The collaborative coders solving Canon challenges

‘Collaboration’ is a word that too often sounds more impressive than it actually is. It’s used to describe everything from ‘a group of people working on the same project’ to ‘a quick conversation about a task’ and, sadly, it frequently falls into the realms of the buzzword. Occasionally, however, you meet a team who are its literal embodiment, just quietly bringing about exceptional and valuable work – together.

“We do software development,” says Gabriella Semple, matter-of-factly. Gabriella is our European Software Technology Manager within the Integrated Printing & Services Group (IPSG) and speaks about the team with a clarity and pragmatism which is nothing less than you might expect from her role. “Basically, we support the business across a variety of areas, but our vision is to quickly deliver high quality software and value to our customers.” Because of the nature of their work – which is problem-solving in an incredibly diverse environment – Gabriella works alongside around thirty software engineers and they must not only have up-to-the-minute skills, but be able to apply them to an exceptional standard, using the established protocols of the global software industry.

In fact, it’s about as far from the ‘coders in a darkened room’ trope as it’s possible to imagine. “Many years ago, it was an isolated job,” she admits. “You could learn the requirements, then sit in front of a computer alone and spend hours and hours writing code before it was passed to the Quality Assurance team for testing and deployment. It's not like that anymore.” The ‘Agile Methodology’ is now the accepted way of working for all engineers and means that they must be collaborative in the truest sense, crafting and perfecting their work in short bursts and adapting quickly to feedback. All software is developed in pairs, with one person writing the code and another reviewing in real time. As you might imagine, this can make the process faster, but – more importantly – it also acts as a live ideas generator and quality control tool. However, working this way also establishes a real sense of closeness across the team, making that collaboration so much more natural and effective.

“We spend a lot of time together, even when remote working,” stresses Gabriella. “We have many brainstorming sessions and daily discussions”. This ensures that everyone has input to and visibility of all aspects of a project – of which there are around half a dozen active at any time. To do this well every team member must have a wider skillset than coding alone. “Everybody has to understand what is needed and be able to propose solutions,” she explains. “But the key to doing this is understanding the true business value of our work – not just developing for the sake of it.”

This kind of business savviness is not something often attributed to teams of software developers, yet is essential for context and understanding, as well as the ability to collaborate outside of their team – hand in hand with the people they’re creating solutions for. This could equally be a customer who requires special enhancements to their network of printers, security challenges or any part of the Canon business looking for a bespoke software to streamline a process. 

Every request is approached with equal care and consideration to understand its overall benefit before the software engineers explore the time and tech challenges involved, not to mention a full analysis of the costs. You might expect this to be a prolonged process, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. “We can quickly help with technical challenges and even prototypes,” she adds, a nod to the established success of this way of working. “Most of the team are software engineers or senior software engineers. Then we have QA engineers, a software architect and a scrum master, which is like a project manager, but more in the Agile environment,” she explains.

There’s a prevailing sense that close-knit and highly collaborative teams are the result of a kind of ‘special something’ – they have an elusive and undefinable quality which makes them successful where others aren’t. It suggests too that it’s incredibly hard to replicate. But Gabriella’s experience, working with our team of software engineers, flies in the face of such opinion. Incredible care is taken during the hiring process to bring together people who have excellent technical skills, but the ability to work as part of a team is also a pre-requisite.

“Our interview process is a technical test, presentation and a design task,” she explains. “But we also want candidates to demonstrate collaboration. So, there is a small session where we do software programming together.” This sets expectations right from the start and brings coding and communication equally front and centre for everyone, as the foundations of the team, making it clear to all that there is no room for error or ego when we’re creating solutions for customers. Together, the team have also written a mission statement, and this too puts the focus on teamwork, trust, openness and continuous learning as cornerstones which help them to reach their goals. “It’s a way to inspire ourselves,” says Gabriella. But, actually, it’s a model to inspire us all, and one that shows us that collaboration isn’t simply a buzzword, it’s about solving problems together – not just talking about it.

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