I foster healthy high performance in software engineering teams.
For a decade, I served as a full-time Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in small-to-mid-sized companies and startups at various stages of growth. I subsequently spent more than a decade facilitating transformational change for a wide range of organisations, coaching hundreds of executives in effectiveness, and serving as a fractional CTO. I bring all of this experience to bear in helping technology companies to dramatically improve the performance of their engineering teams.
These engagements often start with an initial consulting period to discover the full scope of improvement opportunities in context, and to help the whole organisation understand the potential impact of change.
Often this is done with the intention of having me implement these changes by continuing within the organisation as a fractional CTO, but the work itself can also serve as a standalone guide to leadership to help them implement change internally.
There are three proven methods that form my comprehensive engineering “health check”.
Engineering Success Plan
Nobody understands the unique challenges facing the engineering team better than the team itself. The key is to bring this forward in a constructive way.
Through a series of surveys, interviews, and workshops, we explore the problems, opportunities, and gaps, drawing out feedback and ideas from all quarters of the engineering team through a safe and structured process. The end result is a “core dump” of the group mind that I then organise, work with the team to prioritise, and turn into a clear action plan to support a step-change in outcomes.
Engineering Team Health Check
Using a proprietary survey based on theories of psychological flow and my own observations of the key traits of healthy, high-performing teams, I quickly gain a snapshot of the individual and team dynamics that are helping or hindering effectiveness.
This approach provides instant feedback and improvement opportunities to each participant, as well as a group picture that I compare against statistically-significant samples to produce a detailed report on the state of the team, as well as next steps required to improve morale, retention, and productivity.
If you would like to see this for yourself, you can take the survey now.
Engineering Technology Health Check
Strategy and team are important ingredients to the success of any group, but in engineering in particular having the right tools, technologies, and procedures is essential.
Through structured feedback, I take the team through a twelve-point inspection of best practices in software engineering. The results are once again compared against statistically-significant samples of other technology companies to identify the most important areas to remediate as well as the key strengths to build upon.
If you would like to learn more about how this comprehensive, methodical, and proven approach can help take your engineering team to the next level, please get in touch.