The document discusses Advanced Legal's efforts to build formal learning into their team workflows. It outlines reasons for doing so like improved retention, recruitment, and product quality. It describes their starting position with legacy .NET skills and varying developer levels. They hoped to give autonomy, bootstrap learning, and provide feedback. They rolled it out by getting buy-in from leadership and doing it team-by-team. Issues included time away from daily work and measuring impact. They saw it working positively and proposed expanding outreach through conferences and talks.

1. How we’re trying to build learning into team
life at Advanced Legal
V. 1.3

2. An idea from Unruly Media
Making learning a formal part
of what you do every week

3. Why do this?
Knowledge Skills
Improved retention
Improved recruitment
Improved product quality
Increased speed of delivery
Grow professional skills
Better team working
$$$
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose

4. Our starting position
• Largely heavy legacy .Net
• Some common kata stuff
going on
• Regular bunch of developers,
varying skill levels, not a
bunch of industry luminaries
(yet)
• Not a great history of
investing in people

5. How did we think this might work?
Autonomy
Bootstrap
Feedback
Permission

6. How we rolled this out
 Sell it to the CTO
 Sell it to the tech leads
 Sell it to the product managers
 start at next convenient break
 may need to allow for this initially in plans
 Sell it to the team
 Do it on a team-by-team basis to keep focus
and intent
 One team underway
 Next team kicking off next month

7. Issues
 10-20% of time not doing their "day job“
 Trying to make this a formal programme
 A £530k cost!?!? (£170 x devs x 52)
 This is just part of the way we work
 Measuring the impact
 Synchronising with people outside the team
 Would the time be generally respected?

8. How is it working?

9. Where do we go from here?
 Get out to more conferences
 NIHITO Visits (Nothing Important Happens in the
Office)
 Deliver some talks at meet-ups
 Do some team swapping
 Do some organisation swapping

10. Thank you
For more info…
Andy Longshaw
Andy.Longshaw@advancedcomputersoftware.com
@andylongshaw
Dave Poole
David.Poole@advancedcomputersoftware.com
@dangerousDJP