Empowering engineering teams to innovate at the speed of business

LG CNS is the consulting and services arm of the technology giant that has probably made half the appliances in your home. It provides consulting, system construction, and operation services for LG Group family companies and for open market (non-LG) companies. Founded in 1987, LG CNS was established to help LG Group with its technology and consulting needs and soon grew into the #1 IT service provider in the Korean open market.

But, like all things, technology evolves. Business needs evolve. The entire global way of work evolves. And LG CNS wanted to leap forward. It had always used a waterfall approach to technology projects, and that typically entailed intense, detailed requirements gathering up front before building out the product step by step. Once finished, the teams would present the product to the customer, pause for client feedback, iterate, incorporate, and repeat. It’s a process that leaves little room for reflection or revision and no space for innovation and creativity. So, LG CNS needed to get smart, get Agile, and fast.

The team also knew they needed to ramp up their cloud efforts, both internally and for their client offerings. In fact, the chairman of LG Group laid out the vision for strategic initiatives of cloud adoption to revolutionize the way the organization innovates.

After a productive discussion with the Slalom leadership team, the way forward was clear: they wanted to retool their 5,000-person engineering organization into one that can easily deliver the cloud-based migration, modernization, and new product development that was coming their way.  

But rather than simply purchasing a technology product, LG CNS flew a team to meet with, work with, play with, and learn from our engineers, all with the aim of recreating the entire experience back home.

But again, this was no passive learning environment of whiteboarding and note-taking. This was see, learn, do. When we asked for a live application they wanted to work on, they offered up a modernization of one of their homegrown ERP systems, as well as creating a common reservation system (CRS)—a brand new, internal digital system that covered everything from reserving conference rooms to tickets to sporting events to renting cars.

The technology they leveraged to modernize these apps ran the gamut, but the project team built cloud-native applications using Serverless, Node, TypeScript, Java, NoSQL, and more. We also had many technical discussions on best practices for security, reliability, cost optimization, and operational and performance topics. Together, the teams zoomed through the technological aspect of the cloud projects.

The LG CNS team was also fascinated by many aspects of how our team was structured. How could everyone work in such an open space and not get distracted? Why would you bring your spouse to a work event? And wait—HR doesn’t simply provide laptops but instead drives actual corporate culture and personal support!? After one event, an LG CNS team member was asked if this was different from the events back home. His reply? “Yes, it’s a bit different. We’re working and having fun!”

Through it all the teams became great friends, enjoying a lot of non-work time together. Long discussions about where the best sandwiches were in Seattle, lots of Korean barbecue, and the hundreds of other little things built strong friendships.

Which, in actuality, is an important aspect of a high-performing team culture, demonstrating that we value connections and experiences outside the walls as much as those that happen within. Ultimately, everything Slalom does was on the table. We showed them our process for creating modern software experiences, but it was more than that.

We had their HR team join us for two weeks to work with our talent acquisition group. We showed them how we go about creating an inviting space and had their operations leader (a position which didn’t even exist before) come to Seattle to discover what that entails. We went deep on everything: culture, staffing, opportunity management, people management, marketing, and everything in between.

When the project concluded and the team returned to Korea, they were armed with more than just checklists and playbooks. They arrived home with a firm organizational construct and a set of capabilities and skills for a new LG CNS high-performing team. They also knew how to harness all of it together to ultimately deliver value for their clients. And how, even during work hours, fun can help productivity.

Now all that watching, learning, seeing, and doing is paying off. The new team employs several hundred people and is rapidly scaling and growing the business.

The LG CNS team is now always thinking about what’s next in the cloud, data engineering, machine learning, and more. Because this project was more than just guiding LG CNS in agile software delivery: It was about teaching the craft of building.