Engineers have asked for more autonomy: now we need to prove why

To ensure modern development practices are maintained in large organisations and we don’t loop back to overly-detailed three-year Gantt charts, engineers need to prove their value to customers, writes Jatil Damania, director of delivery at Contino

As more organisations are moving towards modern development practices, they are mirroring established engineering models of fast-moving companies like Netflix & Spotify. This is a big shift in practices for traditional companies who used to operate in command-and-control policies with project plans and three-year programs.

Traditional companies are now allowing engineering teams more autonomy and freedom. They have made this shift to ‘engineering first’ on the back of promises of higher ROI and value proposition.

But to ensure this model is maintained, engineering teams need to demonstrate that this model does work better and provides its customers the benefits they’ve been promised. If they don’t, these models may disappear from large organisations and we may revert back to overly-detailed three-year Gantt charts

But what are the steps engineering teams can take to start delivering on those promises that spurred this autonomy-shift?

Go on call

If you’re scared to support your own feature, that probably means you don’t have confidence that it will work. Having bug fixes as someone else’s problem will give you less visibility into the pain points and will result in work coming in from ‘problem management’.

If you are part of the team that is discovering and understanding bugs, you should talk more thoroughly with the product teams on why certain fixes need to be prioritised. This will help your team get more ownership, and start eradicating dreaded technical debt, as you can fix it from the customer perspective.

Companies are making the shift to ‘engineering first’ on the basis of the promise of ROI and value proposition. We’ve heard the reasons: faster time-to-market, customer-centricity, less downtime. But to ensure these models are maintained in large organisations and we don’t loop back to overly-detailed three-year Gantt charts, let’s prove to our customers that this way is better.

• Photo credit: Campaign Creators