It’s good to talk…
Having been at Sainsbury’s for more years than I’d like to say, I have built up a network of people across many different teams. I’ve always worked in “IT” but have moved around a fair bit, now residing in “Digital”.
I’m loving my last move to work in the digital space, and am now a keen advocate of agile (after having had bad experiences of people cowboying the term to cut corners).
Something surprises me about agile though, which is the focus on collaboration, interactions and conversations… this surprises me as I think it’s just common sense, to speak to people, build a shared understanding and work together to get things done. Actions may not always be “right first time” but as long as you involve the relevant people in the conversations then you’ll stand a pretty good chance of heading in the right direction and when it goes wrong, talk about it and try again and again and again…
I guess some people need common sense written down for them hence the agile manifesto.
So what has this got to do with my network of colleagues…
Over six months ago we surveyed the engineers in the office to understand how things are going and allow them to feedback anonymously about any areas for improvement they might have. In amongst the feedback about the office being too hot/too cold/or people cooking fish in the microwave, we also had a fair few bits of feedback around our network. Engineers couldn’t get to the resources they needed as they were blocked by corporate policy or the tools we used didn’t respect proxied connections.
What was “wrong” with our network ? Well, nothing actually but it wasn’t designed around a modern software engineering function which builds software using the open source tools and tech. Our network was designed as a classic enterprise network which is reliable, secure, protects our colleagues and the business allowing them to do their jobs.
There had been friction, tension and people implementing their own work arounds (think 4g hubs and guest networks), not great for colleague retention, not great for protecting our digital assets and not the most efficient use of resources.
Why hadn’t anything been done previously ? This is difficult to answer, people fire off emails (typically to the wrong people) or raise single support tickets but no one just sat down with the right people from the Network Team and had a chat…
I don’t think I need to say much more, we spoke to the relevant people, painted the picture of what were the challenges and how we would like to work, they listened and understood. Together we built a shared understanding of the ‘need’. There were some bumps along the way however the developers and network engineers collaborated on each one and put us on the right path.
Now… would anyone like to have a chat about microwaves and fish ?
