Expert consultation sessions now available online

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I am now available again for 1-hour online consultation sessions. Use ONLINE20 for a 20% discount.

We can shape a consulting session to explore any topic relevant to your organization’s current context and future goals. Typical topics include:

Consulting sessions are particularly beneficial when used as part of a larger learning program.

➡️ https://confluxhq.com/p662a

Tips for facilitating round-table discussions

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Round-table discussions can be a really useful way to discover and share direct experience with peers and colleagues. A good round-table discussion is quietly facilitated by someone who knows the subject matter enough to include interesting questions and can ensure that everyone has a voice.

Here is what I have learnt from facilitating round-table discussions and watching others, too.

  1. understand the participants
  2. understand and prepare the topic under discussion
  3. remember: this is not your platform
  4. encourage quieter people
  5. nudge the discussion to ensure all points are covered

The rest of this post goes into more detail on these points.

table with cakes

Continue reading Tips for facilitating round-table discussions

Diversity in tech conferences and meetups – how and why

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I have been helping to promote greater diversity in tech conferences and tech meetups since 2012. Here is my thinking on how to promote diversity in tech events and why I think diversity is important.

Update: please first read this post from Trisha Gee: What Can Conferences Do To Attract More Women Speakers? and then this post by Jez Humble on How To Create A More Diverse Tech Conference. Trisha and Jez make many excellent points; in this post I try to offer some additional perspectives.

Since 2012 I have been running several meetups and conferences with a technology focus: London Continuous Delivery meetup group (2500+ members with around 80 different speakers in total), PIPELINE Conference (5 events since 2014 with around 50 different speakers), CodeMill digital skills meetup, and Assembly Conference. I have been keen to attract and promote a diverse range of speakers and attendees to all these events, and I think (with help from amazing team members) we have been fairly successful in promoting diversity in these tech events.

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Much of this diversity improvement has been focused on encouraging more women to speak and attend, but of course there is more to diversity than just gender; recently, I have tried to address other aspects too, including ethnic background, social class, and also personality “type” (particularly more introverted people).

Continue reading Diversity in tech conferences and meetups – how and why

Designing organisations for responsiveness

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Key points:

  1. Set up the organisation to ‘sense’ its environment
  2. Treat internal teams (almost) as external providers
  3. Conway’s Law should shape our organisation design
  4. Promise Theory is a useful approach to organisational agility

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I have been doing quite a bit of work recently with various organisations to help them develop new capabilities for building and evolving software-rich services. Part of this work involves thinking about the responsibilities of different teams and how these evolve. This blog post captures some thoughts and links on how the more successful organisations arrange themselves for agility and responsiveness.

Continue reading Designing organisations for responsiveness

Things I (Don’t) Like About Continuous Delivery – LondonCD meetup June 2017

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

This is part 4 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Our 4th Open Space discussion challenged people to identify the things that they don’t like about the Continuous Delivery book: things that don’t work in practice, things that are plain wrong, etc. – a slightly cheeky session!

tl;dr: Jez Humble and Dave Farley – authors of Continuous Delivery – did not get anything wrong in their book but they “did not say enough” about the culture/people aspect of Continuous Delivery. People and culture are tricky – who knew?! 🙂

Continue reading Things I (Don’t) Like About Continuous Delivery – LondonCD meetup June 2017