Learnings from Github Women’s Day: Large Scale Organizational Change
Co-written by Sonya Khan and Erica Dohring
A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of attending Github Women’s Leadership Summit. This free, one-day event put on by Github highlighted female leaders in technology sharing how they implemented various challenging initiatives across their organizations.
Large Scale Organizational Change
A big lesson we walked away from the conference was that large scale organizational change is possible. We were especially impressed how these stories that impacted us most, were not from stereotypically tiny agile startups, but from large and highly regulated organizations like Bank of America, IBM, and the US Government. Here are some highlights from each of those talks:
Panna Pavangadkar, Bank of America (Data Platform Architecture and Engineering). Panna made it her mission to make Bank of America inner source. Inner source is very similar to open source (any engineer can contribute to the project), except it is restricted to members of the organization. Our favorite piece of the talk was her framework highlighting change in an otherwise skeptical organization[1], which was a little more nuanced than the don’t wait for permission — just lean in and just do it message that is common for women.
Daniele Hayes, IBM (VP of Tools and Systems). Daniele discussed how she, in general, ran her org at IBM. One key piece we felt was compelling was having her IT engineers sit with the stakeholders. That way, if something was not working, these were the people you are having lunch with, so you are going to know it pretty quick. We like this idea as a faster way to find bugs. It has to be balanced with developer productivity (maybe quiet, less interrupted), but we like the idea of being closer to stakeholders as it makes you more empathetic to their problems.
Maria Roat, Small Business Administration (CIO). Maria was, by far, our favorite talk of the day. We both recall having the expectation that her talk might be a little on the dry side because she is a government leader and we were very pleased to find out we were wrong.
Having spent 26 years in the Navy, Maria commanded respect and attention the moment she walked on stage. She described the state of the organization she walked into leading: they had been through nearly 11 leaders in 10 years. Her first week on the job, she got a phone call that their data centers were flooded with water. She came up with a plan and took action immediately. We asked later during the Q&A why she didn’t pursue the 90 days principle that is suggested to executives (come into the organization, listen, then make a plan), and she succinctly replied that they did not have time for that.
She declared a handful of organizational goals including getting SBA onto the cloud, water out of the data centers, and everyone from Windows 3 to Windows 10. She described how she achieved these goals (hiring an excellent team and being firm) and transformed the SBA into one of the intra-government leaders for IT and Security. When asked how she was able to act so swiftly and decisively, she credited the Navy in repeated exposing her to situations outside of her comfort zone, which forced her to grow. If you ever have a chance to hear her speak, we highly recommend it.
[1] This is a link to a very similar talk she did at another conference.
