We’ve found that people appreciate having a strong influence on their destination during team reorganizations and that self-selection reteaming places people into teams they are happy to be part of. But there are difficulties to be aware of and, as with everything, there’s always room for improvement.
In January 2021 we completed our 3rd annual reteaming process at Redgate. In previous posts I have described the principles of our approach to reteaming — to give our staff a strong influence over the team they are part of and the work they do — and detailed the process we apply. …
Questions we’re commonly asked about self-selection reteaming at Redgate and an offer to help you plan your own process
In January we completed our 3rd annual reteaming process at Redgate. I’ve written a couple of posts about how that went on this site and shared a tour through a key event in our approach — the team charter expo.
In response to that video I’ve had several people from different organizations make contact with me to ask about reteaming. They were curious about similar aspects of the process, so I thought I’d share my answers here, in case it’s useful for anyone else.
If you like videos for this kind of thing, I cover some of the questions in…
This month Redgate’s Product Development organisation embarked on our annual “reteaming” process to reconfigure how our teams are assigned to reflect the company’s 2021 strategy and plans. For the last 3 years, our approach to these team changes has been to allow people to strongly influence where in the new team structure they will work, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most engaging. This year, for the first time, we had to run reteaming as a fully-remote process.
As I described in more detail in my previous post, our reteaming process involves asking people in product development…
Level Up Week 2020 was Redgate’s first ever global event focused on learning and personal development. It encouraged us to share skills, knowledge, and ideas with other Redgaters and give each other opportunities to grow and improve. Originally envisaged as a physical conference, Level Up Week also became our first company-wide remote event, delivering content at a sustainable pace and in a format we thought people could really engage with while they’re working from home.
This post continues the story of how Redgate pivoted its internal tech conference to be a company global virtual conference in September 2020. If you’d…
Since 2018 Redgate’s Product Development organisation have run an internal conference to inspire people to engage in their personal development, build capability across our teams and bring people together to learn, share and collaborate. The conference — which we called Level Up — got us out of our usual working environments to learn from other Redgaters working on different things and gather fresh insights & opinions.
In 2018 our first Level Up conference had 80 attendees with around 20 people speaking to deliver sessions. Last year, Level Up 2019 had 120 attendees and almost 40 speakers. …
In January 2021 Redgate’s product development organisation will undertake a “reteaming” process to reconfigure how our teams are assigned to reflect the company’s strategy for 2021. Our approach to these team changes will allow people to strongly influence where in the new team structure they will work, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most engaging.
We’ve applied a team self-selection process for the last two years in preparation for changes to development team assignments in 2019 and 2020. Overall, the process has garnered good feedback from team members, team leaders and divisional leadership. …
During social distancing measures, with all our teams working remotely and with differing work patterns, we should be especially attentive to the wellbeing of our teammates and how we collaborate with each other. Last week I got together with a group of our engineers, designers and technical leads to explore what practices and behaviours were making a difference in their teams, as they look to nurture wellbeing and stay connected & collaborating with their teammates.
We ran a simple virtual post-it sharing session using the online collaboration tool Mural (there’s your first tip — Mural is excellent!) …
The book Accelerate — The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim has been really important for Redgate over the past 12 months. It’s helped us find a software delivery terminology that teams and the wider company understand and buy into, and allowed us to compare how we’re performing against the best in the business.
Over the years my fellow Redgaters and I have become resistant to “productivity” measures like velocity, lines of code, code coverage and time spent on tasks, and related techniques like…
In my previous post I explained why, at the end of 2018, Redgate wanted to give people a strong influence over what team they worked on, our concerns about short team self-selection events and how we decided to approach the idea. I also covered what feedback we received immediately after the changes and reflected on the results nine months later.
This post explains in much more detail exactly how we that first formal team self-selection process, in the hope someone outside the company might find it useful.
A recap of the changes we wanted to make to our team structure
Our aim was to keep to the principles of self-determination but to try…
Are you attracted to the idea of allowing people to decide for themselves what they work on, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most motivational, but something is holding you back from trying it? Perhaps you’ve heard of organisations that have run team self-selection events and, while that’s sounded to you like the right thing to do, you’ve thought “that’ll never work here”? Well, that is how Redgate’s product development organisation felt at the end of 2018.
This is the story of how we took the plunge, ran our own style of team self selection process and…
Chris Smith
Chris is Head of Product Delivery at Redgate. His job is to lead the software development teams that work on Redgate's ingeniously simple database tools.
