Partner Up
Last week I talked about a new initiative we’re trialling called Partner Up. Partner Up is opportunity for PwC staff below Manager grade to showcase technologies and interact with Senior Staff. Held in one to one (or one to many) sessions, volunteers are encouraged to discuss modern technologies with those who have the ability to create future opportunities for PwC.
For my Partner Up session, I had the pleasure of pairing up with Diana, who works in our IT Consultancy team. Diana had decided to showcase the capabilities of Google Sites, in particular things that could be done using Google Apps Script.
After 45 minutes of learning a hell of a lot, including calendar integration with forms, qualtrics surveys and data visualization embedding within sites, Diana was closing the session in showing me the capability of integrating other tools we use. The highlight being the capability to embed a kanban board within a Google Site, which to me was fantastic!
Agile nerd alert 😍 😍 😍
I started to imagine a world of submitting a request via a Google Form, which then copies into a live Kanban board, where you can see the lead time for your request, where it sits in the queue etc etc…evoking memories of the Phoenix Project and visualising lead times for replacement laptops…always a dream of mine to implement something similar!
Special thank you to Diana, she really went above and beyond what I expected and it was great to have an hour dedicated to someone helping me learn.
Feedback, feedback and feedback
With our performance year coming to an end this month, the inevitable overflow of feedback requests have been hitting my inbox this week.
One of my struggles with this time of year is determining what warrants feedback and potentially turning down requests where not appropriate.
As a firm we have our professional framework which, whilst important, feels unfair/unfit for purpose when, for example being asked to score someone against “global acumen” if the work they did was help me out on something small locally. Similarly, I often find people request feedback as a means to showcase they’ve completed work, rather than using it for a constructive conversation centred on development. If that’s the reason for a feedback request then surely we’ve lost the spirit of it?
So yes, I really struggle with this time of year, also as I find it increasingly challenging with what we do to quantify the impact myself and our team is having on the organisation.
How do you quantify internal coaching impact? Number of people trained? Training NPS? Number of Agile projects vs. Waterfall? Number of teams coached? New products launched using Agile principles? Portfolio WIP trend? Portfolio/team cycle time? Individual feedback?
I’m still learning about what we can look at empirically in supporting what we do, but for now have settled on a blend of all the above in terms of my own performance appraisal.
Before you ask, yes, we are still doing annual performance reviews.
Mid-year reviews take place as a checkpoint and more of an informal discussion, but end of year is when you get your performance rating which may/may not be attributed to a pay increase and/or bonus.
The majority of people I talk to express surprise/dismay we still do it this way.
I’ll put that down as one for the cultural debt backlog to be addressed long term…
Training
Today I’ve been running another Hands On With Azure DevOps session, this time for folk in our Consulting team. The session has gone well, with pretty much all attendees feeding back that they had learnt a thing or two, which is the main thing for me. One particular feedback was that it was “the best training someone has been to in the past year” — I didn’t stop to ask if this was the only training they had been on ;)
The course is structured like so:
I learnt that I didn’t have the right setup for enterprise licenses today, which meant a number of people couldn’t move work items on the board — not ideal! However I found a workaround through pairing and learnt about what I need to fix for next time…so a good day for me on the learning front as well.
For those of you who are users, I’d love to hear if you have any feedback on the above and if you think there are significant gaps for first time users.
Next week
Next week I’ll be finishing my performance appraisal, putting my Google Sites learning into practice, and heading up t’north to our Manchester office for an Agile Foundations session. Looking forward to a week of reflection, learning and starting others on their Agile journey.