Talk: Growing or Distributing Teams Using Techniques from Open Source Communities
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Speaker:
Paul Shannon
Talk description
Title:
Growing or Distributing Teams Using Techniques from Open Source Communities
Short synopsis:
Most technology organisations go through a time when they have to expand. The choice is either new distributed teams or growing permanent teams by splitting people between subdomains. Trying to maintain cross functional teams, shared knowledge and coherent flow when teams expand is difficult but some of the techniques used in the world of open source can help. Learn from open source practitioners at eLife and their collaborators, and find that they can even help social and cultural aspects too.
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Long synopsis (optional):
This session is an iteration on a long-standing idea created by Paul and his former colleague, who works at a global consultancy, and is based in Australia. It was observed that many of the teams the consultancy works with would benefit from the ways that lean/agile open source teams collaborate, especially when they're moving into a new way of distributed working. Paul's experience in open source has informed the consultancy in its experimentation with these techniques in teams and they have collectively spoken to many other teams with either similar experience or a similar need. The goal of this work is to eventually produce a paper on the concept but for now, Paul would like to share his and his collaborators' experience at a well attended and thought-provoking event like Agile on the Beach and hopefully gather further data, feedback or contacts. He will take you through an in-depth look at how his team's openness and related ways of working helped them expand their team quickly, while also collaborating with teams and individuals across multiple continents. As his team is in quite a unique organisation, being a nonprofit with a mission to create open source software, they have the interesting position of working with open source while also being co-located, permanent and product driven. Paul will also look at how these ideas are being applied at a global consultancy, bringing examples of techniques adopted from larger open source projects like Kubernetes and Terraform. He'll further share insight from other software consultancies that regularly work with teams of different skill levels and geographic locations, exploring the ideas of transparency, traceability, empathy, governance, structure, decision making, logistics and automation. He'll conclude with some clear techniques worth investigating in your own teams to help cope with dramatic change, growth and the unpredictability that might bring
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