Redesigning teams for high-performance engineering requires transformation at multiple levels
Work culture plays a vital role in driving organisational performance. Investing in the creation of a strong engineering culture has the potential to drive the delivery of a superior quality of work, the development of a high-performance mindset, and enhanced productivity. This requires an environment that promotes transparency, trust, mutual respect, and a desire to improve, where employees can thrive and excel in ideation.
Teams that collaborate and co-create effectively have a direct and positive influence on business outcomes – from facilitating faster time to market to creating delightful customer experiences to delivering innovative solutions. A well-designed team structure promotes enhanced efficiency and creates development capacity that can be redeployed to create more business value.
When redesigning team structures, ensuring teams have the necessary resources, tools, and platforms to adopt strong technical practices is the starting point. Teams can be set up either as component teams – by technology skill or function – or as feature teams or pods that are cross-functional with ownership to deliver end-to-end. Transitioning to a feature pod requires organisations to create appropriate roles within the team and empower the team to operate independently, resulting in fast and efficient deliveries for clients. This is an evolving journey tracing the maturity curve, where teams start off as distributed across sites to later become self-contained with engineering, testing, and product roles embedded within the pod.
High-performing teams demonstrate characteristics such as close integration with businesses, pride in problem-solving, business or domain acumen, a strong work ethic, and elevated team engagement. These teams also demonstrate a high degree of ownership and accountability, resulting in increased agility and opportunities to innovate across all levels – products, solutions, and processes. Additionally, in-person collaboration catalyses deeper team engagement and a sense of belonging within the team. This desired team structure combined with the adoption of good Agile practices and a strong engineering discipline paves the path for high performance.
Vice President, Information Technology, Global Services,
Fiserv
By having a product owner working alongside the team, the product design and delivery can be taken forward by the engineering pod, as the team has the right level of expertise in architecture, development, testing, implementation, and production support. To witness a significant positive impact on business results, close collaboration between product managers and product development/engineering teams in an Agile environment, with regular feedback loops and iterative rollout of features, is imperative. Continuous improvement and sharing feedback from clients with the product development/engineering teams can make the product more robust, reliable, and capable to address customer needs on a real-time basis.
Redesigning teams for high-performance engineering requires transformation at multiple levels. Besides looking at team structures and optimising the roles for a self-contained pod, teams require the ability to self-assess against attributes such as team culture, technical skills, and technology processes and practices, using an assessment mechanism and a playbook. Such a transformation can yield tremendous results in terms of accomplishing effective and efficient solution delivery while driving operational excellence.
