FINN recently created a position called Technical Leader which is going to be our champions of technical excellence. One of the objects for this two-day field trip was to get everyone in the same room and share ideas and challenges from a technological point of view.
Quality does not cost … it pays
Most companies talk about how they work hard to “produce quality”, but most companies also fail to follow through and make quality a focus for the entire organization. Our first session was about defining what quality means for different stakeholders such as: end users, our CEO, operations and product owners. These discussions lead us to a first draft of a checklist which will be used before each new release.
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No known bugs
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Tested in every environment
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Customer support is informed of important changes
Walk’n talk for good mental health
The term walk and talk is both a technique for making movies, but it is also a therapeutical technique. At FINN we practice this by randomly pairing two people who both have prepared a challenge they have in their daily work and then they walk and talk for about an hour. This was the first time this group did this exercise and it was a huge success. It was great to get out and talk about stuff to someone you do not get to talk to very often during the work day. As a team building exercise I think this is a great tool which is highly recommended!
The challenge of company Open Space sessions
During day two we had three open space sessions which was buzzing with excitement. Doing open spaces at conferences it is really inspiring and you learn stuff which you can bring back to your organization. Having open space sessions for just company employees has a different dynamic and can really be something to get your spirits down. When you do this inside a company you build up excitement during the sessions and along with the excitement comes expectations that “somebody needs to make this happen”. There is nothing in “open space theory” about how you can easily get more out of these session than just a lot of nice thoughts. This would resemble putting up a suggestions box and then do nothing with any of the suggestions. What we did was to get some people together after the session to see what actions needed to be taken after the sessions. Kind of like a retrospective where we looked at what came out of the open spaces. It would be interesting to hear what others do with their internal open space sessions.
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