Victoria Morgan-Smith - Internal Tech Conferences: Accelerate Multi-team Learning

Internal tech conferences can make a significant impact on anorganisations level of sharing, learning, and communication byaccelerating multi-team learning across technology departments. Anincreasing number of enlightened organisations are using this powerfulapproach to spread and embed new ideas and practices.

In this book we share practical advice on how to prepare, run, andfollow-up on an internal tech conference, together with some casestudies from several organisations showing the approaches in common andthe adaptations for each situation.

This book is for people involved in technology leadership in some form:people in official positions of leadership (CIO, CTO, Head ofEngineering, IT Operations Manager, etc.) and those in more informaltechnology leadership positions, such as team leaders, senior engineers,and people who simply like to lead by example. Having been in suchpositions ourselves, we (Victoria and Matthew) want to help othertechnology leaders to devise and run successful internal techconferences to act as a key strategic differentiator for organisationsbuilding software systems.

• gives an overview of internal tech conferences and why you might want to run such an event. Read this chapter if you have never run or experienced an internal tech conference before to help you understand the purpose and the things involved.
• explains how to prepare for an internal tech conference. Read this to understand what is involved, how long the preparation takes, and what kind of team you will need to make the conference happen.
• covers the conference day itself. Read this chapter to understand all the operational aspects of the conference and to see what kind of help you may need on the day.
• deals with the weeks and months following the conference. Read this chapter to see how to get the most out of the day by following up on talks and panel sessions and how to ensure that the conferences are an opportunity for learning and growth.
• contains detailed case studies from a selected group of organisations. This chapter is different from the others in that the material is presented in a more linear, retrospective fashion (more like a story). Read this chapter to get a feel for how real organisations have run internal tech conferences and what they learned.
• The at the back of the book contains tools and templates for planning and running an internal tech conference; these can be used and adapted as needed.

Chapters 1 to 4 deliberately read as how-to guides with quite specificrecommendations. Chapter 5 has a more narrative flavour, befitting thecase study stories. The Toolkit provides some templates and quick-start guides for getting results quickly.

We met (appropriately) at a conference in 2015 where Victoria gave atalk about some early changes at Financial TImes to create a learningorganisation. We realised that we both had some similar experience oforganising and running internal tech conferences and decided to write anarticle, published by InfoQ in 2016 .

Since the article was published, we have been happy to see several newonline articles covering internal tech conferences, and we know fromspeaking to people in the industry (at least in the UK) that theapproach is becoming more widespread. We therefore decided to write thisbook to provide a template and set of guidelines for not just runningthe conference itself but how to go about preparing for one and how toget the most strategic and tactical value out of a series ofconferences.