Overcome time and technical constraints, obtain business cooperation, and achieve team buy in

A series of 4 workshops
Chelsea Troy

Overcome time and technical constraints, obtain business cooperation, and achieve team buy in

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


1. Overcoming Time Constraints to Keep Code Maintainable

  • How “lack of time” compounds.
  • Making maintainability work visible.
  • Measuring the time impact of maintainability work.
  • Gathering and preserving system context for faster changes.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn to estimate time and effort spent on maintenance work.
  • Learn to advocate for investment from the business.
  • Learn to demonstrate results from that time.

2. Overcoming Technical Constraints to Change Code Bases

  • What is a technical constraint versus a time or cooperation constraint?
  • Example types of technical constraints.
  • Building a stepwise plan to change a technical constraint.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn to identify types of technical constraint and where they arise.
  • Learn the ROI of rewrites and when to approach one.
  • Learn to plan the incremental removal of technical constraints.

3. Obtaining Business Cooperation for Software Goals

  • Explaining our solutions to the business.
    • Why “tech debt” discussions tend not to work.
    • Metrics to use instead.
  • Instilling confidence that our maintenance efforts will actually improve velocity.
    • Why do we tend to rapidly return to our prior velocity after “tech debt week"? - How do we fix it?

Learning Objectives

  • Learn the pitfalls that make business stakeholders wary of engineers asking for time to do maintenance.
  • Learn to navigate those pitfalls and establish trust with the business.
  • Learn to proactively design for business goals to improve the working relationship and achieve better outcomes in the code base.

4. Achieving Team Buy-In for Large Software Projects

  • Why do teammates resist technical changes?
    • Context is power; the bigger the change, the bigger the impact to shared context. Invalidating a bunch of someone’s context can disempower them in ways that concern them, both absolutely and relative to other team members.
  • Why the Hollywood approach to presenting big changes doesn’t work.
  • A stepwise approach to achieving team buy-in.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn the underlying reason for teammates to unexpectedly resist an idea.
  • Learn how to socialize changes among your technical team.
  • Learn to talk to colleagues about changing decisions that they feel attached to.

For who?

This workshop is targeted at Senior Engineers, Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, and Product Managers.

Requirements

You have some experience writing on production systems in any programming language.

Testimonial

Chelsea is one of the most engaging programming teachers I've learned from in recent memory,

Chelsea Troy

About Chelsea Troy

"I write code for money, fling barbells for fun, and write about tech for jack diddly at chelseatroy.com."

Chelsea writes code on projects like the Zooniverse Citizen Science Mobile App and the NASA Landsat Image Processing Pipeline. She looks for clients who are saving the planet, advancing basic scientific research, or providing resources to underserved communities. She has been known to take projects in mobile development, web development, and machine learning. She streams some programming sessions to YouTube, so you can watch her code (and narrate!) in real time. She then turns the recordings into educational materials.

Chelsea also teaches Mobile Software Development at the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of chelseatroy.com and a book called Remote Work Sucks (the title is kind of a trap). She organizes two conferences: PromptConf (Chicago area, very technical) and ORD Camp (Chicago area, not nearly as technical).

Chelsea flings barbells around for fun. She drives an electric cafe cruiser named Gigi. She's very gay.

All workshops by Chelsea Troy
@HeyChelseaTroy

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


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