Culture can really set apart productive teams from non-productive teams.

We are constantly striving to create Multi-

skilled Engineers.

We focus on building engineering competencies such as:

 Abstraction: Engineers should be able to deal with a certain level of ambiguity. Level of independence.
Degree to which requirements are defined.
 Complexity: Engineers have the ability to deconstruct and simplify problems. Innovation scope. Degree of
difficulty, efficiency, extensibility, optimization to expect. Ability to deconstruct and simplify problems.
 Delivery Execution: Engineers are able to successfully design, test, build, deploy & operate software that
improves a major portion of a product or application with great quality.
 Collaboration: Influence over implementation, design, architecture, technical strategy, product features,
etc. Degree of influence developing others and driving engineering best practices.
 Continuous Improvement: Improvement of development process (i.e., package management, build, test,
release/deploy, monitor, etc.). Focus on customer experience, operational excellence, software resilience,
maintainability, security.
 Knowledge/Judgment: Understanding of successful design, data structure, and algorithm patterns. Ability
to make good decisions that consider the whole picture including balancing difficult short-term and long-
term trade-offs.

We use a number of approaches to build and access our capabilities, a few examples are:

Moving from ‘I Shaped’ to ‘Comb Shaped’ Engineers

Engineers are becoming multi-skilled. Developers want to keep their skills up to date and learn new technologies
and methods to avoid obsolescence. For example, the number of single technology specialists is reducing and
more developers are joining full-stack groups. As a result, developers are moving from ‘I shaped’ where they have
deep skills in a single area, to ‘Comb shaped’ where they have greater familiarity with a variety of technologies and
underlying processes. We are utilizing a wider variety of platforms and are finding that multi-skilled employees
decrease overall labor costs, provide greater efficiency and have greater job satisfaction.
To build capability to increase our level of talent, we:

 Assess skill levels of our current developers

 Provide training and coaching at Foundation, Advanced and Leadership levels

 Raise the bar on expectations

 Establish a clear career path

We help our people move to ‘Engineers’ instead of ‘SME/Developers’

‘SME/Developers’ are I-shaped practitioners who generally understand the measurable and mechanical aspects of
software. The structure of their roles limits their ability to drive impact beyond code.

‘Engineers’ are developers who not only write code, but are also able to automate testing, leverage modern
technology & tools, and automate as much as possible to achieve continuous deployment and deliver for their team.
They are also horizontally aware and actively join Engineering communities to educate and collaborate on technical
solutions.

DNA Grid

In this simple spreadsheet, we capture all the skills (business and technical) of people in the teams. For every
row/column intersection we capture a number (ranging from 1=Beginner to 4=Expert) in the particular area. When
we sum up the scores – we know which areas we do not have enough expertise on, which people are well rounded
and which people are less rounded and need rotation to build more skills.

Technology Competency Soft Skill

Search
Total

Total
Java

BDD
Play

RES
…

…
Person Track
Name1 QA 3 4 7 2 4 6
Name2 QA 3 3 6 4 3 7
Name3 QA 0 0
Name4 Dev 4 4 8 4 3 7
Name5 Dev 3 3 6 3 4 7
Name6 Dev 3 3 6 0

Aligning People Appraisals to KPI Performance

We have successfully used methods to align appraisals of people in our teams to performance against agreed-upon
SLA’s and KPIs. This ensure an outcome driven recognition culture and drives significant KPI improvement.

Happiness Index

As Leaders we also focus on Happiness Index of our Engineers