Community of Practice

Pragmint adds Technical Consultants to your team in order to set up and maintain Communities of Practice (CoP). Each CoP is set up to cover areas that are gaps in skills or processes as observed by the Pragmint team. We've found that this community-based learning model is the most effective way to share knowledge, standardize practices, and promote innovation. This model creates a safe and supportive environment that encourages cross-team collaboration and learning. CoPs connect people who are trying to solve similar problems in different parts of the organization.

Every month, each CoP has a meeting to sync-up, showcase learnings from the prior month, prioritize new learning activities, and learn about upcoming breakout training sessions. The breakout training sessions follow the one of the below formats:

• Traditional training session (may include guest speaker)
• Hands-on workshop
• Round table discussion
• Retrospective
• Book club meeting
• Watch party (typically a pre-recorded conference talk)
• 1:1 coaching session with a Pragmint coach

As these CoPs mature, Pragmint identifies evangelists from your organization and invites them to aid in running the CoPs and setting their future agendas.

Code Foreman

In high performance teams, new ideas flow freely and are experimented with regularly. However, some teams are less willing or able to experiment with new ways of working. They can grow into a high performing team, but will need a more prescriptive approach to get things off of the ground.

The responsibility of a Code Foreman is to ensure a team's output is steady and consistently aligned with best practices. To do this, the Foreman will work with the team each sprint to put the architect's plan into more granular detail, along with a blameless code retrospective to help the team establish preferences on shared values and conventions. In doing so, the Foreman can more directly facilitate the collaborative workflows and shared stewardship of the code, while also providing best practices training within the context of the work itself - extracting a rule-of-thumb from specific examples versus attempting to apply a broader, less contextual best practice outside of the classroom.

This role is designed to be temporary, like a scaffolding that dissolves away as a new set of norms calcify in its place. The Code Foreman drives the team towards buy-in of a new set of norms and behaviors that enable the team to self-govern quality and continually improve.

Apprenticeship Program

Building a formalized Apprenticeship Program is a reliable way to create consistency amongst teams within an organization. Great programs give apprentices the space to fail and subsequently learn from those failures. They also push apprentices just past the edges of their comfort zones such that meaningful experimentation can take place. Great apprentices approach apprenticeship programs with an open mind and an eagerness to learn as much as possible.

Pragmint offers a done for you and a done with you style of setting up an Apprenticeship Program. We have a stable of experienced mentors who can help your team interview and mentor a group of apprentices from start to finish. Alternatively, we can mentor your mentors, advising on a program curriculum that fits the customized needs of your organization.

Consulting

Any engagement with Pragmint comes with a Technical Consultant and Project Director. These two roles regularly communicate with our Client's leadership team to provide insights about bottlenecks, skill gaps, process inefficiencies, etc.

At the start of each engagement and at 6 month intervals, our Consultants add to their context by hosting multiple 1:1s with various parts of the organization to glean insights on challenges that can later be shared and solved alongside our Client's leadership team.

We bring an outsider's perspective that's colored with our experiences from organizations in all sorts of industries.