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The EngOS Audit: What’s broken in your team’s operating system?
A group poll to quickly uncover your eng team’s biggest challenges.
Run the EngOS audit with your own team.
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Step 1: Prep the audit
Moderator: Before the audit meeting, set up your audit in 4 easy steps.
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Clear the sample data
Step 2: Choose EngOS categories to include
Choose which categories to include in your audit by checking the toggles below.
Include?
Category
Example topics
1
Planning
e.g. Our planning process, including top down guidance, bottom-up goal setting, dependency tracking, etc.
2
Team Collaboration
e.g. How we work together, including sharing knowledge, meetings, project tracking, training, etc.
3
Decision Making
e.g. How we make decisions, how long it takes us to make decisions, whether our decisions are “sticky”, etc.
4
Team Formation
e.g. How we allocate headcount, our hiring process, our reporting structures, etc.
5
Team Management
e.g. How we onboard new hires, our 1:1 meetings, mentorship, training, etc.
6
Team Calibration
e.g. Our performance management process, succession plans for critical roles, compensation, etc.
7
Engineering Design
e.g. The state of our engineering wiki, design process, review process, etc.
8
Engineering Productivity
e.g. How we manage tech debt and track productivity of individuals.
9
Engineering Operations
e.g. How we manage postmortems, pager rotations, bug load, etc.
10
Personal Productivity
e.g. How each engineer manages their calendar, task, email, Slack, etc.
There are no rows in this table
Step 3: Group poll on pain points
Everyone in the meeting: Silently and individually read the pain points below. Mark how painful each one is to you personally. You can also add any additional pain points that aren’t on the list. Check the box at the bottom when you’re ready to discuss.
Category
Pain Point
Strongly agree
Sort of agree
Not a problem
Planning
The plans we generate are insufficient - either too abstract or too detailed, or lacking clear objectives and/or good success metrics.
Our planning process is a mess, not clear what to do, takes a long time, and the output is not great quality.
We struggle tracking all our projects continuously or it takes an unreasonable amount of time to do so.
Our level of innovation is insufficient
We struggle managing all the backlogged tasks and/or have not created a clear roadmap that organizes our backlog.
The transition from planning to execution is rough. Plans/OKRs are in one set of tools and largely decoupled from how teams are creating their lists of day-to-day tasks
Our launch process is messy and unstructured, often lacking sign-off from important stakeholders like security, legal, marketing, etc
Measuring and reporting who is or has been working on what project or task type (feature development vs maintenance for example) e.g. for Software Capitalization is very time intensive.
Team Collaboration
The information like eng wiki, training, onboarding, talks, career information, all-hands, pager rotations, etc is spread over a lot of different tools and places, often outdated and hard to track.
The information my team needs is spread across countless documents, tools, dashboards that are rarely in sync or take a lot of effort to keep in sync.
Our staff meeting is not great, we do not spend enough time on the right things and too much on the wrong ones.
I am worried about our engineers being overloaded with meetings and not having enough deep focus time for high quality problem solving / coding.
It is hard to track progress on our projects against their goals.
We are not doing enough internal training and learning - and never seem to quite have the time for this important task.
Decision Making
Our meetings have too many and often the wrong participants to be effective decision making forums.
Making good sticky decisions is a problem for our team. We often take too long to make a decision, and once a decision is made it often gets changed later (does not stick).
Team Formation
Keeping track of headcount budgets, creating reports, tracking transfers and hires takes takes a lot of time I would rather spend on other tasks.
We struggle to allocate resources among different engineering teams in order to maximize productivity and meet project deadlines.
Staying on top of the hiring pipeline and being confident we fill our key positions in time.
Managing our interviews is an issue, e.g. training interviewers, managing and balancing interview load, and controlling quality.
We lose diverse talent somewhere along the interviewing funnel.
We need to improve our organizational design, how we form teams and reporting structures.
Team Management
We should do a better job onboarding new engineers and tracking their productivity over the first 6 months.
Many of my 1-1s are unprepared, we do not check OKR progress or developed code frequently enough, and our 1-1 doc is mostly a collection of meeting notes
We should approach sponsorships and mentorships in a more stuctured and organized way.
We are not doing enough employee / manager training.
Step 4: Discuss results as a group
Everyone in the meeting: Now, discuss the results of your audit as a group. What did you learn? What will you do now?
Rank
Pain Point
Category
Pain score
Pain Point
Category
Pain score
Action items
1
The plans we generate are insufficient - either too abstract or too detailed, or lacking clear objectives and/or good success metrics.
Planning
35
2
The information like eng wiki, training, onboarding, talks, career information, all-hands, pager rotations, etc is spread over a lot of different tools and places, often outdated and hard to track.
Team Collaboration
31
3
Our planning process is a mess, not clear what to do, takes a long time, and the output is not great quality.
Planning
22
4
Our launch process is messy and unstructured, often lacking sign-off from important stakeholders like security, legal, marketing, etc
Planning
10
5
We struggle tracking all our projects continuously or it takes an unreasonable amount of time to do so.
Planning
4
No results from filter
Step 5: What’s next?
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