Josh Haines began his career at Rolls-Royce as a special process engineering intern almost two decades ago. He rejoined the company as a senior materials engineer 10 years later and now, based in the US, leads the Global DevSecOps Capability (Development, Security, Operations), during which time he founded the company’s internal Software Factory, a hub for digital innovation.

He also owns a software business on the side and holds a BS and MS in Materials Engineering from Purdue University, Indiana.

You describe yourself as a lifelong learner, where is your curiosity focused at the moment?

There are two big things I’m geeking out on lately. One is a programming language called Rust, which is slowly taking over the world; to avoid a lot of potential cyber problems, many governments are looking at how we can start refactoring some old programmes and apps into more memory safe languages that can be protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities.

The other big one is a technology called htmx, which is a different way to think about building modern software and web apps. It’s going back to the roots of HTML and seeing whether we can use the way the internet was created and built to do a lot of the new work that we do today. You see, lots of the modern technologies and frameworks we use currently are about avoiding some of those core technologies.

Opinions differ, some people say it’s the future, others say it doesn’t make any sense, so I’m working through a book and doing some demos to see if there’s anything we should be using htmx for in the future.

What is the most intriguing part of your experience at Rolls-Royce?

Probably the career switch. For the first 10 to 12 years of my career I concentrated on materials engineering, and although I had a side business doing software and I’ve always built software while I was in engineering, Rolls-Royce is where I fully switched my focus from materials engineering to software.

This is when I set up Rolls-Royce’s internal startup called Software Factory. It was just me at the beginning – a crazy idea that has grown into an entire startup inside a big traditional enterprise.

Can you give a summary of the Software Factory and its purpose?

We wanted to find out what would happen if we approached software like the rest of the world. So, we looked at all the big tech companies – Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Microsoft, Google – to see if we could find a way to be very efficient, very fast, very agile. 

What would it look like to bring the new body of knowledge on software into a big, traditional company doing controlled, regulated, defence products? What would the challenges be? We wanted to adopt as much as we could and find the areas we needed to tweak. Because, you can only build software like Spotify, in the Rolls-Royce context, up to a point.

So, Software Factory is a team that understands how to build software, the architecture to use, how to deploy things securely and safely into a zone that users can access. It takes into account data controls and protections, and all the different things you have to worry about, basically we have an organised approach to software development. Another big aspect of the Software Factory has been teaching colleagues in Rolls-Royce how to become ‘citizen developers’ and join us in building and delivering modern software in the company. We’ve taught about 150 citizen developers so far. The Software Factory provides the frameworks and architecture, buys the classes and the books, then we coach and mentor those citizen developers, in order to make it easy for them to build tools and software for themselves, to solve their own problems.

In founding the Software Factory, how did its philosophy and values come about?

I wanted to do things differently to solve a lot of the problems I’d seen at big companies over my career. For instance, an important value of our teams is psychological safety, which I see as the biggest predictor of team performance. But it’s tough; you have to be really transparent, honest and vulnerable at times – a lot of things that don’t come naturally at a big company. 

The tech community is very interesting; people love to share their work, to give away the techniques that they’ve learned, and they are honest about challenges and mistakes. At Software Factory, we run blameless post-mortems, which is really important. You must have a team that feels safe so that they can admit mistakes right away, and to have a process where you can talk about what happened, how we don’t let it happen again, but not in a way where there’s any blame because we’re all professionals doing the best we can.

What does collaboration mean at the Software Factory?

A lot of my Rolls-Royce colleagues are partially working in the office, but we work remotely most of the time, so for us it’s how can we build close relationships and collaborate effectively while being remote? 

We’ve had to do some things differently, in a way that I think works better for remote teams. For example, we have found novel ways to stay secure while using tools more common to the tech industry, like using the communications app called Discord for part of our collaboration. Setting up a developer community where people can learn and practice skills in a Discord server has been a game changer. In particular, it has a feature where you can sit in a channel by yourself, sharing your screen, and anyone who might be curious can just drop in. 

I think this is one of the most powerful collaboration features out there. It’s like someone walking past me in the office writing code, and they stop and ask what I’m working on. If I’m in that mode, I’m open to collaboration and that leads to serendipitous situations, ‘water cooler moments’, where people just end up chatting and collaborating. It has unlocked so much value for us. Our people then take those skills back inside our secure environments and can apply them to real problems.

How do you approach innovation and can you provide a few examples of practice?

We work in a hyper-agile way; what I mean by that is we try to think even more ‘agilely’ than just sprints. There are a few things that go along with this, for example we don’t allow big requirements documents. These are common in the industry, especially for a big company like ours who will expect to write a 10-page document about what an app needs to do.

At Software Factory, we will ask for the first three things something needs to do, and once they are done move on to the next. It sets up a model of what the industry is calling a Frozen 2 style of development. In the movie, the character Anna sings a song called ‘Do the next right thing’ and that is a very powerful concept with agile working. If you’re working through a big requirements document there’s no guarantee that what just came out of someone’s head is the right thing to do; it’s just their best guess. They’re trying to specify business value from the beginning, but you can’t.

‘Do the next right thing’ frees you up to discover business value over time and has led us to build some really great features and apps that no one could have thought of at the beginning. I really believe you can only innovate over time and discover new things when you get there.

In the 21st century, tech innovation has been defined by a ‘make things fast and break them’ mentality underpinning practice. Operating in a highly regulated industry, how are you able to innovate at speed to deliver the digital transformation the business requires?

In our world, you need to have the freedom to change course. Businesses change their minds, business needs change, customers change, and you will always have to meet some new security update.

There are certain things that are set in stone – such as the way a compressor has to fit on an engine core – but in the areas you can change, you should try to discover it and embrace the scope creep. You’ll end up with much better outcomes.

By leaning on the idea of “Do the Next Right Thing” and avoiding big requirements documents, scope creep feels natural.  If we are only talking about the next couple of features then the customers can change those as frequently as they like.  Scope creep only hurts a project when you have a large plan or requirements document that has to be edited with the updated and changed scope.  If you are planning a multi-million dollar construction project (or designing an engine!) scope creep can destroy your Gantt chart and throw the project into chaos. In agile software development where we trim the backlog to only a couple items, scope creep is smooth, encouraged, and usually delivers more value.

If someone has a new idea for feature 7 after seeing feature 6 delivered, then we want to make that change.  It’s only at that point people can really decide what new update will deliver the most value.

In the same way, when the ‘Next Right Thing’ is to stop messing with things and just use it to get work done, then we’re done for the time being.  We never think of our apps as complete.  They are simply at, say, version 2.1.1 and we consider if it makes sense to pursue 2.2.0 now or some time in the future.  People always have new ideas and we just balance those with the resources we have available.  Our customers often have day jobs and these tools and applications are a means to help them do their jobs better.  They’re often happy with “good enough” and want to just get back to work.

It also goes back to creating psychologically safe environments, where you don’t just want to break things but you want to move fast and learn fast, at a speed where you’ll make mistakes. Set up your environment and culture such that you’re running small experiments and the mistakes you do make, don’t have big consequences. You shouldn’t be taking down your whole production app; you should be running a side one and if you try something and it doesn’t work, you fix it. It’s about making sure that the blast radius of your mistakes is low.

With your experience of undertaking digital transformation in a regulated industry, do you see any types of practical frameworks or governance/oversight that you abide by which could be used by other sectors, or in general, to provide checks and balances?

Something I talk about a lot is the delicate art of bureaucracy, which is a book that includes a model of how to work through bureaucracy. I have done all three of these to get where I am in the Software Factory: 

• The razor, where you build a new process that accomplishes the necessary controls in a new and more efficient way, thereby removing an older, less-efficient process.
• The monkey, which is when you try to do something openly non-traditional or non-standard and see how the organisation responds. If there is no response, that branch of bureaucracy isn’t active; if you receive pushback, you know who you have to work with to drive change.
• The sumo, where you beat your head against the wall till it moves.

Another big one, around governance and oversight, is a model of empowerment. You have to really trust your people. When things get more regulated, you end up having more hierarchical approvals which become less and less valuable the further you get from the problem. You need the people close to the problem space to be empowered to make those decisions… and actually, you don’t get much more risk mitigation by getting oversight from people far away.

From your experience of working at the intersection of engineering, innovation and digital technologies for a number of years, have you seen a change of approach from governments, industry and the public relating to sustainability?

There is a lot of motivation in that direction. Specifically at Rolls-Royce, we’re investing in future technologies related to sustainability and efficiency. Globally, the industry is pushing hard on things such as sustainable aviation fuel, and I think governments are starting to realise that they need to take action on regulation.

The pattern of change is usually the public asking the government, and then the government taking action. As such, we are seeing a lot of changes around ways to reduce energy usage due to public demand, and Rolls-Royce is deeply involved in that goal. We’re also investing in nuclear energy right now – we have just nearly doubled the size of our facility in Raynesway in the UK, because we believe that nuclear power is so important.

Which aerospace organisations do you feel are doing the most exciting and impactful work regarding environmental sustainability from a digital innovation perspective?

As a member of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), I see the group and others like it as linchpins of much of this work. There is a unified push from governments worldwide and it feels like digital is a way forward and a way to improve outcomes in many spaces – from costs to environmental sustainability.

There are a lot of industry committees, like the AIAA, that are globally focused and hearing the call, so they’re starting to spool up research projects and grants in all of this space. I don’t think we’ve seen a lot of delivery of it yet, but these are long-cycle projects; it’s going to take years to get through the research and development to the implementation and laws that govern it. 

But I would say it feels big and things are moving quickly.

If you had a magic wand and could remove one obstacle to innovation what would it be – and why?

I would wipe away people’s fear of failure. I find that fear often slows down the delivery of new value. If you ensure that trials and experiments have a small and safe blast radius, experimentation and small failures can be extremely useful to growth and improvement. All those rapid learning moments can then be stacked to deliver true innovation.

Thank you Josh for sharing your experience and insights, you have certainly shaped a fantastic innovation hub at Rolls-Royce!