How the NAB Cloud Guild was built
I love the analogy Sam Kroonenburg from ‘A Cloud Guru’ gave when he presented at NAB, he said “If you drive a car, there is an expectation that you are safe to drive on the roads. The government expects you to pass a series of tests designed to make sure you are safe on the roads. If you pass, they are happy with the fact that you will now drive safely in your country…”.
When applied to cloud technology, how do we know that you are ‘safe to drive’ the technology? We could take your word for it…but that’s not really acceptable for a regulated financial institution. We need to test you, at the very least, to make sure that you are safe to ‘drive technology’ for a bank. Getting certified ensures teams re-evaluate all they had implemented and refactor where applicable.
How to start?
Gathering facts and data and putting the mechanisms in place
Start by setting up a baseline to work from. I did this by reaching out to all the teams inside of NAB to get an understanding of how many engineers were AWS certified. I’ll talk about why certification is important shortly, but this is the first phase to enable the building of your own Guild in your organisation.
Reach out to your teams, speak to all those who are technical, ask around at important meetings, or get your Executive team (in NAB we have our Executive General Managers or EGMs) to send emails out. I did this and was very surprised with the outcome. At NAB we have over 30,000 employees, with around 8,000+ technical employees. I was very surprised to learn that at that time, we only had seven, yes, seven people who were actually certified in AWS. That is only 0.0875% of technical engineers certified in this technology, across all the bank that works out to 0.023% of the organisation. I would love your feedback on this stat, let me know if this is a similar case in your organisation.
Cloud technology fundamentally shifts an enterprise’s approach to managing technology. We have outsourced to external vendors and have been vendor managers with non-technical teams for the last ten plus years. We outsourced and as such we lost a lot of intellectual property to the vendors who sourced our applications. To remain competitive we needed to adapt by enabling our teams to drive outcomes for the organisation and in order to do that we needed to learn how.
Lets touch on the certification requirement and why this is the metric I used. As a Senior Cloud Engineer at NAB, part of my role was to consult asset team by asset team, kick starting their cloud journey to get them into AWS. Now this sounds like a great idea, but there were a few things that kept on repeating as we were trying to migrate the assets. The first thing I noticed was that everyone says they know AWS, they don’t need to get certified. The second was that the same conversations occurred on every asset team we tried to migrate, especially with our architect teams.
Let’s talk about my observations on these points: the statement “I know AWS! Why do I need to get certified?” This is a half truth, yes they knew about some of the AWS components that they’d used in the past, but not how to setup all the well architected pillars. For example they would be awesome at the performance excellence, but they never looked into the other pillars at all, like cost optimisation, or operational excellence. They had a specific lens but never incorporated all of the 5 well architected pillars. See here for more details.
Stop the repetitive to drive outcomes
As I was migrating technology to the cloud, everyone knew a little bit of cloud technology, but few knew enough to do it correctly. It was like groundhog day in the beginning — “You can’t!”, “It’s not secure.”,“Compliance says no.”, “It’s speed to on-prem is too slow.”, “It goes into the internet.”
These statements were re-occuring in each meeting, until we had a percentage of people who were educated and trained. It’s an old saying, but knowledge truly is power, and this was clearly demonstrated once we started getting skilled and educated in cloud technology.
Talking the same language was a game changer as we migrated more and more to the cloud.
Find like minded people and setup a Community of Practice (CoP)
Gather like minded people and become a sharing organisation.
Find the people in your organisation like you who want to change how you are doing technology. In our organisation, our outsourcing model was very costly, slow and ineffective, so it was easy to find people wanting to drive technology differently.
Start to enable the sharing of great work people had already completed. A great way we did this at NAB was setting up a comprehensive CoP.
- I found a CoP has much better chance of success at lunch time, as you’ll get a much better turn out in numbers. People will have conflicts and meetings throughout the day, and other commitments before and after work, by doing this at lunch, it enables those who want to learn to attend.
- Provide lunch, yes there is a cost associated on this, but it also enables a much better turnout as well. If people have to find and get lunch for the CoP, it will have a continuous flow on effect and the meeting will not be driven as effectively. Providing lunch also ensures less interruptions. This sounds simple, but these small changes got a much greater number to turn up.
- Know your audience and who wants to learn. The CoP was originally organised with technologists who already understood a lot of cloud concepts, and was ideal for DevOps teams. However we have a big organisation, so needed to refactor what we presented on. AWS were presenting a lot of items that were coming up or new features that had been launched which was great, but none of these would be able to be consumed for a while yet.
- Let your teams present the great work they have done, and share their repo’s. This change also enabled more teams to come to the CoP, and changed it from being just for DevOps to any technologist who could choose what to attend based on the specific agenda.
- Reward great behaviour — at NAB we can recognise peers by nominating a recognition award for exemplifying our values. Recognition goes a long way to get more people to attend and engage, especially when it comes to presenting. This may sound obvious, but its amazing how it can really change the CoP.
Set up lunch and learns and brown bags for education
Create interest and train those who want to become self learners
So before I got a business case organised and approved for the NABCloudGuild, I found out if there was interest and a need for training in AWS. I worked with my AWS Solution Architect at the time Arden Packeer and we worked on a 12 week pack to train or immerse people with the aim to get them certified at the end of the course. I started with it on lunches where lunch was supplied, and we established a one hour a week lab lecture which we started off offering to 20 people. Word of mouth then spread, and before I knew it, I was training during all of my lunches, and I couldn’t scale any more. So I reached out to a couple of key people who knew AWS really well, and helped me to drive out and scale more. Big shout out to Kevin Littlejon and Lupco Trpeski.
I carried on driving out the learnings for teams of 15–20 people over the hour lunches, and trained around 150 people in AWS. Some key takeaways:
- Does not scale very well to train en-masse, it starts a conversation and gets people excited to start learning.
- No capacity to be able to continuously drive this each week, as I still had my day job.
- Not enough space in the rooms/ organisation without getting support to have a permanent room available.
So I doubled the number of people certified in AWS — we now had 15 people certified in associate level, but could not scale much more in the current format.
Next — Part 2, Leadership support and Board backing, and the ability to present.
If you’re interested in joining us, you can learn more about working in technology at NAB here.
About the author: Paul Silver is a Manager Engineer and the NAB Cloud Guild Founder. Prior to his current role, Paul has held several DevOps and engineering roles at NAB as well as senior technical specialist roles at IBM, Odecee and AIA.
