From hands-on engineering to technology leadership: What I’ve learnt so far

This blog is an exploration of how I am applying what I have learnt from many years of delivering technology change to a leadership role where I am now responsible for setting our cloud technology strategy and enabling change.

Like many of my Kainos colleagues, over the last 15 years my career has taken several interesting twists and turns as I’ve been stretched and placed in positions outside of my comfort zone.

Starting as a systems engineer in 2007 on the IT helpdesk, I quickly moved on to specialising in cloud platforms and automation. In 2012 just as DevOps was entering our collective consciousness, I was given my first proper project baptism and I’m humbled to have since worked with some insanely talented people delivering services that have positively impacted millions of people in the UK including:

• Enabling everyone in the UK be able to join the electoral register and exercise their democratic rights.
• Enabling adults in England to access healthcare services directly from their smartphone via the ‘NHS App.’
• Helping farmers in England to access subsidy payments, which for many, is the difference between success and failure.
• Building out the cloud platform underpinning the EU Trade platform which replaced existing EU services handling food imports, animal exports and other critical services.

So, embarking upon this brave new leadership journey I figured it would be a good time to reflect on my past experiences looking at what worked well when delivering technology change and how to better enable it through my actions.

What unites delivering change and enabling change?

The common thread in all the high-performing teams I have been part of is the transparency and inclusiveness of communication – up and down, left and right.

When in delivery roles I quickly learnt that investing time to build broader stakeholder support for the technology solution being developed served to streamline progress. By socialising our needs early, we could short-circuit feedback loops and quickly address challenges, concerns or problems as they arose.

In short, we advocated for early scrutiny and involvement of our technology stakeholders. We sought to involve them in our planning, decision making and worked as openly as possible to build trust and inclusivity. We considered it a success when arms-length architects responsible for assuring our solutions became active participants in the decision-making process.

This ensured that as the needs of the project changed, requiring us to quickly pivot in one direction or another, we did this as a group with our stakeholder network rather than as a project deciding in isolation.

Overcoming fear of relevancy

The challenge in our industry, given the speed of technology innovation, is often simply to remain relevant - if you aren’t continually learning you are falling behind. Now with broader leadership responsibility, my sub-conscious fear was that sacrificing elements of my hands-on delivery role would lessen my technical relevancy over time.

To balance this, rather than relying on project pressure or deadlines as a learning catalyst I’m increasingly looking to my extended network to challenge, suggest and better shape how we deliver customer outcomes using public cloud.

With this I am slowly realising that technology leadership is not primarily about personal contribution like the engineering roles I held previously, it is about identifying and leveraging the strengths in others to augment your own weaknesses and catalyse thinking. It is

about finding a platform and amplifying those voices that have ideas of how we can be better and lending support to explore them. It is about prioritising and implementing those ideas that you feel have the greatest potential for positive impact.

So, my challenge is then to create mechanisms that ensure everyone has a voice that can be heard.

Feedback loops, Feedback loops, Feedback loops

The simple solution to this challenge is to create feedback loops where they do not exist, ensuring the voices of those people now delivering the change, can also better enable it.

Sometimes creating these feedback loops can mean establishing forums for encouraging open ideation/discussion and sometimes it means broadcasting ideas that you know are not well-honed knowing it will encourage challenge and kick-start the conversation.

A key enabler for these feedback loops is then encouraging a culture of engagement that promotes psychological safety for contributors alongside inclusive and open communications far and wide. Luckily, this is exactly the type of company culture we have spent years promoting across Kainos and within our teams, so I hope I am already quite well-practised at this from years of having lived it. One key area I am also keen to explore is how from encouraging this broader dialogue we can avoid the pitfalls of groupthink - this will be an interesting exercise and perhaps cause for a future blog!

My key learning so far…

As a technology leader, it is important to accept that whilst you may know the intended destination you will not always know the path the journey will take. Collectively through the strength of others, you can navigate closer to your destination over time and better chart the map.

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