Pivot To Home-working

Reflections on a move to MS Teams™ to support home working during the Covid-19 Pandemic

We hired a new IT manager just before the recent Covid-19 pandemic lock-down, who completed a project moving us to MS Teams. This has proved inspired, enabling an almost seamless move to remote working for an R&D staff of around 15 engineers.

We use MS Teams™ for meetings, and I believe the video is important for small team or one to one conversations because otherwise the facial expressions and body language which we as humans use to interpret the emphasis of verbal communication is lost. Screen sharing has proved useful to facilitate group work on a document, and for presenting.

In larger meetings video can be switched off ( to save bandwidth of course), enabling involvement in a meeting by listening whilst also rapid typing in order to attend to other important tasks.

MS Teams™ supports effective communication management because all information (conversations and documents) is accessible in one location, and searchable.  Previously information might have been lost as we moved from an email thread, to a skype conversation, or even a telephone call.

It is necessary to map the business process to the use of MS Teams, to organize the information carefully in the back-end repository (usually Sharepoint™), and to logically arrange the teams and channels to match the business structure. If each user was allowed to create their own data organization scheme, before long the application would degenerate into a confusing mass of information, in which it was difficult to find and track relevant information, and would become very ineffective to use.

Users must be educated about how to use MS Teams™ effectively, since simple features such as tagging colleagues in a conversation to trigger an automatic prompt and enable them to easily find and join a conversation in which they should be engaged are available.

The obvious disadvantage of integrating such an application into the company business operations is the potential lock-in with one the provider, and the difficulty of subsequent migration to another platform.

Software Development Career Paths

Software is truly ubiquitous, just look around and you will see just how important it is to our every day lives - in our mobile phones, smart watches, cars, TVs, and all the equipment required in our hospital intensive care units.

There is a place for everyone within software development, you just have to find out what really interests you. I think an very broad initial classification could be business or embedded development. Do you love playing with one or more of the single board computers which have appeared over recent years, such as the Raspberry Pi (TM,  Arduino (TM), Beaglebone (TM), with their associated hardware plug-in adapters and then diving into low level drivers and enabling these boards to sense and interact with their environment ? Or, do love developing websites, WindowsTM or mobile applications, and their associated business layers, and database backends ?  

Of course, you don't have to decide between these fields - you could dabble in both. There are so many excellent further education courses at college or university to choose from, you could start of on a general computing course and specialise later as you find out more.

Alternatively, what key technology trends do you find most interesting - such as AI and Machine Learning, robotics, cyber-security. You only have to search online for such trends, and then dive in and investigate what interests you. A quick search today, revealed the list on the Forbes website (Mar, 2020)  which includes Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, The Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and augmented analytics, Cloud and edge computing, Natural language processing, Voice interfaces and chatbots, Computer vision and facial recognition, Robots and cobots, Autonomous vehicles, Digital platforms (such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb), Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, Cybersecurity and resilience, Quantum computing, and Robotic process automation. What a list, some many fascinating areas, and software is of intrinsic importance in all these fields. 

With the community editions of Visual Studio on Windows, or a GCC with linux, everyone can setup a professional quality development environment for free - so go ahead, dive in, code and play. If you get stuck, well there is a wealth of quality websites with tutorials or information to help you out - such as stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/), and codeproject (https://www.codeproject.com/) being just two quality resources at the tip of the iceberg.

So, having played with development, perhaps studied and passed qualifications, or whilst studying, you will also want to find employment - or perhaps setup your own business. If you take the former path, then in-addition to your coding skills you will also need to practice your interview technique. A great podcast which can help here is by Felienne (2020). 

So, dive in, start coding and have fun !

References

Felienne (2020) 'Episode 412: Sam Gavis-Hughson on Technical Interviews', Software Engineering Radio, [Podcast]. 10 June 2020. Available at https://www.se-radio.net/2020/06/episode-412-sam-gavis-hughson-on-technical-interviews/ (Accessed 22 June 2020)

Marr, B. (2020) These 25 Technology Trends Will Define The Next Decade, Forbes, 20 April 2020 [Online]. Available at

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/04/20/these-25-technology-trends-will-define-the-next-decade/#5fee050029e3 (Accessed 22 June 2020)

Leadership Traits

The latest PM Podcast is an interview with Shyam Ramanathan who discusses some of the leadership traits explored in his article '27 Traits of Strong Leaders in Times of Crisis and Turbulence' 

The article is a comprehensive and perceptive list, which would prove useful for stimulating any debate on this topic.  

During the podcast,  the interviewer Cornelius Fichtner focuses on possibly his favourites, namely: 

• Leaders are visionaries
• Leaders grow other leaders 
• Leaders are generalists
• Leaders are brutally honest
• Leaders are quitters (yes really - read the article to understand why this is included.)
• Leaders are continuous learners
• Leaders are high on self-care

Shyam in his summary states the emphasis of the traits will vary depending upon current conditions, and individual situations, however in his opinion the most critical are always :

Leadership is having a big vision, inspiring others and leading by example.

References

Fichtner, C. (2020) Special Episode: Leadership during Crisis and Turbulence, PM Podcast [Online]. Available at:  https://www.project-management-podcast.com/podcast-episodes/episode-details/875-special-episode-leadership-during-crisis (Accessed 12 June 2020)

Ramanathan, S. (2020) 27 Traits of Strong Leaders in Times of Crisis and Turbulence, Linkedin.com [Online]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/26-traits-strong-leaders-times-crisis-turbulence-shyam/ (Accessed 12 June 2020)

Podcasts

The 'younger' generation have grown up with the internet, and are adept at finding information (or just browsing humorous social media postings.) Whereas some people prefer to find written, and perhaps illustrated, information, others will jump straight to online video tutorials. 

However, when you are unable to read, or to watch videos or just as an alternative, there are many excellent podcasts which can be listened to at any time. If you are commuting or walking the dog, and don't just want switch-off time, then podcasts are invaluable.

There are a number of podcast applications available for mobile devices, such as Castbox  which is available for Android and Apple iOS(TM) operating systems, and many other platforms.

There are many podcasts to which you can subscribe, such as

Software Development

Project Management

Link from the apple podcasts website here 

References

Castbox (2020) [Online]. Available at https://castbox.fm/ (Accessed 9 June 2020)