We were introduced to an iconic UK burger brand as they sought to reassess and re-architect their technology approach. We aimed to bring stability to their platform, unravelling some previous decisions driven by an outside (non-technical) agency, and set the business up for future success.
From mid-2020, the brand embarked on an ambitious architecture and paradigm shift within technology through an external consultancy. Driven by frustration with external tools and support, the decision was made to bring all tools and development in house. This would theoretically provide the maximum amount of leverage and control, ensuring the technology delivered to the business more accurately met the needs of colleagues and customers.
The desire for a strong technology fit is understandable and the resulting decision makes a lot of sense from an outside perspective, especially for a business as focused as they were on a great experience for colleagues. Third-party tools can lock a business into a certain way of running, which can be detrimental to the overall goals of the organisation. An older platform not following industry best practices had resulted in a feeling of stagnation, frustration and overall slow movement within the operations, finance and technical teams. This can be particularly frustrating when the business has limited to no control of its data and destiny, resulting in a strong desire on the part of the business to take back control of its future.
The primary concern for the business centred around HR provision, including management of employee information, holidays, rotas, training and compliance. This was serviced through a slowly evolving third party application that is extremely common to the industry. It was this platform, its slow speed of development and a rigid data model, that triggered a realisation within the organisation that technology could better contribute to their success. The business wanted to be able to move faster, be more agile, and operate on a platform they could see working well for years into the future.
To alleviate the issues with this legacy platform, the recommendation and implementation from the external consultancy was to bring development in house, building a completely custom and extensible HR platform. This new HR platform was to be accessed in a unique way, through the use of chatbots within Facebook Workplace as the business used this platform as the primary hub for employee interaction and activity. The aim here was to allow employees to self serve with many common HR-related tasks, such as updating information, checking on and booking holidays, dealing with absences, overtime and more.
To achieve this, the external consultancy chose to implement chatbots in a “no-code” platform and manner. No-code solutions absolutely have their place, opening up options for non-technical and semi-technical teams to solve problems in a quick and user-friendly manner. GUI tooling as well as easy integrations between platforms allow for a working product to be built quickly and easily, rolling out to employees and allowing the business to maintain control over data and workflows to a high degree. The Bot Platform and Integromat were chosen to implement this new system, with a backend built on top of Hasura and Postgres to provide a single source of truth.
There were two notable challenges to this build. First, the interaction model for employees is different to what is typical of HR platforms, with users interacting via chatbots and answering questions/prompts, requiring significant and thoughtful UX to ensure a high-quality solution. Second, and perhaps more of an impediment to progress, there were no career technologists either in leadership or within the team tasked with delivering the system. This resulted in the choice of some directions, for example; no-code tools, as well as the fundamental misunderstanding of how to appropriately get the flexibility needed without having to rebuild readily available tools on the market.
Issues then began to arise from the chosen solution, many of which take a number of months to properly surface in the real world but can be easily spotted in advance with effective technology leadership.
While it is natural for the business to wish to take more control of their data, it is clear that the business pivoted from one extreme (no control) to another (total freedom) without considering the interim ground of more autonomy but less building internally. Bringing this much development in house, even (or especially) in the form of no-code platforms, is costly from a time and energy perspective, not to mention compliance, security and ongoing maintenance. The number of bots, as well as the workflows within those bots, grew rapidly, with just one person responsible for all workflow creation and updating, creating a significant bottleneck in the business. Hiring into this team is also challenging as the skillset required is somewhat technical, but not technical enough for a large number of careers to be built around it, minimising the potential talent pool.
The complexity of the system also grew in ways that were unexpected for the team and leadership at the time. No-code offers perceived simplicity, however to run an entire HR platform as well as processes on it, with a new interaction model, it is clear the complexity of such a task will grow almost exponentially. With increasingly large workflows, as well as additional functionality, any benefits of using these platforms are quickly outweighed. They are also not well designed for running such a large and complex process, with a lack of version control and reproducibility adding to the development complexity. There is more to the process of developing high-quality software and systems than the selection of programming tools. Low-code lowers the bar to entry but does little to support systems thinking or analytical problem solving so fundamental to software engineering.
A move to providing more control in a business that typically hasn’t had that level of autonomy, coupled with a lack of strong technical leadership, resulted in an attitude within the business that all requests are valid and should be fulfilled. While this approach is a positive for the culture of the business, it quickly escalates the complexity in the technology team which if left unchecked results in time and energy to maintain an ever-growing feature set. This was aggravated by the lack of change control or appropriate testing environments which added risk and uncertainty to updates and production rollouts.
The ability to build the platform in the exact way the business desires also came with other downsides. Just because something can be built, doesn’t mean it should, and a lack of restrictions resulted in a platform that had unique and bespoke processes which are hard to understand and maintain. This then leads to spiralling into deeper and deeper technical and process rabbit holes, making it harder to understand the system as well as make course corrections from bad processes.
The unique interaction model of using a bot to process all HR and admin requests is a novel one, however it adds complexity from a data perspective. Keeping data in sync, as well as sourcing the data in a validated and formatted manner was a challenge, with users able to respond to bots in unexpected ways which were causing data inconsistencies and corruption.
Finally, cost was cited as a large reason for moving in this direction, however significant time was being used both on the development and maintenance of the platform, as well as operational time from restaurant managers, staff and central operations. This time lost more than offset any saving in CapEx realised from the winding down of third-party tools.
Rational Partners came with a clear mission; Plan for the next phase of growth. We looked at a number of areas to support this.
First, we worked with Nick Wright at Burns Sheehan to plan the first technical hire. We wanted to find someone who was still close enough to code that they could get their hands dirty and run the platform and integrations, but also operate at an executive level with the C-suite. This is a rather unique role, essentially looking for someone who enjoys the technical (and perhaps wants to jump back into it after a period of management) but can also hold the responsibility and accountability within the business. We’ve long advocated that moving into management roles isn’t the only way to continue a career path in technology, and individual contributors can be as valued, if not more so, than management roles. This role absolutely reflects that, but also represents an interesting trend we believe we’ll see more of in the industry. With more expectations for delivery, there will be more expectations for senior engineers that can get involved rather than stay high level and “architectural”. But the best of these engineers will also be keen to take responsibility for execution and delivery at the board level. This was an ideal fit, as the aim is never to build a large technical team, but rather to use a high amount of leverage, third parties, and a small team to execute well. We couldn't have a manager in the role. At the start of April, a new hire started as the new Head of Technology for the business, bringing this unique blend of hands-on and leadership.
A rethink of the fundamental approach and paradigm used for the problem was also required. Moving away from building internally, we advocated for using industry-standard third-party platforms, which offer the upside of having already solved the problems with the benefit of not having to run the platform. An HR and rota platform was sourced alongside the team, negotiated and then implemented, offering staff a standardised way of accessing the tools they need to do their jobs, in a way that made sense and could be understood with minimal training. Gone will be the days of having to ask a bot how much holiday allowance is left, or who has called in sick that day, as this information will now be readily available to relevant staff in an easy to use and understandable interface.
Ensuring interoperability between the chosen platforms, as well as the other elements of the platform, has been essential in building out an architecture that serves the business well in the future. Because of the hiring choices made previously, we are now able to be flexible and not require turnkey integration between platforms. A lightweight API layer is planned ensuring that when needed data can be exchanged or even augmented. A fundamental approach of using third parties, augmented with a data layer that provides integration as well as data lake capabilities, will give the business significant flexibility, speed and agility in the future while keeping the substantial simplification of having a managed technology stack.
The aim for Rational Partners was always to provide guidance, advice and direction for a limited amount of time, setting the business up well to chart its own course in the future. We’re moving off the project at the end of April, with a new head of technology firmly installed, a new HR platform rolled out to the business, and a rota tool moving into a pilot phase. The data lake and integration layers are well on their way, and the business is feeling secure and comfortable with its technology choices. No longer hampered by fear of change or inconsistency, and with industry-standard paradigms and tools, we’re confident the business can get back to what it does best - amazing burgers and chips.
Rational Partners brings a common sense and measured approach, working with business executives to find the right approach and reduce risk. We only deploy senior technologists with multiple decades of experience, ensuring projects are given the highest quality advice and guidance.
Rational Partners takes a context-aware approach to all of our services, opting to engage with the business based on where they are rather than an expectation of where they should be. As experienced CTOs, we understand that real-world decisions are affected by a number of factors, and trade-offs occasionally need to be made from the “ideal”. Taking these real-world conditions into account is key to the Rational Partners approach, ensuring that a considered view is taken.
