Programs and Processes
Hey everyone!
Long time no see, the past few weeks, I've been very focused on several topics that took a lot of my time, and I couldn't find inner peace to sit down and write a piece that I felt happy with.
I've focused on managing processes and programs for the past few weeks. Both were trying to scale engineering practices across organizations of different sizes.
In general, we're looking into having the teams retain their autonomy but adding a thin layer of governance on top such that we keep the teams from slowing down or getting into fighting the nitty-gritty details of each project or decision they're trying to take.
Empowering, and making teams and people thrive in the organization, is also something I've made my main focus. It's less about having things "because we said so, "Instead, I'm working to empower and work with teams to have them experience the benefits of the new approaches and gain buy-in across the organization.
On the other hand, managing programs is one of the hats we need to wear as staff engineers; maybe not at the dedicated Program Manager skill level, but from time to time, we'll need to run a program where we need to help the multiple teams organize across, research the context if we tried before, why those attempts failed? Define a north star, manage risk, unblock teams, and communicate across and with leadership.
This has been an exciting exercise. I've done it a few times before, but mostly on more controlled projects, where either they were already started and needed to cross the finish line or at the beginning where soul-searching was occurring, and the later parts could be delegated entirely.
Program management also requires skills in whatever tools the company expects to be updated with whatever is happening in the program. Jira? Confluence? Emails? Check, be good in sending weekly or bi-weekly updates, and any risks, be quick to surface them.
Do you have any recommendations when scaling processes across an organization? Going from 10 to 20 to 50 to 80 to 100 to 1000 people? Or do you have any suggestions on managing projects?
Some readings I found interesting on both the spaces I'm working on:
- Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps
- Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally
- The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
- Get on Track: How to Build, Run, and Level Up Your Program Management Office
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