Talk: Write that down! How to stop teams forgetting what they've learnt

Talk description

Title:	Write that down! How to stop teams forgetting what they've learnt
Short synopsis:	Organizations often run on vast amounts of implicit knowledge, often held by specific individuals or teams. This works up to a point: what happens when a significant amount of the team leaves and is replaced? Or a number of new people need to be on-boarded and brought up to speed in a hurry? This talk will explore how practices we may already regularly use (e.g. pairing, testing, retrospectives) can be enhanced so that important lessons are never forgotten and shared across the organization. Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	What happens to teams when they are in a state of flux: quickly growing, quickly shrinking, quickly churning, or a combination of all three? Sometimes, knowledge of lessons learnt the hard way (through failure, pain, and/or hard work) can disappear overnight. A possible remedy is to focus on extensive documentation, which risks becoming out of date and a massive maintenance burden for everyone involved. This talk will explore how simple enhancements to common practices can help capture these lessons as more permanent artefacts, ensuring that knowledge is not lost and can be transmitted to future team members (including future versions of current team members!). These techniques are lightweight, easy to experiment with, and totally independent of each other, allowing teams to mix and match the parts that they feel resonate with them. The talk will also assess the relative successes and failures of these approaches within the contexts they have been learned in: a bootcamp where the student body changes every 12 weeks, a team featuring an ever changing cast of contractors, and a startup trying to double its headcount every quarter. Max size: 5000 chars
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