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One Engineering System (1ES): Unifying Tools to Accelerate Team Excellence

Unifying engineering practices and tools to streamline workflows, reduce friction, enhance collaboration, and deliver consistent quality at scale.

One Engineering System (1ES) is a strategic standardised, integrated framework designed to streamline software development by unifying tools, processes, and practices across teams. It provides a consistent, scalable foundation that supports high-quality, efficient, and secure software delivery.

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Overview

The One Engineering System (1ES) is a strategic approach to unifying engineering tools and practices across teams to reduce friction, foster collaboration, and enable consistency at scale. It’s about creating a shared engineering backbone that allows teams to move faster and more predictably by removing the chaos of disconnected toolchains and ad hoc workflows.

At its core, 1ES is not about enforcing a single toolset but about aligning teams around a common set of engineering standards that streamline how work gets done—from planning and coding to testing, deploying, and supporting software in production. This shared foundation reduces cognitive overhead, simplifies integration across teams, and makes it easier to deliver high-quality, reliable outcomes.

A successful 1ES strategy recognises that tools must serve the way teams work, not the other way around. Each team should be empowered to adapt their workflows within the shared system, leveraging the strengths of the chosen tools without being constrained by rigid implementations. It’s not about uniformity; it’s about coherence.

Implementing 1ES requires more than tooling changes—it demands investment in enablement. Teams need guidance, training, and support to adopt the system effectively. When done well, 1ES creates the conditions for scalable engineering excellence: clear communication, consistent processes, and a resilient development lifecycle across the organisation.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

References

Learn More about One Engineering System

Case-Studies

From Fragmentation to Flow: How NKD Agility Helped SLB Consolidate Systems and Standardize Engineering Practice Across 800+ Teams

NKD Agility helped SLB unify 800+ engineering teams by consolidating DevOps systems, standardizing processes, and improving visibility, collaboration, and delivery.
Blog

Stop Building Silos. Start Building Systems

Explains how fragmented automation and tool silos harm software delivery, and advocates for unified engineering systems and platform engineering to enable reliable, scalable DevOps.
Case-Studies

Engineering Excellence in Action: How NKD Agility Helped SLB Streamline Build and Release Across 90 Teams and 13 Countries

NKD Agility helped SLB unify build and release processes across 90 teams in 13 countries, boosting team ownership, efficiency, and engineering accountability.
Videos

What is your favourite DevOps consulting outcome?

A complex software project unified 80+ teams across 9 countries by adopting Azure DevOps, streamlining processes, and achieving a single engineering system.

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