Optimising for Fast Flow in Norway's Largest Bureaucracy

One of the key success factors for fast flow in modern software services is alignment: alignment between mission objectives and domain terminology, alignment between domain terminology and engineering teams, alignment between engineering teams and software architecture, and so on. 

NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) is the largest public agency in Norway. Our mission is to assist people into work, and we provide a series of benefits related to pensions, disease, unemployment, and others. 

Five years ago, IT in NAV was all about projects run by consultants. Today, we have 300 internal developers in over 100 cross functional, autonomous teams that deliver and evolve 250 software-based products for our users. 

In this talk, we describe how we have succeeded to align our teams by using a mix of descriptive and normative techniques: Internal tech radar increases communication between teams, complemented by a weekly technical deep dive on a specific subject. 

As principal engineers we have articulated a set of both strategic and operational changes we propose to each team. Finally, selected best practices are implemented in our platforms. 

We also discuss the wider applicability of these techniques - could they be useful for creating alignment outside technology?