How visibility changed the game
The Challenge
Understanding engineering productivity
When your client base is made up of some of the largest enterprise organizations in the world, it’s important to come correct in every aspect of delivery. When you’re delivering an array of security and identity solutions to those clients, alignment between engineering and the needs of the business is critical.
“With multiple cloud and on-premise solutions, the engineering challenges at Ping are vast and ever-changing,” says Gary Allison, VP of Engineering.
When Allison came on board to lead Ping’s engineering, he realized that although there was plenty of qualitative information on how the team was performing, they were missing key data to make quantifiable decisions around engineering processes and strategy.
“The people you're leading and working with are just so exceptionally brilliant, but it's not so easy to explain to the rest of the company what they’re doing,” Allison says. “As trained engineers, we think about data all the time, but there was no real data to explain what we do.”
Who they are
Ping Identity creates custom, secure and seamless digital experiences for enterprises with a world-class network of partners and a focus on championing their customers. Along with serving 60 of the top 100 banks around the world, Ping clients also include several Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies.
Ping Identity by the numbers
Founded in 2002
Headquartered in Colorado, US
12 Global Offices
Serves 5 of the
top 7 retailers
SC Awards 2019
Best identity Management Solution
“The transparency and visibility we get from Pluralsight Flow is unprecedented. I'm a big fan.”
Gary Allison, VP of Engineering, Ping Identity
The solution
With better data comes better decisions
Allison needed a way to justify investment in engineering and hiring with metrics that other executives in the organization could understand and get behind. He had built other homegrown systems to track some of this data in the past, but he wanted a robust offering that would help him make better decisions in the long run for his team and the company at large. To meet this need, Allison and Ping turned to Pluralsight Flow.
With Flow, Ping Identity’s engineering organization began gathering and tracking the core insights and KPIs they were unable to collect before. Allison says this was the first time in his career that he could actually measure the impact of things like large roadmap planning exercises. He could see the impact dip across teams in real-time as they were heavily involved in design architecture and requirements analysis.
Allison also started to understand how long it takes for new engineers to train and ramp up to the rest of the team. “I can tell you when we will have fairly productive engineers, and when they’re going to be one hundred percent productive. I can see that in the numbers. It's super clear,” says Allison.
The data that Flow provided Allison and his team was becoming a central part of their team, when Covid-19 happened in March of this year. Suddenly, what the team considered a nice-to-have became a must-have as all employees began working from home.
“When the big shift to work-from-home came, the value of the Pluralsight Flow data went from being interesting to essential,” says Allison. “We're all distributed, working from home around the world. You can't imagine the diversity of those locations.”
The key benefits of Pluralsight Flow for company
10.2%
Increase in impact to codebase
2%
Increase in efficiency
47.1%
Decrease in reaction time to pull requests
"When the big shift to work-from-home came, the value of the Pluralsight Flow data went from being interesting to essential.”
Gary Allison, VP of Engineering, Ping Identity
Results and next steps
Showing impact when crisis hits
As Covid-19 introduced the global work-from-home experiment, Allison started seeing the executive team show more interest in how engineering was progressing. Given the sudden and large-scale shift, leadership had concerns about potential slumps in progress. Using Flow, Allison had the objective data to confirm that his team was excelling, even through the rapid transition. In fact, Allison’s team had the information to show they had not missed a proverbial beat. “We didn’t have any fall-off as a result of the move to remote,” says Allison.
Ping Identity has found that having clear and concise data on how their engineering team is performing has only grown as the economic landscape shifts. “My leaders and managers are using it much more frequently,” says Allison. “It's not replacing any of those human touch points, but now the instant visibility from top-to-bottom, from the largest team to the single individual, is far more critical.”
Allison also notes that the ability for the company to get a clearer view into how their software is built, and a way to understand and celebrate their successes with the company has been incredibly valuable. “It was actually during a company all-hands meeting after the Covid transition to home that we could show the entire company the data, and give them confidence that the engineering team was continuing to deliver,” says Allison.
"When the big shift to work-from-home came, the value of the Pluralsight Flow data went from being interesting to essential.”
Gary Allison, VP of Engineering, Ping Identity