Victoria Morgan-Smith
We interviewed Victoria Morgan-Smith at Continuous Lifecycle London conference about her book, Internal Tech Conferences.
Victoria Morgan-Smith is the Director of Delivery for Internal Products at the Financial Times, where she has been helping teams succeed since 2009. Before leading teams she was a developer for 9 years, a background which fuels her interest in finding fun ways to coach, energise and motivate teams into self-organising units. She is passionate about collaboration beyond the team, adopting agile principles to get under the skin of what will deliver measurable business value around the organisation.
Q. What is an internal tech conference and why should you run one?
An internal tech conference is an event that is run by and for people within a single organisation. It can have a variety of content types that any conference can - it could be speaks, talks, it could be workshops, discussion panels - you name it. The main outcome of it is that you are seeking to spread knowledge across the organisation, across different teams.
One of the huge side benefits of doing this is the fact that bringing people together into this sort of event acts as an explicit invitation to people to challenge departments, to raise new ideas, to talk about how things can be done differently and to notice each other and discover the skills that surrounds them and that maybe they don’t even know about because they are hidden within different teams. Exposing people to all of that fantastic knowledge can be really inspiring to people and trigger all kinds of ripple effects.
My own experience with Internal Tech Conferences is running the ones we’ve had for the last 5 years at Financial Times. We’ve seen a huge variety in different types of them we’ve run through the years but as we’ve gone through, the fact that is a real enabler and the thermometer for testing the progress and change that has happened in the organisation over time.
There has been a big change from year one where we saw lots of discussion panels where people were very polite to each other but we did see some very specific and meaningful spin of activities where people came together to solve a common problem they’ve seen with alerting the overload on microservices - a very very meaningful output. Four years on, the big change is the conversation is about culture and the type of organisation we want to be working at FT - a huge shift.
“It has been a good way of exploring technical and business challenges but the biggest thing has been the change around how we work and building those connections.”
It has been a good way of exploring technical and business challenges but the biggest thing has been the change around how we work and building those connections.
Follow Victoria Morgan-Smith online: @VictoriaJMS