Nikkei Engine Room 3 — Collaboration Fuels Innovation
Some of you may have read a post that I shared last year where I (as well as others) shared our experiences of running the 8th edition of the FTs internal conference, Engine Room.
Well, this time I’m going to talk about the amazing opportunity I had to visit my colleagues at Nikkei in Tokyo at the end of June, 2023.
In the previous post, I talked about how we had some Nikkei speakers at the conference and it was there the discussion began about the possibility of FT returning the visit and having some speakers at the next instance of Nikkei’s Engine Room. This would be the third instance of their Engine Room, the theme was Collaboration Fuels Innovation and the internal conference ran over two days. We were able to make our attendance at Nikkei’s Engine Room a reality!
As Tokyo is a long way away from the UK it seemed a shame to travel over for just the two days of the conference, so I thought it would also be a great opportunity for knowledge sharing with the technology teams at Nikkei. I’d already had conversations across remote video calls and this was a chance to continue those conversations and explore different topics too.
Collaboration Fuels Innovation
Nikkei’s office building is in the Chiyoda City district in Tokyo, with great views of the Imperial Palace. It’s an impressive building and although I had been to Tokyo previously, I had not spent much time in this district since it is one of the commercial districts in Tokyo.
The Engine Room conference was scheduled for the end of the week when I arrived, so I had three days in which to meet with colleagues and explore ideas and share knowledge. The theme that came out of all of the conversations I had was that in some ways our colleagues in Nikkei were further ahead in their technology development, in others we were around the same. For the most part language was not a problem since I had some excellent colleagues who spoke good English (unfortunately my Japanese is pretty limited!). One thing we found really useful was to have a centralised document where we shared ideas for discussion ahead of time, so the discussion could be driven with purpose.
I’d like to give some brief thoughts and details on what we discussed (to perhaps give you consideration for discussion of similar themes with your colleagues in the future).
Technology operations and infrastructure management
Nikkeis SRE team walked me through their infrastructure setup which consisted of four different bespoke systems focused on different elements of operational excellence at Nikkei. Firstly, they had a system that was focused on supporting business continuity planning. It was interesting to me to see as someone from the UK the extra consideration they had to put on being able to manage impact from natural disasters. They also have a system that helps them manage incidents and follow up from incidents — very similar to how we manage them at the FT.
They then also had two systems for Monitoring and Metrics. It was heartening to see the effort being put into finding innovative solutions to these key components of SRE — while the technology stack was different we were looking to solve the same problems. This is something that will definitely be worth future knowledge shares with the equivalent teams in the FT.
Engineering recruitment and building culture in your organisation
Engineering recruitment is a complex and fascinating process in every organisation I’ve worked in so it was great to get an opportunity to gain insight into how this works at Nikkei. In particular what stood out to me was the focus Nikkei talent teams have on having a unified process for bringing in early talent, either via internships or five day onboarding sessions that cover not just the technology side but the editorial side too. They also have a separate way of providing staff onboarding for more senior joiners which is unified and includes a newspaper factory tour — something that used to be part of the FTs process but no longer is.
On the culture side, I got a sneak peek at Nikkei’s new Engineering Vision — which is aiming to provide 5 principles that all engineers can think about and bear in mind in their day to day work. In essence, as a basis for them to consider and make decisions related to issues they deal with. We have been discussing how we can do this in our technology teams, building on the FTs own values and it was good to see the parallels with what Nikkei teams value (such as encouraging an environment that promotes and supports engineering growth).
Focusing on developer experience and how to enable this through cross organisational teams, Engineering Enablement
As you’d expect given this is the remit of my group at the FT I was most looking forward to this conversation. There were some good discussions around how to use mechanisms such as Infrastructure as Code (and technology like Terraform) to build ways of making onboarding to technology easier. We’ve had much success with this internally recently at the FT moving our internal web application firewall solutions around — which was largely done in a way such that engineering teams had to expend minimal effort to onboard to the new platform.
In addition to the above we talked about how we can measure the success of such initiatives, including using things such as DORA metrics, team retrospectives and more traditional user research techniques (such as interviewing).
Exploration of use of AI tooling
Here we mostly discussed how technology teams can deal with the recent explosion of growth in AI tooling, mostly around availability of things like Github Copilot or Large Language Model interfaces such as ChatGPT. What was agreed that is extremely important is to form governance groups internally to manage and direct investigations, particularly around ensuring ethical considerations for media organisations.
Summary
All of the conversations were really interesting and I’ve only shared a brief snapshot of what was discussed above. Indeed there were a lot of ideas to share and take from my colleagues at Nikkei. A shared agreement was that key foundations for enablement are built in forming standards and best practices in a way that makes your engineering teams’ lives easier without becoming a hurdle to overcome.
Nikkei Engine Room — “Tech Inside”
Nikkei engineering teams took inspiration from the FT’s Engine Room which they encountered when one of their engineers (Yoshiaki Sugimoto) seconded into one of FT’s engineering teams and decided to replicate the conference at Nikkei. The organising team at Nikkei took special care to make the event hybrid, having a dedicated space in the Nikkei office building but also making sure the live stream was accessible for attendees and presenters to take part remotely. Since reading or speaking Japanese is not something that was possible for me without assistance, I found a way to translate the slides in real time using Google Lens on my phone. In one instance, the presenter had translated a script for me to follow along with too which was really appreciated.
There were over 120 attendees for the conference, in person and remote and what really impressed me was the range of talks on offer across the two days — there were twenty talks delivered from across all departments in Nikkei. One of my favourites was a historical walk through how Nikkei innovated their CMS implementation from the 1980s through to the present day since it gave me a good historical view of how Nikkei had advanced their technology through the eras. There were also topics about AI, building solutions in sustainable ways, measuring performance, implementing wireless LAN in the office, Cyber Security… so many different things to learn about.
My talk was all about how (Engineering) Enablement Empowers Collaboration and was one of only two presented in English. Yoshiaki gets a special mention here again as he spent the time to translate English on my slides into Japanese for the benefit of the audience. In this talk I covered three themes
- Enablement via Collaboration
- Enablement through Knowledge
- Enablement powers Innovation
(At some point I will likely write another post detailing this talk more).
My excellent colleagues in Manila, Rodel Sigson and Dustine Prenda, were the second presenters from the FT and they talked about “Collaborative Ingenuity : How FT Manila fuels Innovation”. This was all about how the teams use collaboration techniques (such as mobbing) and their inherent Filipino culture to drive innovation in their teams.
I learned a lot through all of these talks, too much to share in one blog post. There was also a set of awards for the best three talks — the winner was a presentation by Nikkei’s internal office infrastructure team. The awards were determined using a behavioural sentiment AI tool powered by the Slack commentary on the channels, which was definitely in the spirit of the Engine Room theme!
Looking to the future
What was clear throughout this visit to me is that building a good engineering culture is important, no matter where you are in the world and this is why finding the space to run events like Engine Room for Nikkei and FT both are really important. What I found I learned from Nikkei that I will take away the most is the value of having good connections with your departments outside of technology to support these events and beyond too. This is something that I think I will take forward to the next iteration of FTs Engine Room this year. I also hope that we can count on having our Nikkei colleagues join us again!
Outside of the Engine Room conference opportunity, getting the time to have good conversations with many different technology teams was so useful. There are already many different themes that we will continue to discuss with our colleagues in Nikkei and many more that we will start to discuss having learned there is a good opportunity to do so. So if you are lucky enough to have colleagues in other parts of the world — make sure to take the opportunity to reach out to them and see how you can learn from each other.
Finally it was a real privilege and pleasure to be invited out to speak at the conference, meet so many wonderful people and get to visit one of my favourite places in the world, Japan. I am excited to see how FT and Nikkei continue to find different ways to collaborate and share knowledge in the future!
With thanks to my awesome hosts and colleagues Yoshiaki Sugimoto, Daisuke Akazawa, Osamu Takayasu and Yuya Saito who helped make the visit be the best it could be.
Thanks also to reviewers of this post, Alice Bartlett, Victoria Morgan-Smith, Alex Wilson & Cynthia Mbulu.
