Victoria Morgan-Smith
We interviewed Victoria Morgan-Smith at Continuous Lifecycle London conference about her book, Internal Tech Conferences.
Victoria Morgan-Smith is the Director of Delivery for Internal Products at the Financial Times, where she has been helping teams succeed since 2009. Before leading teams she was a developer for 9 years, a background which fuels her interest in finding fun ways to coach, energise and motivate teams into self-organising units. She is passionate about collaboration beyond the team, adopting agile principles to get under the skin of what will deliver measurable business value around the organisation.
Q. Why are Internal Tech Conferences relevant now?
The books are particularly relevant now because agility means always learning and that means every day, not just once a year at a conference or a training course. Technology comes and goes, it changes so fast that people really need access to the skills and experience of people around them if they're to continue to grow at the rate that they need to as things change around them.
“Technology comes and goes, it changes so fast that people really need access to the skills and experience of people around them if they’re to continue to grow at the rate that they need to as things change around them.”
One of the potential hiccups with agile is that having these small autonomous and powered teams means that there is a risk of them being siloed and some of this great knowledge and experience can be hidden within those teams, so an event like this that elevates that and surfaces to other teams so that people outside them can be really really powerful and to break those things down.
The other aspect of agility - the continuous change, means that the connections that people build at these events is another huge benefit. The social capital that people build by connecting can be a huge benefit when people are trying to then solve problems and deal with this change which is a constant thing.
Follow Victoria Morgan-Smith online: @VictoriaJMS