The Challenge: Addressing Shallow Communication in a Newly Re-Missioned Team In 2019, I worked with a feature team that was about to re-mission, and that would receive expanded responsibilities. The re-missioning necessitated a wider range of skills which resulted in the addition of three new team members. Initial Team Structure and Challenges Prior to the re-missioning, the team consisted of seven members, an Engineering Manager (EM), and a Product Manager (PM). Despite having worked together for over a year, communication within the team remained somewhat superficial and some critical conversations were not taking place. During one-on-one meetings between the EM and team members, topics surfaced that would have been more…
Case Study – Overwhelmed Engineering Managers: Causes and Solutions
The Challenge: Role Complexity and Overwhelm Following a reorganization at one of my clients, various formal and informal leadership roles were consolidated into a new position—the Engineering Manager. This role encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, from recruitment and career development to handling expenses, internal mobility, product and value creation, collaboration and processes, and technology. The large scale of the organization, along with technical interdependencies between teams, exacerbated the situation. Within two years, no two Engineering Managers were executing the role in the same manner. As a result, certain aspects were inevitably neglected, affecting team performance, value creation, or quality. The Study: A Comprehensive Analysis Instead of running a…
Case Study – Agile Transformation at Avanza Bank
Overview Avanza Bank underwent a comprehensive agile transformation to address internal inefficiencies and enhance its market responsiveness. Initiated by a need to overcome inter-team dependencies, increasing lead time to change, decreasing staff motivation, and leadership silos, the transformation sought to implement systemic changes across the organization, aligning with its customer-first culture. The Challenge Initially, Avanza’s structure comprised component teams that had naturally evolved as the organization scaled. This setup, while beneficial in the early stages, had led to deepened dependencies among teams, slowing down decision-making and product delivery. On average, teams depended on >5 other teams to complete their work. Visualization of how many teams a standard project…
Case Study – Optimizing Cycle Time for Data Center Maintenance
Overview Most teams do not measure lead time and cycle time [1], missing opportunities to improve their system’s value flow. Here’s an example of how a data center team I worked with managed to reduce their cycle time from 32 days to 5 days by starting to measure it. Initial Setup and Discovery We visualized our work on a physical board and tracked our metrics manually because the available tools (Jira, Trello, LeanKit Kanban) did not meet our specific needs. We did not know what we would discover, but once we measured our metrics, we learned that our cycle time was significantly higher whenever work involved scaling a part…