Training Day
Today was our first session of what we’re calling “Team Education Day” at Engine Yard. We used to hold these when I was at Netsprout; we called them “Knowledge Sharing Days.” The concept is that each member of the team chooses a topic to give a short, half hour presentation on, with an additional half hour for Q&A. The sessions are held every other week. On a highly cross-functional team, presentations needs to be high-level, so as to be useful to everyone. On teams of designers, or developers, presentations can be more technical or detailed.
In our case, we have a team made up of designers, developers, marketing, writers and managers, so the conversations are definitely higher-level. That’s not to say that the information isn’t useful; the whole idea of these Education Days is to learn something new. Cross-functional teams may be made up of different and varying disciplines, but everyone is aided by knowing how to do even a little bit of each others’ job.
Here are some photos of Andy’s presentation on Git:
<span class=”full-image-block”><span><img src=”/storage/IMG_0253.JPG?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1220024780497”/></span><span class=”thumbnail-caption”>Andy giving his Git presentation</span></span> <span class=”full-image-block”><span><img src=”/storage/IMG_0256.JPG?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1220024863824”/></span><span class=”thumbnail-caption”>Complete with Keynote presentation!</span></span>
