🗂 Pairing at DBS
There are various mechanisms and methods that we use to transform the skills of our incumbents. Dedicated classroom training programs is one way, but it is the least preferred option. Mostly, we believe in pairing employees who need to be trained with others who are native to those capabilities; we have found this to be one of the most effective methods of transforming people. We hire people with the required capabilities and pair them up with the incumbents, and the result is that those capabilities are multiplied across the organization. This is rooted in the simple belief that in order to learn something, you must experience and practice it rather than hear about it in a classroom setting.
Also, on pacing yourself:
We started work on a new technology stack on cloud native architecture two years ago. Six months into the journey, we started to feel that the value of the truly Agile approach was not just in Agile rituals, but also in having a truly Agile architecture and development practice. One year into the journey, we started to realise the benefits of extremely high quality releases, minimal production support resources required for these platforms and more importantly, solutions that delivered superior user experience. Using platform-as-a-service (PaaS) such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry, we started to realise the benefits of developer productivity. The platform empowers developers with superior non-functional capabilities such as auto-scaling, self-healing and easy deployment, so that their time can be focused on creating business capabilities.