Approaches as a Developer to help Improve Organizations

During my time working as a contractor/staff aug from Omnitech, I’ve observed a lot and experimented with different ways to serve. I think these have helped the whole organization improve as I show these aspects by example and share.

Build reputation

• Get to know others, show them you care about them
• Be a servant, be humble do things others wouldn’t (even cleaning up the kitchen or emptying the dishwasher, etc)
• Enable others on the team to do work
• Take on troubleshooting
• Allow others to interrupt you with questions and help them
• Help with training
• “Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification” Romans 14:19
  • communicate more, maybe even more then you think you need to
• you can’t know everything, be humble, admit it and ask questions

Don’t forget the power of the nudge

• you can “start digging a trench off the river and watch what follows”
• “This worked well elsewhere”
• Introduce ideas, but don’t try to force them
• Be ready to help move forward
• Experiments: https://www.aligneddev.net/blog/2021/safe-to-try-template/
• Ask for ideas from your team

Documentation: OneNote or Obsidian

• Purpose: Share knowledge
• free from silos in people’s heads and emails
• save time, send a link instead of having the same conversations
• On-boarding and project setup documentation
• Acronyms
• Domain knowledge
• When you’ve learned how to troubleshoot, share how to find the issue and how to fix it
• Make sure that when you leave, others will have enough documented knowledge to run, troubleshoot and add on to what you’ve helped create
• Value Stream Mapping and Management to help visualize and improve flow of work
• Map the universe (c4model.com is a good example on how to diagram) of the system
  • Identify the products
  • understanding of how pieces put together
  • background processes that are running

Communication and Collaboration

• Face to Face meetings (listen, but speak up)
• MS Teams or Slack if they don’t have Office365 accounts
• Get more info into Azure DevOps items
• Break down barriers between teams

Training/Teaching/Mentoring

• Lunch and Learns and Book Clubs - join or get some started
• Automated Testing, Architecture, other areas
• If you notice someone is struggling, find ways to help them
  • Paired programming, check in often, talk to the leader about how to help them
• Teach Agile practices or Git. Share your expertise
• Lead meetings when needed

Automation

• Tests
• Pipelines
• Infrastructure (ARM templates/Ansible/Terraform/)
• Manual work to scripts
• Installers
  • Replace manually install work with Installers

Cloud

• Can they move to the cloud? What changes are needed first?
• Incremental approach?
• Can the use it for less cost and more efficiently?

Kick start Book Studies, Lunch & Learns, learning opportunities

• The first book recommendation will depend on where you perceive the team to be
  • Mature
    • The Unicorn Project
    • Clean Architecture
    • The DevOps Handbook
    • (Better Value) Sooner Safer Happier
      • https://medium.com/sooner-safer-happier/agility-build-the-right-thing-69d316aeb56b
  • Needing more guidance on working legacy code
    • Working With Legacy Code
  • Chaos and constant fires?
    • The Phoenix Project
    • Then the Unicorn Project
    • Accelerate
• The Art of Unit Testing
• Weekly Dev Tips Podcast - short tips on good programming techniques
• MS Learn and Pluralsight
• DevOps Summit videos

Feature Teams

• Cross functional teams that can get the job done together with less wait times
• Create these around products
  • Make work Visible

Reduce Feedback time

• Automated tests
• Feedback from the users
• break down barriers between teams

Ask “What’s the biggest constraint?” and attack that first

• Then move to the next one

Retrospectives often

• What went well?
• What didn’t go well?
• What do we need to change to improve?
• Constantly experiment, learn/reflect and improve