Название: Internal Tech Conferences: Accelerate Multi-team Learning
Автор: Victoria Morgan-Smith, Matthew Skelton
Издательство: Leanpub/Conflux Books
Год: 2021-03-23
Страниц: 139
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), mobi, epub
Размер: 27.4 MB

Internal tech conferences can make a significant impact on an organisation's level of sharing, learning, and communication by accelerating multi-team learning across technology departments. The pace of change in IT means that cross-department learning is essential, and many organisations have found that an internal tech conference is an excellent way to achieve this.

This book provides practical advice on how to prepare, run and follow-up on an internal tech conference, together with case studies from several organisations showing the approaches in common and the adaptations for each situation.

This book is for people involved in technology leadership in some form: people in "official" positions of leadership (CIO, CTO, Head of Engineering, IT Operations Manager, etc.) and those in more informal technology leadership positions, such as team leaders, senior engineers, and people who simply like to lead by example. Having been in such positions ourselves, we (Victoria and Matthew) want to help other technology leaders to devise and run successful internal tech conferences to act as a key strategic differentiator for organisations building software systems.

What is an internal tech conference? An internal tech conference is effectively a technology conference run by and for the staff of a single organisation. Done well - as suggested by this book - an internal tech conference helps to bring together disparate teams and individuals in a shared celebration and examination of the current practices and approaches within the organisation, accelerating learning at a time of rapid technological change. The conference could be a half-day event, a single day, or multiple days; it might be every few months or just once per year. Speakers and conference organisers alike are drawn from within the organisation, making the day a real “team effort”. The focus is on learning and improving together as an organisation in a setting where sometimes-sensitive details can be shared openly with colleagues. With many public tech conference tickets costing upwards of €800-1000 per person, many organisations find that an internal tech conference is a highly cost-effective way of training and developing staff whilst simultaneously improving cohesion and camaraderie.

"Running an internal tech conference has made a big contribution to changes in culture and approach at the Financial Times. We aren't the only place who have seen this type of impact. If you want a practical guide to how to do something similar in your organisation, this book is for you!" - Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability, Financial Times

"We've found internal tech conferences to be transformational for our software development teams and Victoria & Matthew's book provides valuable, practical guidance that will help you plan, run and capitalise on your own brilliant conference." - Chris Smith, Head of Product Delivery, Redgate Software

"At IDBS we build some complicated software for the life science sector using a wide range of technologies, so it's vital that all our engineers are always up to speed on the different approaches and techniques. In 2019 we ran the first of our Eng.age events, an internal conference for all engineers working on our software products. Over 20 people presented topics ranging from AI/ML, Serverless, UX in Scrum, blockchain, performance testing to GraphQL. We used the excellent ideas and patterns in the book Internal Tech Conferences to help us plan, execute, and follow-up on the conference. The book was hugely useful for making our internal tech conference a success - in particular, the checklists at the back of the book helped us to avoid a whole set of non-obvious problems, making the day run smoothly." - Wesley Childs, Senior Director of Engineering, IDBS