Presentation: Dream job? The vision and journey to the company culture you want

This session is part talk and part workshop. We aim to give you insight into how important culture is to your business and your happiness, the inspiration to recognise the type of culture you want to build - and the practical tools that will help make your vision a reality.

 

It begins with a story from the founder of a tech start-up known for its unusual structure - employee owned with a flat hierarchy and ‘radical management’.

 

From employee theft on minimum wage to frustration as head of departments, Helen describes working in broken cultures. After years of experiencing the price exacted from customers, employees and shareholders alike, she realised that a rigid hierarchical culture hurt everyone - no matter what their place within it. Along with two colleagues, she went on to found Gamevy, a company in which the culture came first - before product or customers. For Gamevy this meant making the company’s aim to increase employee happiness through ownership and freedom.

 

A new beginning is not the only way to change culture. We can make gradual changes, attract adherents, dictate top-down changes, organise grass-root campaigns … What all of these have in common is the need to communicate with one another what type of culture we want and how to get there. The way we choose to communicate can have a huge impact on how likely our cultural change is to take root and succeed.

 

Pete will run an interactive workshop session in which participants work in small groups and explore different types of communication. Specifically we practise how we might shift from advocating (telling people what we think the solutions are) to enquiry (figuring out together what might be going on and what to do about it). This turns the vision of ‘culture change’ into some practical skills in uncovering assumptions, asking key questions and kickstarting change. Participants can apply the insights and practises straight away in their work.

Tracks

Covering innovative topics

Wednesday, 4 March

  • Architecture Improvements

    Next gen architecture, Arch over the full lifecycle, Bleeding edge tech in legacy, Cognitive biases in architecture, Evolving Architecture.

  • Big Data Frameworks, Architectures, and Data Science

    As big data tools and architectures continue to evolve, how do you architect and select technologies that work now but are also future-proof?

  • DevOps and Continuous Delivery: Code Beyond the Dev Team

    As infrastructure becomes as malleable as code, a unified approach from reqs to ops is needed to deliver promised breakthroughs.

  • Engineering Culture

    The best teams and companies talk about how to create amazing engineering cultures.

  • Java - Not Dead Yet

    Java is evolving to meet developer and business needs, from lambdas in Java 8 to built-in support for money types rumoured for Java 9.

  • Mind Matters at Work

    How theories from neuroscience and psychology can help us better understand IT professionals and discover what really motivates them.

Thursday, 5 March

  • Docker, containers and application portability

    People building stuff for and with containers showing why application portability is important, and what can be done with expanding ecosystems.

  • Evolving agile

    Reflecting on and learning from successes and failures in applying agile approaches since the creation of the Agile Manifesto and exploring ways of applying agile practices to increase business value.

  • HTML and JS Today

    The state of the art in web technologies. What is important to know and why?

  • Internet of Things

    What software devs need to know to design and build for instrumented environments and reactive things, what new issues and questions it raises.

  • Modern CS in the Real World

    How modern CS helps you tackle today's problems.

  • Reactive Architecture

    How to create reactive systems is more than simply learning a framework. Thinking in a reactive way helps you to design responsive architectures.

  • The Go Language

    The Go Language - Concurrency, Performance, Systems Programming.

Friday, 6 March

  • Architectures You've Always Wondered About

    Get a rare look behind the scenes and get to see the architectures of the most well-known sites with the least known architectures.

  • Low latency trading

    The 'race to zero' continues. Join us to learn about the latest tecniques being deployed to optimise order routing and execution.

  • Open source in finance

    Financial services have changed from OS as cost-saving to a competitive weapon. See open source projects that are disrupting the finance industry.

  • Product Mastery

    Come have fun with fellow PMs and BAs as you learn about Value Management. We'll even tell you dark tales of Snarks, Hippos and other obstacles.

  • Taming Microservices

    Tackling the challenges of microservices in practice.

  • Taming Mobile

    Mobile is no longer the Next Big Thing but a requirement for your business. Hear from those who have implemented successful mobile systems.

Conference for Professional Software Developers