Case Study - Alef Education
How a tech unicorn in the Middle East is driving engineering excellence through Plandek data
The challenge
Alef Education develops one of the industry’s leading AI-powered digital learning platforms. It is renowned for its delivery efficiency, which it aims to take to the next level (velocity x quality).
For this reason, the company was looking for a stack-agnostic analytics tool to cross various organisational layers from strategic to operational without disrupting existing workflows. This was an important requirement for them, as the scope of their work requires an extensive network and infrastructure of technical teams/leads.
Alef Education implemented Plandek with the aim of:
- Establishing a set of balanced scorecard metrics that promote delivery efficiency at all levels of their engineering organisation.
- Aggregating critical data without disrupting existing workflows.
- Empowering engineering teams by giving them the autonomy to make tactical decisions that improve their long-term engineering strategy.
The scope
Alef Education worked with the Customer Success team at Plandek to build a bespoke metrics dashboard that reflected their primary goal of taking delivery efficiency to the next level. Plandek’s configurability enabled the creation of metrics that provided unparalleled transparency of the current processes, key measures, and infrastructure, with the capability to scale up as needed.
By adopting Plandek’s outcomes-based approach to ‘North Star’ metrics, Alef Education was able to align teams with their broader engineering objectives, leverage a set of standard metrics that enabled them to share successes and learning across teams, and grant teams the autonomy they desired to take different tactical approaches to continuous improvement. This empowerment removed any individual apprehension that a data-driven approach would lead to micromanagement. As a result, Alef Education was able to make this culture shift seamlessly.
The outcome
- Delivery time from open to deployed (ideation to production) has decreased by 20%. The time from “In progress” to “Done” (cycle time) has decreased by 67%. This illustrates that lead time to value and ideation status (e.g., ‘to do’) are potential areas to focus on to increase efficiency further.
- Delivery lead time (code cycle) has been reduced by 56%. This is due to proactive efforts in reviewing, approving, and merging/closing pull requests.
- The above is due to a notable improvement in Deployment Frequency (+127%). The time between deployments has decreased by 50%.
- Code hygiene has been cleaned up as pull requests without a ticket reference have decreased by 13% due to new robust internal processes. As a result, Plandek has more data, which, in turn, offers Alef Education more actionable insights.
- The main area for development is at the tactical level, as the sprint completion rate (Planned-to-Done) across Alef Education’s teams is 58%. The target should be 80% to consistently achieve the goals.
