Executing an Engineering Strategy

Aligning expectations is crucial for the right execution

I divided the topic into four posts/emails.

1. Part I. What the heck is Strategy?

2. Part II. Understanding the high-stake problem.

3. Part III. Giving direction and coherent action.

4. Part IV. Executing an Engineering Strategy [This post]

5. Engineering Strategy Template

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Executing an Engineering Strategy is as crucial as Designing a Good Engineering Strategy.

As I shared in Designing Engineering Strategy Part III, you can use the Coherent Actions as a Pull System, where the team members pull the Coherent Actions to be done instead of you pushing those to them.

To create this sense of “I want to lead this Coherent Action”, we used a template like the following:

Here is an example:

Where people show their interest in performing that Coherent Action as:

The Importance of Expectations when you do Pull Based System

Compared to a Push Based System, where there is a person in charge of coordinating all the actions and ensuring they are properly executed, a Pull Based System might not be that obvious which are the different responsibilities of each team member.

During an Execution, there are at least three actors:

• Who led the Engineering Strategy Design

• Coherent Action Lead

• Coherent Action Helper

And between them, you need to align the expectations of who will do what.

Planning Expectations

• When will we hold a kick-off meeting to align the Coherent Action Expectations?

• How much effort will it require?

Execution Expectations

• How much team time will we dedicate in each team sprint?

• When will we do checkpoints to see the progress?

• How many team members do we need for this coherent action?

Reporting Expectations

• How will we report the progress?

• Who is responsible for making progress visible to everyone?

Those are some of the expectations I will align next time we design a Pull Based Engineering Execution. I hope it helped you! 😄

Meme for you

Index

1. Part I. What the heck is Strategy?

2. Part II. Understanding the high-stake problem.

3. Part III. Giving direction and coherent action.

4. Part IV. Executing an Engineering Strategy [This post]

License

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