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Short-term Strategy

Mission

Use our organizational resources, skills and competencies combined to build a shared Engineering Culture that is a competitive advantage.

Vision

A work environment that sparks innovation, fosters collaboration and allows rapid delivery of high-quality solutions.

Strategy breakdown

The results of the survey combined with the experiences of the pillar team members suggest that the organization has multiple different engineering cultures. We believe that in order for us to improve the engineering culture, we need to find common ground by aligning all existing cultures.

To make progress towards our vision, in H2 of FY21 we aim at aligning the different engineering cultures that currently exist within Storio Group.

Enablers

Our growth initiatives will be supported by the following enablers.

1. Fact based and common language

Every team has their own vocabulary regarding engineering culture and the practices that are part of it.

The goal is to generate a fact based language about the existing cultures and to build a single common language around this understanding. This will help in answering the following questions:

  • What are the similarities?
  • What are the opportunities?

Action plan:

  1. Select a tool to allow us to share documents and participate between teams. It’s important that this is open and easily available to everyone.(SharePoint, Notion.so, Atlassian Confluence)
  2. Create communication etiquette documents:
    • Storio Group engineering culture manifesto
    • Asynchronous (i.e. Slack)
    • Synchronous (i.e. Meetings, Zoom calls)
    • Code Reviews / Pull Requests
    • How to make Engineering decisions (This can be explored later on by introducing Design Documents and Weighted scoring of new technologies)
  3. Gather feedback and tweak if needed the documents
  4. Create spaces for people to communicate:
    • Monthly Knowledge Sharing sessions
    • Monthly Learned lessons sessions
  5. Include the documents and spaces as part of new hires on-boarding process

Metrics:

  • Number of attendees of the Knowledge Sharing sessions
  • Number of attendees of the Learned lesson sessions

Success criteria:

After working on the action plan the following outcomes should be achieved:

  • The tool to share documents between teams is determined
  • The communication etiquette documents are written and shared within the company
  • Monthly Knowledge Sharing and Learned lessons sessions are planned
  • The written documents are used in the onboarding process for the IT department

2. Manifesto validation

It is important to determine if the values identified by us are either applicable/valid in the other teams’ environment or if they are something we should not adopt as a company. The values previously added to the manifesto should be something that is applicable to all IT teams, it can be something that is already in place or teams are at least willing to do. If there’s something that is not part of the company culture (or future vision) we should consider removing it for now. Also, there could be some practices that are not on our list yet, and we could consider adding them.

Having significant differences in how teams adopt a certain culture is not good, because it can undermine the culture itself, or even discredit the company culture. Imagine a candidate for a position in Storio Group talking with persons from different teams about a certain topic, and they have completely different opinions about something that is on culture manifesto, it does not sound good.

So it’s important to validate the Manifesto adherence within all IT teams. If we encounter different opinions we need to understand why such differences exist, and if they are something that the teams are just lagging behind or if it’s something they don’t believe or don’t want to adopt. Based on that feedback, we might review the manifesto and change it.

Action plan:

  1. Schedule a meeting with all IT teams. We can split on this, 2 of us can interview a team each time, so we don’t overload us with so many meetings. And we can invite 2 volunteers from each team. During the interview we can:

    • Present our manifesto.
    • Ask what are the cultural aspects you like most on your team.
    • Ask what are the cultural aspects you don’t like or are not present in your team.
    • Ask what should we as a company do differently or incorporate as a company culture.

  2. Assess or provide assessment tools which the teams can evaluate how they fit into the company culture. If applicable, inquiry teams on why they are not good or scored low at any cultural topics.

The goal is to help teams to evaluate their cultural adherence/maturity by providing the tools for this. And after collecting the data, we can setup focused meetings with teams where low scores/maturity were found.

Metrics:

  • Number of Storio Group IT teams that were interviewed

Success criteria:

After the meetings with Storio Group IT teams, the following outcomes should be achieved:

  • All Storio Group IT teams were interviewed.
  • Every team should agree, or at least partially agree, with 100% of the items in the manifesto.
  • None of the items in the manifesto should be fully disagreed or objected by any of teams.
  • A tool or checklist on the culture manifesto adherence should be published and shared for all teams.

3. Storio Group culture promotion

Without the promotion, few people would be aware of the unified Storio Group engineering culture. With this enabler we want to have the culture defined and available for future reference. After that our colleagues can use it in their day-to-day decisions and in various workflows (like recruiting). We can also initiate further change in our engineering culture with the help of influential employees of the company.

Action plan:

  1. Publish the Storio Group engineering culture manifesto. The manifesto should be available to all company, including all departments and locations. Also the manifesto should be available publicly, at the company’s website and social media (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, recruitment pages, etc), so that candidates can be aware of the company’s culture.
  2. Present the manifesto to the company so that people can start using it in their day-to-day decisions.
  3. Identify influential employees who can be the agents of further change.

Metrics:

  • Number of visitors per year of Storio Group engineering culture manifesto

Add tracking to the manifesto. We’re assuming that if people open the manifesto from time to time they use it in their day-to-day decisions and conversations.

  • Number of people aware of Storio Group engineering culture manifesto

We can also ask people in a survey if they are aware of the manifesto. This should prove the effectiveness of our presentations/interviews.

Success criteria:

  • Everyone in our IT department opens Storio Group engineering culture manifesto at least once in the first year. Meaning number of unique visitor equals number of people in IT department.
  • Everyone in our IT department indicated that they know about our engineering culture manifesto

4. Culture alignment within and across teams

After our manifesto has been promoted and validated, we need to get a baseline for how much we are aligned on our culture. In order to measure how the organization aligns with the desired culture, we need in-depth feedback on how the values are practiced in our day to day work. We need to measure this in two dimensions: Within teams and across teams. We will periodically ask teams to briefly reflect on a completed project with respect to the engineering culture: Which aspects were applied and where did you experience shortcomings. These reports will be collected and compared to see how alignment differs between teams and evolves over time.

Action plan:

Ask tech leads and/or IT managers to complete a short survey that asks to score the five bullet points outlined in the manifesto in two dimensions: How do you perceive the adoption of the culture within your team, and how do you perceive the adoption of the culture in teams you closely work with. Note that we will not ask to specifically rate other teams, only the average adoption of other teams. Using this data we will see where we can improve alignment the most.

Metrics:

  • Number of survey responses

  • Duration of cross team open pull requests

Success criteria:

  • We will measure the initial alignment by the result of the survey in the action plan. The survey is a success if we have responses from all engineering teams, and we obtain actionable insights with which we determine our follow-up steps.
  • Average duration of cross team open pull requests is shorter than it was

Execution

Yearly Roadmap

We will define our yearly roadmap based on the strategy described above and break it down into quarterly OKRs.

Way of working

We will favor an asynchronous model of work so that feedback and collaboration can happen more frequently and easily.