In 2007 when the organizational structure became client oriented, I was nominated for Software Leader of the product line of Hybrid Battery Management Systems. The role was a mix of Project, Program and Group management.
Since the business relations were in a crisis, I defined my primer goal as Building trusted relationships with the Business management team. It took me quite some effort since the first step was to gain the trust of my team leaders. It was one of the hardest tasks I had till now and only one of the most gratifying.
My next challenge was the optimization of the development process. I knew the standards, I knew the real work, I did the gat analysis. The real challenge was to satisfy the process quality management. It turns out that the form is the key and it might be much more important than what is behind. The skill to have your story in the right form was a real roadblocker that took me a lot of energy.
After all I am very happy with what we managed to reach: close integration between business management and prototype development lead cycle reduced twice.
The business grew and my software department had soon more than 20 highly skilled engineers structured in three development and two test automation teams.
Growing professionally together with the company, I saw how the company reorganized internally in order to ensure its growing path and serve the external environment. The organization changed every 3-4 years from technically oriented, to customer oriented (e.g. project oriented), then switched to matrix organization. Later on I learned the reasons behind and made a great retrospective.