Improve Team Dynamics, Reduce Rework, Remove Documentation Silos.
Discover your team’s friction points and create realistic action plans for improvement. Restructure your delivery pipeline to bridge the quality gap, automate improvements, and reduce rework. Then, take ownership of the documentation, and curate a knowledge hub that keeps information flowing throughout your organisation, empowering engineers, executives, partners, and customers alike.
Your Problem
Your development team is slowed down, your customers are frustrated, and your support team is constantly banging down the door. Nobody can find the information they need, and they struggle to talk to each other to work it out. Relationships on the team have soured, with developers, QA, and ops all taking an “us vs. them” position. Your backlog grows faster than the team delivers features. Retrospectives involve more finger-pointing than decision-making.
The Engineering Retrospective
Bring in software craftsmanship’s consulting detective to mentor your teams, identify friction points, and create realistic, achievable plans to bring about change. I stay with the team to help them implement those changes, track improvements, and refine and adapt as they solve their old problems and uncover new ones.
Reduce Rework
Ensure your whole team is aligned on shared goals. I investigate both your team’s technology pipeline and its social structure, and highlight the areas of conflict and inefficiency. Working with your team, we change the culture to empower quality champions, and bring everyone around to the same direction.
Unified Documentation and Architecture
Create a single platform that produces documentation that follows my extended version of the Diátaxis framework: in addition to accounting for different contexts and ways of engaging with the documentation, consider the different audiences, so that a single documentation repository serves customers and internal stakeholders alike, with strict guards to ensure that no internal secrets accidentally get into the user manual.
The documentation repository is version controlled and continuously published, so everybody has up-to-date information. Using a single source makes it easy to adopt a single, ubiquitous language, so that everybody uses the same words to talk about the same concepts. Learn more about how to escape the siloed documentation trap in the white paper, “The Hidden Cost of Documentation Silos: how fragmented information drains your engineering budget”.
Get Started
Book a free 30-minute review with the consulting detective, and then let’s get on the case! Discounted rates are available for projects published under a free software license. Choose the engagement that works for you and your team:
| Package | Format | Deliverables |
| Tier 1: Team Friction Audit | Fixed-Scope | Diagnosis of the problems your team faces, and an executive roadmap with prioritised fixes. |
| Tier 2: Cultural Realignment | Recurring Whole-Team Engagement | Sprint retrospective facilitation, resolving silos, mentoring teams to unblock delivery. |
| Tier 3: Fractional Architecture and Information Surfacing Retainer | Ongoing Retainer | Ongoing oversight of team information flows, documentation and governance visibility, and architectural mentorship for scaling engineering capabilities. |
Why Dr. Graham Lee?
My 20+ years of experience in software engineering, including stints at Facebook, Apple, and Oxford University, takes in the breadth of engineering activities from coding and testing to leading software architecture for a financial technology scale-up. My experience of writing books on creating software, speaking at conferences, and hosting and participating in podcasts sets me up as a clear communicator, explaining simple approaches to improve complex systems.
