Head of Engineering
Company: IntelligenceBank
Feb 2019 - Sep 2020
Abstract:
Stephan unlocked IntelligenceBank's potential to grow into a scaled organisation. There were 9 IT people and lack of process prevented them from growing. After Stephan's improvements, 21 people were ready to scale further and IntelligenceBank is still thriving and building upon his foundation today.
Stephan also delivered the live video streaming project for the NSW courtrooms, technically architecting this highly secure system himself.
Situation
A lack of processes was limiting IB, a 50 person Scaleup business, to increase feature delivery. Stephan joined IB to resolve those issues. He started with a single team of 9 Dev and 2 Test, no automated testing and a large tech debt.
Tasks
Reporting into the CTO, Stephan was accountable for the delivery of features, a (shared) budget of $400K, improving the processes, and managing the people.
Actions
After a short observation period, the team was restructured into two crossfunctional teams. Together with the Product Owner, Stephan reduced the WIP limit to only one “Project” per team at a time. A formal estimation processes was put into place before the project started and clear accountability for the teams to own “their” estimates. Stephan hired a Test Lead to uplift the Automated Testing capability and detailed reporting was implemented through real-time burn-up charts to provide progress tracking of in-flight projects and released features.
Results
These initial actions and improvements allowed IB to increase Engineering staff, setting up a third team and delegating line management responsibilities to team leads. Stephan trained the team leads to be successful in their new roles.
As a result of Stephan’s actions, the department headcount has been doubled, and due to improved processes the feature delivery has increased even more than double, project estimation variance has been reduced from ~300% to ~20%, Production issues reduced by 30%, and maybe most importantly staff satisfaction has gone up significantly.
Reflections
IntelligenceBank is a great company with a fantastic culture. The transition was fantastic to facilitate and to see blossom.