AVEVA’s Operations Information R&D organization includes a variety of roles that provide support to our Software Development teams and help them achieve the goals of their programs. While many of these roles are not responsible for the development or delivery of specific software products or services, they do provide critical guidance to the teams and in some cases additional deliverables that augment our products and services and increase their value to customers. These supporting roles are organized into functionally aligned teams known as R&D Guilds. The charters and responsibilities of each of these guilds is documented here, along with a description of each role within the guilds.
Each guild has expertise in some aspect of Software Development. The supervisor of the guild is called the Guild Manager. They focus on coaching and developing guild members and ensure that the guild adheres to a processes aligned with AVEVA's Operational Information R&D. Each guild also has one or more members in contributor roles. Some of these roles have different levels of expertise. As in the technical track for Software Development, the levels are important to the relationship between leaders and contributors in each guild.
There are many ways to categorize the attributes that make a guild member successful, but these four categories are particular to our organization’s software development culture. These categories represent the key areas of development and mastery at each level.
Have you been seeking to improve your craft? Have you become an expert and/or gained expertise in multiple technical areas?
How does your work align with the overarching goals of AVEVA Operations Information R&D? How reliably and consistently have you delivered complete work items? How large and complex a feature or capability have you proven capable of owning? How efficiently do you work with other departments? How well do you understand tradeoffs between velocity and technical debt?
How receptive are you to outside feedback on your work? How broad of a perspective do you consider when making decisions? Can you independently identify stakeholders who will be affected by your work and proactively incorporate their viewpoints into your technical designs? To what degree do you prioritize the team’s needs over your own?
How effectively have you communicated your team’s challenges, their importance, and solutions? How effectively have you been able to resolve conflicts? Have you raised the level of your team through documentation, standards, reusable work products, and best practices? Have you effectively communicated within your team and across teams? Have you developed other guild members’ skills through mentorship and developmental feedback?
Each role description below has two parts, a high-level description, and common attributes. Attributes are tagged by four categories: (T) Technical Skill, (P) Productivity, (E) Empathy, and (I) Influence. As outlined in the FAQ, these attributes aren’t an exhaustive checklist but rather a guideline for behavior we would expect from someone at that level.
The Guild Manager is responsible for one or more teams that comprise an R&D Guild. Their teams share a common charter and include one or more individual contributor roles. Guild Managers are responsible for growing the skills and capabilities of their teams to enable them to function at a high level. Like Engineering Managers, they are role models and they instill an attitude and perspective that is aligned with AVEVA's core values. They also play a supporting role to all software development teams in AVEVA Operations Information R&D, providing guidance and/or resources to enable teams to be successful in delivering program goals. They keep the energy and standards high on their teams. Unlike Engineering Managers, who focus mostly on people and process, Guild Managers must also be considered the subject matter experts in their guild’s domain.
Attributes
A Guild Manager should have significant experience and training related to the subject matter area of their guild.
The Deployment and Performance Guild supports the rapid deployment of Operations Information software and services which provide quiet enjoyment to our customers by producing prescriptive deployment topologies, best practices for deploying our software and performance envelopes for these prescribed deployment topologies.
The guild is responsible for verification and documentation of PI System prescriptive topologies. These topologies are the mechanism by which AVEVA Operations Information R&D communicates how the products we make were designed to go together and, for a given set of hardware, what level of performance can reasonably be expected. In order to produce such a topology, the guild needs to bring together:
A broad skillset is required to meld such varied inputs together, and there are significant differences between the business-oriented tasks and the technical tasks required for the final output. Members of this guild should exhibit the attributes listed for their role, but it is unlikely that any one team member will possess all skills required for the guild in abundance.
This is the one and only role within the guild. Because the skillset required to fully staff the guild is so varied, it is not expected that any one staff member will possess all required skills. All skills are equally valuable, and staff must already have their skills mastered in order to participate in guild duties. Therefore, levels of staff are not applicable to the nature of this particular guild. Prior experience working as a PI System administrator, PI Product Specialist, or Sr. Technical advisor (or equivalent prior job function such a Center of Excellence engineer) is a requirement for membership in the guild.
System Topology Specialists perform all of the development, testing, and reporting of Prescriptive Topologies. They work primarily with Architecture, Product Management, and Customer Success to understand both how R&D intended the software to work, and how customers need to deploy our software. They develop automation required to build topologies, perform tests, and produce reports. They define the success criteria against which test results are compared, and they communicate their analysis of said test results to the entirety of the AVEVA organization.
Attributes
The Product Readiness Guild helps drive the PI System infrastructure forward by working with customers on new product incubation and providing a critical feedback channel to R&D.
The team helps answer two fundamental questions:
Engagement types:
Work with customers and partners to drive adoption of our new products and offerings by building samples, demos, and walkthrus. Specific responsibilities include:
There are four levels within the Product Readiness Guild. The titles and most of the description of these job roles mirror those in the AVEVA Operations Information R&D Technical Track. This is to facilitate movement, in both directions, between development teams and this guild. The levels are:
Detailed descriptions of the job roles can be found in the technical track page.