As we end another week it's time to reflect on what's happened. This week has seen me driving the massive upskilling effort that's happening, supporting other peoples Q1 initiatives, and starting to come out of the fog of being heads down for a while. You know how it is when there's a lot going on and you're focused on getting through the task list - you lose sight of the longer-term goals, what's happening around you, and what you should be focused on as a leader.
Part of my role is to oversee a team which is fairly transient by nature. People who are between client projects come to the hub where they spend some amount of time, sometimes a week, sometimes a month, before going to their next client engagement. During that time they need to catch up on any upskilling they're behind on, prepare for the new project by investigating technologies being used there, and somehow find time to help with internal projects. It's difficult to manage something like that because of the almost persistent knowledge drain of such a setup.
This is where SDD is going to help - it forces us to make explicit that information, that knowledge which people take with them when they go to a project. It's not an easy transition and has some people who are resistant to the change, but from my perspective it's the only real way to ensure that knowledge doesn't leave with the implementers and to help free up some of my time from knowledge transfer sessions for those people who are working on new projects.
I've been encouraged by the number of people who are working through the upskilling that we're producing though. So far about half of everyone has engaged with the latest upskilling efforts after only two weeks, with the target being ten weeks. This puts us slightly ahead of where we wanted to be and alleviates one of my fears that people won't want to engage and there'll be a need to use the 'stick' rather than the 'carrot' to get people down the learning paths.
Over the next few weeks I want to work on building out a set of skills, agents, etc. to use in Claude Code to help make managing our internal projects easier, quicker, more hands-off (but still keeping the human-in-the-loop). Let's see how that plan fares in the face of to never ending to-do list.
Overall I'm feeling a mixture of positivitiy but also trepidation for the week ahead and the scale of work to be done.