?What is Engineering Operations
Engineering operations is a growing field that aims to support and enable the engineering organization to grow quickly and in a way that maintains synergy and organizational alignment, while focusing on continous and improved Software Delivery.
Engineering Ops teams are responsible for the program management of the software delivery and managing cross-team projects in development, such as quarterly roadmaps and complex technical capabilities, building and improving processes and requirements, implementing information systems, and creating metrics to measure continuous improvement.
Accordingly, the team typically consists of a mix of people with a background in business consulting, project managers with an emphasis on software development projects, Agile Coaches/Scrum Masters, and analysts. In relatively small organizations, there is one person responsible for all of these areas, and in larger organizations, the team is composed of several people, each of whom specializes in one or more areas.
Engineering Operations as part of the company's scale journey
Engineering Operations are the team that focuses on continous improvement of the engineering processes and tools and leads the journey of scaling the Engineering to support the hyper growth of the whole organization.
The Engineering Operations team is supposed to lead these scaling processes in the Engineering and its main adjacent departments- Product and Technical Support.
The wisdom of the journey lies not only in how the engineering should work 5 years from now, but in how to get there. Many can rewrite the book on incredibly precise processes, but the added value of the Engineering Operations team is the ability to take an organization at a certain level of maturity, which is in a crazy run, and know how to advance it step by step towards that maturity. When building a product, we are constantly adding one capability after another. We do the same in organizational processes and tools: we are moving forward every time one step forward. And the wisdom is to know how to break down the process into small steps that are suitable for the organization we have reached.
?What do Engineering Operations do
The main content areas in which Engineering Ops professionals work are:
- Software Delivery Project Management – to accompany development teams in practice in managing development itself and in implementing the chosen development methodology. For example: implementing Scrum in teams or building and tracking the implementation of a complex development plan.
- Building, improving and implementing work processes – identifying places where processes are not happening properly, the tools do not properly support the process, or there is room for improvement in efficiency. In addition to the identification itself, this team will be responsible for diagnosing the need, building, and implementing the appropriate process and supporting tools. For example – building a change management process or transferring all teams to a unified development process.
- Analysis, Configuration and Implementation of information systems – as a complementary content world to work processes, the world of information systems that supports the proposed processes requires definition and analysis and, after building the process, correct adaptation and implementation according to the limitations of the tools.
- Building, Operating and analyzing data infrastructure for development analysis– for example, creating dashboards that allow different interfaces to get a broad picture, and for managers to understand the status in depth, identify red lights, and know how to fix accordingly.
Who are the Engineering Operations teams?
Engineering Operations professionals are project-oriented, with the ability to learn quickly and enter new content areas. They have a background in Agile methodologies and their practical implementation. They have diagnostic, analytical, and implementation skills like business consultants and analysts, and they love technology and have a burning passion for optimization and continous improvement. And above all, they are people’s people. They combine emotional skills of empathy, flexibility, and high communication to drive without authority alongside uncompromising quality and analytical and macro-vision skills.