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Technology titles & performance reviews
At TIM in 2012 we specified our titles and promotion path for members of the Technology team, which was later adopted by other parts of the company. The criteria for promotion was the scope of impact and there was a direct mapping of titles to perceived scope of impact. I’m […]
Read MoreUsability Testing Is Not Just For Customers
tl;dr: Developer tools and shared code can be usability tested, providing a different insight to code review or pair programming. While working on a developer tool, knowing I intended to perform usability tests got me focused on making something usable. Just framing the problem as “providing a usable tool” […]
Read MoreFieldwork: Teaching Javascript
Three developers are working together on a single computer. Another developer is across the table at his own computer. The three working together are taking part in a hands-on learning session as part of the front-end working group. The man standing (Tony Tsui) is leading the learning exercise. The woman […]
Read MorePods – a Step Towards Self Management
Managers are the people everybody loves to hate, but there are things a good manager will do which will hugely benefit those who report to them. About a year ago, the technology department at TIM Group started an experiment to flatten its organisational structure by making everyone self managed – […]
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Cron instigated contention
Compute resources are 21st-century utility, much like water, electricity and gas there is a limited supply. When you run out there are implications, even when the period was brief. This can cause to unexpected failure scenarios in systems thought to be resilient to failure. tldr: If you have cron jobs […]
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Fieldwork: Values
A laminated card. The card lists out various things that individuals use to guide their decisions and interactions on a day to day basis. These cards are found throughout the office: on desks and in meeting rooms. I often find myself, and see others, picking up the card during discussions […]
Read MoreDoing Fieldwork in TIM Group
How do you get a sense of the culture of a place? This is the question that Joe Schmetzer and I were contemplating at our fortnightly morning ‘get together’ where we mentor and coach each other. We’d been discussing the idea for several meetings by this point, but this time […]
Read MoreWhat I learned about self-organisation
I learned a number of things at Olaf Lewitz and Adam Pearson’s course ‘Enabling Self-Organisation: Getting Macro Results without Micromanaging‘. I think my biggest a-ha moment was that self-organisation is not something that you do to others, it is something that you do to yourself. The course focussed on a […]
Read MoreGaining Feedback, Building Trust
A powerful means of building trust and collaboration within a team is to gather around a table and tell each other face to face ‘this is how your actions made me feel’, both the good and the bad. The importance of feedback Effective software development requires a robust feedback loop. […]
Read MoreChoosing what work to do at TIM Group
TL;DR: Working at TIM Group means having the responsibility to decide what work to do. The most obvious criteria is business value but I don’t think that is enough. At TIM Group we have been experimenting with self-organisation for a while. It’s been a gradual process that started with the […]
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