In engineering circles, the term “Technical Excellence” gets thrown around every once in a while, but it often remains a vague intention. Here technical excellence is the core focus of a company wide initiative to stay ahead of the competition.

Problem

Bank Julius Baer is a large private bank serving customers with high expectations. The bank has historically delivered exceptional results, but as technology evolves, so do customer expectations. The bank was realizing the old ways were not going to be enough. In order to keep pace with the competition, they needed to respond to customer needs quickly. They needed to change the way they developed and maintained software. They needed to establish a culture of technical excellence.

Solution

Dedicate a small team that will to listen to engineers, understand their pains, then deliver enhancements that foster a culture of technical excellence within the organisation.

Discovery

I lead the discovery phase, guiding our team through workshops where we stated our assumptions about the bank, its developers and their ways of working. We then crafted an interview script to validate / invalidate these assumptions and bring new insights to the surface.

Initially I lead the interviews, but encouraged all team members to conduct at least one interview themselves. This excited the members, adding a new skill to their skillset, empowering them to validate their own assumptions and gain valuable insights. It also sparked a real understanding for customer centric thinking.

We interviewed developers and managers from different departments, finding a few common threads in what made their work harder than it needed to be, but also what was stopping them from innovating with speed at scale.

Framing

After gaining some context in discovery, we carefully defined the purpose of our team, it’s goals and limitations. Then we created an internal brand and communication strategy to make sure people didn’t get the wrong idea about us. This was a technical excellence team (TechX) meant to serve developers, not make them feel inferior.

Delivery

How did you actually change things?

Obviously establishing a culture of technical excellence is a complicated undertaking with many nuances, but here are a few goals and deliverables that helped the seed of technical excellence grow.

Increase developer productivity

Starter apps - standardised shells
Reference apps - best practice examples
Dedicated onboarding process and materials

Avoid duplicate work

Architecture Decision Records
Tech Radar
UI Library

Improve communication and knowledge sharing

Community of practice meet-ups
Internal and external presenters give fresh perspectives
Fast feedback loops
TechX channel on internal chat tool

Outcomes

The path to production is more streamlined, software standards are reducing duplicate work and simplifying code, and a community is forming across the organization of engineers that includes employees and contractors. “We are creating the Julius Bär engineering culture and this is massive.” - Filipe Abrahao, Global Head of Software Engineering

The TechX team is setting the tone for technical excellence and organically influencing other teams to think and work differently. There are now TechX teams operating in Zurich and Singapore.