Innovative Executive Leadership
An international publishing company, based in Minnesota, had experienced some excellent business growth over a 3 year period. However, the maturity of their organization & staff, had not kept pace, so they asked Mr. Knight to use his Executive Leadership skills, and Chartered Engineer experience, to correct the situation.
The development groups were in significant disarray. Two teams were performing at an acceptable level, two were “hit & miss”, and the other two were very poor. Morale was low, and people were leaving for more attractive opportunities elsewhere. Valuable, undocumented knowledge, was being lost.
Mr. Knight introduced a comprehensive program of his own called "Improving Engineering" to address these problems. This program had many facets, and allowed for continuous improvement in all areas, while immediately tackling the worst problems.
The attrition ceased, and morale rose higher and higher. The staff say it is now higher than it has ever been, and key people who left, returned.
Team Effectiveness
Having addressed the individual staff effectiveness and development productivity, the next step was to address the effectiveness of the various development teams. Mr. Knight reviewed each team, one-by-one, and determined their strengths & weaknesses, then set about eliminating the weaknesses and building on the strengths.
CMMI Model
Mr. Knight was unhappy with the progress of a process improvement project (using CMMI). He abandoned their approach of copying a similar company's model, with its many hundreds of documents & procedures, and instead organized a lightweight, role-based CMMI model (OSSP), focusing on checklists (rather than lengthy procedures), point & click mapping, etc. This was rolled out on-time on with only 19 formally-required artifacts.
New Technologies
Mr. Knight also made a significant contribution in the technical arena. Upon reviewing the systems, he believed that they were in danger of falling into atrophy over the coming years, since they were based on ageing technologies. He therefore started a program to look into new applicable technologies, which represented not just a more modern approach, but would also bring significant commercial advantages (i.e. create / support new sales opportunities). The technologies he finally selected were:
- Service Oriented Architecture
- Business Process Modeling
- Content Management
He also introduced Data Quality tools to address perceived quality issues in the data coming from a new acquisition.
Acquisition Challenges & Governance
As part of an acquisition that occurred just before Mr. Knight was engaged, he took responsibility for development in Pennsylvania and Illinois, and was alarmed to find out that all areas of the development process were severely challenged; including Governance, Development, QA, Release, and Escalation. They had missed their 3rd committed delivery date in-a-row to a major international customer, and were about to miss the 4th date & lose their biggest customer.
"This was typical of an engineering group that had been organized by non-development professionals" Mr. Knight explained "From a high level, what they were doing made sense, but in reality, it was failing badly". Mr. Knight brought his expertise to bear, and he quickly put together a plan to stabilize the situation. They made the 4th code delivery on-time.
He analyzed the flow of work around development, and determined where changes were needed to stabilize the workflow through development, so that a far higher standard of planning could be implemented. The first of those areas was Governance, where a chaotic 3-4 hour meeting of very senior executives was being used to set priorities & assign work. This body would change the development priorities every month. He determined the need for a set of parallel pre-Governance meetings to take place, where Subject Matter Expert business representatives & development management determined the priorities & critical dates on an area-by-area basis. The first governance meeting with this new model took just 1 hour, and there was just 1 change to the 600 items that were presented in the materials. This was recognized as a great improvement by all, and helped stabilize the inputs to development, thus allowing better development planning.
Mr. Knight carried out the above improvements & restructure, while managing the development of new software features for the main business that generated an additional $30MM in sales that year.