Staff+ Toolkit

A collection of essential tools for driving change across the engineering organisation

In the historical drama television series Rogue Heroes, that depicts the formation of British SAS special forces unit during World War II, there is a particular scene in the desert where legendary Lt. Paddy Mayne starts training French volunteers. He tasks them with building two scaffolding towers. And just before they obediently start building it, he explains the importance of asking Why: “You must ask why, because if you know why you are carrying out your mission, when things f*** up, as they inevitably will, you’ll know how to achieve what you set out to achieve in a different way…”

This leadership gem can be applied to building strong engineering culture and architecture. Staff+ are rarely people managers, so there is little to no “obedience” aspect available. It is mostly up to having skills to properly articulate the problem, the success criteria or the vision for solution, available paths, proposal and reasoning behind it (the why) etc. The Why is necessary both vertically (management) and horizontally (peers, teams, etc.)

Here is a short summary of tools available for Staff+ to exactly do that:

RFCs/RFEs

Request for Comments (or Effort) are very useful tool for writing proposals on how to address particular problem and solicit feedback. Although it is mostly used for technical matters, it can be used for product decisions, operations, team processes, etc. It is strong antidote to “Ivory Tower Architect syndrome”, as ideas needs to be articulated, questioned, defended etc. which improves transparency, inclusion, meritocracy and making durable decisions.

ADRs

Architecture Decision Records are documents outlining specific decisions from RFCs. They capture necessary context driving the decision, assumptions, consequences, etc.

Technology Radar

It is a visualisation tool categorising technologies, its adoption stage within organisation, usage surface etc. It is very useful for organisations to manage technology portfolio, avoiding duplicate evaluation and legal review efforts, improving risk profile, etc.

Reference project

Engineers like to joke that best testing is in the production :) In the context of new technical ideas/standards it is very useful to have a reference project where they can be tested within close-to-real environment. Some companies prefer to have a purely isolated / non-production project, while others tend to have one or more production projects that serve as gold standard for organisation.

In the next posts, we’ll do a deep dive into each of the tools mentioned above.

Stay tuned.