1. Benefits - why run an internal tech conference

1.1 What is an internal tech conference?

An internal tech conference is effectively a technology conference run by and for the staff of a single organisation. Done well - as suggested by this book - an internal tech conference helps to bring together disparate teams and individuals in a shared celebration and examination of the current practices and approaches within the organisation, accelerating learning at a time of rapid technological change.

The conference could be a half-day event, a single day, or multiple days; it might be every few months or just once per year. Speakers and conference organisers alike are drawn from within the organisation, making the day a real “team effort”. The focus is on learning and improving together as an organisation in a setting where sometimes-sensitive details can be shared openly with colleagues. With many public tech conference tickets costing upwards of €800-1000 per person, many organisations find that an internal tech conference is a highly cost-effective way of training and developing staff whilst simultaneously improving cohesion and camaraderie.

1.2 The business case

Modern software development has co-evolved with cloud and IoT technologies to become a vital part of how successful organisations do business. Gone are the days of “death march” software projects; instead we have long-term product-based or service-based ownership of business services and user experiences, all enabled by rapid infrastructure provisioning, ubiquitous automation, and high-fidelity instrumentation and telemetry.

Software delivery approaches such as Lean Agile and DevOps have demonstrated convincingly the value and power of focused collaboration on key aspects of technology and user need. Research from industry experts such as DORA and Google has shown that organisations that invest in technical and social practices for their teams consistently perform better than other organisations [46] [47]. Internal tech conferences are an excellent way to invest in team social practices.

In their 2018 book Accelerate, authors Nicole Forsgren and colleagues identify some key drivers of organisational performance, based on research involving thousands of organisations worldwide. Their research show that staff loyalty and how well members of staff identify with the mission of the organisation are important components of high organisational performance [48].

We believe that internal tech conferences are one of the best ways to increase staff loyalty and identification with organisational goals for several reasons that we’ll explore in this book:

1. People see their work celebrated and validated within the organisation
2. People see their colleagues and coworkers on-stage, presenting their work in a compelling way, and can be inspired to do the same
3. People have a chance to reflect on recent achievements and consolidate their understanding of recent changes
4. People can see that the organisation is investing in learning and development in a very visible way
5. Where organisations run internal tech conferences on a regular basis, people can see that the organisation as a whole takes learning and improvement seriously. Learning and mastery are key to staff motivation [54] so learning helps with loyalty too.

By bringing people together in the same physical or temporal space for an extended period of joint learning, organisations help ideas and approaches to spread and align across many different teams [45]. Increasing inter-team cohesion like this helps to produce a culture of excellence based on mutual learning which in turn increases organisational performance.

1.3 Measurable benefits

An internal tech conference can be a powerful way of communicating and celebrating technology teams that build and operate the software systems that are increasingly essential to many organisations.

An event like this has many immediate, measurable benefits, as well as some hidden, long term ones. One major goal is to shape and promote a culture where people are encouraged to challenge the status quo and to get excited about new possibilities by having the space to experiment without the fear of failure. Psychologically, people are braver surrounded by people they know and trust; an internal tech conference can help people get to know each other in an open context, allowing them to share opinions and ideas.

In our research for this book, we have examined the motivations of many organisations for running this sort of event. For example, employees at Metaswitch say that their conference “reminds them they work with a great bunch of people” [3] says Calum Loudon (head of architecture and conference organiser). Investing in a full day for employees to share the things that excite them enables them to appreciate each other afresh and boosts their engagement with the organisation (the full case study from Metaswitch is in Chapter 5).

Other organisations had similar experiences. In fact, three clear themes emerge as reasons for running an internal tech conference: Empowerment, Learning and Connection.

1.4 Empowerment, Learning, Connection

1.4.1 Empowerment

Successful organisations are increasingly finding that a vital part of organisational agility is the empowerment of teams. Giving teams localised autonomy over their work enables a tighter feedback loop between action and results, helping the organisation to self-steer towards better outcomes for customers and users.

If you are looking to introduce a more egalitarian mindset within your organisation - where employees are given more autonomy over how they work, have more opportunity to be creative, are expected to take more accountability for making smart and responsible decisions, then you need to engage them in the bigger picture. Empowerment needs to be taken, not given - and this is a great opportunity to create an atmosphere that will enable that to begin.

It is clear that the traditional model of having senior managers provide all of the answers, expertise and direction is severely limiting. This event can act as an implicit invitation to collaborate with leaders to take collective ownership of your department’s health.

Most of the organisations in this book talk about their internal conferences being organised from the bottom up, by ordinary staff. Whilst in some cases there is a clear agenda set by leadership based on a theme they would like to address, many others facilitate an empowered curation of content. In both scenarios - whether leadership are asking the questions, or inviting the room to ask them - they are inviting the department to help answer them.

Internal conferences help to open the floor to all people, elevating voices not often heard. People do not necessarily need to be talking about weighty topics, simply the fact of being given the opportunity to design their own day is empowerment in action. Of course, if people do choose to join some debates about some of the options and choices made in terms of technology, ways of working, or department goals and structure, then that’s going to have a huge impact on their levels of engagement.

1.4.2 Learning

Building and operating modern software systems is a challenging task: the pace of delivery is rapid and we need to draw on a wide range of skills and experience in a coordinated, joined-up way. As our world changes, and new ways of working and leading emerge, so should new ways of learning. Spending money on sending a handful of people out to public conferences no longer seems to make the impact we need it to, at least alone; public conferences are often too expensive for all staff to attend and they are not tailored to the needs of the organisation or individuals.

There are smart people working hard in technology departments the world over - experimenting, discovering new ways of solving problems every day - and yet most organisations tend to look outside for learning. That is of course vital, but what the companies that feature in our case studies have also realised is that if they look at their own employees then they can learn a huge amount without going anywhere at all.

Hearing about the approaches other teams have used to solve problems can help you think differently about the challenges you are facing. Learning about how others ensure quality, for instance with different approaches to security, testing, monitoring or deployment, can inspire you to step up your own game. As an extra bonus, at an internal conference, these solutions are more likely to make sense in the context (infrastructure, regulation, culture) in which your organisation operates. - Ben Maraney, formerly of Klarna [50] (Read more about Klarna in Chapter 5.)

Empowerment is closely linked to the shifts in corporate culture that enable emergent leadership. It is held that by encouraging self-organisation and self-management, companies will end up with a better-led organisation.

The Learning 3.0 approach is a response to this. Just as there are better ways to lead an organisation - encouraging everyone to be proactive in their quest to make their company a better place to be - there is also a better way for employees to learn than to passively receive information. In his book How Creative Workers Learn Alexandre Magno talks about emergent learning - people learn through experience and interaction, not through consuming reams of pre-prepared material. “Learning emerges from the connection of stories, ideas and practice”, he says [5].

Whilst a conference that has the agenda driven externally can teach attendees something “theoretically”, an internal conference brings the exciting opportunity to explore ideas and challenges within the context of the organisation, with insights coming from the collective and not solely from a few appointed experts.

The Financial Times recognises the value of sending people out to public conferences, but their Engine Room conference “ensures that we also learn from the brilliant people inside our company.” Cait O’Riordan (CPIO) explains that “Ideally that would happen anyway in the course of our daily lives - but putting some time in the calendar makes sure that sharing actually happens and happens at scale” [5].

Furthermore, from the perspective of the speakers, giving a talk means doing a lot of learning themselves. In order to get up and speak authoritatively on a subject, speakers need to do some research into what else is being said in the industry on their chosen topic to validate or update their viewpoints. So this is their opportunity to further enlighten themselves on something. “Be the protagonist of your own learning” says Learning 3.0; an internal tech conference should be an enriching experience for speakers to grasp with both hands.

1.4.3 Connection

In the 2019 book Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais identify the need for regular learning and cross-team knowledge sharing using a range of techniques, especially internal tech conferences [45]. One of the challenges of the increasingly common culture of autonomy is that people often don’t take the time to connect with colleagues beyond their immediate team. Agility has seen a move towards self-sufficiency, giving teams the ability to realise the value of their work without depending on anyone else who might slow them down. Although this self-sufficiency is generally positive, it does create its own problems. In particular, the desire by engineers to solve their own problems means that the same problems are often being solved repeatedly in the same department: autonomy without alignment.

There are benefits to connecting with other teams beyond the opportunity to learn and swap stories. It is hugely valuable for people to have the chance to break out from the normal team silos and to encounter other people in a setting that is not defined by project scope or operational problems. The parts of the conference day where the interaction is at its highest - whether it’s in an open space discussion, lunchtime chit chat or evening drinks - are in many ways the most important parts of the day.

The informal interaction during the internal tech conference day is where people build up a healthy balance of “social capital” [26]. Each time social capital is boosted it is like an influenza jab, inoculating them against later conflict when a more difficult time appears. If people need help from each other, their interaction will be swifter and smoother after spending time chatting at the conference. If they need to present a challenge to one another, they will do so with more humanity. It is said that for technology departments and organisations today the only constant is change, which means that misunderstandings and and conflicts are never far away. Social capital provides a buffer to help people pull together across the department when these changes arise, so anything that builds up those reserves is worthwhile.

Donald Clark’s excellent article Conferences – jumped up classrooms? [30] presents a challenge to prevent an internal conference from turning into a scenario where “people turn up to be spoon-fed by sages on the stage talking at them […] a lazy approach to learning”. He urges readers to evoke some emotional response and to not fall into the trap of being a “forgetting experience”. For internal tech conferences, avoid anything that feels like pure instruction, and instead seek to stimulate some lively debates that will actively engage employees and trigger some shifts in mindset. The behavioural change that comes with new ways of thinking and seeing others is the lasting effect you can most hope for.

1.5 Define what speakers gain

Speaking in front of a large group of colleagues can be daunting for people, so be clear about the benefits for speakers. Management will also want to understand the advantages of investing time in training and preparing the speakers.

1.5.1 Celebrate unsung heroes

An internal tech conference is a great opportunity to identify and celebrate ‘unsung’ people, teams, and achievements; it’s a way to showcase team projects that might be forgotten or that do less exciting but crucial work. You may decide to deliberately look for people who have done particularly interesting, foundational, or transformative work - such as database upgrades that allowed them to shift platforms or deployment automation that reduced outages - or perhaps someone who can describe in (painful) detail what it’s like to be on the 1st-line support team.

1.5.2 Personal growth

Speaking at an internal event will help people to challenge themselves. The opinions they’ve been expressing on a daily basis to their neighbouring coworkers will need to be fact-checked if they want to express them on stage, then do a bit more research to be sure they know what they’re talking about. A team can easily become a small echo chamber, so it’s healthy for people to raise their head occasionally. Then they can say, “Hey, it’s not just me - other people are saying this stuff too!”. Many conference speakers will tell you that the biggest thing they get out of talking at an event is the extra learning they do in order to test and flesh out their message.

1.5.3 Confidence

To many people, public speaking is the most terrifying experience in the world; consequently many great ideas and opinions remain unheard. If an internal tech conference can help people tackle that fear of speaking, that’s a huge gift. As we see in Chapter 5, many people go on to talk at external conferences as a direct result of gaining confidence to do so at internal events.

1.6 Define what attendees gain

Attendees at a well-run internal tech conference should receive a huge boost to their awareness and enthusiasm for their work, but how do they know this beforehand? Take the time to spell out exactly how attendees will benefit.

1.6.1 Engagement with the organisation

One of the big benefits for attendees is the buzz of sharing insight and successes; this makes an organisation feel like a great place to work. The organisations in our case studies have all reported a general boost in morale after these events, as the chance to take time out and think about things in a different way and to hear inspirational stories from each other gave employees a renewed connection with the company.

1.6.2 Feeling valued

Metaswitch ran in-depth workshops that last 2-3 hours giving people a chance to get stuck into the new technologies like the Internet of Things - in parallel to talks on both tech and non-tech subjects, thus delivering something for everyone. Across disciplines, attendees felt a strong sense that they were considered worth investing in.

1.6.3 Learning and validation

Another benefit of internal tech conferences can be the validation that comes from hearing colleagues talk about practices used elsewhere in the industry too. Encourage some speakers to talk about practices in other organisations by referring to books they have read or talks they have seen. By bringing a piece of the outside world into a company, everyone gains a better understanding of how their shared work makes up a bigger picture. Often this involves reinforcing that they’re doing the right things already - a big motivation.

1.7 What types of events work?

There are several options for the type of event you run. The format you choose will depend on what outcomes you seek from your event, as you can get quite different results with each format. The following examples provide a flavour of the different kinds of events that have been proven to work well.

1.7.1 Financial Times: 1-day annual event with internal speakers only

The Financial Times (FT) is a global news organisation with roots in London, UK. The FT team decided to run a full day event with a mixture of content and debate from a diverse set of people across the department, joined solely by an internal audience. The conference consisted of Lightning Talks, Panel Debates, Open Spaces and a game, rounded off with beer, chatter, and more beer. The conversation-based sessions proved hugely successful at capturing the mood and stimulating changes in the department [7].

A panel at the FT’s Engine Room Live event get ready for a question on its way from the audience - complete with soft blue throwable microphone [8]!

1.7.2 Metaswitch: 2-day annual event with internal speakers and “friends”

Metaswitch, a software for telecommunications company, ran an energetic multi-stream 2-day event, incorporating a mixture of full-length talks and workshops, with team-led social events in the evenings. The audience is almost entirely internal, but with a few “friends of Metaswitch” as guest speakers. It’s described as a highlight in the company calendar, and has directly influenced employee engagement within the engineering department.

1.7.3 Klarna: 1-day internal off-site event for all in engineering

Klarna is a major European bank based in Sweden. Since 2014 Klarna has run an annual 1-day internal tech conference in Stockholm, bringing together an increasingly large engineering community to share ideas and discover new approaches. Klarna found that by mentoring and training their own staff in speaking and writing talks, the quality of talk submissions has grown each year. All speakers are now drawn from within Klarna and this helps to make the event highly relevant for all attendees [10]. The main conference (attended by everyone) is a 1-day event, but Klarna also use the day before the conference for additional workshops and roundtable sessions for smaller groups; this is the only time in the year when they have all the engineers in one place.

Read more about the Klarna, Metaswitch and FT examples in the Case Studies in Chapter 5.

1.7.4 Paddy Power Betfair: off-site, with some external speakers

Other organisations have found different formats that work well for them. For instance, the online betting and gaming company Paddy Power Betfair hold an annual DevOps Community conference for everyone in Product and Technology [11]. Rich Haigh, former Head of Delivery Enablement at Paddy Power Betfair, explains:

“On the morning we invite vendors to come and talk about how we have used their products – what’s coming up in their roadmaps, etc. In the afternoon we open the floor to talk about projects they have been working on, interesting tech, R&D they are doing, etc. We then have a social event in the evening. … We hire an external venue … and we video everything so we can share the knowledge further after the event.”

1.7.5 ING: internal and external speakers, with a specific theme

At the Dutch bank ING, an internal change from older, silo-based ways of working to a more fluid, DevOps-inspired approach was accelerated by running an internal conference based directly on the DevOpsDays conference format, combining external invited speakers, internal talks, and short ‘lightning’ talks of 5 mins each. This event helped to “stir up the discussion” around new ways of working and inspired people to attend and help organise a public conference (DevOpsDays Amsterdam) [12].

Furthermore, after the ING people blogged about their conference and shared the slides, a team at US retailer Target were inspired to run their own conference [28]. The recently-published DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim et al has more on the approach at Target [40].

1.7.6 UK-based ticket retailer: 6 monthly half-day event, all staff invited

An online ticket retailer in the UK opted to invite teams outside of technology to learn what the tech teams actually did, as that was a mystery to many people; the sessions were known as ‘Engineering Day’. All staff in the London office were invited. The first installment was a full day session with many different speakers from the engineering teams (and some from other departments too). Subsequently, the team ran focused half-day Engineering Day events every six months which allowed more people to attend as they found it easier to spare a half day rather than a full day. Teams in India were included via video conference and eventually the show went ‘on the road’ to the teams in Edinburgh [9].

Consider an “unconference” if your organisational culture is right. An unconference is a learning event that prioritises peer-to-peer learning, usually with a schedule developed on the day itself by the participants. This format works well in situations where those involved are confident about presenting and sharing ideas [55].

1.7.7 Permission to pause

There is no ‘right way’ to run an internal tech conference - it depends on what your team, department or organisation needs. An important thing to consider early on is the audience: who should we invite? Who would benefit most from the conference? The answers to those questions should help to frame your conference planning: as the attendee list grows the focal point of discussions stretches to fit the audience, whereas a more compact group of attendees allows the focus and aims of the conference to remain tighter.

However you choose to run your internal conference, it’s important to give people enough time and space to immerse themselves in the event: help people clear their calendars so they can ‘shake the every-day out of their hair’. This is a chance for people to give themselves permission to pause - they need to be ready to get as much out of the day as possible.

1.8 Learn from external events

Much can be learned from looking to successful external (public) conferences for inspiration. In a blog post How to run a good tech conference [44], Matthew Skelton identifies nine key things to address:

1. Find a fabulous organising team
2. Choose a venue wisely
3. Make the conference practitioner-led
4. Make the conference inclusive
5. Find good sponsors and suppliers
6. Plan the money side carefully
7. Use a decent ticketing platform
8. Treat all people involved with respect
9. Find great keynote speakers

Of these nine points, only point 5 (sponsors and suppliers) and point 7 (ticketing) do not really apply to an internal conference. A strong and passionate organising team is essential (see Chapter 2). You may be restricted to company offices for the venue, but if you have the option of hiring an out-of-office venue, look for a venue that does not “split up” the conference, so that every one of the attendees can feel part of the same shared experience.

Build the organising team with representatives from across your engineering organisation. This is particularly important for the people who solicit and review talk proposals. If attendees know that the organisers and speakers are practitioners like them, they interact as equals and feel able to share more; make sure to encourage practitioners to get involved, particularly those who are from underrepresented groups or those who have not spoken before. An inclusive, diverse conference will generate better engagement and discussions than a conference with the same faces that always speak.

As we have seen, many of the challenges and activities between external and internal conferences are similar, but there are some differences that are worth bearing in mind, which we explore in the following sections.

1.8.1 Tickets

External conferences generally have two sources of income to cover the costs of their event: ticket revenue and sponsorship. For an internal conference it’s unlikely that you would want to charge your employees money to attend your conference. You might use a ticketing platform for convenience, but keep the tickets free.

1.8.2 Sponsorship

Whilst sponsorship for your internal conference might be possible, it is something to approach with caution. Your conference is probably focused on things that are core to your organisation and will most likely only include external people as guests. As such it is unlikely to be appropriate to introduce someone else’s brand/context to your event or hugely beneficial to any potential sponsor; you should expect costs to be covered entirely by departmental/divisional budget. Use the example budget in the Toolkit to help you establish what the budget should be and adjust your plans accordingly.

1.8.3 Marketing

An internal conference will need some marketing and promotion to attract staff but probably not to the same degree as an external conference. Consider how to create a “buzz” around the event without making things too polished or formal. Whether people are expected to attend or the conference is optional, how can you make it exciting or interesting?

1.8.4 Publicity

The organisation probably expects some kind of positive publicity from the internal conference, but you will need to be careful with some of the photographs, videos, and details - it’s likely that some of the material in the talks will be confidential or for internal-use only. At a public/external conference, it’s normally safe to assume that all the material has been checked for sensitivity, but this is not the case with internal conferences. Check with relevant people before publishing details of talks. Of course, the fact that you are running an internal tech conference should be something to publicise; make people want to join the organisation so they get to find out more details about the talks!

1.9 Chapter Review

Every organisation is different, and what you decide to do will be dependent upon your context. Use the ideas here to help you decide what you want to do.

Some benefits are “tangible” and immediately measurable:

• Working groups forming to tackle a cross-team problem
• Projects transformed through “lightbulb” moments
• Social capital injection avoiding wasted time and energy in future conflicts

Ask yourself: What tangible benefits would you hope to see from your event? And how will you measure them?

Other benefits are harder to measure, but arguably far more significant:

• Empowerment - and the resulting responsibility
• Learning - peer-education, shared lessons
• Connection - improved relationships and collaboration

Ask yourself: What goals do you have in your department that would benefit from improved inter-team relationships?

Provide lots of opportunity for personal development:

• Participants - confidence, public speaking skills, grasp of their chosen topic
• Attendees - engagement, new knowledge, relationships, validation
• All - sense of being valued

Ask yourself: In what ways would you like your employees to grow and develop? How can you use this event to help them do this?

Choose the approach that will give you the outcome you want:

• “By the people, for the people” - a bottom-up approach
• A specific theme for the day
• Showcase your group to the rest of your organisation

Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve from this event? What opportunities or constraints might you have that help determine your approach?

Decide whether this is something for you:

Consider how you could experiment and learn whether this is really for you. Set a limited budget, run it once, and review whether to scale up or down the following year.

Ask yourself: How much are you willing to invest in this?