Mission

Our mission is to help teams reach their peak potential faster and at a lower cost than historically possible.  We want to be an indispensable tool in any team's toolbox.

How Tekata works

Our grading algorithm works by looking at the skills you define for a team, taking into account importance of the skill based on its stack ranking, and examining the skill rank distributions of the members on your team.  Your most important skills should have more skill coverage to make sure critical, high throughput functions of the team are adequately covered.

Tekata's team and skill grades will help you identify skill gaps and key person dependencies.  

Key person dependencies exist on a team when there aren't enough people on the team capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of the team.  This situation is common in organizations trying to manage Agile or DevOps transformations, for example.  This is because rapidly changing tools and technologies tend to create pockets of expertise.  When a whole team is on the line to deliver results that depend on knowledge or ability that only one person on the team possesses, you'll have problems keeping commitments or even planning out work.  Key people can't take vacation or get promoted: if you are irreplaceable, you are un-promotable.

Tekata will help your team as they retrospect on their sprints and plan out what they'll improve on next.  How you invest in training, hiring, building internal documentation, and functional cross training will all be more targeted thanks to Tekata.  You'll also be able to track progress over time.  This will help you monitor ROI of those training investments and demonstrate a big part of your EVP (employer value proposition) to your employees as they see how their skills have grown at your company.

History

The word "Tekata" is a fusion of "Tech" and "Kata," a Japanese word meaning "dance."  In martial arts, katas are learned as a series of movements against imaginary opponents and practiced again and again.  A kata is used to hone technique and demonstrate those learned skills to teachers and peers.  A person studying martial arts may learn hundreds of katas using various weapons, tools, or just their hands and feet.

Tekata is a labor of love born out of a desire to help teams around the world reach their peak potential, even if they don't have access to highly paid consultants or highly skilled, veteran managers.  

Whether a team can improve, and how quickly, is directly related to how pervasive the commitment to continuous improvement is across all team members, and in their ability to focus on improving the right things at the right time.  In our experience, the first part of that is far easier to achieve than the latter.

It’s usually not that difficult to convince people that constantly improving is a good thing.  People get excited about that concept.  Most of the time you just need to make sure the team knows that their commitment is valued and make sure they have time and space to do it.

The real difficulty is in focusing those improvement efforts on the right things.  There’s a lot of factors involved. How do you decide what the right thing is?  Not only that, but no matter how open, trusting, honest, and committed everyone is, they only know what they know.  Sometimes those conversations can lead to real insight about what’s been holding the team back.  That typically happens when a veteran has joined the team and can bring fresh perspective to the group.  That veteran could be an experienced engineer, manager, or coach. It could even be a consultant.

We became passionate about building Tekata because we realized that there are hundreds of thousands of teams around the world who don’t have access to those veterans.  They can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars per day for great coaches. They can’t afford the best managers - most of their managers are great developers and project leads who have been promoted into the position with little support or training to help them with the transition to their new career path.  Even if these companies had the money, in many cases there simply aren’t people available.  From what we’ve seen, this situation is extremely common.

We realized long ago that we won’t be the people that cure cancer, fixes the healthcare system, gets humans to Mars, or any of a million other wonderful achievements.  But there are teams working on those challenges right now. If Tekata can help them be even just a tiny bit more effective, then we’ll consider it a success.