12 Engineering and operational excellence
This chapter covers
- The importance of engineering and operational excellence
- Tools to get you started
- Engineering and operational excellence as a continuous process
- How to navigate resistance and establish engineering best practices
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
As an engineering manager (EM) for a team of eight engineers, you have observed struggles in meeting customer expectations and delivering on time. The code deployment frequency—once every two weeks—is slow, causing delays in getting changes to production. Additionally, the code shipped by the team is often buggy, causing effects on customers. Over the past month, your team has experienced four critical problems affecting company revenue, which suggests potential problems with operational procedures, communication among team members, coding standards, and quality assurance (QA) testing. This situation is where engineering excellence and operational excellence—two distinct but connected concepts in the context of software development and management—come in.