PART II - Optimisation

This article marks Part II - Optimisation of a three-article series for tech leaders covering Scaling Up, Optimisation, and Scaling Down.?

If you missed Part I - Scaling Up, you can find it here .

PART II - Optimisation

Companies go from scaling to optimising in a split of a second.

Mostly for 2 reasons:

1. There’s always a point in time, in which throwing money to scale is no longer possible or even desirable.
2. Even during growth stages, it is always good to pause, breathe and optimise the mayhem that gets installed at times. You do not want your org to grow without contention.

As a tech leader you need a few strategies when that time comes.?

Here’s my top selection:

1. Continuous improvement
2. Re-shuffling the org
3. Declutter
4. Limit your Partnerships
5. Re-focus and re-prioritise?
6. Build Insights
7. Develop talent
8. InSource Practices

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is often touted as a buzzword, yet its effectiveness hinges on a dedication to small, incremental changes over sweeping transformations.

Begin by pinpointing bottlenecks in your product development processes, often gleaned from team feedback, or in your tech services, derived from stakeholder and customer input. Implementing actionable improvements derived from these insights can expedite deliveries, reduce team effort, and yield superior outcomes without significant investments. However, be vigilant in avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy; instead prioritise constructing processes that augment efficiency.

Here's a possible approach:

• Collect Feedback: Gather from across the organisation to identify areas for improvement. Either coming from teams, leaders, stakeholders or customers.
• Prioritise Changes: Select the most impactful changes to address, focusing on those that will yield the greatest benefits. Pareto law might come handy here.
• Establish Measurements Criteria: Define metrics and how you are going to measure success of the proposed changes.
• Pilot the Change: Implement the proposed changes on a small scale to test their effectiveness and gather data.
• Monitor Progress: Continuously monitor the impact of the changes and gather feedback from stakeholders.
• Learn and Scale: Based on the lessons learned from the pilot, iterate on the changes and scale them across the organisation.

Re-Shuffling the org

The organisational structure is dynamic, not set in stone. It must adapt to changing times, needs, priorities, and roadmaps. To maximize efficiency, you can adjust your organisation with the existing resources.?

During periods of exponential growth, teams may have been formed without considering synergies, or areas may have been misaligned. Now is the opportunity to reassess and reorganize. Here are some guidelines:

• Understand Business Needs: Assess the demands placed on the organisation by the business. Ensure you have the necessary capacity to meet these needs and strive to anticipate future requirements. If the business focal point is not where you are concentrating investment, then re-balance and shift capacity.
• Identify Opportunities for Integration: Identify areas where merging or developing teams under the same mission and goals could yield benefits. For example, aligning teams from the same product flow under a unified domain may enhance collaboration and efficiency.
• Address Weak Delivery Points: Identify areas of weakness in delivery and take steps to reinforce them. This may involve reallocating resources, providing additional support, or implementing process improvements.
• Reduce Dependencies: Minimize dependencies between different areas of the organisation to enhance agility and reduce bottlenecks. Streamlining workflows and clarifying roles and responsibilities can help reduce reliance on other teams.

Declutter

During periods of hyper growth and abundant resources, it's common for organisations to accumulate frivolous perks, such as an excess of third-party applications serving similar purposes. For instance, multiple testing platforms, various collaboration tools, or different management & reporting applications may be in use unnecessarily. It's essential to declutter and streamline operations.?

Here's a potential approach:

• Create a Software Inventory: Compile a list of all software applications being used, along with their intended purposes and which teams utilize them.
• Assess Impact: Evaluate the impact of removing some applications by conducting surveys and determining the true value these tools provide to different teams.
• Establish Guidelines: Define and standardise tools and processes to minimize the proliferation of different software for the same usage.
• Perform Cleanup: Begin the decluttering process by removing redundant or unnecessary applications.

Despite the above considerations, it's crucial to remain open to experimenting with new tools. Teams may identify potential added value and efficiencies that can significantly benefit the organisation.

Limit your Partnerships

Be cautious not to overextend your partnerships.?

While it may be tempting to engage with numerous partners for flexibility and access to talent pools, this approach can lead to challenges. Managing multiple relationships can become time-consuming, and conflicts may arise between partners. It's advisable to limit partnerships to the level of niche skills required.?

A possible suggestion:

• Keep two key partners for broader usage, including major initiatives - usually the ones with greater flexibility and more generic roles.
• Engage with additional partners only for specialised skills that align with specific needs.

Focus and re-prioritise

To ensure a focused and prioritised approach, it's essential to emphasise the business value and establish clear business cases. Learning to say no more often is crucial, as well as operating under the assumption of zero growth to prioritise effectively.?

Here's a potential approach:

• Allocate Capacity for Maintenance and Support: Reserve a portion of your total capacity for maintenance and support activities. Utilize historical metrics to determine the appropriate allocation for each team or domain.
• Address External Commitments: Prioritise firm external commitments and allocate resources accordingly. Ring-fence teams dedicated to meeting these deadlines to ensure they are not compromised. If capacity is insufficient, engage in discussions with the business to reassess commitments and explore alternative options.
• Assess Available Capacity: Evaluate remaining capacity after addressing maintenance, support, and external commitments. Prioritise initiatives based on company strategy and business value, including your own tech initiatives essential for supporting business scalability.

The key takeaway is to recognise that capacity and resources are limited. By operating under the premise of zero growth, you can cultivate a mindset that encourages careful consideration and judicious decision-making. This approach ensures a better utilisation of resources, fulfilment of commitments, and continued evolution of your technology capabilities to support business growth.

Build Insights

Improvement requires measurement and a clear understanding of your direction and progress relative to targets. Establishing the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), tracking them effectively, and deriving actionable insights from the data are essential components of success. Here's a proposed approach:

• Leverage Existing Systems and Processes: Capitalize on systems and processes already in place to collect various data points related to product development performance, delivery metrics, portfolio management, service levels, etc. Examples include cycle time, lead time, on-time delivery, estimated vs. realised business value, time to acknowledge incidents, time to resolve issues, mean time between failures and system availability.
• Extract Meaningful Insights: Numbers alone are insufficient; it's crucial to analyse and interpret the data to extract meaningful insights. Look for correlations, trends, and patterns across multiple variables to gain a deeper understanding of performance and areas for improvement.
• Establish a Performance Cockpit: Develop a centralised dashboard or reporting mechanism to track and report on key metrics regularly. This allows for real-time awareness of performance against targets, facilitating timely adjustments and informed decision-making.

Develop Talent

You've already onboarded highly qualified talent, but in a fast-paced environment, it's crucial to ensure continuous skill development among your teams. This will increase delivery speed and quality. Here's how you can do it:

• Create Tailored Development Plans: Build development plans for teams and individuals, aligning with their career goals and growth areas.
• Collaborate with People Development Team: Work closely with your people development team to identify and leverage the best training programs available or to design customised training initiatives tailored to your organisation's needs.
• Prioritise Training: Make training a priority within your organisation, ensuring that leadership acknowledges its importance and allocates resources accordingly.
• Facilitate Workshops and Knowledge Sharing: Encourage participation in workshops and facilitate opportunities for teams to share their experiences and learn from one another.

InSource Practices

To drive innovation, cost-efficiency, and expedited delivery, harness your internal resources and expertise by using InSource practices, rather than relying heavily on external vendors or outsourcing. This strategy not only aligns with the concept of limiting partnerships but also fosters higher engagement, reduces dependencies, and encourages knowledge sharing among teams. Here's a suggested approach:

• Establish Clear Governance Structures: Define roles, responsibilities, processes, and tools for issue tracking, version control, and collaboration.
• Foster Cross-Functional Teams: Comprising members with diverse skills and expertise to tackle complex challenges collaboratively.
• Establish Community Guidelines: Define coding standards and security policies to ensure consistency and adherence to best practices across the coding repository.
• Select Tech Champions: Appoint individuals as Tech Champions to advocate for and promote best practices, innovation, and continuous improvement within the organisation.
• Perform Periodic Audits: Conduct regular audits focusing on security, compliance, and code quality to identify areas for improvement and ensure adherence to standards.
• Establish Clear Versioning Policies and Release Management Practices: To streamline the deployment process and minimize disruptions.
• Standardise Dependency Management: For managing dependencies across projects.
• Track KPIs: Monitor key performance indicators such as contributor engagement, code quality, and productivity impact to assess the effectiveness of internal processes and initiatives.

Balancing growth, optimisation, and innovation is essential for long-term success.?

While optimisation is crucial for achieving efficiencies, it's equally important to maintain a level of experimentation and innovation to drive future growth.

Stay tuned for the last part - PART III - Scaling Down.

Take Care,

Helder