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Survey Analysis

Rating questions

  • There is broad satisfaction with the state of Autonomy and Experimentation
  • Nobody assigned a negative score towards quality, and a large majority is happy
  • CI/CD maturity and documentation are clear focus areas: CI/CD maturity in particular has the most negative answers.
  • Communication and feedback could use improvement but it is unclear how

Actionable insights:

  • We should encode the current autonomy of teams and degree of experimention in our culture, and celebrate it.
  • We need to look at how we can improve the satisfaction with CI/CD and documentation. With CI/CD there are many (measurable) improvements we can aim for.

Textual comments

Note: The dataset was small enough that manual analysis was feasible. We should be wary to draw broad conclusions from specific comments.

Ownership/Autonomy

  • Many comments mention that their team owns the whole product and requirements.
  • Multiple comments mention satisfaction with their Product Owner.
  • Two negative comments stand out: One complains that they do not have ownership over the what, only the how. The other mentions that they have ownership but not independence: Tickets for other teams lay around for too long and too many critical applications fall on one team.

Documentation

  • Large variance in where documentation is located: Github, wiki, sharepoint.
  • Teams have various rituals to share knowledge: Explicit knowledge sessions, pair programming, code comments. Actionable insights: We could look into which method works the best for cross-team collaboration and discovery of documentation. We should also critically reflect on the need for certain kinds of (explicit) documentation.

CI/CD

  • Most people are satisfied with the CI/CD solution employed by their team.
  • There are some outliers: going by cost center it seems Plant IT is very unhappy with their CI/CD maturity Actionable insights: We should make sure CI/CD is the standard going forward and suggest to allocate more resources towards teams that report their CI/CD is not mature yet.

Experimentation

  • There is a lot of satisfaction here and people want more
  • Some people comment that major improvements to their domain were achieved through experimentation.
  • A major theme in experimentation is the replacement of legacy or otherwise unsatisfying parts of the domain. Actionable insights: We should celebrate experimentation and stress that we observe significant improvements in quality and maintainability by enabling experimentation. This relates to autonomy, in the sense that engineers should have a large voice in determining the what.

Quality

  • The most frequently mentioned practices are code reviews, tests and elimination of technical debt.
  • Some mention code review as an explicit acceptance criterium, others mention it more passively. Actionable insights: We could create guidelines regarding what Storio Group considers a good code review or test suite, as there is for technical debt elimination(10-20% rule)

Communication

  • The comments are generally positive, mentioning trust, openness and constant feedback
  • Comments do not really reflect the mild score

Cost center analysis

I’ve analysed the ratings also per cost center: I chose cost center over manager because it maps better to teams (Some teams share a manager, and some team members have a different manager, if they are the PO for example). The mapping of cost center to team is incomplete, I have asked for help regarding this. Cost centers also do not represent teams perfectly, so there is still some noise in this data. The information presented here is not necesarily complete due to the participation rate (40%) and low sample size. Finally this survey is confidential so please do not spread this information until we have a complete picture.

Three cost centers stand out on the whole: 3300(IT Editors), 3800 (IT Resnap) and 3400 (IT Plant). They are significantly less satisfied than other teams. IT Editors are overall not happy with documentation and experimentation compared to other teams. For IT Plant 3 out of 4 people rated below 3 on CI/CD maturity, and 2 out of 4 rated below 3 on communication and ownership. Finally IT Resnap scores lower on Quality and CI/CD satisfaction then other parts of the company, and slightly on documentation.

Following up on cost centers

  • We can do in-depth sessions with these teams to get a better picture and see if their or Storio Group’s engineering culture needs improvement there
  • When we start recommending a practical implementation we can request to specifically allocate resources to the biggest gaps.