S6 | 523: The Dojo model and its transformative effect with TEKsystems, Part 2

Digital StrategyTechnologyConversational AI
Written By Basil Ali

About the Episode

In the evolving landscape of today’s professional world, the pressing need for continuous skill development has never been more apparent. In this series we’ll dive into how the Dojo model transforms an organization’s learning culture.

I’m excited to introduce part 2 of a special series on continuous skill development, brought to you by TEKsystems, a global provider of business and technology solutions.

To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Prakamya Choudhary, from TEKsystems.

Resources

Transcript

Please note: this transcript was AI-generated and only lightly edited.

Greg Kihlström: In the evolving landscape of today's professional world, the pressing need for continuous skill development has never been more apparent. In this series, we're diving into how the dojo model transforms an organization's learning culture. I'm excited to introduce part two of a special series on continuous skill development brought to you by TEKsystems, a global provider of business and technology solutions. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Prakamya Chowdhury from TEKsystems. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at TEKsystems?
Prakamya Choudhary: Hello, Greg. Nice to meet you. My name is Prakamya. I really am working as a principal coach right now with tech systems. I started my journey as a DevOps engineer, eventually transitioned into doing DevOps coaching and have played multiple different roles in agile and product. So I bring together all of the experiences I've had playing several different hats throughout my career and apply that to any problem that the client is looking to solve. So that's a little bit about me.

Greg Kihlström: Great, great. Well, yeah, let's let's dive in here. And for those that haven't heard the first episode in this series, I was wondering if you could just give us a brief overview of, you know, what is the dojo model?

Prakamya Choudhary: Alrighty, so dojo is actually borrowed from a Japanese term, which means place of the way. And really what it means is the teams come into the dojo to learn a host of different skills, all ranging from Azure product, DevOps, cloud, AI, and, you know, sky's the limit, really. And we help them learn these new technologies, new skills, while actually working on the actual backlog and delivering solutions to the customers. And when we think about Dojo, Dojo is actually a vehicle for organizational change.

Greg Kihlström: How did you originally get involved in implementing the Dojo model to organizations? And what was your background that led to that?

Prakamya Choudhary: Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I was a DevOps engineer, I was hired by a company that already had in-house dojos for the continuous delivery chain transformation. And as a result of that, I joined their team. And that was my very first introduction to the dojo model altogether. I've been doing that since then, because I've absolutely seen the power of the dojo model that is had on individuals and teams collectively going through the transformation.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so for many listening to this, perhaps they've, they haven't gone through this, this process before. So, you know, I wanted to get your thoughts on what was the process like for setting up and launching your first dojo? And, you know, did you encounter any unexpected challenges with the class or the organization, you know, any, any, any thoughts there?

Prakamya Choudhary: That's a very good question. So in the dojo, we have what we call the discovery phase. And during the discovery phase, the coaches really take a step back and really figure out what truly is working well with the team that we can start capitalizing upon. What are some opportunities for improvement that we are noticing and observing? And what is the feedback that we're getting from individuals and teams as a whole in order to create a customized coaching plan? So within the first two weeks of the discovery, coaches will do a host of different things, which include conducting interviews, observing the team's ceremonies or scrum events, or Kanban events. And then it also includes looking at their code base. the DevOps CI CD pipelines, figuring out where the maturity there is, we send out a lot of like anonymized surveys, do a lot with initial skill assessment. And all of that data is really what is fed into creating a customized loading plan for the team. So no two dojo experiences are going to look the same. And that's what the beauty is about. any team wanting to go through a dojo experience because the experience is really catered to their needs. And in the dojo, we always say we meet the teams where they are at or a half step ahead so that we can guide and navigate them throughout the experience. And going back to your other question, what was some unexpected challenges that we encountered? So when we first started doing dojo at my first client, they just had recently gone through transformation. And as a result of that, there was a lot of sensitivity around in the environment. And so a lot of people were shut off, they were not very open to change, and getting them to feel comfortable and building that psychological safety was very, very essential from the get go. So that teams were eventually, it took us a bit, but once we got them there, they were able to put their guards down, understand that we were there to help them advance in their career. And one thing that I absolutely love about anybody going to the dojo is that it's not about the skills that they immediately will learn and apply only to the existing work. These are skills that they can take and apply to any organization, regardless of the role that they play. So that's the beauty of anybody coming through the experience.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, and building on that, you know, I think there's definitely a collaborative component to this. So, you know, in your experience, you know, how does the Dojo model enhance both collaboration as well as cross-functional teamwork, especially in environments where there are those entrenched silos?

Prakamya Choudhary: Definitely, and we see this more often than not, where we have individuals that are siloed not just in terms of their skill set, but there are a lot of different functional silos that exist within an organization. Within the Dojo, what we like to do is we like to bring teams, individuals from across different disciplines together. And the way we do this is using different techniques like pairing and mob programming. I have one of my favorite examples to share from one of my most recent client, where the developers were used to writing code and throwing it over the wall for the QEs to do testing. And both the environments were really like a black box to each one of those individuals. And what we did was we brought those individuals together on a single story and asked them to show what it entails to get the development done for that piece of functionality and what it means to have it be QE tested. And what that did was bring visibility into different types of tests that are being performed at the lower and the higher level, build empathy, because there are a lot of things that each individuals go through in their roles, in order to get something done. And so that is one of my favorite examples. We've definitely done this with two developers kind of sitting and trying to solve a common problem. We've done this when we've even had like interns, for example, that have come in that are relatively newer to the software development journey. And we've paired them up with a very senior member on the team. And that's how we've helped build the collaboration and cross functionality on the team.

Greg Kihlström: So not only are there internal operational and team things that are continually evolving, but there's also things like new technologies and approaches. So wondering your thoughts on how does the Dojo model adapt to and integrate with emerging technologies and methodologies?

Prakamya Choudhary: Yeah, I would say one of our core values in the dojos here is balancing learning with delivery. And we definitely apply that value to ourselves as coaches. And what we always do is we have dedicated learning sessions every week where we spend time exploring new technologies, whether it's learning GC, getting a GCP certification or AWS or exploring AI. And so right, right this very second, you know, our entire team here at Tech Systems is exploring what that would mean when we start to do AI dojos with different clients across the globe. And so we always pride in our pride, take pride in basically like going out and learning about different technologies so that we always stay in the forefront and to find the best ways to help clients through different mechanisms.

Greg Kihlström: And to do that, obviously it takes sustaining that over time. So I wonder if you could share what strategies have proven effective in your experience in maintaining momentum and engagement in dojo programs over time.

Prakamya Choudhary: Yeah, one thing I would say when it comes to particularly the teams that we coach and work with, we do a couple things to set them up for success. As the Dojo model is the one-to-one-teach-one, towards the last phase of the Dojo, we really partner with the team in order to create what we call the exit plan. And the whole idea behind creating an exit plan is setting them up for the future. Like, what would a working environment look like without the coaches present alongside of them? And so that is the very first step in the process. There's a couple of other things that we do in order to support the teams in general, would be the one month, three month, and six month follow up. We try to hold the teams accountable to the goals that they have created and figure out how they're progressing towards those goals over time. And when we do meet with the teams on those frequent check-in points, we also meet with the leadership of the team to figure out how they've continued to support and build the momentum on the team as they have celebrated from the dojo experience all together. In addition to that, when we think about the enterprise dojos, for the enterprise dojos, we have a continuous backlog of teams that are wanting to go through this experience. We've created the dojo sensei model. And the whole idea behind a dojo sensei model is to increase the coaching capacity within the organization. And so we work with the senior leadership and identify those key candidates that can be prospective coaches within their organization in the future. And we apply a very similar model to building the coaching capacity within the organization, which is see one, do one, teach one. We have perspective coaches that ride along in the journey with us and we get them to a point where they start actually coaching different teams on different business problems across the organization.

Greg Kihlström: And so you've touched a little bit on the role of leadership here. But, you know, I wanted to ask, and I think I may know that the answer to the first part of this question, but, you know, first, you know, how important is leadership buy-in for the success of a dojo program? But also, you know, can you share any tips for securing that leadership support?

Prakamya Choudhary: 100%. I would say it is very, very important for us to have leadership support for the success of the team, not just while the team is in the dojo, but post the team has celebrated from the dojo as well. The very first step is we meet with the leaders during our discovery period. And what we do is we identify or co-create a vision for why the team is coming through the experience. For some, it may be reducing defect rate into the higher environments. For others, it may be what it means for us to become more of a product-centric team. And so different teams come through for different reasons within the Dojo model itself. And so we really partner with the leadership to identify and identify the vision, set the expectation with the rest of the team and other stakeholders that may be involved as the team is going through the experience. A couple things that I found really helpful in getting the buy-in and support is ensuring that the results of what the team is going through is made fully visible and transparent to the leader at any given point in time. And what we do here in the dojo is we do something called as weekly leadership reports or journaling, essentially. And those journals are basically co-created with the coaches and the team that highlights what the team experiences was this week. What did they learn? What were major impediments that they encountered? And what would support mean from leadership perspective? So that we can get the leaders involved at the right stage so that they can help remove those organizational barriers. In addition to that, what we have done is that we have created what we call the leadership cohort. And the whole idea behind leadership cohort is one to provide support to the leaders while the teams are going through the dojo itself. And during the leadership cohort, we create like a learning backlog. co-create a learning backlog with the leaders so that they get the most value out of that experience and figure out what are some common challenges that they're experiencing across the org that they can collectively come together to solve, not just to support their own teams, but to support other teams within the organization.

Greg Kihlström: The topic of value, you know, I also wanted to get back to how success is measured. So, you know, how would you recommend that organizations measure the success of their dojo programs? You know, what metrics should they track? You know, what are your thoughts there?

Prakamya Choudhary: 100%. So when we get into the discovery phase, as I said, we create the vision with the leadership team. While creating the vision, we identify what are some key metrics that matter to them, that they would like to see the needle moved on. And the metrics really are very customized. And it is very context specific to the problem that they are trying to solve at the moment. And it could include Dora metrics. And with my last client, as it was focused on quality, we really honed in on the idea of the defect. So the defect rate to higher environment, what was the reasons for those defects and getting into the higher environment, resolving some environmental constraints and test any problems relating to test data. lead time cycle time really always come in handy. But in addition to that, when we're doing enterprise level dojos, we also help build the maturity models, so that they can actually look at ways so that teams can self assess themselves and figure out the right way of engaging with either the dojo or using the DIY approach. And so we have definitely like, you know, we help build the metrics from ground up in many instances. And in some instances, we leverage what's already available within the organization. And a lot of that is driven from our initial discovery with a client.

Greg Kihlström: Great. Well, one last question for you. I just want to make sure, you know, any parting thoughts or anything else that we haven't had a chance to cover yet?

Prakamya Choudhary: The only thing I would say is about the dojo, it's we definitely couple things that really the teams, it's about commitment to learning. And I feel like when a team is really committed to their own learning journey, they get the most out of it. And they have a ton of fun with it. Because they see the impact of going through that experience, not on just themselves, but how they're impacting the customers and other stakeholders that they interact with. And that is powerful. And the other piece that I will highlight is that because we do most of the activities in the dojo that's around data, we definitely tell the story towards the end of the experience. that is very data-centric and it helps get the buy-in from different stakeholders across the organization for why there is value in teams allocating capacity and time to learning, which is really powerful because in many organizations it's difficult to justify why a team should allocate like 10% of their capacity into learning. And so this can be really powerful for those that are looking to justify it.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Thanks again to Prakamya Chowdhury from TEKsystems for joining the show. You can learn more about TEKsystems and their perspective at techsystems.com. Thanks again for listening to The Agile Brand, brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.GregKihlstrom.com. That's G-R-E-G-K-I-H-L-S-T-R-O-M.com. While you're there, check out my series of best-selling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics, or you can search for Greg Kihlstrom on Amazon. The Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina-owned, strategy-driven, creatively-fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile.

Prakamya Choudhary, Principal Coach, TEKsystems

Basil Ali
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