The Engineering Leader

A Moment to Consider the Alignment of People Process and Technology

March 22, 2022 Steve Westgarth Season 1 Episode 7
The Engineering Leader
A Moment to Consider the Alignment of People Process and Technology
Show Notes Transcript

In this moment some of my guests reflect upon strategies that they have successfully applied to align people process and technology. This common theme is a consistent challenge across organisations and the alignment strategies suggested in this moment are applicable in every industry.

Steve Westgarth:

My name is Steve Westgarth. And this is the engineering leader. Let me tell you a secret, you also write bad code. If you disagree, you may as well switch off. One of the themes that I've noticed in chatting to guests on the engineering leader is the importance of people process and technology coming together in order to enable delivery of great solutions for our organisations and customers. In this moment, some of my guests reflect upon strategies that they have successfully applied to align these three pillars.

Adam Rush:

For me, it's about defining some key ways of working. So in terms of just like, the software lifecycle, right, how do we raise a PR? How do we do a code review? How do we, you know, these are like fundamental things that we do in within engineering teams, but it's very good to sort of define those as a team. So we get together, you know, how do we perform a code review? Is it one person to person? Do we approve with some comments, you know, there's all these kind of little things that you need to sort of clarify as a team. And once you've kind of gone through that process, and everyone knows, almost like the rulebook, if you like, you know, not necessarily want to enforce, but everyone knows how we all work together.

Michelle Kearns:

Everybody pulled out all the stops. And when I moved over to boots, we were working on trying to deliver a software to support the COVID vaccination journey within boots, or the sorry, the PCR journey within boots on the COVID vaccination journey as well. But what we did is we worked with the HSE, we worked with other organisations to figure out how can we do it the best. And I think that's one thing that traditionally, I think people can be quite reticent to just make decisions and get over things. Well, we didn't have a choice, we just had to get on and do it. And we had to deliver something good. And we had to, we had to make sure that it worked for everyone. I think what I really, really found fascinating was just how willing people were to change all the time. And how for different cohorts and different age groups from a software engineering perspective, you know, you're changing small little things like, you know, you're eligible now, because you're over 60 Oh, now you're eligible, because you're over 50. But that's still deploying new code every time because you're changing the decision engine in the background, you're changing what applies, what doesn't apply, you know, who's eligible for a vaccine? Now? Who's eligible for one nature? How are you going to try and keep that information? What we find is the teams that we were working with, they just they helped us and they supported us to get back to where it needed to be?

Rob Merrett:

What is going to be the people adoption of it, how you're going to skill people to use it? How are you going to bring that technology into your business processes? Should your business processes change as a result of having that technology? And that's always a really interesting one, when you're going from a world where perhaps you had a very paper based process to, let's say, case management system, for example, that automates a lot. So it's a big mindset change. And then, I guess, once you've got the technology in, because you never really see a tool where you've got all of the benefit of the tool on day one. So it comes for me, it comes to that kind of product owner mindset of how do you continue to leverage the tool or technology to the best of its capability and get the full benefit out of it?

Alex Karp:

Yeah, I think one of the easiest things to do is to is to kind of build trust with the people around you. And I think when people think about making a good first impression, building trust, they think, Oh, I'm going to do something really impressive. Really, really large, really impressive. And then people will, people will respect me. But in reality, it's a lot easier than that. You know, like, in my, in my book I talked about it talked about this idea that building trust doesn't have to, doesn't have to involve really large gestures. When it comes down to it, it's all about setting setting an expectation, and then, you know, achieving that. And so, over time, like as you have more interactions with people where you, you know, set an expectation and you achieve that, that goes a long way towards building that trust that yes, this person, you know, whatever it is that they say they're going to do, they're going to do it.

Steve Westgarth:

If you're enjoying listening to the engineering leader, please take a moment to share a link to the podcast on LinkedIn or Twitter. bringing together people from a diverse range of backgrounds helps to ensure Do we have the knowledge and skills available to solve truly global problems My name is Steve Westgarth and this is the engineering leader