Improving at all Levels

Purpose

We strive to empower everyone to improve:

1. themselves
2. their project’s processes
3. the entire company.

In this lesson, we discuss how.

Individual Level Improvement

Individual improvement relies on your personal goals and motivation. Whether you spend your time reading technical books, contributing to side projects, or working extra hours, the foundation for your advancement is your commitment. To help accelerate your progress and reward growth, we provide the following tools and benefits:

• Your individual preferences and goals are taken into consideration during project placement
• We have a review, bonus, and raise process that accounts for quick individual improvement
• Career advancement (managing larger projects and teams) as Innolitics’ grows
• Ample time to learn new technologies for new projects
• Opportunities to work overtime on side-projects
• Reimbursement for technical book purchases
• The #ask-advice Slack channel
• Incentives to write articles
• Weekly 10x time

Chapter 33 of Code Complete (2nd edition) discusses personal character and individual improvement. We think it is a worthwhile read (there is a copy of the chapter in the Google Drive library).

Project Level Improvement

Each project and team is different. On some projects, we work side by side with our client’s engineers, while other projects are purely internal. Some projects must conform with United States (and other country’s) medical device regulations, while other projects do not have to adhere to any regulatory guidelines. Since there are many differences between each project’s requirements, every team is given the authority to determine and improve their own development processes.

As an integral member of your team, we are counting on you to speak up when you see room for improvement, or think an activity is a waste of time, or if you believe there is a better way to ensure patient safety. There is usually room for refinement, even on heavily regulated projects.

Here are a few examples of situations which could be improved:

• A weekly meeting often feels like a waste of time
• Your team doesn’t ever pause to consider whether the current process could be improved, and as a result, changes are only suggested if there are serious problems
• Unclear roles and responsibilities result in lost effort
• Poorly communicated deadlines cause client strife or block development
• Unprioritized backlog tickets leads to developing low-value, nice-to-haves rather than core requirements
• Missing documentation makes it difficult to onboard new developers or for current team members to contribute across features.

Trust is a fundamental component of group improvement. Unlike individual improvement, which depends primarily on your own motivation, team, or project level improvement requires you to have confidence that all team members will listen and work to advance together. Changing a client’s process can be even more formidable, and communicating the need for altering operations can be a difficult conversation to have. In particularly challenging cases, you can trust that leadership will back you and put pressure on the client to make the necessary changes.

Innolitics Level Improvement

Other improvements occur at the Innolitics business level. As is the case with team and project level improvements, we want you to be open to discovering better ways to do things and to trust that Yujan and David will listen to your feedback and take action to improve.

During our annual company retreats, we discuss our company mission and values. From time to time, we adjust both. For example, we have expanded our domain from “medical imaging” to “medical devices”. Additionally, as discussed in our handbook, we have revised our values before. Remember, part of our mission is to develop tools to help others in the industry, so be on the lookout for ways to improve the medical-device industry in general.

While improvements to our mission and values are rare, improvements to our business processes are much more common. We are always tweaking and improving our company policies. Suggestions and ideas for improvements are welcome and encouraged. Here are a few examples of improvements we have made to our company processes based on team member contribution:

• Someone asked if we could provide company health insurance. Since we operate in several states, we thought the overhead of managing a plan would be too much for a small company. However, after a second person asked about this, we looked into the monetary and time costs of a few options and decided to move forward with our current plan. To be fair to team members that already had insurance, we provided an equivalent reimbursement for people who waive the fee.
• Our company handbook used to only include questions for the reviewee to answer during a performance review. It was suggested by an employee that the handbook should also include questions for the reviewer because it creates a more collaborative review process. After some consideration, we added reviewer questions to the process.
• An employee pointed out our holiday schedule did not consider people who celebrate days outside of the US Federal Holidays. After some consideration, we added a floating holiday policy to honor these days.