Introduction
Internal tech conferences can make a significant impact on an organisation’s level of sharing, learning, and communication by accelerating multi-team learning across technology departments. An increasing number of enlightened organisations are using this powerful approach to spread and embed new ideas and practices.
In this book we share practical advice on how to prepare, run, and follow-up on an internal tech conference, together with some case studies from several organisations showing the approaches in common and the adaptations for each situation.
How to use this book
This book is for people involved in technology leadership in some form: people in “official” positions of leadership (CIO, CTO, Head of Engineering, IT Operations Manager, etc.) and those in more informal technology leadership positions, such as team leaders, senior engineers, and people who simply like to lead by example. Having been in such positions ourselves, we (Victoria and Matthew) want to help other technology leaders to devise and run successful internal tech conferences to act as a key strategic differentiator for organisations building software systems.
- Chapter 1 gives an overview of internal tech conferences and why you might want to run such an event. Read this chapter if you have never run or experienced an internal tech conference before to help you understand the purpose and the things involved.
- Chapter 2 explains how to prepare for an internal tech conference. Read this to understand what is involved, how long the preparation takes, and what kind of team you will need to make the conference happen.
- Chapter 3 covers the conference day itself. Read this chapter to understand all the operational aspects of the conference and to see what kind of help you may need on the day.
- Chapter 4 deals with the weeks and months following the conference. Read this chapter to see how to get the most out of the day by following up on talks and panel sessions and how to ensure that the conferences are an opportunity for learning and growth.
- Chapter 5 contains detailed case studies from a selected group of organisations. This chapter is different from the others in that the material is presented in a more linear, retrospective fashion (more like a story). Read this chapter to get a feel for how real organisations have run internal tech conferences and what they learned.
- The Toolkit at the back of the book contains tools and templates for planning and running an internal tech conference; these can be used and adapted as needed.
Chapters 1 to 4 deliberately read as “how-to” guides with quite specific recommendations. Chapter 5 has a more narrative flavour, befitting the case study stories. The Toolkit provides some templates and quick-start guides for getting results quickly.
Why we wrote this book
We met (appropriately) at a conference in 2015 where Victoria gave a talk about some early changes at Financial TImes to create a learning organisation. We realised that we both had some similar experience of organising and running internal tech conferences and decided to write an article, published by InfoQ in 2016 [1]. As far as we could tell, this was the first online article to cover all aspects of internal tech conferences in detail, comparing approaches from different organisations, and it was included in the InfoQ eMag Scaling DevOps in May 2017 [2].
Since the article was published, we have been happy to see several new online articles covering internal tech conferences, and we know from speaking to people in the industry (at least in the UK) that the approach is becoming more widespread. We therefore decided to write this book to provide a template and set of guidelines for not just running the conference itself but how to go about preparing for one and how to get the most strategic and tactical value out of a series of conferences.
About the authors
Victoria Morgan-Smith is Director of Delivery, Internal Products at the Financial Times, where she has been helping teams succeed since 2009. Before this she was a developer for 9 years, a background which fuels her interest in finding fun ways to coach, energise and motivate teams into self-organising units. She is passionate about collaboration beyond the team, adopting agile principles to get under the skin of what will deliver measurable business value around the organisation.
Twitter: @VictoriaJMS | LinkedIn: victoriamorgansmith
Matthew Skelton is Head of Consulting at Conflux (confluxdigital.net), where he specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability and organisation dynamics for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services. Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016), Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016), and Team Topologies (IT Revolution Press, 2019).