Interlude I. Meet Our WealthGrid Team
Now it’s time to meet the protagonists of the WealthGrid story. Jenny, the program manager, is the character we will be following most closely through WealthGrid’s journey to cloud native. Jenny is first to realize that her company is facing pressure—that the stranger is coming to WealthGrid’s town—and needs to evolve. Even if others have perhaps also recognized this, she is the first to take real action. Either way, Jenny is the catalyst for WealthGrid’s cloud native initiative. In later chapters we will also meet Steve, WealthGrid’s CEO, who plays an equally important role in the company’s cloud native transformation efforts.
So where were we? Oh, yes: a stranger has come to town. WealthGrid is facing pressure, perhaps even genuine existential threat, to adapt to this change in their market/environment.
Jenny has been a program manager at WealthGrid for several years, and she is good at her job. At WealthGrid, as in any mid-size or larger Waterfall or Agile-ish company, program managers are quite literally middle management. They sit squarely between upper-level executive leadership, which is responsible for defining strategy and project initiatives, and the engineers responsible for delivering the actual product. Program managers act as project facilitators and keep communication flowing smoothly between these two groups. Working with the engineers, project managers have detailed boots-on-the-ground insight into a project’s progress. In turn they keep upper management informed, only without bogging them down with unnecessary details. Project managers also spend a lot of time interfacing with other middle managers, facilitating project handoffs between WealthGrid’s specialized teams, and trying to keep production schedules on track.
Jenny likes her work and finds her position an interesting challenge. Being a good program (or project) manager means having enough technical knowledge to understand the engineers and their work, balanced with enough business knowledge to explain things to the executives. In short, Jenny acts as a translator between the otherwise fairly separate enterprise and technical cohorts within the same organization. She can explain the business case of a proposed feature in terms that rally the engineers to get behind a new project. She can also respectfully communicate upward, in proper C-suite speak, when a suggested new feature might be impractical, maybe even infeasible, from a technical standpoint.
Thus Jenny’s job as program manager requires high exposure to the business side: customer conversations, understanding the market forces that shape the company’s path, and involvement with planning and improving internal processes. It also involves daily immersion with the teams themselves, closely tracking the decisions they make and the outcomes they produce. She enjoys this because, like most good engineering managers, Jenny herself is a former engineer. Even though she has moved into a management role, she tries to stay up to date and knowledgeable in the latest trends. No matter which hat she’s wearing, though, Jenny’s natural ability as an organizer and her solid people skills serve her well.
Jenny’s job requires her to manage both downward and upward at the same time—to make things happen, but still make everyone reasonably happy on both sides. But being in the middle also means that she gets pressure from both above and below.
Pressure from Both Sides
One particular pressure that has been subtly building for a while now has to do with WealthGrid’s response to the cloud computing revolution. Cloud-based services have been radically altering both how enterprises can deliver products and services and how customers can consume them. Jenny herself is aware of the rapid evolution of cloud native tools and techniques—of course she has heard about containers and microservices. But she doesn’t have deep knowledge in this cutting-edge tech. Hardly anyone at the company does since it’s so very new.
That doesn’t stop her engineering team from badgering her about Kubernetes and how cool it is—most tech folks love exploring the latest and greatest innovations in their field, and her team is no exception. For Jenny, this means every time someone comes back from a conference, they are excited about the possibilities of putting together their next project using microservices architecture, orchestrated by Kubernetes. Heck, she’s excited too—she goes to a few conferences herself and has heard first-hand about the power of cloud native to revolutionize a company’s delivery model to make it responsive, iterative, and, above all, fast. She has been doing some research, and it seems like cloud native is real and here to stay.
But where could this fit within WealthGrid’s well-defined, proficient, and long-standing (i.e., legacy) systems and processes?
Interestingly, this pressure from her engineering team dovetails with pressure that Jenny has recently experienced from above, regarding hiring. Recently, hiring for technical positions at WealthGrid has become surprisingly challenging—surprising because WealthGrid’s compensation is at the top of industry pay scales. However, openings simply aren’t drawing many good candidates. Concerned, Steve, the company’s CEO, ordered some internal surveys to identify how the hiring process might be improved.
The answer was plain: WealthGrid’s systems are legacy tech. Nobody just emerging from university with a computer science degree wants to work on boring old stuff. They want new and cutting edge! Worse, while high pay may entice some into applying anyway, these hires don’t tend to stay long once they realize that there is little opportunity for professional growth. Pretty much the only way to advance professionally if you are an engineer is to move into management. And forget about developing new skills: WealthGrid is really good at what WealthGrid does, but that is all they do.
Some of the company’s executive managers have started mentioning cloud native architecture in other contexts beyond the hiring issue. They have read Gartner and similar publications talking about how the cloud is how modern companies now need to operate their business—so they think, of course, that WealthGrid should do this too. This gets considerable pushback from other managers, though, who say that business is good and there is no need to rock the boat.
So, from her position at the nexus of enterprise and technology, Jenny hears a thousand different voices, each one telling her different things. But it is just this simultaneous, often conflicting view into both worlds that gives Jenny a unique perspective. The business-savvy side of her recognizes the stranger danger that threatens to disrupt WealthGrid’s comfortable world. Her technical knowledge and experience give her the confidence to do something about it.
In the end, those thousand voices all seem to add up to the same message: it’s time for WealthGrid to make a move to the cloud.