Consultancy
Starting your own innovation lab? Wondering how to deliver a successful internal hackathon?
From hourly or daily dates, to virtual or in-person sessions, we can guide you through it all with 15+ years of innovation experience.
Hosting your first hackathon? It can be daunting, and there's so much to think about - but we're on hand to help every step of the way.
Want to chat about building high performing teams?
We can provide coaching (both in-person or virtual), or we can come to you and run practical sessions to help teams work together more effectively.
Our top five tips to makes a high performing team:
Psychological safety
We believe one of the first pillars of high performing teams is where each and every member brings not just their self, but their full self to the workplace.
We can provide practical exercises beyond the classic icebreakers which can strengthen team dynamics and empathy whilst also guiding individuals to play to their strengths.
Autonomy
How are decisions made in the team? Are they dominated by the loudest voice in the room? Or the person with the highest level of seniority? What about the point of most knowledge?
We can help you and your team explore this pivotal, often under-looked aspect of team dynamics. There's rarely a 'one size fits all' approach here so we'll spend time through interviews, coaching, shadowing and other techniques as appropriate to understand the dynamic and guide through any suggestions for improvements.
Rapid development methodologies
In our experience, the shorter the feedback loop, the higher quality of output from a team, and the happier that team tends to be.
If your team aren't able to push production quality releases multiple times a day, we can help unlock your missing potential!
We can lead with technical changes; like improving source control, continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), infrastructure-as-code (IaC), testing and optimised use of artificial intelligence to always help, never hinder.
And we can also help with procedural and human changes; like use of Agile, SAFe or Scrum, and a review of any processes, procedures and ceremonies being applied.
Fail fast mentality
We all make mistakes, but the only real mistake is failing to learn from them.
How do you manage mistakes as a team? Is there a blame culture? Do you have an action plan for when mistakes are made? Do you have built in resiliency, disaster recovery, or can you fail forward?
Linked to rapid development, teams with higher pace can recover quickly, adapt, and release solutions within minutes, not days.
Releasing a new product or solution? We can guide you through the process to identify your riskiest assumptions, and help you find ways to test those early, reducing the chance of bigger, costlier mistakes in the future.
Knowing when good is good enough
As engineers, we've all been there - the desire and passion to build out a solution, only to realise only a fraction of the functionality is actually used, or that technical debt from pushing out feature after feature has resulted in a project with fragility and unnecessary complexity.
Whether it's a process of 'EDUF' (Enough Design Up Front), Lean Start Up or something else, we'll work with you to understand current practices and provide practical tips for minimising technical debt whilst maximising success in every feature developed.
Read more:
These are external links, unaffiliated with WD Events, may provide useful added context and reading:
RAMP: https://www.gamified.uk/gamification-framework/the-intrinsic-motivation-ramp/
Two-Pizza Teams: https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/amazon-two-pizza-team/
The Mythical Man-Month: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959