IMO uses data to measure the impact of organizational changes
The Challenge
Ivana Naeymi-Rad was promoted to VP of Engineering in the midst of a few substantial organizational changes. Engineering had just made an agile transformation, and the team was growing faster than ever. Identifying the need for calibration around career tracks, Ivana took it upon herself to design the system.
It soon became clear that to have clarity around the career advancement tracks, IMO's engineering organization needed a way to objectively track progress. With the company’s quick growth and changing workflows, Ivana and her team began looking into how recent changes were affecting team performance.
With a master’s degree in software engineering with a focus on estimation and measurement, Ivana was the perfect person to take on this challenge. "The curriculum basically said 'you can’t measure these things well. It’s just impossible,' but that never resonated with me."
Staring at this unsolved need, IMO's VPE rolled up her sleeves and began manually collecting and analyzing data from various sources, even engaging the company’s BI team along the way.
"I knew metrics were the key to improvement, but it was so much work," she recalls.
Despite the best efforts of the IMO leadership team, manually tracking team performance became a massive effort that inevitably fell flat. "We felt discouraged and were basically just flying blind," she says.
“I knew metrics were the key to improvement, but it was so much work. We felt discouraged and were basically just flying blind."
Ivana Naeymi-Rad, VP of Engineering at IMO
The Solution
When IMO found Pluralsight, it was an immediate fit. "Really, within days it was transformational for me as a manager," Ivana says. "Now I can accurately assess how the organization is doing."
The initiative to become data-driven had a positive impact on the organization as a whole. Ivana and her managers were able to visualize how the agile transformation affected the team's health and productivity at both an organization-wide and granular level, which allowed them to integrate data into their career advancement tracks.
The initiative resonated with IMO’s engineers as well. "The engineers were amazed that they could look back and see their progress over time," Ivana explains. "It has helped them challenge themselves and experiment with different workflows, too."
“Really, within days Flow was transformational for me as a manager. Now I can accurately assess how my team is doing."
Ivana Naeymi-Rad, VP of Engineering at IMO
Results and next steps
IMO's engineering leadership now regularly uses Pluralsight to understand how the organization's work patterns are trending over time. From there, they can make process-related decisions with confidence and easily advocate for engineering's continued progress at the executive level.
For Ivana, this means her team can now form hypotheses about the organization's delivery process and test them to understand what’s working and what’s not. Every quarter, they make slight adjustments to refine their work process. As the engineering team has scaled, they have begun to experiment with things like sprint duration and optimal team sizes.
"We have identified our baseline, so when we make changes we can understand if we’re improving. We use Pluralsight to answer that," she explains.
Being able to evaluate the health of different types of teams in an unobtrusive way is critical for IMO as it supports its rapidly growing teams. With Pluralsight Flow, IMO’s leadership has the data they need to drive technical direction and foster continuous improvement efforts.
"Personally, it’s made my life as an engineering manager much easier," Ivana adds, "and it’s helping me be the manager I’ve always wanted to be."