Quality Engineering & CoP Pathways to Leadership

Roku are excited to host their first Ministry of Test Cambridge meetup, and we’re even more excited to be able to share two presentations from distinguished guest speakers, Drew Pontikis and Neil Younger.

Agenda

• 18:00 - Food & drinks
• 18:20 - About the evening
• 18:30 – Session 1 of 2: Why talking about Quality Engineering can be hard
• 19:20 – Q/A - Break
• 19:30 – Session 2 of 2: Communities of Practice: A Pathway for Leadership
• 20:30 – Q/A, chill and chat

Building a quality strategy for a company you've never worked at (how hard can it be)
Neil Younger has been part of the community on the science park for over 10 years and has presented/workshopped sessions at MoT previously on a variety of subjects including putting joy at the heart of process in a theorised/hypothetical future company not worked at yet, through to tips and tooling for note taking!
In his own words - “Is teaching Quality Engineering to a Company you don’t work for and have never met a good, or even practical, idea? What if that involves pitching your idea to the founder of the company, where would you even start?
In this talk, we will explore how I found myself in this exact situation which all started with a simple experiment around sharing.
We will cover experiments, building an engineering capability model, and how a team might get better at testing and quality without hiring a dedicated role.
While this is an experience report specifically related to a single company, I’ll also highlight how you might be able to take some of the ideas presented and make them work for you.
And for those that would like it, I’ll also have a printed workshop that you can take away to run with your teams to help them identify and share what makes them great”.

Communities of Practice: A Pathway for Leadership
Drew Pontikis is a regular at Ministry of Test events, having spoken at Test Bash twice previously. His passions extend to anything and everything that’s community of practise related.
In his own words – “Why do some communities thrive when others struggle and fall away? Why are there no clear one size fits all path for making a community of practice successful?
I believe leadership is one of the key differentiators and often makes the difference between success and failure in a community of practice. While we all 'know' what a good leader is, no one ever teaches you how to be a leader. It’s not enough to just be an expert in your domain, but no one ever teaches you how to be an effective leader. What are the skills that make you good at it? And crucially, where do you go to learn them?
In this session I will go through the skillset that I believe helps make someone an effective Community of Practice Leader, list resources that will help you on the journey and - hopefully - give you the inspiration to take either the first or next step”.