Ramsay Ashby is a Senior Software Delivery Operations manager, with over a decade of experience working both in and with agile teams. He’s also worked in environments with more traditional methodologies, as well as being part of two agile transformations. He began his career in engineering, initially as a test engineer where he focussed heavily on developing automated tests and automated test frameworks, before moving into development engineering where he was a team lead for a globally distributed team for several years. Today, Ramsay is responsible for presenting and maintaining the suite of internal agile training courses that Skyscanner offers to its employees. Ramsay works closely with a broad spectrum of employees across the business, ranging from recent university graduates up to director level, helping them and their teams to perform at their best.
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Continuous Improvement by the numbers, & the culture
A case study in repeatable use of Team Metrics for continuous improvement at Scale
Team metrics are in vogue. There are a plethora of companies offering tools to support our agile practices, and there is no shortage of books espousing the value of various combinations of metrics that will lead your team(s) to delivery stardom.
Skyscanner would like to share our journey from realising this would enhance our competitive advantage to deploying not just a tool but changing our engineering management culture to being one that valued and utilised these metrics to drive greater improvement at scale. We will share what originally took us down this path, including the signs that change was needed.
We will explain how our understanding of what we needed evolved throughout the exploration process and how we ran trials with teams to understand this better. We will share our interpretation of the most important metrics, the sources we were inspired by and how we expected to need to augment them.
We will talk about the challenges we discovered with adoption, those we predicted and how we altered our plans to adapt to them. We will look at the values we created to assess the various tool providers to find one that would enable our team and, more importantly, reinforce the cultural change that was the fundamental goal of this exercise. At the time of writing, Skyscanner is guiding 80 squads (~600 engineers) through this change. We are seeing good levels of adoption and insights being acted on, having created cross-organisation communities of practice to support this change and bed it in for the long term. We will talk about the principles we have used to drive this adoption.
Key takeaways…
* Gain insight into the benefits, pitfalls, and opportunities possible from establishing a culture of repeatable use of team metrics across a large organisation
* Gain insight into proven techniques to foster bottom-up adoption of team-level metrics