How we get comfortable with new technology
There is a saying that there is nothing new in the world which I tend to agree with and when it comes to technology it’s very rare that organisations are implementing something that is completely new to industry. However, there is an important consideration that gets skipped over. Whilst a concept or an idea might be old it doesn’t allow for the fact that at the pointy end of every technology project are the people.
The people are the ones that still have to learn it, still have to work out how an idea applies to their specific context or wade through the technical documentation.
Our team at NZTE has to get comfortable with new technology quite regularly and I’m sure we aren’t the only ones. So if it’s a challenge your team are grappling with here are some of the approaches we take to dealing with the discomfort –
We run spikes – technical spikes are designed to drive out risk and reduce uncertainty. Its borrowed from XP (even though we more closely follow scrum) where 1 or 2 developers will take a challenge and try a number of alternatives in a timeboxed period to land on the best solution. This is a particularly useful technique to improve our estimates instead of making it up or sandbagging one to allow for this time as well as the fact that it is highly transparent! It will often run a sprint in advance of our estimates so we have time to build the learning into the flow of work.
We have planning and innovation weeks – we know that to really get into learning new things you need to carve out some dedicated time (you know what I mean, more than the 20 minutes to search stack overflow during the work day). We find this works best in one week chunks for a squad so they can fill it up with some personal development as well as stepping back from the flow of work to think about some of our harder problems. In one of our upcoming weeks (March 1-5) we have people doing a SAFe certification and others doing an MLOps sprint series hosted by a partner so a wide variety there. It’s a great way to get in front of things that are probably coming down the line so the discomfort is lower when they turn up!
We carve out our own learning time – not all of our upskilling is going to be determined by scrum masters and our leaders, people are empowered as part of their professional development to set aside work time (yep, actually during work hours) to learn how best works for them – sometimes that’s youtube vids but it can be creating sandbox environments and doing something more hands on, we aren’t prescriptive about the how you learn, it’s driven by the individual.
We ask for help – at the heart of learning new things is the ability to ask for help when you don’t know how to solve something, we often see our teams jumping on a call to crack something and draw on the experience of the team, even if it’s just a steer in the right direction it’s always good to know the team have your back. In addition to that we run a web guild (by developers for developers) where the team talk about the challenges in our code base each fortnight. Given we don’t have things like ‘senior devs’ or architects its an important ritual to keep the team humming but you can read more about that here.
If your looking for this sort of environment to build your skills and learn new things there is a role we have open now for a business analyst or DM me directly for chat.
https://www.nzte.govt.nz/jobsatNZTE/bd7ffdba-b8e5-4dc3-a113-296fe2fbb9a9