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Hierarchy of Engineering Needs
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Where theory meets practice for software delivery systems
SO MANY GOOD IDEAS
Higher software delivery and operational performance are proven advantages for software-producing organisations. Yet, daily commitments and longstanding limitations often make the ocean of good ideas in the software industry seem unattainable.
SEQUENCING THE GOODS IDEAS
We created the Hierarchy of Engineering Needs© model not just for ourselves but for the entire community. It's a tool that helps us understand and sequence good ideas for our software delivery systems.
Basic Needs
What does any team, regardless of age and stage, need to build an application and deploy changes to it?
HIERARCHY OF ENGINEERING NEEDS
Based on years of working towards and achieving continuous delivery (routine 1+ daily production deploys) with hundreds of teams and thousands of Engineers worldwide, we have created a living model to help organisations assess and understand what constraints are the best problems to solve across architecture, cloud-native, development, operations, engineering culture, operating models, governance and team experience.
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The Hierarchy of Engineering Needs model combines Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory with industry research and our combined lived experience to galvanise action.
Key Learnings
What we've learnt the hard way to now guide our methodology
#1 FLOW - THE PURSUIT OF ALL SOFTWARE TEAMS
The most important thing for any active software team is efficiently delivering value to customers while increasing customer trust in the value already delivered.
#2 MEASUREMENT
Today, organisations can, and should measure the performance of their delivery system(s) to achieve #1 - Flow. Given the cost of software engineering, it is irresponsible not to.
#3 CAPABILITIES LIMIT PERFORMANCE
The current and potential flow performance is directly related to the evolving maturity of a hierarchy of capabilities and needs across people, processes, and technology.
YOUR SOFTWARE DELIVERY SYSTEM
APPLICATIONS
At Wires Uncrossed Engineering we use the Hierarchy of Engineering Needs model daily when working with organisations. Through that work, we continue to evolve the model, publishing updates and refinements in response to industry changes and feedback from clients.
More broadly, the model has proven effective in helping or simplifying the following:
Communication with senior and non-technical stakeholders
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Informing Strategy
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Prioritising Engineering Enablement
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Initiative Prioritisation among Engineering Leadership
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Shared responsibility modelling
Like to learn more?
If you are curious about how our methodology applies to your delivery system, we encourage you to reach out and arrange a no obligations introduction chat.