Practices¶
CDS has four practices: Engineering, Product Delivery, QA, and ITSM. This section explains what practices are, why they exist, and how they work — and provides a home for each practice to share its standards, approaches, and expertise.
What Is a Practice?¶
A practice is a cross-cutting community that spans all of CDS's client teams within a discipline. Practices are deliberately broad — designed to break down boundaries between related specialisms, not create new ones.
A practice is not a team. There is no membership, no application process, and no gatekeeping. Practices are a shared resource and a shared responsibility, open to everyone at CDS.
Why Practices Exist¶
As a consultancy, our primary structure is the client team — the group of people deployed to deliver for a specific client. But client teams alone create a problem: without something running across them, knowledge stays siloed, standards diverge, and people develop in isolation.
Practices solve this by providing:
- Consistency — shared ways of working, standards, and expectations for what good looks like across all client engagements
- Knowledge sharing — a central place for resources, techniques, tools, and lessons learned that any consultant can access regardless of which client they work on
- Professional development — a home for growing skills, learning from peers, and staying current in your discipline
- External credibility — a vehicle for promoting CDS's capabilities through thought leadership, case studies, and community engagement
For CDS staff: the Skills Matrix
Professional development starts with seeing where you are. The CDS Skills Matrix lets you record and track your skills across disciplines. It's an internal tool — you'll need to sign in with your CDS account.
How They Work¶
Each practice is led by one or more Practice Leads. Every practice runs regular sessions — knowledge-sharing events, standards reviews, retrospectives — and maintains shared resources that all CDS consultants can draw on.
Practices are open to everyone at CDS. If you want to attend a session, use the resources, or contribute — you can. There are no artificial barriers.
That said, every consultant has a home practice — the one that aligns most closely with their primary discipline. Within that practice, expectations grow with seniority: from actively using standards and attending sessions at Associate level, through contributing and mentoring as a Lead, to shaping strategy and championing the discipline externally at Principal level.
Practices and Client Teams¶
Practices don't replace client teams — they strengthen them. Think of practices as the horizontal layer running across vertical client teams. An engineer on one client engagement and an engineer on a different engagement both draw from the same Engineering practice: its standards, its resources, its community.
Practice Leads work closely with delivery and technical leads on each account to ensure practice standards are reflected in client delivery.
In this handbook¶
Each practice section contains discipline-specific standards and techniques that go deeper than how we work — detailed tooling guidance, specific methodologies, and practice-owned resources that consultants on CDS engagements work from day to day.