Wall of Champions
Ulterior Motive
Let me start by being totally honest. The "Wall Of Champions" initiative started out with an ulterior motive. It's goal was to help identify people who "knew stuff" so that we could pounce on them and force them to share their knowledge at a technical community event. Subtle huh? 😊
The reason for this subtle approach was that technical communities without content (i.e. speakers) don't really work or make it easy to build people so we needed a way to find speakers to get our targeted technical communities rolling.
Let me explain how we went about this initiative, how it worked out and where it finally landed.
The Three Lists: Tools, Techniques and Technologies
To start the ball rolling we created three lists. One for "Tools" (e.g. Jira) and the others for "Techniques" (e.g. Scrum) and "Technologies" (e.g. HTML) - all excluding version numbers. We then asked people to help us populate and review the lists and add their name against any item if they felt themselves to be an expert on that topic.
We also sought to assign a status for each department within the Digital Delivery Group (DDG) against each tool / technique / technology as to whether an item was either not used, in use, starting use or deliberately not used or stopping use by that department.
We also flagged items as "Top Skills" for the items that had been identified as part of our strategy at the start of the year as skills we wanted to grow in order for our business to meet growing customer demands and emerging markets.
Just imagine ... at the end of this we would know that status of all the tools, techniques and technologies used across the whole DDG and who the experts are for each of them. What's not to like!
A Bridge Too Far
Many things start out with good intentions (or ulterior motives) but end up failing because they are asking too much, unrealistic or simply impractical. We hit all three of these and so the initiative started to fizzle out before it really got started. You could even hear people quietly saying "good luck with that" as they side-stepped the initiative.
Expecting to populate and maintain our three lists was simply unrealistic.😒
I wasn't overly concerned about the failed initiative as there wasn't much I could do about it. I looked at it as one of the many plates that I was spinning knowing that some would break and therefore this must just be one of them.
The Quest For Community Speakers
The most effective way I have found of helping technical communities to find speakers is to operate a simple hierarchy.
In my case, I work with community owners and their deputies. I work across the communities to encourage each of them to build up a backlog of ideas for future meetings whilst arranging short term events and seeking to achieve our agreed community goals.
In turn, each community owner and their deputy works with their group of community leaders (usually 4) to plan and drive meetings. They are the ones who identify the speakers although I also approach individuals directly myself and ask them to speak at events. Some speakers take more encouraging than others - especially busy "goto" people.
Once communities become well established they pretty much drive themselves in terms of people wanting to present.
Wall Of Champions Re-born
The goal of technical communities "building people" in a tangible way proved to be the saving grace for the "Wall Of Champions" concept.
As we ran study squads to allow people to study together for exam certifications we spotted an opportunity to publicly recognise success for people achieving certifications (over and above our standard reward and recognition systems).
Our "Top Skillz" initiative (yes that's how it's spelled after re-branding) asked communities to list courses on community team sites that people could take to further their skills. Some team sites went on to provide links to various other resources too, including sample exams for certifications.
As a result of certification success, we decided to add a "Wall Of Champions" page to each community team site. This lists the certifications sought by the community along with a list of names of those who have attained them (in alphabetical order to show no bias).
The "Wall Of Champions" concept was thus successfully re-born and now serves to celebrate the success of certified individuals and demonstrate the tangible success of our communities to build people. This also acts as a motivation to others to get their name added to the Wall Of Champions and also satisfies the ulterior motive of identifying a list of SMEs to potentially speak at future community events. Yay! 😊
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
18th October, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini