Free the engineers you already have
Aamer Baig
Senior Partner, Chicago
You don’t have to be a soothsayer to know that the coming year will bring with it significant pressures for tech. Layoffs in the tech sector and initial belt-tightening measures going into effect in most enterprises mean that tech leaders in 2023 will need to master the art of doing more with less.
The trap will be to try to get your tech people to simply do more. We’ve seen, in fact, that huge amounts of productivity are there for the taking by getting your engineers to do less—less administrative work, less bureaucratic work, less manual work. We’ve found that, in many large organizations, engineers spend as little as 50 percent of their time on actual development. Imagine improving that by just ten percentage points for a large company that has thousands of engineers.
CIOs can make significant inroads into this productivity gap in 2023 by being more scientific and methodical in developing and applying the craft of engineering. First, be more thoughtful about team makeup and getting a much better handle on who your top performers are. Our research shows that individual engineer performance can vary two- to threefold between teams.
Second, look into how many distractions you can take off of the plates of your engineers. In many cases, even relatively simple fixes, such as cutting down on meetings or making “agile ceremonies” more productive, can free up substantial time.
And third, go all out on automation to remove the scourge of manual tasks that weigh down engineers. Automating testing or compliance, for example, can have a huge impact in terms of freeing up engineer capacity to do what they love. Through these and other actions, we have seen companies able to increase the productivity of their engineers tenfold.
This isn’t just a productivity issue; it’s a talent issue. The CIO of a telco company recently spoke about the need to become a destination for top engineers but had not factored in how important developer work style is as part of that equation.