Why I never ran a program without a Project Charter

Lessons on large-scale delivery program management ...

I continue to dig into my past artefacts to showcase my work portfolio. I'm using a multi-pronged approach here: 1\ Showcase my work to prospective employers; 2\ Openly share my work so that others (people I coach, my colleagues and boss, etc.) can benefit; and 3\ Act as my own living knowledge repository.  

I spent a decade climbing up the project management ladder, in the same way I climbed up the software engineering ladder (from junior engineer to principal engineer) - I first started project managing small software product development (2-4 teams with 10 services), then scaled up to large middleware services (20+ teams, 50+ services) as lead delivery owner, then up to full stack systems integration (full stack of all major components: kernel, middleware, integration layers, applications), then program managed a full go-to-market product launch scaling out to including Tech, Business (Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain) & Operations (Customer Care, Retention, Content, Legal, Regulatory) - as senior program manager. I also owned the full plan of starting a business from scratch to launch (a video streaming company) in 8 months. I did a stint in management consulting, running the top 5 business projects for a $3 billion run-rate business, which some companies might call Tier 0/1 initiatives - where I co-ordinated these large-scale programs, as Chief Program Director - delivering through multiple business lines, multiple project management offices and multiple product and engineering teams. In a sense, I served as the CxO program manager, advisor and delivery owner.  

It is with this experience and knowledge, that I dare to share about my work experiences - and I'm not making these things up - you can check my LinkedIn recommendations page for proof.

During my tenure as the lead program director mentioned above, I often found myself picking up and repairing distressed programs - and along the way, I'd help improve team processes and coach the management teams as well. I also ran new business & technology initiatives from scratch, start-to-finish-then-handover. So with this diverse experience, I developed a simple method that helped me navigate both types of program scenarios: either resetting or starting from scratch, the simple, powerful mechanism of a Project Charter document. To this day, I'm surprised to see many program & project managers failing to use the Project Charter in the way it was meant to be used (clarifying the essence), and often find less-experienced, newly minted PMP/Prince2 certified professionals, doing it "by the book". My approach to project charters went much deeper than that...

So what do I mean by using the Project Charter in "clarifying the essence" then?

A seasoned, experienced project leader, chief program director, end-to-end project manager, senior technical program manager, etc - call the roles what you like - in my view, is not about just putting a plan together, working backwards from a deadline or target completion date. No, I believe as senior program leaders must apply their minds to appreciate the bigger picture and create a program structure that becomes the north star in guiding and leading multiple delivery teams. I never started a program without first establishing my project charter, which at the top level, focuses on the following:

• Start by understanding the why. Why is this program needed? Why is it important?
• Move on to understanding the who. Who are the sponsors, stakeholders and teams impacted? Who will be working on the program? "First who, then what"
• A program manager must be sufficiently well-versed with all the roles expected from the program, and work hard to secure the roles needed. Yes, this means the program manager must escalate to get the people needed for the program (on the bus, as well as off the bus). A responsible program manager would raise all these risks & concerns up-front, before officially kicking off the program.
• Clarify the what, including calling out what's missing - Set up the mental model for the program. What is this program about? What is it not about? What's in scope? What's not in scope? What workstreams make up the program? How do all pieces come together?
• Agree, Align, Action - The 3 As of project execution involve agreement on the deliverable, alignment of all parties involved which includes acceptance of their workstreams and ultimately agreeing on the action plan to execute.

Project charters don't necessarily have to be communicated in a written document, a slide deck is more than adequate to communicate the essence. Depending on the business environment and culture (for example, some business cultures prefer slide decks over detailed documents to save reading time, whilst others like Amazon, insist on detailed text narratives). So a seasoned project leader must adapt their style to suit the particular business need & culture of the teams.

In this post, I'm sharing a version of a Project Charter as a slide deck. In a future post, I will share a detailed 50+ page document project charter that involved the launch of a consumer electronics device, the program covered a mix of engineering, business and operations workstreams.

Example Program: Transform Digital Self-Service of a $3 billion run-rate business

I was called in to help reset and kickstart an overarching cross-cutting program to improve a selection of key metrics that would result in increased usage of digital self-service channels, improving customer satisfaction and overall reducing operational costs. This program covered the full value chain delivering the service: 3rd party technology vendors developing phone "mobi" apps using USSD, iOS/Android self-service app, Website, Payments, a hardware kiosk station, set-top box interactive application, integration with internal & 3rd party CRM/Billing systems - and resulting business workflows: finance, customer care & banking channels. Technology teams were spread between the CTO/CIO lines (3 IT pillars), and business teams reported separately to the CEO. The program also served the needs of Group Strategy, Risk & Regulatory. Bringing all these things together requires a steady hand, a tactful negotiator, a strategic and business mindset as well as a strong technology leader. This is why I enjoyed such challenges as these programs were never boring, limited to only tech/engineering.

Enough said, let the slides talk and let me know what you think in the comments!

How I scaled engineering ops excellence to ±10X with Mission Control

Continuing with me sharing my experiences as CTO, in this post I share the actions I took to help improve an engineering organisation's operational health in our journey of scaling an online video streaming platform from 1X to 10X, from May 2017 to October 2020. To get to 10X improvement takes a journey, which I achieved in under 3 years, and after reaching the goal, I decided I'd learnt enough of the CTO experience and exited, after having set up a strong succession leadership pipeline in place. 

To get an idea of some of the major themes that I tackled during this time, as a leader I had to lead from the front, back, left, right setting the direction of my managers to follow (as all of these interventions were new to them), whilst doing my best to respect what came before:

• Establishing the team despite constant re-orgs going on at parent company - getting the right people in the right roles at the right time
• Transforming a rag-tag undisciplined team to a disciplined, clear-headed, focused organised unit 
• Introducing laser focus on product engineering by unbundling non-core video apps to other businesses
• Being critical on the technology platform by establishing a baseline of the architecture, using third party auditors to rate the scalability of the platform
  
• Improving physical infrastructure: networking, compute, storage and data centres. Move away from self-hosted and self managed data centres to partnering, shutting down data centres as needed.
• Build an industrial grade networking stack and leveraging modern peering facilities and overhauling the server infrastructure
• Setting the roadmap for cloud by transitioning first from single region data centres, to multiple data centre deployments, to running multiple stacks simultaneously, introducing containers and microservices then finally getting ready for cloud and leaping first into serverless paradigms
• Embracing cloud partnerships with big players: Akamai, Microsoft, AWS, etc.
• Improving product and engineering delivery by revamping and overhauling the agile work processes and backlog management.
• Introducing communications mechanisms that helped remove doubt and earned trust across the many different business units and teams (we were known as the online pirates doing their own thing)
• Improving risk, governance and security - bringing it to the top, raising awareness
• Creating strategic partnerships internally and externally to leverage skills and expertise I couldn't get in-house or afford to build or manage ourselves
• 
  Introduced technical operations controls - Mission Control, more active management of operations daily, 24/7 with increased focus, planning and prep for peak times, like weekends and major events planning.
• Aggressively reducing costs on key platform components whilst capitalising on gains through economy of scale

In this post, I'm going to share some of the early context and interventions I introduced in my first 3 months on the job, that remain effective to this day, more than five years later: Mission Control Ops.

The dreaded 403 We're sorry, something went wrong

I took over a team that weren't prepared for the intense discipline needed to run and operate a highly available 24/7/365 platform. There were many reasons for this which I might touch on in another most. I recall coining the term "Bloody May" as the month of so many outages, that I wondered: 1\ What on earth have I taken on? 2\ Is my life going to be consumed by work from now on? 3\ Is there any hope for this platform? 4\ How am I going to turn this platform around? 5\ How much is the job worth to me?

It turned out there was going to be many more "Bloody Mays"in 2017 whilst my team set about improving stability. In 2017, the platform experienced outages that racked up about 20 days of downtime in one year. This equates to ± 95% availability, which is unacceptable for a video streaming platform. When I left the team in Oct 2020, we had turned around the platform to reaching 99.5% availability trending higher. Today, 5 years on, I'm told the availability is much higher but their usage profile has drastically changed (reduced the number of concurrent streams to one device only, also reduced their devices supported, moved most of the services to AWS). 

ChatGPT - Whitepaper generation, can it write like a CTO?

In December 2019, after a successful Rugby world cup (despite experiencing technical glitches, I felt my team did well to reach the stage we did, with evolving the technical platform only two years into it's turnaround journey) - I realised that the members of the Board and ExCo, did not fully appreciate the world of online video streaming because they came from the traditional world of satellite broadcast world, where technology stack was largely under their control - and reliability / availability was generally accepted as always on. So, from their perspective, to expect a system to be either "1" or "0" wasn't unreasonable, albeit ignorant of the complexities, they couldn't be blamed for not having that context. So it was up to me as CTO to get them to understand, or at least, help educate them on the subtleties driving the differences, that are actually quite big and therefore a certain level of perspective is needed. In the online world, when a platform fails due to high load, usually this is a good signal that the platform is gaining much traction, and engineering teams can use this data to learn and only get better. 

So I wrote this whitepaper here.

And today, I asked ChatGPT (3.5) to write something similar - and here it was it produced.

Verdict: My paper is much better. Clearly my blog isn't part of ChatGPT's data set yet.  The machine isn't going to replace my role just yet...but at least the machine can help as my co-author!

You are a CTO responsible for building an OTT video streaming platform. You are having trouble communicating with executives who come from traditional PayTV satellite broadcast and set top box world. Write a white paper than shows the different challenges posed in the end to end technology stack for online video streaming as compared to traditional satellite set top box environment. Cite references used. Focus on what makes OTT different (and hard).

The rest below shows what ChatGPT produced:

Providing clarity of job expectations and career pathing for engineers

I cut my teeth during my first decade of my working life experiencing the software engineering job family, starting as a junior engineer in 2000 and working my way up to principal engineer by 2010 (and then spent eight years from PE to CTO, then switching down to engineering manager in 2021). In between senior engineer and making principal engineer, I switched from coding to software engineering management and project delivery. Just before going back to technical, as a principal engineer, I was performing at the level of a senior technical program manager and software delivery owner for a very large software stack. 

I was fortunate to have worked for pure software product companies in that time, focused on consumer applications as well as infrastructure systems. The companies were led by people with an engineering background, CEOs/VPs/Directors with PhDs in the sciences, who had practiced as engineers before getting into leadership positions. As such, the culture of those companies were very engineering focused - leaders took the time needed to develop clear guidelines for career planning and development. The job family framework NDS created was super helpful in level setting expectations with engineers and managers alike. People had a map to reference, removing the ambiguity and suspicion that often comes with promotions. A clear job family framework, in my opinion, is a must-have for any engineering organisation because it provides people with direction to chart their career path. It is an extremely powerful mechanism especially when the company is diverse and allows a spread of career options. Having this map allowed me to experiment with different roles myself, switching between business units and trying roles out, until I figured I'd explored enough or reached my aspirations.

I'm talking about years 2003 to 2011, working with what was at the time, the world's leader in TV software and encryption systems, with offices world-wide (NDS/Cisco/Synamedia). I left that company with solid engineering management experiences and upon returning to South Africa, was well positioned to help raise the bar of engineering excellence. Surprisingly, more than ten years later, working in Amazon AWS, I marvel at NDS's high bar in the early 2000s - pretty much working now for Amazon AWS, I'm  pretty much picking up from where I left behind in NDS from an engineering excellence perspective, I'm glad I schooled with NDS.

When I led one of the largest consumer device initiatives in the history of that company, in 2011-2013 - I was quite surprised that the engineering organisation was missing a vital mechanism for its engineering workforce: The Engineering Job Family guidelines Career Ladder. As a program manager without much direct hierarchical influence, all I could do at the time was provide feedback to engineering leaders about the quality of their engineers and managers, as not meeting the high bar expected from the industry. I influenced quite a bit of change indirectly, helping overhaul the entire technology division's structure and engineering practices that was needed to get the program delivered. However, I couldn't do much about the HR guidelines when it came to job specifications. Instead, I wrote a blog post about my experiences and shared this with the HR/Tech executives in 2013.

Here's some proof of the indirect / referent influence I had as a program manager overhauling the engineering org, that if we didn't do would've cause the project to fail:

When I branched out on my own doing management consulting, I was invited by the business HR & Tech executives to talk more about the technical career ladder framework, which I picked up from NDS days. 

[P.S. I'm sharing material I created as a management consultant. If you'd like a copy of the frameworks, please reach out to me via my contact page.

Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences to showcase to prospective employers, future clients if I decide to consult again. I'm publishing my work portfolio so that recruiters / headhunters or hiring managers have easy access to my work products, saving you time. If you like what you see, let's talk!]

I created this slide deck to talk about the concepts:

Sense making, apples v oranges, finding a path forward from multiple options by asking searching questions

I've been writing about my experiences as technology executive when I was placed in the midst of uncertainty and high ambiguity that impacted both my personal and professional aspirations in a big way. Making the decision to leave my experiment into boutique management consulting behind, after building a solid reputation as a high-level program manager, switching to a deeply technology role into a business unit that was going through disruption due to both external and internal forces -- was not an easy, straightforward transition to make. I experienced classic imposter syndrome (see this post). Nevertheless, looking back now, more than five years on, those experiences helped shape me to becoming more well-rounded, what some would call a diverse Business, Technology and Operations (BTO) executive - or - as Amazon calls it, a Strong General Athlete (SGA).

My writing this month is on communication methods, mechanisms and tools: 

• How should CTOs (engineering leaders / technology executives) communicate to all groups of stakeholders?
• What tools of writing and visualisations to use?
• How to use critical thinking and the art of reflection to deep dive on the technology strategy - calling out the good, the bad and the ugly?
• How to dive deep to sense make by asking searching questions, that force upwards stakeholder management to engage in guiding the teams on strategy?
• How to find a common ground and build bridges between two (perceived) competing technology organisations?

Questions & Answers Tree - Seeking Clarity from Executives

Let's recap the situation:

In 2017, I took on the role of CTO for an online video streaming technology platform. The business unit was part of a traditional satellite PayTV company, that created an online companion application to supplement its existing TV subscribers to watch TV on the go, initially through web & mobile applications ("Delta" platform) - by investing in digital media division. Not long after this value added service was created, about two years later, the parent investment company, started up a new video streaming business ("Sierra" platform borne in the cloud, no attachments to traditional PayTV like Netflix), completely independent from the existing PayTV business. The two businesses hardly interacted or shared common product, marketing or technology elements for the first two years. When I joined in 2017, there was talk about potential synergies and closer partnerships - which directed my three year turnaround strategy - to modernise Delta closing the gap on Sierra, thus creating comparable modern video consumer experience (Netflix was the bar). A year later, additional complexity and uncertainty came in when the parent investment company, decided to unbundle its independent video businesses to allow itself to focus solely on e-commerce ventures. What happened? Naturally, Sierra business was folded into Delta - create a new business with two product & engineering organisations running in parallel: 2 CPOs, 2 CTOs - tasked to figure out what the future world could look like in creating a Delta 2.0 strategy.

As part of the interactions, still being the management consultant (at the time, I was regarded as independent without any affiliations to taking any sides - since I worked with all businesses before and had existing relationships with all), I helped the executives tackle their options.

The first one - let's understand the assumptions and questions that challenge assumptions. Can executives be clear about their end game? What is the vision? Why are you so caught up about the apparent duplication in tech platforms?

Here's the tree:

Comparing Apples to Oranges: The decision table view

When two engineering teams are challenged about their platforms doing essentially the same thing, especially when the ask comes from non-technical executives, very often engineering leaders become defensive and say "Ah, you can't compare apples with oranges, you must compare apples with apples". Whilst this might be technically accurate, this is not the way to manage communications with stakeholders. Part of technology leader's job is to simplify technical and product capabilities, meeting your customer and stakeholder needs, where they're at. Even if you feel a visual oversimplifies, you still need to tell a story, like the one I used to gain approval that cemented Delta 2.0 roadmap:

Who knew that four years later, I would be digging out the same mechanisms to help AWS executives, (in my first month barely completed onboarding by the way) to decide on a technology stack that my engineering team would need to build/deploy/operate - for providing calls / chats support as their technical call centre platform, servicing one of their highly-regulated, strictly controlled, private cloud partitions? See below decision table, similar oranges to apples story:

How to sell a technology strategy to senior executives

I've started writing about my time as a CTO when I was responsible for turning around and transforming an online video platform to scale 10X as the business doubled down on its growth strategy by investing more heavily into marketing, acquisition and retention drives. As a result, the impact on the engineering team was very high, much higher than when the team built the first version of its platform "Delta 1.0" - and now, under new leadership, I was tasked to take this platform that was lacking in several areas and transform the stack to a future 2.0 vision. It all became more complicated and ambiguous a year later, when another business was merged and we ended up with having two video platforms, offering different product experiences, for different segments of customers.

Despite the technology ambiguity and business uncertainty, the ask from the top was for the Delta product & engineering teams to come up with a plan for a unified stack, showcasing the 2.0 experience. 

I previously shared the technical narratives to help communicate my technology plan. Alas, the docs were too lengthy and detailed for high-level business executives. I needed a way to sell my vision and at the same time secure funding to be allowed to multiple tracks of work running.

How do I show to non-technical business executives, the current state and our future desired state?

What words do I use to show we need to leap from A to B?

How do I convey a story that creates excitement?

How do I gain credibility that my planning is sound?

How do I show complex technology stack layers incl. infra to reset mental model of a "simple app"?

If you've been reading my other posts, you'll learn that I like visualisations, a lot. I also like story-telling - and even way back then, in 2017 - I was familiar with Amazon's future press release concept - and decided to use the future press release headline summaries as a way for me to communicate the release plan. Who knew, that five years later, I myself would end up working for Amazon!?

Here's the anonymised deck that shares concepts you could use, if you find yourself owning a technology platform modernisation challenge, moving your platform from V1.0 to a Nextgen 2.0 state, and sell the strategy to non-technical business executives. By the way, I put this strategy together during my first 100 days into my assignment, in the midst of many other operational responsibilities:

How I managed a technology budget ($100m) with 5+ CFOs, 3+ CEOs

In a previous post, I shared how I took on a challenging role as CTO for an online video streaming platform, with a business at the time that was going through rapid changes in leadership every year. In my 3.5 years stint, I would see my direct manager (CEO) change at least 4 times, their own ExCo board members change at least 2 times, and at least another 5 changes in CFOs and senior finance managers. Whilst these changes happened, my job was to still keep the technology platform running and my engineering team delivering on the product roadmap. 

Another spanner in the works was the ambiguity around having two engineering teams, led by two separate CTOs, building online video platforms, Delta and Sierra - a change that happened a year into my tenure after just landing the full-time CTO role (I'd stopped consulting, only to find myself in further uncertainty with a business merger and potentially more rounds of org-design changes). Delta was under my ownership, serving traditional TV customers with value-added internet services to access Live TV & Video on Demand (VOD) streaming. Sierra, was a pure internet, deep catalogue subscription video on demand service (like Netflix), built and run by a parallel engineering team, under different CTO, in another country, outside of South Africa.

So, with these many changes in executive leadership, at the top-level financial review - executives would naturally inspect why the business seems to be duplicating engineering efforts at building online video platforms, even though the two products serve a different set of customers, emerged at different timelines, using different set of technologies - but they both appear to "stream video" at the high level. So why is there duplication? Where are the costs going? How do we streamline engineering costs?

Enter the Financial Model & Technology Budget Commentary Document

The first order of business for me, being tasked with a turnaround challenge - was to review the existing cost components, identify the main cost drivers and derive a perpetual financial model based on the core business driver of growing monthly active users.

Starting in 2017, neither the technology team nor the finance managers could tell with a high level of confidence what the true costs of running the technology platform were, and ultimately what the cost of running a technology platform translated to a cost per user value, and ultimately how much from the profit margin this cost was eating into. My platform provided value-added-services for free, existing users were homed to a primary TV subscription package (satellite TV using a dish and decoder / Set Top Box (STB)) as main profile. Additional viewing profiles for online consumption through mobile phones, smart TVs, game consoles and web browsers, were offered at zero cost. Additionally, my platform served internet connected STBs with larger video catalogues for streaming on demand, this too, at zero cost to the subscriber.

Financial Model (brilliant, if I say so myself!)

So I created a detailed financial model that was able to show how to forecast a largely fixed cost investment, to operate in a variable cost domain. The largest cost components for video streaming is the infrastructure cost for the networking pipe (internet transit) and content delivery network (CDN) data costs. Since video consumes large amounts of data, these costs are covered by the streaming operator. CFOs prefer fixed cost accounting than variable costs because it helps manage their cashflows and forecasts better. In an on-demand video world, where customers come and go, or viewing behaviour varies by seasonality or during peak events, the experience is more bursty than constant. This is why video providers focus heavily on content personalisation and recommendation systems to drive stickiness and increase engagement. The more users watching video, the more data is consumed, the costs of data increases. The longer users remain on the platform, the more users are engaged and the more video data is consumed. All these point to increasing costs - but - at some point, the costs per user eventually decreases because the number of users increase, the cost per user eventually decreases. I created a financial model that showed how we could manage variable costs through a fixed cost model, by buying data wholesale upfront, using a minimum commit model with overflow-at-zero-cost into next year for unused data, and also negotiated year-on-year cost savings, since cost of data decreases year on year.

Using my financial model, I was able to show significant cost savings to the tune of R80m ($5-7m) in two years. I also, single-handedly negotiated significant costs savings with our primary transit links and CDN providers, as a result of my financial model forecasting. In year one, I negotiated a 1233% increase in CDN bandwidth and secured 71% decrease in out-of-band data costs, 50% decrease for inband per GB data costs - keeping my overall costs relatively flat to track a fixed expense. In year two, I negotiated additional cuts, reducing in-band data costs by a further 63%, out-of-band by 48%. In year three, I negotiated further deal reductions because of increased competition in both the transit-and-cdn space, landing on a further 20% reduction on inband and out-of-band costs. Over this period, I secured enough guaranteed capacity in the network that exceeded future growth targets, but kept most of the projected fixed costs inline. As a result, when I decided to leave the company, in my 3 years tenure, I drove internet costs down by 84% on a cost per user metric and 96%reduction on costs per GB per user metric.  Additionally, working with the same transit and CDN partners, I secured more than 7X improvement on overall internet throughput, reaching close to 1 terabits/sec on network capacity, which for the African continent, is not bad going indeed! In terms of storage, from 2017, I increased the data commitment by 2000% cumulatively year-on-year.

An example of resource planning a 100 person technology team

Here's an example of how an engineering leader can go about managing headcount and resource planning to deliver on both the technology roadmap as well as business goals. For context, this is a resource plan for a 100-person size engineering organisation who had end-to-end responsibility for building and managing a live-streaming and video-on-demand online video platform "Delta". 

I was the CTO responsible for managing everything, pretty much a CIO in my own right, overseeing: 1\ Physical Infrastructure services: Datacentres, Networking, Compute, Storage; 2\ Internet backbone transit links; 3\ Cloud integrations and peering; 4\ Telecoms integrations; 5\ Software development & testing; 6\ Video broadcast & streaming infrastructure; 7\ CDN management; 8\ Personalisation & Content Recommender systems development; 9\ Agile Program Office; 10\ Technical Operations Command Centre offering 24/7/365 first/second/3rd line support; 11\ Enterprise & Solutions Architecture; 12\ Security, Anti-piracy, Risk & Governance; 13\ Platform Intelligence Dashboards & Analytics; 14\ Vendors.

Whilst I had my own technology strategy to deliver for the underlying platform to serve the scaling needs of the business, as we were aggressively targeting a growth phase - my teams had to also continue to build out product features and enhancements for all devices we supported (sometimes the apps varying by user experience depending on the device itself, e.g. Smart TV versus iOS vs Web app), we also had to deliver new business product offerings and deliver across group-wide projects and initiatives as shared goals.

With these challenges, an engineering leader must have a firm handle on the "resource" allocation. Sorry, agile folks - I myself cringe at the mere mention of "resources" - but heck, since joining Amazon, I was amazed of how natural the term "resources" is used by management. There are two camps, people who belong to "I am NOT a resource" and "I am a resource"!!

Anyway, I digress. As a leader, you have to keep an eye on your workforce. Based on on your existing headcount allocated to you, how do you best organise your people and plan around the various delivery demands placed on your team? How do you show your stakeholders where your resources are allocated? How do you motivate for additional headcount or escalate a change of priorities if you don't have the data that accompanies your story? How do you show that although you might have 100 people under your org, the capacity for doing project work is only 80 or less, because you need to account for management, team leads, shared service work and other internal projects? See below pivot summary table:

As tedious as it might be, an engineering leader has to do some "management" work - no matter how boring it might feel. This stuff is important. The finance folks need this information. The business owners need to have a view of what impact their projects have on your teams. 

A resource allocation plan can be a powerful tool - my advice - use it often, maintain it and let it become a key mechanism for you to have productive, collaborative conversations with your stakeholders.

Yes, I maintained my own list, accounting for each person in the org. 

No, I don't always support the notion that people are fungible resources, can be chopped and changed or "allocated" using numbers on a spreadsheet. I also don't believe the fractional numbers help either, but they are meant to be rough allocations to help with accounting - which I'm afraid is unavoidable - part of any software managers job really.

Below picture shows what goes into headcount planning / forecasting for the year, trying to keep the headcount to 100 people due to the hiring freeze. Just imagine, a 100-person size team responsible for building the full infrastructure and consumer applications for a streaming video platform that served the whole African continent (50+ countries)! Amazon has the Frugality leadership principle - we were frugal on people but wise on partnerships, using another of Amazon's LP - Invent & Simplify.

As an experienced engineering leader, my advice to software managers: If you're not maintaining a resource allocation plan, you're missing a vital tool of software management. Be careful!!

Visualising a technology roadmap and year plan on just one page

Here's something that other engineering leaders might find useful: Showing all the work under one's ownership, a technology roadmap on a single page that nicely prints to A3 paper.

In this example, I capture everything that was important to me as the leader responsible for what was at the time, one of Africa's largest online video streaming platform (Live TV + VOD). I was responsible for the full platform end-to-end:

• Physical Platform Infrastructure and Networking - Data Centres (Compute, Storage, Networking)
• Cloud Services commercials & workloads
• Software Engineering  - multi-platform, multi-device software development & testing
• Enterprise & Solution Architects
• Video Streaming Hardware & Software infrastructure integration & management
• Recommendations & Content Discovery Engines - AI/ML scientists and engineering
• Agile Program Management Office - Agile Specialists
• Technical Operations & Integrations - Command Center & Mission Control 24/7/365 support
• Security, Anti-piracy, Risk & Governance streams

How do I show on one page, the focus areas for the above teams in terms of our year plan, showcasing:

• The themes that categorise the work so non-technical customers & stakeholders can understand
• The cadence of releases for product feature delivery for product & marketing teams
• The key KPIs our work drives - growth targets for monthly active users
• The key events happening during the year that would put a strain on the platform load/stability
• Show what the tech team will be producing month-on-month
• The owners and points-of-contact for each work stream

So if you're a CTO or Head of Engineering responsible for an overarching technical platform, and you're not visualising your work in your own roadmap view, then IMHO, you're missing a trick. I used Excel to craft my roadmap because I was being scrappy - but it is possible to create such views if you invest in a solid product/program planning tool.

Click to enlarge: An example of a technology leader's roadmap / year plan

An example of a CTO's operating year's business plan

I'm continuing my series of posts sharing my work portfolio from my past as a technology executive (CTO) when I was directly responsible for a large engineering team (150+ people excluding partners). I approached this role as the next big challenge in my career aspirations. I gave myself a timebox of 3 years, after that, I'd intended venturing on to something else outside of the video world. I'm grateful for the experience as I left with learning all types of executive-management skills for managing business and technology operations. I also accomplished praiseworthy results in what would seem a short amount of time, in just 3 years. This shows how much intensity and density can be packed into a 3 year work experience. I know I would probably not see that much excitement and high-stakes challenges again for some time, even as I write this post in 2023, five years later, whilst working with Amazon's AWS...

Every CTO/Engineering Leader must write an Operating Plan

If you're a technology executive and you're not owning your very own technology operations business plan, in writing and not through high-level powerpoint slide decks, then you're missing a trick and you're missing out on a powerful asset and artefact, that IMHO, is essential for navigating your technology journey. Even before my time with Amazon, I used to write a lot, despite my employer not being a writing-documents oriented company, especially at executive leadership level. Personally, I needed a way to make sense of things, apply critical thinking and process my thoughts into a credible strategy for executing. I also needed to take my senior managers on my journey, lead by setting an example of thought-leadership through writing (because writing documents was unfamiliar to some managers). I also wanted to reach the software engineers on the floor, doing the day-to-day work, help them see the big picture and grasp how the work they do matters to the end goal. 

Another benefit of sharing your technology strategy in written form is to promote alignment and information sharing across many groups of stakeholders - customers, internal partners and external third-party primary partners. As a CTO for a specific business segment (online video), I had my own company's leaders as my primary stakeholders (CEOs, fellow C-Suite top team peers like Customer Acquisition, Retention, Marketing, Sales, Ops, Product, etc.), I also had to support other business' shared goals. In addition, I was part of a wider group structure of the parent group company, inheriting goals from the Group-CTO, Group-CIO, Group-CDO and Group-CISO domains. So the ever familiar problem of having multiple demands placed on a technology organisation. 

As a leader then, you need a mechanism for alignment on your execution plan for the year - this is usually an organisation's yearly operating plan. The aim is to show how you, as the engineering leader are accounting for all the priority goals you're taking on from your various customers and show how the work you plan to deliver, relates to achieving those goals and objectives. Additionally, the specific technology initiatives that you are taking accountability for yourself (like tech platform modernisation, addressing technical debt, etc.) remain nevertheless important for your org to deliver results and meet stakeholder expectations.

Below is one version of a year plan that I authored and used as a constant reminder for checking in and reflections on progress. Let me know if it helped you :-)

[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, this post dating back to 2017-2020 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to share my learnings and experiences to teach and mentor people on a similar path to me; with the side benefit of showcasing my professional work portfolio to current and future prospective employers & head hunters, through my writing].

How I led the turnaround of a tech platform from 1X to ±9X in just 3 years

In a previous post, I shared how I ended up transitioning from a program manager to being the leader of a large engineering organisation as CTO. I then followed up another post sharing my context in this leadership position that was beset with highly volatile, uncertain, complex and unambiguous challenges - the world of online video streaming. A dynamic, tough, competitive space, especially as Africa was only then waking up to the streaming video wars that started in 2015.

[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, this post dating back to 2017-2020 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to share my learnings and experiences to teach and mentor people on a similar path to me; with the side benefit of showcasing my professional work portfolio to current and future prospective employers & head hunters, through my writing].

In my 3.5 years as CTO, I would see the business change executive leadership multiple times - I think by 2020, we'd been through at least six changes in executive leadership (CEO/Exco-heads). This meant that almost every year, I had a new boss, who's strategy shifted to suit their new vision as they aimed to leave their mark on the business goals of an an aggressive growth strategy.

From a CTO perspective, I had to navigate different expectations of these new leaders, who didn't grasp the nature of technology and engineering challenges. Quite often, my team would be compared with the big players like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu - citing the incredible numbers of concurrent users (millions), comparing against our fledgling platform built in Africa, by Africans, for Africans - a platform that emerged not natively online, but an extension of the existing PayTV broadcast ecosystem. Despite whatever truths be valid or not from the engineering perspective, my job as CTO was to manage expectations upwards as best as I could whilst working with my engineering team on the necessary upgrades to scale the platform accordingly.

Once an app is live and already being used daily, with a steady increase in monthly active users - despite technical debt and platform instability - customers expect to receive feature updates and when it comes to consuming video, a stable viewing experience. Add an aggressive marketing and acquisition strategy, my technology team didn't have the luxury to pause, stop and fix things. Business goes and and IT tech folks just have to get on and deliver, smartly.

One of the first things I did with my team, in addition to resetting their mental model - was to create a simple graph of our state - not so dissimilar to Amazon's infamous flywheel. Based on the business growth strategy, the key drivers impacting my technology team pivoted around two fundamental missions: 1\ Increase the number of active users (growth) and 2\ Increase Engagement. So I created this map, as our North Star - that would remain, un-erased on the whiteboard for 3 years since creating. This picture would become my constant reference during my management meetings (reminding my directs and technical leads why we exist, what areas are important) as well as my all-hands updates:

Technology Strategy Map - North Star / Key Focus Areas

A video streaming business is about reaching as many customers as possible, providing engaging content that captivates their users to return and consume more and more content, staying longer on the app, remaining more engaged. The app user experience needs to be seamless, easy, intuitive and on-par with other well known players (ala Netflix). The tech platform then becomes core in providing the experience. What the picture highlights are the key pillars, which became the driving force for our improvement goals. I focused our attention to execute on these and only these: 1\ Product development (software delivery of app features across as many devices and platforms as possible); 2\ Streaming & Networking infrastructure - CDN & cost optimisation; 2\ Platform Scaling challenges (big area of technical debt - transition to AWS cloud); 3\ Platform Intelligence (don't fly blind); 4\ Content Discovery (AI/ML recommenders); 5\ Telco partnerships (we didn't own the full network). Controlling all of this, was technical operations excellence, something I called "Mission Control" - active, preventative and proactive monitoring of the live platform (technical alerting and social media monitoring).

A large part of this challenge was managing cost. Based on the business growth targets, the cost to serve the technology platform per customer had to remain low. In parallel with me turning around not only a distressed platform whilst keeping the integrity of the engineering teams together (because of layoffs and re-org), I had to work on delivering cost-savings whilst armed with my own sizeable budget. We could no longer be operating on a shoestring budget anymore, and at the same time, we couldn't afford to be wasteful - frugality was still top-of-mind. My budget over my tenure would amount to R1.5 billion (±100 million USD) covering people, capital expenditure, and operations expenditure (video streaming businesses is a costly game), aligned to a Buy / Partner strategy instead of Build-your-Own.

As a result of this strategy, my team were able to execute year-on-year, exceeding expectations and turning around what was once a platform on the brink of extinction, rebooting and refreshing in 2017 to deliver a nett ±9X improvement on active users and availability of the platform:

Platform growth over 3 years under my leadership

As a result of this experience, I wrote a white paper that dived quite deep into the technical challenges a CTO in the online video streaming business must not overlook - check it out here.

My engagement as a CTO was timeboxed from the start - I wasn't expecting to work longer than 3 years as I'd set myself the challenge of learning and setting up a leadership succession plan that would continue to lead the team and deliver on the technology transformation strategy I created. At the end of that experience in 2020, just around Covid times, it was clear I needed to reset myself, and after 20+ years career in video technology, I sought a change...and decided to leave the TV world behind.

Looking back, more than two years later, I somewhat miss the thrill of high-stakes leadership, and the intensity of the experience. More so, leading a large group of people (150+), rallying them to raise the bar and turnaround their tech platform (that I had no prior experience in building, nor was I familiar with the code) and also themselves, in trusting me to lead them - and get past their stigma of not trusting a business program manager... 

My next posts will dive deeper into some of the streams on how we got to 9X, covering some hits and also some big misses too!!

How I communicated a CTO's 3 year plan through writing

In my previous post, I shared my method for applying visualisation in simplifying complex technology migration programs, communicating effectively by way of one-piece-of-paper. I also shared how I communicated progress updates for a plan with multiple programs using a simple slide show. Before getting to the stage of summarising complex topics through the powerful, simplifying visual means, one must do the deep work of critical thinking, reflection & reviews. This process usually takes the form of written word which serve as inputs into the visualisation and storytelling stage.

[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, this post dating back to 2017-2020 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to share my learnings and experiences to teach and mentor people on a similar path to me; with the side benefit of showcasing my professional work portfolio to current and future prospective employers, through my writing].

How does deep work happen then? Well, through writing narratives, of course! I love writing. Even before joining Amazon, I was rather Amazonian! As I reviewed the content I produced over my past work experiences, it became clear that what I was doing way back then in 2016-2020, was actually preparing for my future work at Amazon!! Amazon is infamous for its writing culture. Powerpoints be damned! If you aren't able to articulate your thoughts and ideas through writing at Amazon, then you're not going to get much traction!

In this post, I share what I wrote back in 2018, basically reflections that I'd written for an audience consisting of ExCo (Group CTO & CIO members), my senior engineering direct reports as well as some non-technical board members who expressed some curiosity on the learnings from our journey to date, since the massive re-organisation of the business and resetting 2017 strategy (as I shared previously in my experience as CTO in  my first 100 days). 

The situation in 2018 at high level, executive board level: 

In Q1 2017, I was tasked to build the future online video platform (Delta) for the group. By the end of 2017, the group inherited another business unit, bringing its own video platform (Sierra) into the mix. The parent company created a new business unit as a result, consolidating a new operating model, bringing all entities servicing online video customer segments into a single operating business unit. With two different product portfolios, serving different market segments and powered by two different technology stacks, Sierra & Delta. Sierra was borne in the digital world from day-one cloud-native, with Delta having evolved from the traditional broadcast PaytTV world, pre-cloud. So you now have two independent CTOs (separated by continents apart) responsible for two different tech platforms, talk about ambiguity! From a high-level cost accounting perspective, it looks like there's much duplication going on surely!? Simply put: both organisations build apps that consume video, why don't you guys merge into a single platform? :-) 

I thrive in thinking big and looking around corners. I also enjoy solving what seems at first, to be intractable problems. I also love to cooperate and collaborate - always seeking out the best interest for the business in the end, even at the expense of my own career (I was never one for empire building). Setting all personal differences and healthy tech competition aside, I chose to focus on building bridges, looking for reasonable compromises. I also set out to describe the situation in terms that both technical and business stakeholders could understand. So I created this doc, to share my thinking into a 3 year technical strategy would look like, taking into account the learnings from the conversations to date. 

I'm sharing this with my readers as an example of what is expected from a senior engineering leader when it comes to strategic thinking and planning longer term - you have to do the deep work, confront the brutal facts of the current reality and set clear goals and aspirations for a future state. 

Incidentally, the contents of the doc is not so dissimilar to the content one would find in the Amazon Operating Plans (OP1/OP2):

How to Visualise & Communicate Technology Migration 3 Year Plan

My previous post shared my journey into my early days as a CTO, taking you through my challenges and opportunities in my new role that experienced high degrees and uncertainty, and despite the ambiguity, I had to not only come up with a 100 day plan, but also win hearts-and-minds all-round. 

[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, dating back to 2017 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to rather showcase my work portfolio to current and future prospective employers, through my writing].

Despite the uncertainty with the mothership corporate's complete overhaul of its business operating models, we had to go on as business-as-usual. As such, I had to create a credible three year plan for the technology platform: Create future online video platform V2.0 that replaced the existing V1.0 (let's call this platform Delta) and combined the best of a standalone partner platform (Sierra). 

Both platforms were roughly the same age, with Delta create to pretty-much replicate the traditional PayTV's Set Top Box (STB) experience (via a Satellite broadcast) but over the internet and consumed through devices other than STBs (i.e. mobile phones, web browsers, game consoles, smart TVs). Delta wasn't a truly home-grown, native internet application, being tightly coupled to existing broadcast and satellite workflows. (To understand the world of difference between Internet Over-the-Top video and traditional Broadcast TV systems, refer to my white paper here).

Sierra, on-the-other-hand, was built from the ground-up, as a pure internet streaming platform, but only for on-demand content, like Netflix - but didn't provide live broadcast TV & thus didn't experience the realtime expectations that the Delta platform did. 

Nevertheless, the business strategy was to create a more unified, homogenous viewing experience for the customer, simplify the multiple applications problem by providing the customer (end-users that consume video over the internet), a single container application to enjoy any type of media content, on-demand - i.e. xVOD. From a product and user experience perspective, this made perfect sense. For the technology platforms though, it meant choosing a path forward that involved a technology modernisation program: Build out the new platform, migrate as much as possible, reach parity and provide the new 2.0 experience.

The job of creating this technology strategy naturally falls on the CTO, me. This initiative, to be a success would need the full co-operation of 5 separate commercial entities, impacting the day-to-day work and operations of 500+ people, including 50+ resources from our partners. 

How do I simplify a complex technology strategy & execution plan on a single piece of paper?

How do I ensure the picture shows all the key elements (workstreams) that tell a credible story?

How do I present and communicate progress overall to non-technical stakeholders?

How do I influence stakeholders & bring in a wider audience than just the engineering teams?

My One Page Project Scorecard

Back when I was an independent management consultant, I used to lead very large enterprise-wide programs that cut across multiple business units, each with its own project management office. My job was to lead, direct, coach and deliver through others, without myself having any hierarchical power - apart from referent power as my sponsors were the C-suite themselves. The job itself was interesting as I had to wear multiple hats: dive into the detail working with implementation teams whilst at the same time, be ready to communicate with my higher-level stakeholders, abstracting the detail. But if asked any questions, I must have the answers for them, without differing to the workstream owners.

Typically my programs would entail any number of workstreams, from ten to fifty. Some workstreams (or work packages) themselves would be considered programs in their own right. A program being a collection of multiple projects. Projects being a unit of work usually involving a single group, to deliver a series of tasks. I would be leading and executing through many program and project managers, as well as individual functional managers.

Over time, I'd developed my own mechanisms for structuring and managing these large-scale initiatives. One such mechanism is a simple project dashboard, on a single piece of paper, that shows the full map of all the initiatives, calls out the owners responsible and overall status - highlighting a call to action.

As a consultant however, my role was to guide, raise risks and mitigate as much as I could (within my scope of influence and control), and then escalating upwards for decisions outside my control. What's a consultant to do, eh?

Let me know what you think of this visual?

An example One Page Project Report from 2015: large-scale media workflows automation program

My first 100 days as CTO: Resetting the Mental Model

[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, dating back to 2017 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to rather showcase my work portfolio to current and future prospective employers, through my writing].

In my previous post, I shared how I switched from being a high level Business, Technology & Operations Program Director to a General Manager of Technology & Platforms (fractional CTO) - and disclosed my feelings of imposter syndrome at the time.

Looking back, this role helped me immerse myself fully into the fast-moving-pace of "immediate get done now, everything is important" culture, ambiguous and uncertain, competitive, make-a-plan do-it-yourself courage, sheer multitude of technology options, rapid development at internet-speed -- not that I wasn't familiar with the domain before -- but this time, I was in the trenches, with full responsibility to turn the ship around and make something a success. Previously, as a management consultant, I would advise and highlight risks, I would coach and help the business put together some plans - and then coordinate the delivery. But I wasn't accountable for delivery as consultant. I wasn't responsible for people management. I wasn't responsible if the platform crashed and get paged 2am. I had no skin-in-the-game...this time, it was totally different. I had skin-in-the-game - which meant that I was leaving the world of consulting behind, back in the trenches, leading from the front as well as guiding from behind, and at times digging the trenches myself. 

What I'd accomplished in the 3.5 years was largely positive on many fronts with more upsides than downsides - but it wasn't all hits! - there were some big misses too. (A future post will share my hits and misses). But in the end, after my time-box was over, despite embattled with some scars of hard graft, I left the world of TV/Video behind, knowing that I'd met my aspirations...handing over the baton to a very capable 2IC that would end up lifting the team even further.

The Situation - VUCA !

I joined the company at a time of massive change and uncertainty. The group company embarked on a complete overhaul of its business and organisational design across the board. Typical with most corporates in Africa, the company contracted one of the big consulting houses to lead the transformation program. Their intention to create a new operating model that would better set them up for the future, i.e. "future fit the business". As a result of this new operating model, entire businesses were remodelled, some businesses reducing roles (job cuts), whilst new lines of business set up for the future (new roles to be advertised & fulfilled). Some businesses were also merged and thus resulting "duplication" were optimised for efficiency. This FutureFit program started slowly and would run for 18-24 months, with its orbit soon to approach my business unit later that year. 

So joining in May 2017, knowing there's upcoming organisational changes, already started my engagement on uncertain, unsteady ground. So as a result of this uncertainty, I decided to transition first as a contractor (Interim fractional CTO consultant) to wait-and-see what happens with the new business operating model designs; and if/when an opportunity presented itself for a permanent role, then apply. 

At the time, I joined the digital business "DStv Digital Media" (DDM) had already been through change, having merged Mobile & Online businesses into one, focused on Digital Media. The product portfolio was expansive covering 55+ countries in Africa, servicing 5 commercial entities in the areas of: web sites hosting, content management, voting applications, sports app, video streaming apps, set-top-box applications, etc. Servicing these product portfolios was a single technology team, which I was responsible for. The role in itself was ambiguous and sensitive, as I had to take over from the previous leader who decided to hang around as an individual contributor focused on innovation.

Despite the uncertainty and impending changes that could come by FutureFit program, my teams still had to get on and deliver. Our business customers were increasingly losing trust in the engineering's team ability to maintain commitments to timelines - almost every project or product release was late. Further, the end customers weren't enjoying great levels of customer experiences as the platform was unstable. Almost every weekend there were outages, that took long times to recover - sometimes customers issues and outages over weekends would only be looked at the next Monday. The state of the technical platform drove many of the business stakeholder and my product customers to insist on the engineering team improve to becoming "world class".

Their partners (other technology teams within the group) also didn't enjoy the best relationships with this new team I was joining. Lack of trust, failed commitments and constant tug-of-war on systems ownership and capabilities - a clash of the traditional structured "IT" versus the modern, fast, scrappy digital tech pirates. There was always tension, most of it being unhealthy.

The state of my engineering team in terms of morale, motivation and appreciation - was not in the best health either. As a result of the constant pressure from customers and stakeholders, late deliveries, being pulled in multiple directions, having to support multiple projects simultaneously with limited resources, not having enough budget for adequate tooling and infrastructure - being on the receiving end of loud, upset customers...I'd inherited a team in distress. Futurefit was also looming, people had seen their friends leave the company as redundancies (layoffs) were made public. It was just a "matter of time" that the restructure find its way to them. So, yeah, fair dose of volatility there. Add to that, their leader was replaced by someone renown for hardcore program delivery - what did this guy know about tech, and why should they trust him when they still had access to their previous leader?

The outgoing leader was still attending the management meetings, contributing to strategy discussions. I had to tread carefully because the work I need to do, demanded calling out all the problems & issues in a respectable manner. The respected the the principle of "respect what came before", but it was still an awkward interaction to be in, sharing my ideas for getting the engineering team in shape and on the road to being "world class" with their ex-leader in the room.

A further sensitive issue was one of my direct reports, a senior software manager openly challenged me for the position - and was extremely unhappy that I was given the role (as they were allegedly promised the role as being next in line). Not a good way to earn trust on the first week on the job! So I seriously had to earn trust upwards (customers, stakeholders), downwards (directs) and sideways (peers & partners) as well.

Added to this was a level of complexity of the system in the way that newly created DDM business co-existed with a few commercial entities as well as how the technology division (my group), interacted with the wider enterprise technology group body. Engineering platforms for multiple products to run in 55+ countries, with each country having its own unique custom features as well as priorities for differentiating markets - all supported by a small scrappy team with a shoestring budget, adds a different spin to complexity.

With all this, I was still excited to take this challenge on. The experience was going to stretch me initially, take me out of my comfort zone. I entered the role knowing the known unknowns, was fully aware of what I needed to do. 

I was in for quite the ride! My opportunity to turn the ship around...

My 100 day plan

My first 100 days had to demonstrate: 1\ A bias for action to address the burning technical issues; 2\ Earn trust of my customers, stakeholders and people by pitching a credible technology plan in place; 3\ Deliver results that showed positive progress; 4\ Influence Futurefit program with new ideas influencing positive changes whilst protecting the team to focus on delivery.

Here's my morning papers (journal entries) setting out my 100 day thoughts:

Fri 11-May: Morning Paper

This DDM role is seemingly chaotic, need to find a balance and a way of prioritising and managing my work in progress. I can't be working every day long hours, need to find the balance and time for my other interests. Officially my days start from Monday, of which I will enter a countdown from 90 days! I must set myself something to achieve in the first 90 days.

First stab: By the end of 90 days, we should have:
- settled with product management on a common backlog that drives the work
- delivered at least one release of DStv Now
- kicked off a stream and have a concrete plan of action for a Platform SDK API
- have a realistic plan for the platforms improvements
- agreed on roles and responsibilities between the various customers and my teams

Within the first 30 days, I need to:
- workshops with product & planning team
- complete handover with R (1st week of june)
- complete a 360 review based on feedback from DDM & External customers
- complete view of all the people in the division
- a full view of people by skills, competency and career aspirations
- a view of the vision and strategy for the group - Why do we exist, What are our outputs, how we go about it?
- agree reporting from all lines - Architecture / Dev / Platforms
- set clear objectives on delivery
- agree a way of working/transitioning VOD Wars program

Within the second 30 days:
- town hall with full tech team
- objectives, pds, measurements of performance clearly defined and agreed by all

Within the third 30 days:
- publish approved strategy & objectives
- must have delivered some feature increment
- reporting & dashboards in place
- improved working relationships with customers
- platform network optimisation plan executing in full swing
- vod wars program transitioned out

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Ideas for DDM-GM role

Here's some topics to note if you take the GM role:

• Workshop retrospective - aim is to get people to understand the current reality. Timeline of company showing where they started, turning points and current period
• Map out worlds of interaction of teams - micro and macro worlds. Showing customer relationships and where DDM teams fit within this world.
• Talk through the trust curve and get people to vote into areas of the curve. Where do they think they sit? Need to draw quadrant map.
• Talk about RAGE model. Do a workshop mapping out current reality, aspirations, goals n expectations.
• For each line manager, draw a job card mapped to rage, split by work worlds (DDM, VET, customers, etc.) career and personal categories. For each apply the RAGE model
• Self Assessment. Create survey based on Agile Good Ugly book. Get leaders to rate themselves according to criteria of systems engineering practices.
• Workshop with team to define what "world class" means
• Develop vision and mission for group. Tie back to company objectives. The Why golden circle. Why, How, What. Why does DDM exists? How do we behave to reach the Why? What actions or results to we produce that speaks to the Why?
• Get to know everyone. Radical candor. Review CV, skills and experience. Growth/Performance matrix - who are the rockstars? Who are the superstars? Who likes stability? Who wants to grow fast?
• Discuss the Cynefin model.
• Teach the Dreyfus model.
• Team self-assessment down to each last person (identify gaps, growth, training, etc.)
• Career Ladder - does DDM have one?
• Build authentic relationships
• Build trust from outset
• Do not dictate - listen, embrace collaboration & welcome criticism
• Implement Personal Kanban - time management - teach it?

My first All Hands / Townhall - Reset Mental Model of 150+ People

Despite the uncertainty with the group business redesign, our business unit, DDM still had to deliver the years goals. As the financial year runs from April to March, I joined at the start of the fiscal year, a new division where I had to put together the plans for the year, strategy and guide an organisation through turbulent waters. My first All-Hands was meant to set the major scene for the transformation the teams were about to embark on, with me as their leader. On the day of the event, I was somewhat nervous but confident at the same time. Having worked through the leadership and consulted with them on my ideas, this was going to be the first time I'd be addressing the full group, engineers who I've not had any skip-levels with, not having the time to meet everyone since from Day One, I was immersed in operating, putting fires out. Looking back now, I feel I could have done a few things differently (future post).

Below is the slide deck I used for the All Hands. It was an in-person session, in the campus Auditorium that seated 200 people. I'd previously addressed larger crowds before at the same venue in my big program kick-off sessions. This was my first All-Hands to not only my engineering team but I also extended the invite to core partners (product management) and my manager as well.

My aim was to reset the team's mental model, helping them understand our purpose, where we fit into the system and how I see us transitioning, reminding them on our goals for the year - and finally busting some myths from corridor talks.

More Flux thrown into the mix for fun

Just as I was getting into a rhythm after publishing my yearly operating plan in the All-Hands, around September, 4 months into the stabilisation journey, the parent group company announced a big change to its business structure, creating a brand new business unit altogether, called "Connected Video" which found find DDM and Showmax coming together...this merger brought its own share of angst, anxiety and nervousness into the engineering teams - as now there were essentially two technology platforms providing video streaming capability to largely the same set of customers. The subsequent few months to Q4 of 2017, was me experiencing additional turbulence in the sea of change and flux of making career-changing decisions, contending with people (peers and directs) seeking to lead and emerge as the CTO for the new business. More posts on that later.

Did I deliver on my 90 day plan then?

Yes. Check it out... Whilst my engineering teams were deemed "stable" for the next two quarters at least, I was focused on working the bigger picture: Unbundling the tech stack, removing non-core services not related to video stream (website support, ISP-support, voting apps, sports apps), working with partners on new commercials, and designing for the future Connected Video technology organisational design, even though I was still a contractor and had no control, nor influence, of what the CEOs in the decision-making-seats would eventually decide.