THE SITUATION

Bytes Technology managed the software for a dominant African telecoms operator — over 250 individual system components across four teams. The entire technical knowledge of that system lived inside one person’s head. Releases took four hours and were entirely manual. New engineers took months before they could contribute anything. Projects were started and abandoned repeatedly because there was no structure to see them through.

This is the kind of organisation that looks stable until it suddenly isn’t. One person leaving — or being hit by the proverbial bus — and the whole operation collapses. The business had won new contracts and needed to scale to 70 engineers. It couldn’t do that without first fixing the foundations.

WHAT I DID

I started by mapping what everyone actually knew. A matrix across all four teams and all 250+ components revealed exactly where knowledge was concentrated and where the gaps were. That became the foundation for a targeted training programme, a mentoring structure, and a New Starter Guide that cut onboarding time dramatically. Within six months, the single-point-of-knowledge risk was resolved.

In parallel, I worked with the release team to automate the deployment and release process end-to-end. Four hours became thirty minutes. I introduced a comprehensive code review process, development and branching policies, release procedures, and failover and backup processes — all the documentation needed to support CMMI Level 3 certification, which the business achieved.

Several previously abandoned projects were revived and delivered. The team scaled to 70 engineers without losing the quality or predictability we had built. Staff retention was strong — because engineers who understand what they’re doing and have room to grow tend to stay.