As I’m typing this, 2 of our development team are sitting around our TV listening to a 3rd dev hold court on ‘immutable architecture’ and the pros and cons of us migrating over to Chef and Puppet. Yeah I’m not too sure what that means either, but I do know that these weekly workshops are now an important part of our teams learning and development process.
We now treat workshops in the same way we treat our everyday software development work, i.e. we schedule them in to our production timetable as we would a client meeting, and make sure it gets delivered on time.
Typically each workshop takes an hour (so its certainly no small commitment from a production/manpower point of view) and is based on a subject relevant to our industry, work processes or disciplines that is voted for by the team at the beginning of the week. A workshop leader is then elected who is responsible for preparing the workshop’s content and then presenting it back to the rest of the team.
What makes a good workshop?
1) Get the basics right: location, time, and length.
2) The presenters job is to get participants’ creativity flowing so they generate as many ideas as possible during the workshop.
3) Make sure everyone has input. For example quieter participants should have their say and no one should be allowed to “take over” and dominate the discussion.
4) Sounds obvious but make sure the subject is relevant to the participants’ interests in the subject. Also take into account the experience levels of everyone involved and have different workshops to satisfy skill levels (especially with software dev).
The benefits of the regular workshop:
1) Boosts team creativity.
2) Acts as an educational resource to keep up to date with your industry’s advances, technologies and practices.
3) Actively encourages the team to want to learn more and keep their knowledge up to date.
4) Promotes a culture of being ‘market/industry leaders’ and experts.
5) Increases team motivation.
6) Generates open discussion and debate.
7) Can become a problem solving platform.
8) Can often lead to proposals to change and affect company working practices, infrastructures and services.
In summary, regular workshops will play a small part in helping your business staying at the forefront of your industry. If you can’t find 1 hour a week to do this you need to rethink your time management — find the time!
