Engineering Office
Goals & Business Impact
The Engineering Office groups the most expert people in Consulting to address:
- Consumable and reusable engineering knowledge
- Technical mentorship
- Tech strategy execution
- Support to sales, presales, thought leadership and marketing activities
- Program & project management
The overall expected business impact reflects in the following aspects:
- Alignment with the customer business: Building durable, maintainable and recognizable systems as a good investment;
- Create reliable and reusable knowledge to speed up knwoledge transfer, practice dissemnination, estimations and offers
- Value creation: rationalize our own practices, make them recognizable and
Structure
The Engineering Office is built on top of the following practices:
- [DE] Data & Platform Engineering
- [DS] Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
- [DA] Data Analysis
- [FS] Full Stack Engineering & Microservices
- [SRE] System Reliability Engineering
- [PM] Project & Project Management
The Engineering Office is empowered by two different roles:
- Practice Leads to coordinate and manage a specific practice
- Practice Leads/Principals to execute mentorship and contribute to other Consulting activities
Radiators
The Engineering Office is monitored through the following radiators:
- Number of hours spent by agilers per practice (monthly)
- Number of hours spent by agilers per Business Unit / Circle (monthly)
- eNPS / Employee Net Promoter Score (quarterly)
eNPS
The eNPS is collected through a survey that gathers feedback on:
- Quality of coaching and mentorship
- Time invested in coaching and mentorship
- Composition of coaching and mentorship
- Positive and negative outcomes
The Engineering Director collects the survey quarterly. Responses are required within one working week.
Survey results are summarized and shared during the first Consulting Tactical after the deadline.
Any private or individual concerns are addressed in dedicated 1:1 sessions.
Continuous Improvement
The Engineering Director and Practice Leads are responsible for implementing actions to drive continuous improvement.
Engineering Office and Capacity Plan
The Capacity Plan (SHP:// big data / Capacity Plan / CapacityPlan.xls) contains all explicit assignments.
The Engineering Director is accountable for managing capacity of Practice Leads and Principals, ensuring alignment between engineering operations, technical strategy, and coaching needs.
Allocation
Coaching is led by the following chain:
Consulting Lead Link > Engineering Director > BU Leads > Sub BU Leads > Project Leads > Team Members
Holaspirit is the source of truth for coaching.
Coaches are responsible for the overall coaching (soft+hard skills, career path, etc.), nevertheless coaches are usually technically expert of a few areas.
We have cross-functional teams, a single team contains all the flavours.
For this reason, Agile Lab guarantees a proper technical mentorship to everyone through a proper assignment of technical mentors.
Technical mentorship is organized as follows:
- Default: a coach is also a practice mentor, this applies whenever their tech profiles are aligned, this is the most common case;
- Explicit assignement: a coach cannot directly help on technical mentorship, thus a practice mentor is assigned explicitely
Practices Organization
- A Practice Lead organizes the practice and facilitates knowledge sharing with Practice Leads/Principals, ensuring alignment with tech strategy execution
- Practice Leads proactively schedule recurring assessments across projects to provide feedback, guidance, and improvement actions
- Practice Leads curate the CoP (Community of Practice) agenda to promote learning
- Practice Leads/Principals collaborate to identify technical opportunities, design reusable patterns and solutions, and contribute to innovation and thought leadership
- All practices and materials are documented in the Training Portal
- Practice Leads/Principals collaborate with BU & Project Management to ensure sound technical decisions, architectural alignment, and accurate estimations
Clarification of Roles: Coach vs. Practice Lead/Principal
To foster clarity and collaboration in a self-managed organization, the roles of Coach and Practice Lead/Principal are distinct and complementary:
Coach
- Supports personal and professional development, soft skills, and career growth
- Oversees engagement performance, capacity planning, and P&L awareness (depending on the team structure)
- Serves as the go-to person for well-being, growth, and delivery alignment
- May act as a technical mentor only if his practice is aligned with the mentee's domain
Practice Lead/Principal
- Provides deep technical mentorship, specialist support, and helps foster a strong technical community
- Drives the evolution of practices through innovation, technical excellence, and knowledge sharing
- Has no responsibility over staffing, performance evaluation, or delivery
- Collaborates with coaches to integrate technical growth into personal development plans, without interfering in delivery or project dynamics
Mutual Respect and Boundaries
In order to preserve a balanced and collaborative environment based on self-management and distributed authority, the following behaviors are to be avoided:
- ❌ Practice Leads/Principals must not interfere with delivery choices, team capacity planning, or coaching performance evaluations.
- ❌ Practice Leads/Principals should not propose or promote staffing changes, reassignments, or shifts in project involvement.
- ❌ Practice Leads/Principals must avoid advocating for or against specific projects, clients, or delivery decisions that fall outside the practice's technical goals.
- ❌ Coaches should not Practice Leads/Principals must avoid advocating for or against specific projects, clients, or delivery decisions that fall outside the practice's technical goals.
- ❌ Coaches should not ndermining Practice Leads’ expertise or direction, coaches must trust and support the work of Practice Leads, not question their relevance or attempt
To support a healthy collaboration, the following are expected behaviors:
- ✅ Practice Leads/Principals focus on technical growth, knowledge sharing, and long-term capability building.
- ✅ Coaches focus on individual development, delivery health, and people care.
- ✅ Both roles communicate openly, align on mutual goals, tech strategy, and best practices and maintain clear boundaries of responsibility.
- ✅ Issues at the intersection of the two roles are escalated constructively to the Engineering Director when needed.
- ✅ Coaches should promote and help planning access to technical mentorship, even when not directly involved in a practice.
This approach ensures that each role acts as a complementary force for growth, excellence, and autonomy across Agile Lab.
In a self-managed context like Agile Lab, this division of responsibilities ensures a distributed, respectful, and collaborative approach to leadership and growth. Each role operates within its own domain of expertise, aligned by a shared commitment to excellence and transparency.