- Establish monthly objectives and aim for at least three key outcomes. These objectives should be clearly communicated to team members, so everyone is aligned and working towards same goals. By setting monthly objectives, the team will have a clear sense of what they need to achieve and can prioritize their work accordingly. It’s recommended to break down the objectives into actionable steps and assign responsibilities accordingly.
- When defining objectives, it’s essential to involve all the relevant stakeholders,product partners, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security and Infrastructure teams. By doing this, you can ensure that the objectives are aligned with the broader organizational goals and that all relevant factors are taken into account. By considering the perspectives of different teams, you can avoid potential roadblocks or conflicting priorities that could hinder progress. When working with product partners, it’s important to have a clear understanding of their vision and customer needs to ensure that the objectives are aligned with the product roadmap. By involving all relevant stakeholders, you can ensure that your team’s objectives are comprehensive, realistic and effective.
- To have a successful engineering excellence strategy, it’s important to start small while keeping the long-term vision in mind. Focusing on small, achievable goals can help build momentum and create a sense of accomplishment, which can help motivate the team and build confidence.
- To maintain high level of engineering excellence, it’s important to keep track of progress and regularly review the team’s performance in achieving the objectives. Hold the team accountable, it’s essential to establish clear responsibilities for every task and ensure that everyone understands their role in achieving the objectives. This can help identify any unfinished tasks and roadblocks that are hindering progress.
- Maintain regular check points can help identify any areas that need improvements such as skill gaps, process inefficiencies or communication breakdowns. By doing this, you can ensure team is making progress, celebrate accomplishments and ensure team is aligned with broader organizational goals.
- Convert the objectives into key outcomes and derive key metrics, socialize them to stakeholders, and establishing a regular reporting cadence and communication channels, you can ensure that the team is working towards the same objectives.
- It’s important to look beyond technical uplift and explore other areas for improvement. This can include identifying and addressing process inefficiencies, decommissioning outdated or unnecessary code, refactoring existing code, implementing automation, and enforcing best engineering practices.You can always be the first one to bring a change.
- Don’t be a one man army. When tasks have dependencies on external teams, it’s essential to collaborate, engage, and delegate to those teams.It will foster a culture of team work, communication, and collaboration which lead to improved performance and a stronger, efficient team.
- Attend tech talks and local events and share your team’s journey with as many people as possible. This can include sharing your successes, challenges, lessons learned with others in the industry and ask for their feedback and opinions. You can also gain valuable insights from others, and continue to improve your team’s engineering excellence.
- Engineering excellence is not something that can be achieved overnight. Instead, it is a continuous journey that requires ongoing effort, dedication, and a commitment to excellence, it must be embedded in the team culture and become an integral part of team’s way of working.
