The Importance of Engineers Having Their Own Small Community in the Team

Summary

• Having your own small community in the team as an engineer leads to improving your skills using company time and enhancing your evaluation from your boss.
• It is important to align the activities, objectives, and policies of the community with the organization’s benefits.
• Study sessions are recommended as the contents of the community.

Introduction

This article is written with the assumption of software engineers working as company employees.

In particular, it is aimed at those who:

• Have a desire to improve their technical skills,
• Want to learn using company time, and
• Want to be highly evaluated by their boss for their achievements.

This post proposes having your own community (especially study sessions) within the team to achieve the above goals.

Purpose of Having Your Own Community

The “outward” purpose of having your own community in the team is as follows:

• Solve team or organizational issues through community activities.

As a result, the following effects are expected as secondary benefits. This is the “real and hidden” purpose of having your own community.

• Improve your skills using company time
• Enhance your evaluation from the company
• Increase your presence within the team
• Improve relationships with team members
• Raise the skill level of team members

Your Own Community = Recommended Study Sessions

In conclusion, I recommend hosting and continuously operating a small “study session” within the team. The key points are as follows:

• Align the activities, objectives, and policies of the community with the organization’s benefits
• Start small
• Engage in activities within the team, not externally
• Keep minutes and make them a team asset
• Involve highly skilled and experienced engineers within the team

These considerations will allow you to solve team and organizational issues, and as a result, you will be allowed to study using company time and receive high evaluations from your boss.

Let’s look at each point one by one.

Align the Activities, Objectives, and Policies of the Community with the Organization’s Benefits

This is the most important point.

The essence of hosting a community is to solve the issues of the team or organization.

You can enhance your evaluation from your boss by aligning the activities, objectives, and policies of the community with the organization’s benefits. On the other hand, if you do not align them, you may be seemed as a nuisance or a wast of time, and your activities may be stopped.

What are the benefits of the organization?

You can see the hints of this to carefully hear the words of your boss’s boss or the executives of the company.

For example, let’s think a case that the company needs to reduce costs due to a decrease in sales. Then, in the meeting, the your boss of boss may say something like “we need to reduce orders to subcontractors for cost reduction.” In this case, it means that the company will try to increase the in-house development ratio. In other words, the company needs to improve the technical skill level of in-house engineers to replace subcontractors who are experts in the field.

This is a good opportunity to start your own community.

Your boss has an issue to solve, “improving the technical skill level of team members”. It is a nice chance for you to propose a solution to start “a study session to improve the skills of team members”.

Then, you can set the objective of the study session to “improve the technical skills of team members”, and set the contents of activities to “study for solving the issues of the product which team is developing”. These will give your boss and the company a great benefit even if you study using company time.

From point of view of your boss, a team member (you) willingly offers to solve the issues which the boss needs to struggle with. This is so useful for the boss because the boss can reduce the time and effort to solve the issues.

In this way, by providing benefits to your boss and the company through your community activities, you can be thanked by your boss and further enhance your reputation as a result.

Here, to expect and solve the issues of the team or organization without supervisor’s orders is one of the important abilities to be promoted (of course, it’s great capability for enhancing your evaluation without desires to be promoted).

Start Small

To start small is important for everything. Study sessions (hosting your own community) are no exception. For the first step, it is recommended to start with a few people who get along with you and have same amount of motivation.

The benefit of starting small is as follows:

• Easy to manage the community for beginners.
• Easy to continue the activities because you can choose members who has higher motivation.
• Easy for participants to speak up and stimulate discussions.
• Easy to get feedback from members.
• Easy to do try-and-error to establish the community style.
• Easy to involve key persons related to the issues to solve through the activities.

First of all, a few people who can be counted on one hand are enough. If you want to increase the number of participants, you can do it after the activity is running smoothly.

Remember, however, that it is the quality of the participants that is important, not the number of participants. Don’t forget that the purpose of the community is “solving the organizational issues”, and “gathering people” is just a way to achieve the purpose.

Engage in Activities Within the Team, Not Externally

When you read the words “my own community”, you may imagine like a influencer who widely gathers lots of people, and erne money from subscription of their online salon.

However, this is not the case. The community you are going to create is a small one within the team, not an external one. How wide the community depends on the situation of you. You can set the scope of the community like “within the team”, “within the project”, or “within the department”. But in any case, the narrow scope is recommended.

This is same reason as the previous point “start small”.

For finding the issues to solve, it is easier to find the issues within the team that you are familiar with than to find the issues in the company as a whole.

Then, “activities within the team” means that you should “solve the issues of the team” through the community activities.

For the first step, to find the issues by focusing on the team. To found and run the community to solve the issue in the team. This is the smallest and most efficient way to learn the way to own community.

Here, if you want to have a community out of the company, starting with a small community within the team is a good way. Because team members basically are on your side, and it is closed, then you can try it in a safe environment. It is not too late to start an outer community after you have succeeded in the small, closed community. The essence of the community is same between in the team and out of the company. So, what benefits you provide to participants, and what issues you solve through the community activities.

Keep Minutes and Make Them a Team Asset

It is important to keep minutes of the community activities. Knowledge, discussions, and ideas are must be recorded as documents. This become a team asset.

The minutes are not only for the community members, but also for the team members who are not participating in the study session. Everyone can see the minutes like wiki whenever they want. And the minutes can be stored as a team knowledge, it can be used for the next study session or future projects.

Furthermore, the document will be expanded as the community activities are continued. The team’s development efficiency is expected to improve through a series of study sessions.

The minutes as a visible achievement will also take a important role to enhance your evaluation from your boss. Be sure to keep the minutes of the study sessions.

Involve Highly Skilled and Experienced Engineers Within the Team

If there are highly skilled and experienced engineers in the team, it is recommended to involve them in the community activities.

Senior or lead engineers can make discussions deeper and more valuable. It might be difficult a little to understand everything with only junior engineers.

These benefits are expected:

• Knowledge transfer from senior engineers to junior engineers
• Deepening discussions with senior engineers’ knowledge and experience
• Understanding the true meaning of the rules like coding standards
• Aligning the awareness of development
• Communication among members of different generations

Here, you may hesitate to invite senior engineers to the community because of their busy schedule or not high level of study session.

Don’t worry about it at all.

In fact, the opposite is true. There are many benefits for the veterans too.

• Improve team productivity by improving the skills of junior engineers
• Reduce coding reviews by improving entire coding quality
• Reorganize the knowledge and develop themselves through teaching
• Enhance their presence in the team to take a position of a teacher

Therefore, you can find the study session is a good opportunity for both of junior and senior engineers.

Study Session is a Powerful Tool for the Unestablished

In running a community (study session), the organizer does not have to be the smartest.

Rather, it is those who lack knowledge and experience, such as young engineers and members who have just joined a new project, who benefit most from running a study session.

The reason is that it is easier to take a position of a student and learn knowledge from other members. A student can ask questions a lot, which leads communication with others. Saying “thank you” builds a good relationship (because people generally like to teach someone and to be thanked).

Let’s ride on the shoulder of giants.

As a result, the study session is a powerful tool for the unestablished.

Of course, you can take a position of a teacher if you are already a senior engineer. Newcomers can also share their knowledge and experience of previous projects for taking a position in the new team. A workshop which everyone writes code together sounds great too.

The appropriate way of the study session depends on the situation of the team and your background.

Anyway, don not forget that the essence of the community is to “solve the issues of the team or organization through the activities”.

Example of Activities

The theme of the study session needs to be chosen appropriately based on the situation. Here are some examples of activities I have experienced.

• Documents of quality definition which is defined by the company
• Coding style guide of the project
• Review of the pull request discussion
• Roundtable reading of famous books (e.g. “The Readable Code)

Results of My Activities

I have been running a study session for about 1 year and a half.

After much trial and error, we are now holding online study sessions once a week for 30 minutes (fixed time slot on the same day of the week every week). There are about seven participants including me. Participation is voluntary, and the members can decide when to join or leave.

As a result, the following benefits have been achieved:

• Improved my (portable) skills using company time
• My boss thanked me and wanted to continue the activities
• Enhanced my evaluation from my boss, and my salary was raised (especially to improve skills of team members, not only me, was highly evaluated)
• Increased my presence in the team (I became to be often asked about coding, and took a position good at coding)
• Built good relationships with team members
• Team members said “I feel my skills have improved”
• Improved the productivity of the team

In addition, to summarize the feedback from my boss, the following abilities were highly important for even engineers:

• Actively take actions to solve the issues of the team or organization
• Involve others to do it

And boss also said that there are big difference about evaluation between the leader and participants. It means that “to make a plan, to take actions, to involve others, and to lead the team” are the important even if the community is small.

Conclusion

Engineers tend to be satisfied just doing technological stuff, and be less interested in the organization and other people (me too). However, as I described in this article, set your skill improvement with company time to the “real purpose”, and run a small community to achieve your hidden target, then as a result, you will be able to contribute to the team and organization through solving the issues. This allows you to “ostensibly” become interested in the organization and others, and to make spontaneous contributions to them.

To run a study session is actually no risk. Because you can easily say “Why don’t we try it once?”, and you can stop activities whenever you want. If it does not work, your reputation will not be damaged because it is a good try. And it is easy to stop and restart the activities when the theme changes.

As you can see, there are so many benefits for engineers to have their own small community within the team. I encourage you to give it a try.