Conference:March 6-8, 2017
Workshops:March 9-10, 2017
Presentation: The Holistic Detective Hunt For Great Tech Culture
Location:
- St James, 4th flr.
Duration
Day of week:
- Monday
Level:
- Beginner
Persona:
- CTO/CIO/Leadership
Key Takeaways
- Gain ideas for developing a tech engineering culture that drives people and teams
- Learn how to measure and influence team performance to make teams predictable and pivotable
- Understand how one organisation is improving their engineering culture using a big holistic picture
Abstract
Seeing the whole and thinking wider than software and development processes is something we find very hard to do in the tech industry. It’s so easy to get distracted by the amazing new languages, the neat gadgets, or the fun of tricks like mob programming. If we start to apply a wider lens, some systems thinking, queuing theory, psychology and a sprinkle of cynefin we soon see that if we want to drive an organisation of great teams made of great people that create great products, it’s going to be hard! We need to pull some really big levers like culture, leadership, and HR processes. These all bring crazy complexity and we need to worry about them at individual, team, and the organisation level, even with the customer! This requires a big holistic picture, a holistic detective team and a commitment from senior leadership to change the big things.
I will cover key elements of the organisational complexity puzzle, why it’s so important, what patterns could you choose to use, how we coordinate to achieve change, what changes we have driven in Ocado Technology following this idea and how can we measure the success of this.
Interview
When you want to motivate and empower your people, engineering culture matters. At Ocado we prioritise the people side over building the right thing over building it right. We have had intense discussions on what craftsmanship means to our organizational systems and our leadership approach.
In my organization almost everyone has come from ground up developer tech space, all the managers have a tech background. This talk is interesting for tech people that want to become team leads or tech leads, and for those who already are doing that role. The talk is not about about specific techniques like TDD or continuous delivery; I will be talking about team dynamics and how teams and people can interact with each other, what organizations might be doing to block people and flow and how to deal with that.
In my talk I will show how we are developing the big holistic picture of our culture. There will be examples of what we’ve been doing over the last years working on our engineering culture. I will dive into the conversations that we are having about what our culture can be, the values that might make a great organization and what behaviors would we like to see from our peers.
Attendees can learn about things like trust, autonomy, self organization, collaboration, and feedback. They will see what teams can measure and how they can measure it, and what can be done to find out how predictable and pivotable teams are.
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