Five ways community of practice can help you enhance your productivity
Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
Let’s first step back to a little history, how we arrived at a consensus on needing Community of Practice.
Jio is a huge ecosystem, with enormous product lines and multiple teams developing those products. Each team works upon different products that support various operating system. Thus, designs and coding guidelines differ across teams. However, there are a few similarities across this diversity like skillset, similar development environment, and at times, same IDE.
One thing that lingers around, is that even if we possess equivalent skills, we still work as remote products. At times, we cross paths in campus, but never really get a chance to communicate or network, or to find solution or debug a problem together.
That is where the need for Community of Practice arises.
Let me give you a gist on how we are benefitting from Community of Practice.
Sharing and leveraging on each other’s experiences
Jio is a huge pool of skilled Engineers, where each Engineer comes with plethora of experience and a lot of tips and tricks up their sleeves. By sharing our knowledge across the forum, we learn from the team and their Engineers on how to tackle a problem and in turn, save our effort and time.
I would like to share one such incident, wherein I was struggling with one of the open source library updates. I was trying to fix an issue caused with the update since a few days. I researched public forums but all in vain. During a lunch break, I spoke to one of the iOS Engineers about the issue while chatting about how our day had been — and I am glad I did! He told me that he faced same issue and provided me a solution to fix the problem — and it worked! Had we talked few days back, I would have saved a lot of time and effort.
Building a learning culture with Social participation
Every Engineer learns a lot in his career, irrespective of their knowledge domain. Everyone wants to be part of learning the trending technologies wagon. After all, no one wants to be outmoded. This forum helps you learn.
Engaging in group learning sessions helps in widening ones horizons, developing soft skills, and also understanding different perspectives.
Networking
This is a very vital aspect in an Engineer’s career. I understand each one of us is fenced with meetings, product deliveries, and work commitments throughout the day. Hence, it feels great to network with likeminded souls and learn new things.
Brainstorm or problem analysis
More often than not, the problems that drive us to our wits end are solved by looking at it from other perspective(s). I believe every Engineer has had such dilemma every once in a while.
We bring any problem that we are facing to the table. We hear a lot of perspectives around the problem statement and we get a different viewpoint. Saves a lot time which is vented out in frustration faced while trying to solve a problem on our own.
Shared assets and libraries
Engineers are always looking for an opportunity to reuse their codes, after all we are both smart and lazy. We develop codes that are reusable and configurable as far as possible, so for a developer who is reusing the codes, it is a mere plug and play.
How helpful it would be if we could create reusable component or a module, as a library or a pod, that every team could reuse. This will help us in maintaining the common interactive elements for users as well across products — similar look and feel, but with varied and configurable themes.
If you are an iOS Engineer at Jio, and not yet part of the community, immediately connect with us.
