Operation Wombat
30.11.2018
Photo credit: Veli-Matti Korpelainen, Reaktor Breakpoint
The playbook of evolving knowledge and business
Author: Miika Toljamo, Business Director and Coffee Chancellor @Codemate
Twitter @tmiika
Linkedin: Miika Toljamo
At Codemate, we have an unlimited budget for attending conferences and training.
Unlimited? How is that even possible? In this blog post, I will go through how our first version of Playbook of evolving knowledge and business – better known as Operation Wombat – was defined and how it has been working during the first ten months.
Operation Wombat
First of all, I have to admit this is nothing new under the sun – or, in our case, under the broken lamp – in the developer cave. Usually, companies have a limited budget for these occasions, and so did we. It restrained us and we didn’t like it. It was not our way of doing things and we wanted to change it.
With an unlimited budget, we believe comes unlimited learning.
Also, an unlimited budget for events would bankrupt us sooner or later. So there’s that. Clearly, we needed to think about what we wanted to gain from these events. The first idea was that since we can’t fit every employee in the same plane, the next best thing was to encourage knowledge sharing. We started from that!
We explored possibilities for quite some time before we found a suitable model for us. Some of the models we reviewed had limited but totally equal budget for everyone, and some had no budget or even process whatsoever – which of both we considered not optimal.
The limited & equal model would prevent people from attending more expensive events – or at least you would have to radically limit your event participation during a year. And the idea of no budget at all really appealed to us. Minus side could be the same as with the other models: how to make sure we think about our people and our customers at the same time? Total riot can be a fun thing, but we wanted to list things that we want to achieve with event participation – and then think further.
So we crafted Operation Wombat.
The goals
At first, all we had was basically “Make it possible to go to events”. However, very soon the list for goals got pretty exhausting. Coming back from this trip in the jungle, we divided the goals into three main categories; learning, sharing and business.
Learning: Grow professionally by going to events that improve your core competence
This is the easy one. By giving an equal possibility to join an event or training you like, we will not only make it possible and encourage learning new but give everyone a chance to network and travel.
Sharing: Make sure to let others know about the greatest findings and implement them
It’s getting a bit trickier here. We need to collaborate on how to digest and present the findings – and choose the media wisely.
Business: Think about the big picture
This is the tricky part, but also a great possibility to learn new. We wanted to make Operation Wombat a competence improvement process by itself. By giving a chance to have all the information needed for decision making, we improve everyone’s big picture, sales, and business understanding skills.
Information such as the real salary expense for event days and the cost of missing billable work gives event dreamer the big picture on the cost side. We wanted the event dreamer to estimate the benefits by planning how he/she would share the knowledge gained with colleagues, customers, and other parties.
These discussions will also affect how we are doing and developing our business in whole. It makes us work together and learn from each other and improve one’s negotiation and sales skills. You can’t get a go signal without other’s support!
The driving principles
No budget
We rather use thousands to common benefit, than hundreds to non-sense.
We are flexible
Flexibility is in our DNA. When both parties are flexible, we get to real results without having to debate on details.
Make decisions together
Targets will be defined together, decisions will be made together.
We have seen these principles in concrete action, such as combining a holiday on a conference trip, and in return, we have agreed on something about the budget.
Defining value and cost.
Now to the fun part. How on earth do we define the value of an event? People are responsible for evaluating conferences and training events based on these questions:
- Does it benefit me and my colleagues?
- Does it benefit our customers?
- Does it benefit Codemate?
Each of these questions will be answered together, thinking about the current situation and the future. We have a Slack channel #operationwombat to present and discuss the event ideas. It’s really important to get support from your colleagues to make the most out of an event. When dreaming of an event, we always advise our people to discuss with our marketing and communication team to think about ideas how to create value for not just internally, but also to our customers and other interested parties.
Business persons help the event dreamer to map the real costs, and also how this proposition fits into the big picture. In each of these steps, one will receive supporting feedback and ideas – all for a greater good.
The direct cost part is a bit easier. Flights, hotels, traveling time, daily allowance, salary. The cruel part is the cost for missing billable hours. Even if we try to fit wombat moments for those times you spend without a project, we have seen it be almost impossible. This fact alone can easily double the cost of event participation.
The final part is to estimate the overall value – together with your local coffee maker (the Boss, in some other places). Decision making is then only acknowledging the situation and communicating others about it.
Sharing knowledge
Coming back to the greater good – how we can think about our colleagues, customers, and brand, for starters? In the sparring discussions, a short action list is created. Usually, it has at least one item from this fine list:
- Technology review
- Meetup talk
- Blog post
- Sharing of event or training material
- Sharing the live action from the event in social media
- Discussions with The Coffee Club (Codemate Management Team) and sales
Sometimes the event or training is not that good. We need to do mistakes to learn, but not the same mistake twice – so let’s be honest. If we hit a bad apple, we must inform others to avoid the same mistake in the future.
As you might see, we didn’t limit Operation Wombat to just one’s improvement and shady nights in cool locations. One of the biggest things we are aiming here is to widen everyone’s perspective. It might be a sales ace who wants to hear more about the latest trends, or a hardcore database engineer wanting to understand the real costs hidden. We wanted Operation Wombat to be a business driven fellow!
Where have we been so far
We announced Operation Wombat on March 2018 – roughly 10 months before this blog post. Some of us have gone to Google IO, some of us visited the local meetup in their hometown. Each of these plans has been made in bare hours. So far the fast-moving Wombat has taken us to these events:
- Flutter expert Iiro visited Google IO and wrote a blog post! Read it from here
- Top JS group Iiska, Henri and Henry flew to Stockholm to have a great time with same-minded people. Oh and they visited Nordic.js. Check out the blog from here.
- Four mates went to the Nordcloud AWS architecting training
- Software knight Tuomas and Design department heralds Laura and Idamaija visited our friends in Reaktor Breakpoint and presented the findings in an internal “What we learned” -session
- Sales ace Vesa-Matti joined Upgraded Life Festival and reported back to the sales team
- A renowned Moccamaster coffee guru Miika visited Nordic Business Forum together with Sanna from marketing and communications. Most of the hazardous ideas are already implemented in our day-to-day life! Sorry!
- Alex and Alessandro are joining Flutter Live on 4th December in London
- And many more!
We were excited about various other events but didn’t attend for reasons.
Closing arguments
Operation Wombat is not the only thing we do together at Codemate. Take these blog posts for an example. I got everyone’s attention, 21 comments, 74 suggestions, 2 co-contributors and our communication team’s help for this one blog post. All in two short days. That is the power of collaboration in a great company. But that’s another story.
In the meantime, we would be grateful for event or training recommendations – maybe with your thoughts on what we might gain from it. In return, I promise to bribe you with cool stickers. You can reach us everywhere!
Miika & Friends
Ps. You might wonder why we named our Playbook as Operation Wombat. Why not? These fine creatures are perfectly adaptable and habitant tolerant. I would love to be one. Here are 7 things you didn’t know about them.
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