Managing organizational complexity with Delivery Engineering

We’ll review a sociotechnical approach to delivery engineering, emphasizing how robust golden path technologies provide strong organizational foundations. We’ll review guiding principles, influenced by DevOps, and an accompanying case study to demonstrate how these principles manifest practically.

In this talk, we’ll delve into a sociotechnical approach to Delivery Engineering, exploring how robust golden path technologies can provide a strong foundation for engineering organizations. We’ll examine key guiding principles of Delivery Engineering, heavily influenced by the practices of DevOps, and highlight how they can help organizations build resilient and scalable platforms.

By using case studies, we’ll demonstrate how these principles manifest practically, and showcase how they can help teams achieve success by fostering a culture of collaboration, sharing, and continuous learning. We’ll also discuss how to implement these principles in your own organization, and how to overcome common challenges along the way. Whether you’re an experienced Delivery Engineer, or just starting on this journey, this talk will provide you with actionable insights and valuable best practices to help you build a strong and sustainable engineering organization.

The central message is about Delivery engineering as a sociotechnical solution to the new organizational problems introduced by distributed systems: silos & drift, lack of quality, and lack of certainty. It will review some of the guiding principles of Delivery engineering and how they manifest in the day-to-day of delivery engineers.

Outline:

1. Introduction: Overview of the new organizational challenges introduced by distributed systems.
2. Defining Delivery Engineering as a sociotechnical solution to building sustainable organizations working in distributed systems.
3. Guiding Principles: Briefly touch upon how DevOps influences Delivery Engineering guiding principles for addressing organizational complexity. For each of the 3 following principles, I’ll also provide concrete examples and elaborate on how it addresses the organizational challenges described in the introduction.
4. Balancing consistency with flexibility: Delivery engineering teams should be responsible for driving standardization across their organization, but they need to balance the trade-offs of consistency with the flexibility needed to support product engineering teams.
5. Reactive vs Proactive Action: Delivery Engineering teams are usually only in a reactive state, but reaching a state where Delivery Engineering teams are proactively addressing organizational needs will enable long-term sustainability. That said, Delivery Engineers need to also accommodate the quickly changing needs of other teams by providing some room for addressing ad hoc (or reactionary) needs.
6. Deciding to Build or Buy: Because of the wide scope of platform engineering, being strategic about when your organization should buy a solution (especially platform-as-a-service technologies) or build it is an essential feature of platform engineering.
7. Conclusion: Summarize the guiding principles sections, highlighting the difficulty of continuously considering the tradeoffs of each area.