How to Instil a Silicon Valley-Style Culture to Amplify Your Digital Transformation Efforts
Technology is used to serve a certain purpose or solve a particular problem. However, recently its ability to transform processes and redefine the method of addressing problems have changed.
Enterprises themselves are now turning into ‘technology companies’ without the sole purveyor like CIO.
A big change came with the realization that enterprise software holds the key to be truly disruptive. This is usually seen with organizations that interact directly with end-users.
With more recent enterprise agility and start-up mentality, an effective and advanced software development programme is essential for all the like enterprises. Thus, companies and organizations are hiring whole teams or departments of software developers instead of having one or two software technicians.
What Is a Strong Software Development Culture?
Companies and enterprises have a unique set of ethics or a culture they are used to. This applies equally to a software development culture which will vary from company to company. This culture is defined by specific opportunities, constraints, and realities. But, a strong software development culture is one in which software developers feel:
- Productive and focus on delivering quality.
- Autonomous enough to drive in a conclusion.
- Working on for some purpose.
- Psychologically safe to experiment, fail and learn.
- Growing to the level of mastery.
Software Development Cultures Key Challenges
In here find the key challenges faced by the enterprises when it comes to creating strong software development cultures.
1. Software Developers Must Feel Productive
The common condition of inflexibility, sub-optimal code quality, poor architecture, ill scalability and the missing mindset of the ever-evolving digital landscape in IT are resulting in slow, waste-ridden, and bloated software development process and IT administration.
Software developers spend minimal time in writing new codes which make the environment intolerable for them.
To feel productive, developers want to visualize a live product. Companies need to help them feel productive by investing significantly in a virtual process and make team architecture faster, flexible and agile.
2. Software Developers Must Feel Autonomous
The typical issue faced by almost all developers is that they are given a solution to implement than a problem to solve. Writing codes based on predefined architectures, designs and requirements make software developers feel isolated from product and technical decisions.
The downside to this is that they are deprived of the opportunity to judge the whole picture and create an optimal solution. The desired autonomous culture can be built by reducing organizational boundaries, reorganizing IT delivery teams into small and agile product teams and by achieving open source software development as much as possible.
3. Software Developers Must Feel Psychologically Safe
Companies have a tendency to promote a so-called ‘hero’ culture. This makes developers and IT practitioners with maximum tribal knowledge singled out for praise. This definitely retains a vast legacy of IT knowledge but often results in a mentality that they must follow the same understanding to preserve strong performance.
This prevents the formation of a safe space where developers can’t get opened up, ask questions and express concerns for a user story, product, architectural detail or program vision. This then turns out to be a place of cognitive and emotional exhaustion.
To avoid these, discussions need to be organized in small intimate groups to bring everyone on an equal scale and promote a space for learning and growing.
4. Software Developers Must Feel Their Growth
Usually, in large enterprises, there is a centralized architecture pattern with Project Management Officers (PMO) and IT operations functions. Thus, the creation of specified roles. Specialists are better than generalists, in some companies though.
Taking this into consideration, this tends to make developers get specialized at some specific skills and functions, thus, not stepping out from the comfort zones to develop new skills.
Any modern company will rather opt to encourage and give a freer hand to software developers in deciding which products they want to take up. Likewise, switching easily from project to project. Though it is always not easy to implement, a range of options must be available for their growing purpose.
Final Thoughts
Digital transformation efforts steered in the right direction will play a huge role in creating systems for the modern industry. Content drives your positioning in the market, but your development team is the backbone of every content.
As an expert content creation service, our rule of thumb is to establish the best software development cultures that amplify your digital transformation efforts.
