Metafora, a management consulting and technology development firm, recently made a new addition to its services portfolio. The firm introduced a coaching program that will guide engineering teams in the freight industry through the process of adopting the Agile software development methodology.

The program, Metafora executives say, is meant to help client companies’ developers work faster and build more reliable software. The consultancy is also promising other benefits. To find out more, Boardroom Insight caught up with Metafora CEO Peter Rentschler and Senior Director of Engineering Kevin Jenkins, who is leading the new Agile coaching program.

Boardroom Insight: You mentioned in your announcement that one issue you’re looking to address for clients is dev teams “hand[ing] over quality assurance”. Can you provide some more context on that and why it’s not conducive to the engineering workflow?

Kevin Jenkins: The ideal scenario for engineering teams is to have testing occur before a feature or user story is considered ‘dev complete.’ By having developers write and maintain automated acceptance tests concurrently with software development, we enable quicker feedback loops, facilitating faster integration and deployment. In this approach, everyone on the team assumes responsibility for quality assurance.

Peter Rentschler: We recognize that this approach may not work for all teams. For example, bandwidth limitations may mean having an outsourced partner to help with QA. QA-as-a-service with a trusted partner can be extremely helpful as your team works to also improve its agile practices.

Boardroom Insight: Another interesting point made was that more efficient/reliable software development can lead to higher developer retention. Can you elaborate on that?

Kevin Jenkins: Our Agile Coaching program plays a vital role in helping development teams create alignment with a mission-focused organization. When teams understand how their work contributes to the overall mission and goals of the company, they experience a stronger sense of purpose and ownership. This alignment helps create a healthier company culture, where employees feel more connected to the larger vision and are motivated to stay with the organization long term.

Boardroom Insight: One stated goal of your new Agile offering, and probably of high-performance software orgs in general, is to establish a continuous learning and improvement culture. What form does that take – is it something that’s codified in a dev team’s processes?

Kevin Jenkins: This is codified in a development team’s process with retrospectives. These cyclical reviews allow teams to implement small, manageable changes and act upon specific improvements. In addition to retrospectives, there are unlimited opportunities for tuning and efficiency gains in organizations that promote collaboration, diversity, transparency, and learning from both successes and failures.

Peter Rentschler: Metafora is a values-based organization, and we intentionally integrate our values into how we do business. Part of this is our commitment to a culture of continuous improvement. One way we do this is by investing in our employees via a variety of training opportunities. We also have a culture of open and honest feedback which helps us learn from our mistakes, as well as be open-minded to new and better ways to do things. 

All this to say: we practice what we preach. We prioritize recruiting talent who possess certain characteristics. We look for individuals who are naturally curious and have a strong desire to learn.

This culture of continuous improvement is integral to our approach and has played a crucial role in shaping our own award-winning development team. Our clients have shared feedback with us that our teams have outperformed their other vendors, and sometimes even their own internal teams. Our goal with our new Agile Coaching service is to uplevel our clients’ teams so that they can be their own high performing team.

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