Timeline for How many hours should the development team spend on skills improvement during work?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
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| May 7, 2016 at 20:48 | comment | added | Ewan | 100% agree sprints/projects should be focused on getting the project done. Training should be the same as a holiday or illness etc | |
| Apr 30, 2016 at 22:49 | comment | added | Tiago Cardoso |
This discussion is quite interesting, and I second @BartekKobyłecki... you are (at some level) aligned, but with different perspectives. I understand that David nailed it saying their work need to provide value to the project, not the other way around. IMHO, we could see this specific case as the investment on technical debt. Is this something that the client expects to pay? No (and thus, zero)... but if properly agreed, both (the efforts on technical debt and / or trainings) can be converted into future earnings and thus being part of the sprint backlog.
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| Apr 30, 2016 at 19:39 | comment | added | Bartek Kobyłecki | You guys are talking about the same thing here. Seems like we all agree that it is important to let people grow and let them spend some of their working hours for learning. The factor that seem to put people in odds is with how to bill those hours. When customer is ready to pay for that, let him do so and include it in whatever units are used to account for the effort (for example: story points). If not, then increase the hourly rate and account only for effort spent on project, not learning. To me both approaches are valid as long as they're transparent. | |
| Apr 30, 2016 at 13:15 | comment | added | David Espina | Do you understand how reimbursements work? And don't confuse my answer which is for a project seeing with what my answer would be in an operations setting. For a living I grow professionals. I just don't charge the customer directly for it. It is in fact illegal to do so in the public sector. | |
| Apr 30, 2016 at 12:54 | comment | added | RubberDuck | Your teaching hospital analogy is flawed. Those hospitals do in fact charge more than non-teaching hospitals for the same services, precisely because they have to spend more to train people. The customer might not be directly billed those training hours, but the hourly rate goes up to cover the overhead. They're paying for it anyway. You can either choose to invest in your people, or produce an environment that fewer and fewer professionals are willing to work in. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 14:52 | comment | added | David Espina | And they paid those hours directly? You must have quite a touch with your customers. I would have been strung up by my toes. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 14:46 | comment | added | Jeff Lindsey | @DavidEspina I've done this with a major tech company via shared backlog, velocity, and PBIs for learning new tech that affected their costs/scope via time spent. Taking it further, we had 2-day hackathons for the entire team of 30 which also ate into project velocity and generated prototypes for us, not them. They objected, until we explained we do it every year (they benefit from previous years) and it boosts both knowledge and morale in the short and long-term. This was a multi-project, multi-year situation; for some shorter client work examples, please refer to Joy, Inc. as noted above. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 13:29 | history | edited | David Espina | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 29, 2016 at 12:51 | comment | added | David Espina | It's a very different concept. We all pay for overhead with every product we buy. It's a very different thing if you're charged four hours directly for training, which includes some type of overhead variable. So in a very real sense, the customer is paying twice. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 12:28 | comment | added | Bart van Ingen Schenau | In the end, the customer will pay for the training. Either by paying directly for the hours spent on training, or because the training hours are lumped in the overhead costs and drive up the hourly rate. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 9:26 | comment | added | David Espina | That's exactly what they do. Build-up in an hourly price includes some variable for overhead, which is used for training as well as paying for janitorial services. It's just NEVER a direct charge to a customer, whether internal or external. I have never seen it and would be shocked to see it. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 9:11 | comment | added | Bartek Kobyłecki | @DavidEspina I like this idea. From project perspective that approach guarantees transparency in terms of costs. If I get it correctly, when company like to invest in development of it's employees then it should increase the hourly rate and spend this additional money on learning. Is that correct? | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 9:01 | history | edited | David Espina | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 29, 2016 at 8:59 | comment | added | David Espina | If in-house, an employee does training, it is NOT part of the project but part of his/her being an employee. It has nothing to do with the project itself. In a buy-seller situation, an employee can do all the training he wants, but it is not part of the project, not charged to the project. It's the same concept. Sorry everyone disagrees with me bit it is a silly concept from a project perspective. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 1:04 | comment | added | Vicki Laidler | Some companies have in-house software shops, where billing a customer does not apply. Even in companies that do development for customers, not every hour is directly billed: overhead costs are a thing, and some companies include professional development as overhead. | |
| Apr 29, 2016 at 0:43 | comment | added | RubberDuck | Not everyone is a hired gun. I'm with @JeffLindsey, at no point did OP mention clients or billing. | |
| Apr 28, 2016 at 23:42 | comment | added | David Espina | Sounds great on paper. If you have real life examples, I would be very interested in hearing about it. If I ever approached any one of my clients and told them they're going to pay for a four hour class for x number of project people at an average of $150+ an hour, I'm quite sure I'd be looking for a new job. | |
| Apr 28, 2016 at 21:34 | comment | added | Jeff Lindsey | He didn't mention customers or billing...? Even if you have customers, and you want to ensure your team is continuously learning via separate training or spending time on ramp-up for a project's tech needs, you can explain the benefit quite easily - the current customer is benefiting from all previous customers' costs for that time, which now benefits them, and so on - it continues to be "paid forward". See Menlo Innovations, etc. | |
| Apr 28, 2016 at 20:52 | history | answered | David Espina | CC BY-SA 3.0 |