1. Executing Leadership in Software Engineering Carol Brothers Sr. Manager, ProTax Quality/Test Intuit Carol_brothers@intuit.com

2. 2 Agenda  What does Leadership mean in Software Engineering?  What does good leadership look like? The ProTax Story –Knowing what’s important –Knowing how you’re doing –Identifying and executing projects to improve  Putting it all together

3. 3 ProTax Boiled Frog Syndrome

4. 4 What is Leadership? Three basic questions...  What is important?  How are you doing, and how do you know?  What are you doing to improve? Easy to say… tough to do well…

5. Operationalizing the Leadership Model What’s important? How are you doing? How do you know? What are you doing to improve?

6. 6 Start with the most important thing that you do....

7. 7 Drill down to what it means for your organization  Revolutionize Accountants’ Practice through New Offerings  Maximize my practice potential (growth/profitability)  Provide me a competitive edge in running my firm (efficiency)  Create a WOW Customer Offering Experience  My offering fits the way I work (ease of use)  I feel confident of the output... Don’t have to verify (accuracy)  My business is not disrupted (reliability, timeliness, performance)  My offering meets all my needs (comprehensiveness... Breadth and depth, completeness)  Support Great E2E ProTax Customer Experience  Partner with other core and enabling processes to better serve our customers  Deliver for the Current Period...  Deliver customer-defined functionality  Deliver on-time  Adhere to budget  Meet customer-defined quality  Use disciplined project management process ...Build the Foundation for Long-term Growth  Create strategically valuable technology  Increase productivity... Reduce complexity Win Hearts and Minds of Employees and Customers

8. 8 Moving the needle – how will you know? Find the desired business outcomes that show you’re getting better or reaching your goals.  Examples for WOW Customer Experience: –Time to perform critical “jobs” in the product (gets to easy to use) –Tax calculation test coverage, and calculation defects (gets to accuracy) –50% reduction in support calls (gets to reliable product, minimizing disruptions to the accountants’ practice) –IRS and state agency forms coverage (gets to completeness)

9. Operationalizing the Leadership Model How are you doing? How do you know?

10. 10 Execution = Project Management  90% of execution is managed by project management, and it’s also where 90% of the engineers will be spending their time.  The remaining 10% is making sure we’re still building the right thing against the desired outcomes  Great reading: Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell  Start small, with plans vs. actuals: –Scope / requirements –Size –Effort / cost –Schedule –Quality

11. 11 Day-to-day Execution Project Reviews Project Dashboards

12. 12 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Data  Qualitative can be much more telling than quantitative data sometimes!  Examples: –Hallway talk about projects engineers hate to work on – is it because they don’t think it’s important? –Testers can’t figure out how to perform the product jobs in their test cases – if testers can’t figure it out, how can the customer? –Attendance at tollgates or reviews – are people just doing their own work without the balance of the greater team? –Developers say they are done, but testers still working diligently – do the developers feel part of the team and feel like they own the outcome? –Best engineers aren’t assigned to the most important projects – does everyone agree with what’s most important? Your gut is telling you more than you think!

13. 13 Continuous Assessment  Don’t forget to assess projects’ impact on the expected business outcomes, too  How much did the needle actually move?

14. Operationalizing the Leadership Model What are you doing to improve?

15. 15 Use data to decide how to improve the future  Do root cause analysis on projects that have less-than- stellar results  Don’t forget about the qualitative data!  Set up improvement projects to make the future better –Architecture –Process improvements –Reuse –Etc.  Explicitly STOP doing things to make resources available to work on long-term improvements  These priorities should be executed as projects, with equal importance as product-related projects

16. Pointers for How to Get Started big Y’s and levers business outcomes defined resource allocation to priorities dashboards for priority items manage by exception on day-to-day execution explicit communication mechanisms We’re all learning… let’s share what we know and “steal shamelessly” We’re all learning… let’s share what we know and “steal shamelessly” projects that move the needle on key business outcomes

17. 17 Questions??? Comments???? High Praise?????