Explore Skyscanner's approach to achieving a 'ground up' adoption from engineering teams to use
Skyscanner, the well-known and loved “travel search engine”, are a longtime client of Plandek and have worked closely with our in-house team of domain experts over the years to craft their ideal software engineering intelligence tool.
Laz Allen, who leads the Software Delivery Ops team at Skyscanner, spoke at Lean Agile Scotland about “Continuous Improvement by the numbers & the culture”, which centred around their use of Plandek and why they chose this tool to help them on their journey into a more metrics-led culture at Skyscanner.
You can watch the full video from Lean Agile Scotland here – or keep reading for the highlights from Laz Allen and Ramsey Ashby from Skyscanner.
“The worry we had with those tools was; if the main user is up here (at leadership level), the people who are actually doing the work aren’t going to care about the data – they’re not the focus of it. Which means even if you have got a tool that’s focused on by senior leaders, it’s not going to be right.”
No opinions on how to deliver – “We didn’t want teams to have to change their workflow just to get onboards. That’s not how Skyscanner works, we wouldn’t be able to sell that internally.”
So how did Skyscanner land this across all of engineering and achieve widespread adoption?
The problem: “The tool was definitely good. The concept was definitely good. But we were finding that the metrics we were using were too confusing for people.”
The solution:
Skyscanner simplified the names [of metrics] and talked about the ones that everyone knows and loves already.
They also simplified the dashboards they were using already.
“We wanted to make sure it was a nice, easy thing to get people onboard with initially. That meant talking more about the things people are comfortable with. So even if the insights weren’t necessarily going to be quite as powerful as they may have been, it would help us get that momentum going.”
Skyscanner decided not to go with the “default process” for rolling out a new tool or process. Why?
At the time of the Lean Agile Scotland talk, Skyscanner had been rolling Plandek out for six months:
Feedback from the engineering teams using Plandek day-to-day included:
“Plandek helps clarify our goals and focus, makes milestones clearer and reduces WIP.”
“Having Plandek forced us to remove custom implementations that we have in Jira. This simplification allowed the team to have a better workflow and extend the use of other tools like Jira portfolio easily.”
Even more so, the quantitive data Plandek provided Skyscanner with really supports this feedback with actual usage stats (e.g their user sessions etc), for example:
We hear this from a lot of our clients; there are some unexpected benefits when you use a tool like Plandek. Data is power, as they say – and these insights can be used for more than just delivering software more productively or predictably. For example:
R&D Tax Credit – Plandek makes the relatively boring (but important) task of working out how much you can claim for R&D tax credits much easier. See how much time your team has spent on R&D tax credible tasks and avoid doing timesheets (which is the worst, if we’re talking about optimizing productivity).
DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) Applications – interesting Google Study shows metrics in this area and the impact on ethnic minorities. Contextualizing diversity data is necessary to make meaningful conclusions, and Plandek helps build a bigger picture.
Visualize value streams better – these tools have the potential to map value streams in real time in the future.
Skyscanner have been a Plandek customer now for several years. They’ve learnt a lot since implementing the tool, but what’s next?
“First of all, we’re looking forward to continuing to work with Plandek – they’ve been a great company to work with. Will has been taking our advice, thoughts, bug reports really well and allowing us to shape their roadmap going forward.” – Laz Allen, Skyscanner
“Most of the things we’ve talked about by their nature are lagging indicators. But Plandek’s features such as SmartView (known now as SmartView). The idea behind that is it gives squad leads the ability to look during the sprint to see some things that are going on that might impact future delivery.” – Laz Allen, Skyscanner
If you found this read interesting, you can catch the full video from Skyscanner here from their talk ‘Continuous Improvement by the numbers & the culture’.
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Includes:
Leadership dashboards to ensure resource is focused on value creation
North Star metrics to align your engineering organization
Stakeholder reporting to better communicate productivity improvements
Includes:
SmartView for Sprints and Epics – live dashboards highlighting delivery risks & blockers for teams, including DORA, Flow, VSM and many more
Includes:
Track over 50 metrics, including DORA, Flow, VSM and many more
Improve performance and quality of delivery over time
Choose from OTB templates or build your own dashboards from scratch
Includes:
Highly customizable BI capability to test hypotheses, identify root-causes and solve delivery issues
Build your own ‘data lab’
Import custom time series data to overlay financial, HR, developer surveys or customer data with engineering metrics
Includes:
Leadership dashboards to ensure resource is focused on value creation
North Star metrics to align your engineering organization
Stakeholder reporting to better communicate productivity improvements
Includes:
SmartView for Sprints and Epics – live dashboards highlighting delivery risks & blockers for teams, including DORA, Flow, VSM and many more
Includes:
Track over 50 metrics, including DORA, Flow, VSM and many more
Improve performance and quality of delivery over time
Choose from OTB templates or build your own dashboards from scratch
Includes:
Highly customizable BI capability to test hypotheses, identify root-causes and solve delivery issues
Build your own ‘data lab’
Import custom time series data to overlay financial, HR, developer surveys or customer data with engineering metrics
