Supporting the Citizen Developer
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.5 • 58 Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2019
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who wouldn’t want to empower individuals and teams to solve problems as they encounter them? It’s a natural instinct for many developer-led organizations. But as phenomena like Shadow IT or skunkworks have shown, there can be a downside: a lack of coordination over what gets tackled and maintaining solutions over the long term.
In this episode, our co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Zhamak Dehghani, are joined by Andy Yates, Head of Strategy at ThoughtWorks TechOps, to explore the idea of the Citizen Developer. They look at ways of supporting problem-solving go-getters, while giving them the tools to ensure their efforts are aligned to business needs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Parsons. I'm one of the co-hosts of the ThoughtWorks podcast. |
| 0:10.0 | We will be speaking with Andy Yates, who is the head of strategy for ThoughtWorks internal IT. We call it TechOps. |
| 0:17.6 | And he will be describing our journey to supporting citizen developers. |
| 0:23.2 | But first, again, I'm Rebecca Parsons, Chief Technology Officer, and I would like my co-host, |
| 0:29.9 | Jomak, to introduce herself. |
| 0:31.6 | Hi, everyone. |
| 0:32.6 | I'm Jameh Deghany. |
| 0:33.9 | I'm joining you from our San Francisco office and I'm acting as the technology portfolio director |
| 0:39.9 | and excited to have Andy here to talk about his experience with supporting citizen developers today. |
| 0:46.7 | Well, welcome, Andy. So why don't you start up by telling us a little bit of what are we actually |
| 0:51.8 | trying to accomplish here and how you got involved. |
| 0:55.2 | Sure. And thanks for having him here. So I guess people think of ThoughtWorks as a strong |
| 1:00.7 | developer-led culture, a strong developer-led organization. We have a lot of work in open source. |
| 1:05.1 | We see lots of common patterns across the clients that we work with and the projects we're |
| 1:09.3 | working on. And we want to bring some of the lessons that we've learned from the outside world into our own sort of internal ways of working internal IT. We talk a good talk about having empowered individuals and teams. And we walk that walk. We have an attitude of if you can see a problem, you should be able to kind of go ahead and |
| 1:27.6 | fix that problem. And we want to make sure that our people, whether they're in an internal |
| 1:33.6 | team or whether they're consultants who are in between projects, are able to help solve some of |
| 1:39.3 | the problems that we see around our business. We're a pretty sort of value or outcome-driven |
| 1:43.4 | organization. We're always trying to deliver. And so we are quite focused on moving to solving a problem as fast as we can. If I see a way of fixing something, I'll put a credit card and I'll figure out the details later. That's sort of the organization that we have been and have grown up as. And so we wanted to encourage this. What we see, though, is that if you have that sort of unconstrained approach |
| 2:06.3 | of allowing everyone to work on everything, there are problems that show up that come out of that. |
| 2:12.8 | And so we've wanted to put a program in place to both enable the good side of that, but at the same |
| 2:18.3 | time to deal with some of the things that we see that happen. |
... |
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