Embracing Change in IT
13 December 202120 November 2015 | Insights
Change management was the leitmotiv of the week at Fortech, especially on Thursday and Friday when our „Embracing Change in IT” conference took place.
Whether we talk about professional or organizational development, change has become an implicit requirement in our pursuit for excellence. The larger context in which a business operates triggers changes at the organizational level. Further on, these adjustments are transferred as required competencies at the individual level. Given this fact, we are regularly challenged to adapt to changes fueled by industry disruptions, department reorganizations, new technologies, tools or functionalities.
But what does it mean to embrace change in IT? How does change feel? Is there a cycle of accepting change? How do we assess the proper tools for the tasks at hand? How do we embrace the changes that lead to innovation?
These are the types of topics touched during the conference. The agenda proposed by our speakers was designed to include a series of technical workshops and a keynote speech. It covered everything from ASP.Net 5 (a significant redesign of ASP.NET), managing change in the front-end development ecosystem, cross-platform frameworks like Xamarin, customizing Bootstrap 4’s for ASP.Net 5 to performance monitoring using SQL Server.
When it comes to changes in IT, we tend to perceive some of them as opportunities and others as threats. One of the speakers reminded about „A Global Survey of Today’s Developers” conducted by The Application Developers Alliance and published in August 2015, which emphasizes that:
- „The biggest concern that worries the developers by far was the challenge of staying current with the technology of their craft, with a 57% incidence rate”.
- „The reason most cited for project failure was changing poorly documented project requirements”. This was mentioned by 48% of the respondents.
- Among the changing technologies that excite developers, the same survey counts wearable, robotics, IoT, AI, augmented/virtual reality and drones.
Here are a few more highlights:
- Change is not optional. Whether we talk about gradual or incremental change it is happening.
- Change is an implicit requirement.
- Disruption is valued by our industry but is hard to accept internally.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- We are going to feel something. How strongly we feel it and how long the feeling lasts can vary depending on the nature of the change and how significant a change it is.
- Be patient with yourself when working on new things (competencies, skills, technology, etc.)
