[Intro Music]
Kyle: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, a fortnightly podcast on how to improve software delivery. I’m Kyle Chapman, I go by he, him and I work as a senior engineer at Made Tech – who are kindly sponsoring us.
This week, I’m talking to Emily Webber about communities of practice. Emily is an independent agile and delivery consultant, conference speaker, and the author of Building Successful Communities of Practice.
Kyle: Hi, my first question is who in this industry are you inspired by?
Emily: This is such a tough one. So many people. One thing to know about me is that I spent six years at art college, I have a master’s in Fine Art. You know the term Steal like an artist? I think that slight magpie approach applies to the way that I think about things, and the way I put things together.
First is Margaret Heffernan, who is an awesome organisational consultant. She talks a lot about people and embracing change. She’s got some fantastic books. I recommend reading them all, particularly Wilful Blindness.
Kyle: What’s that about?
Emily: It’s about CEOs or others, who purposely ignore things that could be disastrous. It’s very fascinating. Also, I’m really interested in social anthropology. I mentioned Robin Dunbar, who is somebody I wrote a paper with. Robin does a lot of work about human group sizing. We wrote a paper on that and how that works with communities in practise.
Kyle: That’s very cool. I want that paper, please give that to me at the end.
Emily: Yes, it was great to meet him. And lots of the people that I work with in organisations who aren’t necessarily public figures. I really enjoy people who are really passionate about what they do and are really motivated and just getting on with it.
Kyle: Just getting on with it, not being famous, just in a government department somewhere kicking ass.
Emily: Exactly.
Kyle: Yes, I’ve met a lot of those people.
Emily: What really inspires me, what keeps me motivated, is giving those people opportunities, and joining people up, seeing people being really happy and motivated and at work, moving the stuff out of the way that stops them doing that. So, individuals, I would say.
Kyle: That’s a nice call out. It’s lots and lots of people, it’s not just a few famous people who have written books. Actually, there are lots of lovely people who have never written a book but who are doing awesome things. I agree. There’s an energy level there for me, if I’m surrounded by those sorts of people and talking to those sorts of people all the time, it’s like, yeah, I can do everything, let’s go!
Emily: Yes. You get this unique position sometimes as a consultant in giving them permission to be who they are. Getting some of the stuff out of the way that is stopping them doing that or some perception that they have that’s stopping them getting up and talking about their work. Really showing them…
Kyle: Showing them it’s okay.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Kyle: Yes, I really love doing that. What’s it called, the outsider’s privilege or something like this, where you can come into an organisation and do things that maybe other people wouldn’t be allowed to do. You can be a bit cheeky; you can be a bit strange. Those are words I would sometimes apply to myself. Cool, let’s move on. What is a community of practise? What makes a really good one?
Emily: Some of the way I describe this changes over time. First of all, I think it’s worth talking about what community is because I think sometimes, it gets a little bit lost when we talk about communities of practise. It really is about the connections between people, and people that are connected around some kind of common purpose. There are lots of different types of community. When we are talking about communities in organisations, it tends to be people who are connected, are passionate, care about their practise or what they do day to day. That might be that they’ve got a particular role and they are really passionate about user research or product management or software engineering, whatever it might be. It might be a subset of that. It’s people who are passionate about something they do and make it better through their ongoing connections with each other and their ongoing interactions with each other.
Kyle: You’ve done a little work around other communities as well. You set up something in Hackney.
Emily: I did. A while back I set up a forum in Hackney. The reason I did that is I used to live in Hackney, I really loved it and there were a few blogs around that were quite negative about Hackney. I had also been involved with a couple of community action groups in Hackney. I saw that actually, getting a bunch of people together that had a common purpose can be quite powerful. Much more powerful than you can be as an individual. It can be quite positive.
With the forum in Hackney, which had a previous name which I had to change slightly so I could get through the email bad word block filters at Hackney Council.
Kyle: I was wondering, nice.
Emily: I wanted to put something together that enhanced the positive nature of bringing people together and trying to create the conditions where people could make things happen. Again, that carries on into my work with communities of practise and organisation. It’s bringing people together that care about something for some kind of positive good. That might be that it supports people doing their roles and it helps them feel confident, motivated, and helps them be the best they can be. Bringing people together that help make changes that make their lives better, and make the organisation better, or a number of different things. It’s about those connections between people and the power they can have as a group.
If you have people that care about the same thing you do, then you have a shared conversation, you have shared challenges.
Kyle: Something immediately in common, almost.
Emily: Yes, exactly. That’s the real power of communities. If you look at communities in any environment, it is that they understand what the point of the community is. They have a shared purpose around that. What makes a good community is that people have a trusted and safe environment.
Kyle: Is this psychological safety that we’re talking about?
Emily: Yes.
Kyle: Being free from the negative consequences, or harm, really, is how I tend to think of it. Free from the risk of psychological harm. I think it’s very easy to underestimate how much it can hurt to say ‘Hey, I think this might be a good idea, shall we do this?’, and for someone else to say, ‘No, don’t be stupid.’ That’s the opposite of what you are trying to create.
What kinds of things do you think help create safety in those spaces?
Emily: Honestly, the foundation of any community is people getting to know each other. Getting to grow empathy and understand each other’s situations.
Kyle: Just time spent together, in part.
Emily: I also think it’s valuable as a community to talk about a few things. One, which I think is really helpful, is understanding what the boundaries of membership look like. Who is going to turn up? Is my boss going to turn up to the next meeting and then judge me? That’s not brilliant for psychological safety. Or is somebody completely random I’ve never met before going to turn up? What does that look like? So, understanding the edges of that can be quite important. That’s the same for any community.
I was Chair of a Residents’ Association once. The Residents’ Association was open to people who lived in that building. That’s a really clear definition.
Kyle: Yes, it’s nice when it’s really clear like that.
Emily: Yes.
Kyle: It’s not always the case.
Emily: Even then, it starts to get fuzzy because is it people that live there, is it people that own flats there, is it people that rent there? Is it people that are bothered by the noise? I don’t know.
Kyle: Is it a blog post that you’d written about opening up the product to community? Trying to work out how you could create a space that was still safe for those people, while maybe creating a second space to let a wider group of people join in. I thought that was absolutely the right way to do it.
Emily: Definitely. I’ve done that before. Particularly if a community is quite new, and you want to grow those connections between the members before throwing the doors open.
One of the problems I’ve seen when communities try and grow too quickly, if you go from 0 to suddenly 150 people involved, it’s very hard to feel…
Kyle: Nobody knows each other anymore.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Kyle: Yes, that’s a real challenge. Speaking as someone who is in a company right now that has grown quite quickly, it changes more quickly than you realise. The dynamics of how you all talk to each other. People come and go in different roles. I also liked the idea you had of the different roles in a community. People who are going to be your leaders, people who are going to be just on the outskirts, and that’s okay. I think that was a really good, validating way to describe it. Not everyone will turn up. That’s fine. That doesn’t mean that you’ve not built a good community. It just means that different people have different needs, different engagement.
Emily: Yes. I’ve seen this happen a couple of times, where HR take over and they say, okay, you’re a developer, therefore you are now in the developer community of practise, go forth. One particular organisation I was working with had that. Everyone in the HR system has a community of practise next to their name. But they’re not in a community because they are not…
Kyle: Yes, you can’t assign someone to a community. It’s very much humans as resources thinking, isn’t it? Just pick them up and put them over here and ta-da! They’ve got another tag near their name.
Emily: Communities of practise are inherently informal. There’s a voluntary nature to them. They say, oh, there’s great value in that; a quick way to grow communities is just to put people in communities. Actually, that doesn’t really work.
Kyle: Isn’t it annoying, how the quick way almost never works? You talked a bit about this idea of serendipity. Actually, I really liked this because it has reflected some of the things I think I’ve learned over the last four or five years, of letting go of the idea of control. That’s maybe a scary thought to some people. If my goal is to set up a community and part of that, is I have to step back and say, yes, it’s happening in time, I’ve made all the conditions. You can’t force it.
Emily: Yes. I think that’s any organisation going through some kind of transformation, which really is all organisations, all the time.
Kyle: Right now, especially.
Emily: Doing a transformation programme, as many do, there’s a lot of people that want to go, okay, sell me the answer. Sell me the framework that is going to solve all my problems. We’ll just implement that, job done. The thing is, every situation is different because it has different people involved, different environment, that kind of thing.
Kyle: Different history, different context, different technology. It’s so different.
Emily: You see this with communities. In the same organisation, communities have different cultures, like teams have different cultures. It’s about creating the right conditions for success. There isn’t a magic silver bullet that’s going to solve all your problems; do it this way and it will work. There are some very particular things with communities that can help with those conditions. Or the other way, can definitely stop communities happening.
Kyle: I’m interested to hear about those, what you would recommend as better practices for setting up communities.
Emily: I think one of the biggest things is cultural, definitely. Culture is everything, right?
Kyle: What does culture mean to you? A really easy question!
Emily: One of the really important things, you want teams experimenting. You want communities to feel like they are able to do stuff. Going back to that idea of permission, or people feeling like they are able to do things without certain repercussions happening. If you do something and you get told off for doing it, for example – and that happens over and over again – you just stop doing it. There’s a condition called learned helplessness, which is the idea that people just learn that they can’t step out of their area, their bubble. They are going to get in trouble if they try and do something different, so they just stop trying. It’s not a brilliant place to be.
That happens with communities. Your community might motivate you at work, you might be learning new things, you might be fixing stuff as a group of people, fixing things for the organisation. But if your managers and leaders are saying delivery trumps everything, and you cannot spend time doing anything that isn’t sitting at your computer writing code, that’s a quick way to kill anything that happens outside of delivering anything.
Sometimes that isn’t explicitly said, it just happens in the actions. It might be yes, we really believe that you should spend time learning and you should spend time contributing to the organisation, but can you deliver that thing by Thursday?
Kyle: Yes, culture isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. It’s what is rewarded and punished. Actually, it annoys me a disproportionate amount when I hear people say things about culture, their own culture, which is patently false. It doesn’t count unless you put your money where your mouth is and give people some time to do this sort of thing. Generally, at least in the public sector, that’s been pretty positive. When I’ve come in to consult in organisations and said, ‘I think we could set up a community of practise here, I think that would help this silo-ing that we’ve got’, it’s got pretty positive responses.
Energy levels can dip once a community isn’t new anymore. At the beginning it is all exciting, but it becomes a struggle sometimes to maintain them. How do you think you help a community going through that stage, when maybe there is a bit of a lull?
Emily: One thing I’ve found very useful is to tell people that is normal. What happens a lot is people go, everything’s brilliant! People are very excited, they’re like, oh, there’s these people we didn’t know, and we get a chance to talk to each other. They’re very enthused and energised by that. Then the day job takes over and this dip happens in energy. Then some people get disheartened and say well, that’s all rubbish, it’s not working. So, validating that, and also recognising achievements that communities have. Recognising and valuing and rewarding input people are giving. There’s some external validation. You have to say, ‘This is good, carry on!’
Kyle: Do you mean from outside the community, or…
Emily: Yes, I think from inside and outside the community, is valuable. It goes back to people feeling like they are able to get involved and aren’t going to get told off for getting involved.
Kyle: Yes, it’s just the flipside of that coin, in the same way that you are trying not to punish people for speaking out, you are also rewarding them and saying this is a good thing that you’re doing, coming along, and contributing. That does help.
Emily: Exactly. The other thing is checking that it is meeting people’s needs. I do encourage that communities retro.
Kyle: Yes, I really liked this idea. I haven’t seen communities of practise do that a lot. I think I’ve seen them do it informally. Talking about how it’s going, what do we want to do, but not a formal retrospective. I actually think that can be really powerful.
Emily: Particularly because those conversations don’t always include the quiet voices.
Kyle: Yes, that might not be engaging.
Emily: Yes. Understanding that is useful. As well as that varying what the community does. I’ve seen communities that say they have regular meetings, but every meeting is the same. Varying that and saying we’re going to learn something new this time, or we’re going to watch a talk or we’re going to dig into a problem that we’ve got at work.
Kyle: Yes, I think shape like that can help motivate people. Especially if they’re interested in this bit, but not in this bit, so I’ll just come along to these ones and that’s fine. Then they start to get more interested.
Emily: Back to numbers. I’ll speak to people, and they’ll say only ten people showed up. Well, ten people showed up!
Kyle: That’s amazing, yes!
Emily: Ten people got value out of spending an hour together. If three people show up and get value out of it, then that is a valuable session.
Kyle: Yes, culturally we are really invested in the idea of growth and amazing huge things, right? My thing can’t succeed unless it’s absolutely amazing. And you’re right, three people meeting and having a good conversation has value. I’ve done that this week, accidentally. Just ran across some people in a meeting with a slightly different agenda, but we found out we had a common challenge and talked through it. I came away from it thinking I’m not alone, that’s good.
[Music Sting]
Kyle: So, just a quick shout out to Made Tech, our sponsor. Made Tech are software delivery experts, mainly working in the public sector. I’ve been working at Made Tech for a few years now, and I’ve learned more than I did anywhere else in such a short space of time. All the while being supported by a bunch of lovely humans, you can find us on Twitter. That’s @madetech, which is M A D E T E C H. And we’re hiring across a number of regional offices across the UK. Go to madetech.com/careers to find out more about that. Oh, we’ve also got some books. Head to madetech.com/resources – get yourself some free books!
And now, back to our chat with Emily.
Kyle: I’m interested in this idea of how your organisational brain can’t live in only written form. What is the right and wrong things to write down?
Emily: Knowledge management is a topic that has been talked about for many years. Interestingly enough, communities of practise traditionally have sat within knowledge management. The way I tend to talk about it is explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is the stuff that you can write down and doesn’t change very often. Tacit knowledge is more difficult to explain, it changes quickly enough that writing it down with some kind of permanence is not very useful.
Many of us have been in organisations that have the Wiki.
Kyle: Yes, where knowledge goes to die.
Emily: Where knowledge goes to die. The reason that knowledge goes to die in a Wiki is just that, it’s that if you try and write down everything that changes too often and isn’t particularly useful in written form, then you just have this muddy thing that you can’t really find the information that you actually need.
Kyle: Yes, you might read it and the person who wrote it is like, there you go, I’ve written that thing down. But it doesn’t work in written form. I think that’s something I see a lot.
Emily: On the other end of that, I often hear people talk about Slack and say well, we need to have all of the Slack history searchable. People ask the same questions again. Well, they might be asking the same question, but it’s a different context and it’s a different conversation. Actually, unless it’s how do I reset my password on x system – which is something you can write down and doesn’t change – then it is relevant to ask those questions again, today rather than two weeks ago or four months ago.
Kyle: I think sometimes, one of them can masquerade as the other. Me asking what languages we use in this organisation; it looks like it has a straight answer: We use Java and C##. But actually, it’s opening up a conversation about why we use those languages. Yes, I think it’s easy to say these are questions that have been asked before when they’re not, actually, simple things.
Emily: Yes. I can’t cite where this is from, but I think there’s this idea that usually, the most visited page on a Wiki or an intranet is the canteen lunch menu.
Kyle: Yes, that’s the important information that everyone needs to know. I like that.
Emily: They need to know it, it’s something you can write down. You don’t need to interrogate it.
Kyle: I like that, it’s good. It’s interesting, you said some things can be written down but are explicitly temporary. I think that’s something that struck me. Writing can be useful, even if it’s not going to stay around forever. For some people, they see writing and go, well, if I’m going to take the time to write it down, why wouldn’t I put it in the Wiki? It might be useful to someone at some point. It’s a difficult topic for sure, and one that I am still working on, especially this year. I’ve found written summaries to really help me at times. I’ve felt the temptation to put them in a Wiki.
Emily: Everyone is writing a play book at the moment.
Kyle: Everyone loves a play book. Get yourself a run book. Then you don’t need a handover, right? You just give them the run book.
Emily: Yes, that and a design system. These things are great, as long as they are live, they’re living, and somebody owns them. That is actually a place where communities of practise can come in because if it’s people that are doing a role, or really care about a subject area, owning what good looks like in that area feeds into things like play books and inductions and training.
Kyle: Was that something that happened with your work at Gov.UK? The communities that were there, did they start writing guidance for things?
Emily: Yes, the communities at GDS of which Gov.UK is a part, the agile delivery community which I set up, one of the things we used to do was GDS offered service management training for the rest of government. That was different modules about what digital delivery means. We took on the agile bit of that, and then instead of having one person deliver it all the time, that’s something the community owned and updated and delivered in pairs. Which is really great because it means that people are able to bring their own experiences, their own stories, and grow and own that training and keep it alive.
GDS also went on to own the service manual, so there’s much more input from lots of different areas. Those communities really owned the guidance of how to do digital delivery across UK government.
Kyle: I’m a huge fan of the service manual and the other guidance that GDS has put out. As someone who joined working on the public sector less than five years ago, it was really helpful to get all this instant context and history and useful information. It’s really interesting to hear about where that came from and how it came about. Recreating those conditions is something that really interests me.
We talked a little bit about serendipity and trying to encourage that without controlling it. What kinds of things do you think you can do, apart from communities of practise, to help get people in an organisation talking to each other?
Emily: This is a really hard one. During the lockdown, particularly Lockdown 1, whatever that means to anyone, wherever people are in the world, there was a lot of scrambling to make sure you had the right tech. What were the expectations of how you work? Just to get some kind of basics in place. It’s only taken until more recently that people have started to really notice the effects of the lack of serendipity, I guess.
I’ve really seen it – I run a meet up that’s online. I’ve been running it since 2018, so I started it before the pandemic.
Kyle: What’s the name of it, sorry?
Emily: It’s called Agile in the Ether. Following up from a meet up that used to run called Agile on the Bench, which was on a bench in a park and went online. One of the things that I have noticed – and you’ll see this in a lot of your work meetings as well, I’m sure – is that people now turn up to video meetings on the dot or a couple of minutes late. You’re not bumping into people in corridors or the types of stuff that you get from being around in an office.
We don’t even get that pre-meeting chat stuff. Some of it is to do with people now have back to back video calls, and it knocks out that time that maybe you used to chat about stuff because somebody was in the same room as you.
I think people are really starting to miss it. One of the reasons it is hard to recreate is that it happens in those unexpected places, like in the hallway or in the beginning of the meeting.
Kyle: Explicitly not planned.
Emily: Yes, explicitly not planned. I think there are a number of things that you can think about in the area of assisted serendipity, which is a term that I stole from a blog post. In the physical workspace, people like Steve Jobs used to design these buildings so that people would bump into each other.
Kyle: In my head, it’s like a maze where you literally bump into people, like a panopticon of Apple.
Emily: I think in the Pixar book there was a point where people were complaining that the toilets were so far away…
Kyle: It’s necessary for serendipity! Don’t argue!
Emily: …they ended up changing that. You mentioned earlier you had a chat with somebody at the beginning of a meeting or at the end of a meeting and you found out you had a shared problem, and that meant that you had a useful conversation about it. That’s serendipity. One question is how can you create the opportunities that fit into what is already happening? Can you create a bit of extra time at the beginning and the end of meetings? Shorten your content slightly to allow some of those conversations to happen. That’s one thing.
There’s other things you can do. In my community which is off the back of my meet up, we do random coffee. I do think random coffee is brilliant for many reasons. You sign up to a list, we use an app called Donut. Every two weeks, it randomly pairs two people up and they spent half an hour having a chat.
Kyle: That’s nice.
Emily: Yes. It’s a chat about whatever. Whatever you feel like. You do have to opt into it, obviously, but then people just chat about random stuff.
Kyle: And you’re allowed to order yourself a donut for it?
Emily: You can order yourself a donut.
Kyle: Okay, good, that’s an important part of the process.
Emily: I was talking to somebody a couple of days ago. They said that in their team, her and another person in the team do the crossword together.
Kyle: That’s nice.
Emily: Isn’t it nice? They spend time together just doing the crossword.
Kyle: Just a little ritual to encourage it, right? It doesn’t feel serious, it’s not another meeting in the day that you have to do, it’s just a nice habit.
Emily: So, I felt that was useful. Show and tell is really useful for serendipity. A way of watching something and going that’s relevant to me, that’s not relevant to me or whatever. I think in this world, where we are so screen-focused, the question is how can you shorten them? So, if you do things like quick weak notes or bullet-pointed lists of what you’ve been up to or trying to make video updates really, really short.
Kyle: Yes, I’ve had something rattling around my head that at some point will become a blog post, that’s around that it’s kind to be brief. There’s a kindness in saying look, I understand that we are all super busy, so I’m trying to give you what I know in as little as possible. I’m cutting out anything that isn’t really important. Actually, focusing on that is being kind to the people around you. I think that’s something that I’ve tried to focus on more over this last year.
Emily: Yes. One thing that GDS did, there was a rule about video lengths. All videos were two minutes long. There’s one about a user of the carer’s allowance showing how the new carer’s allowance service at the time had made her life easier. It was nice. It had a user, it was inspiring, it was two minutes long.
Kyle: It still had the same impact, but was just really quick, yes. I think it can be a little bit scary to produce something small. Especially if you spend a bit of time on it. You’re like, I made this little video. And they’re like, it’s only two minutes long, what have you been doing all day? Actually, it takes more effort to do this than it does to take a five minute video, to cut it down to its absolute best bits. It’s that thing about perfection is achieved not when you can’t add anything else, but when you can’t take anything else away.
I really love your focus on the human side of work. If you’re comfortable sharing, I would be interested in what you need from others to work well?
Emily: This is an interesting one as a person who works for myself, in a company by myself.
Kyle: Yes, that’s part of why I thought it would be interesting.
Emily: Increasingly, if I take on a piece of work, I will bring someone in with me. Increasingly I like working with other people. The reasons for that and the real value is around the idea of collaboration being that you are able to build on top of each other’s experiences. You’re able to bring different experiences to the table. You can see blind spots that you wouldn’t be able to see on your own because you just don’t have those experiences.
Collaboration is really important. I think what I need is people being open and sharing. It’s very easy to make assumptions about other people if you don’t understand a bit more about them, their situation, how they work, what’s going on with them. Those kinds of things. That’s really useful. That honesty, openness, and shared responsibility.
Kyle: So, they can take ownership over the things that you’re doing together, and say I’ll handle this bit, and you know that’s going to be okay. I really like that too.
Emily: Even the concept of talking stuff through with people is really important. Some of that is that even saying things out loud triggers different bits of your brain.
Kyle: You know about rubber ducking?
Emily: No.
Kyle: It might be a developer thing. I think it was originally called rubber duck debugging. I think that’s how it first came out. You’ve got a problem and you can’t work it out, and the classic thing is you stand up, you go to someone else’s desk and go, ‘Mike, I’m having this real problem, this happens then this happens then… no, I’ve fixed it, don’t worry.’ You just walk off and they’ve never said a word to you. The idea was that you would put a rubber duck on your desk and talk to that instead. Hey Mr Duck! I’m having this problem! You never need to go and interrupt someone else, because just talking out loud helps you.
I’ve bought little rubber ducks for teams before. Although now I realise that’s sending out a signal of don’t talk to each other, so maybe I need to think about that. It’s okay to talk to each other.
Emily: Yes, you want to watch someone else’s face. Are they frowning at you intently?
Kyle: Yes, complete confusion, why are you doing any of that?! What is that? I get that a lot when I’m explaining my mad problem to other people. I think vocalising stuff and having someone else just to ask little probing questions, sometimes. Have you tried this? No, I hadn’t thought about that at all. That’s a really great point that I usually do, I’ll go away and do that, thank you very much. I just needed that one thing to get me out of my own head. Definitely, yes.
Can you tell me one thing that is true about you and one thing that is untrue?
Emily: Okay. The first thing is that I was really into skateboarding when I was younger and won a few skateboarding competitions. I have a twin brother and he was really into skateboarding. I wanted to show him up and show him that I could do it better, and I did.
Kyle: That’s a really elaborate story if it’s untrue, that’s really clever.
Emily: And the other thing is that my first ever TV appearance was on the 80s children’s TV show Rainbow, singing. I’m not very good at singing.
Kyle: That’s amazing. That clip is out there. Someone on YouTube, if that one is true, which I hope you realise you’ve revealed by giving that answer. You hadn’t thought about that at all, perhaps.
Emily: You would have to know the specific episode title to find it. I’m not telling you that.
Kyle: Or it’s not true. This is a difficult one. I can see both of these being good. That’s two very good ones.
What is the best thing that has happened to you this month? It could be work related or not.
Emily: I have started pairing with a few people on work recently. It’s meant that I get to spend more time with some people that I really like. It’s increased my being social, I think, which is brilliant.
Kyle: Like a hint of a return to normal, even if it’s only the start. Where can people find you if they want to talk to you? Do you have anything coming up that you want to plug?
Emily: I don’t have anything in particular to plug, I’m always up to lots of things. I’m on Twitter @ewebber and my blog at emilywebber.co.uk. I’m always sharing things out there. You can also find my meet up at AgileintheEther.co.uk.
Kyle: It was really lovely speaking to you. Thank you very much for coming along and spending some time with me, it’s been a pleasure.
Emily: Yes, thanks, it’s been fun.
Kyle: And that wraps up my chat with Emily Webber. What I really took away from this is building communities of practice is a skill, not a brute fact. There’s challenges to building these communities. We’re not always going to get it right first time, but there’s help out there. And they do really have an impact not just on delivering software, but on how healthy and happy your people, your teams, your organization are. I really think that focus on the human side of it is important. We need each other’s help. I said there was help out there and I can definitely recommend Emily’s book, Building Successful Communities of Practice. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes.
Kyle: Now it’s time for hack of the month. Every other episode, we’ll invite someone to share a quick hack or tip that they found useful. This episode our hack comes from Tess Barnes, who’s a senior engineer here at Made Tech.
Tess: So, this is a tip from me about learning your tools. Whatever you use, whatever programming language, IDE, favorite library or API, spend some time getting to know it and take it for a spin. Have some quiet time thinking with it and play with it. When you’re comfortable with the tool, you know where the docs are and you have some common keyboard shortcuts under your belt, the less it gets in the way when you’re facing your real challenges. You know – user needs, legacy code, all that quirky infrastructure that you’ve just found that needs fixing.
The more tools that you learn, the easier it can be to learn new ones. So I start by constructing what I want to do with a tool from scratch. And I’ll use the docs rather than grabbing something ready-made from say, stack overflow or another site that gives you these ready-made things. While I’m looking for that, I’ll have skimmed over a bunch of other functionality and other things that I might find useful later. So when I’m looking for another solution, I could have already found and read some of this stuff before. So playing, tinkering with a tool and experimenting will really help you out in the long run.
[Music sting]
Kyle: For this final segment – Making Life Better – myself and my colleagues make some suggestions for small things we can do to help out; which could be helping the person next to us, or a little further afield.
So this week is actually about looking after yourself. It’s very easy to forget you need to be kind to yourself too. It’s a lot harder to help other people if you’re running on empty. This comes from Adam Friday, a delivery manager here at Made Tech. He’d like to talk about better work-life balance. So he says, draw a line between work and life. So that could be turning off notifications on slack or email or whatever communication tool you’re using for work. So people from work know you can’t be contacted.
Try not to engage with those tools when you finish work. It’s perfectly acceptable to put your working hours on the footer of your email or in your profile, so clients know when you’ll be back – and to not expect a reply from you until the next working day or when you’re back in. So thanks to Adam for that.
Kyle: Well, that’s it for this episode. You can find my guest Emily Webber, me (Kyle) and our sponsor Made Tech all on Twitter. Emily’s @EWebber, I’m @KJDChapman and Made Tech are @MadeTech, which are all in the episode notes as well.
If you’ve enjoyed this, we’d love a rating or review on whatever podcast platform you’re using. It really helps us to hear how we’re doing and it will help more people find it as well. We’re also very happy to hear feedback by Twitter.
Thank you to Rose, our editor, Gina Cady, our virtual assistant, Viv Andrews, our transcriber, Richard Murray for the music (there’s a link in the description for that) and to my colleagues at Made Tech for helping out: Clare Sudbery, Jack Harrison, Karsyn Robb and Laura Plaga. We publish new episodes every fortnight on a Tuesday morning. We’ll see you next time, thanks for listening!
[Recording Ends]
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