new home, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone knew what needed to be done, the role each of them would play in the move, when and what needed to happen, detailed all the way down to lunch and coffee breaks! It was clear that this is something they’d done before, and regardless of which moving team they’re placed in each day, they knew how to engage. This translates to project delivery, having a process that is both flexible and disciplined enough to extract the efficiency without trading off the creativity of a team is critical!
A well-defined, consistent process is the mechanism that allows organizations (like ours) to scale across the continent, land engineering members on a brand new team, shifted to high gear and raring to go! This has been a tremendous help to our clients who are looking to tap that scale button in order to expedite their delivery timeframes. I think about some of the larger, multi-pod programs we’ve worked on, ones typically involving complex technical architectures and requirements. Our ability to go from identifying the demand, to pulling together a team from various build centres, to onboarding engineers into the client environment, to sprint planning, to effectively executing on stories — all within a 3-week timeframe has definitely impressed our client stakeholders. And it’s all possible because our teams don’t need to relearn the delivery process — they just need to familiarize themselves with business context and the product backlog.
The Wrap Up
Suffice it to say, project delivery is complex. Whether you’re building a web portal or stitching together a complex tapestry of system integrations, the ability to maximize a team’s efficiency during delivery is vital to the success of the program! There are a lot of factors that influence how efficient a team can be, some out of our control, and some within it. The good news is that if we’re able to be disciplined across the three efficiency ingredients — relentless focus on the North Star, strong synergy in teaming, and consistent process — then our odds of delivering a successful project drastically improve.
At Slalom Build, we have a strong, scalable value proposition around these three ingredients, and more importantly, our builders are passionate about using technology to solve meaningful problems for our clients.
