Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

Hey <@U02MAFSM535> fantastic talk! How do you address management's concerns, who may view platform engineering as a significant investment without clear and immediate returns? What timeline is okay in your opinion to give management an idea of delivering results? I know, I am not going in much details, but I was wondering if there was a standard :thinking_face:

Hi <@U05BEPZAEBH>, thank you so much! In my view you need to build some “what if” scenarios first that lead you to your business case. <@U03JPTPGWNQ> has a direct connection to $$$ in <https://platformcon.com/talks/best-practice-insights-from-wise-on-how-to-measure-platform-engineering-impact|his talk>, I tend to be more on the soft side such as better predictability, time-to-market etc. for which stake holders should be able to put a value to it. In either case, you need to get the a buy-in on the “what if”. That should give you the authority to collect some evidence. “Today we are here, and we want to get there, and it brings us X ($ or time or…)“. From there you can start building a roadmap and allocate effort/timelines. I think it is important to get management onto that journey as early as possible.

In terms of timeline: Start with meassuring the status quo. How much time do we spend doing X? How long does it take do delivery Y? How much does it costs us to repeat doing Z manually? X, Y, Z depend on your organisation and what you think are the key topic areas. Doing some manual investigation should hopefully be doable in a few weeks. We and others provide automation for continuous tracking of certain aspects, but for a once off it makes sense to just spend time on it and get a first set of numbers.

From there it is building and managing change. Depending on the size of your org (the larger the slower) you might want to set quarterly goals. Hopefully you can align this with your company’s OKRs or initiatives and get support in a feedback loop :slightly_smiling_face: