Create your own internal workshops to teach developers

[marietheresa]

For anything that's new, teaching people how to do it will make the change go much smoother. Think about it: is it easier to follow someone along or to try and figure everything out by yourself? Even if you provide written documentation, people will have an easier time following it after seeing you do it. Because communication is hard, and written communication without the immediate feedback loop is even harder.

This is why, if you can, you should provide your developer with live training, aka workshops. You could pay a vendor to do that for you, but I think - if at all possible - you should do it yourself. And if you did #7, that's the perfect basis for creating¹ your workshops here.

Creating your own workshop will ensure they fit your company's environment and constraints perfectly. That's going to reduce friction and avoidable frustration. It will also let you put in and talk about non-technical topics like requirements and deadlines. And that's a good way to repeat that information and to ensure that as many people as possible have heard it.² Additionally, holding your own workshop will give you direct feedback on what people are struggling with. That's invaluable information to ensure a good transition. And to get that, you'll first need to create your own workshops.

Footnotes

1. And holding them. But we'll do that in the next stage - action. ↩

2. Repeating yourself doesn't really come naturally to many people. Using different formats - posts, workshops, regular meet-ups - is a bit of a trick to do it anyways, because you really do need to for people to hear you. ↩