Red gate down tools week

Senior management decided to invest in reducing noise emissions by fitting doors and changing the configuration within the canteen. The biggest challenge Red Gate faced when implementing innovation initiatives is communication and access to information.

How do you ensure that people fully understand something new and are able to keep up to date with progress and are able to ask questions along the way? The Red Gate intranet forums served as the main platform for information and questions for all initiatives.

In Coding by the Sea, Red Gate set up a plasma screen in the middle of the office showing live video link to the Suffolk Barn. The employee-led initiatives and engagement events have had a big positive impact on the company. One result of the Sweat the Small Stuff day is a general recognition across the company on individuals taking it upon themselves to fix small things as a matter of course.

Four months after the first Coding by the Sea experience, over 10, downloads of the product were achieved. The first Down Tools Week beat all expectations. It went so well that Neil and Simon decided to repeat it. Now three times a year the whole of Red Gate product development is able to down tools for a week.

Down Tools Week culminated in a show and tell session open to the whole company. There have been nine Down Tools Weeks at Red Gate so far and these have included individual projects. A recent internal survey asked what participants thought was valuable about their project:.

Eight new products have been made as a direct result of Down Tools Week. Skip to main content. January 7, at pm. Sometimes the circumstances are difficult, but we will all still be reasonable. We believe in creating appropriate constraints and then giving people the freedom to excel.

Our best work is done in teams — We work in groups and towards a common goal. The company is more important than the team, and the team is more important than the individual. Get the right stuff done — We admire people who get stuff done.

Visible mistakes are a sign that we are a healthy organisation — What we do is very difficult, the current situation is hard to understand and the future is uncertain. Mistakes are an inevitable consequence of attempting to get the right stuff done. Unless we can make mistakes visible both individually and collectively we will be doomed to mediocrity.

No politics — No gossiping, no intrigue, no pussy-footing around problems and no telling people what you think they want to hear whilst privately disagreeing. We will be transparent in our dealings. Do the right things for our customers — We believe that if we do what is right for our customers then we will thrive. We will succeed if we build wonderful, useful products — Shipping something amazing is better than creating something average and to budget and on time.

Neil Turner. Doerte Letzmann. Was this article helpful? Yes, thanks Not really. Load comments. Related blog posts.

Really big. Let your imagination run riot. You might be thinking of doing something else that needs a lot of people hours.

Down Tools Week will provide the hours. Traditionally, developers are the focus for Down Tools Week. DTW v2. DTW v. A whole host of events, activities, and weird and wonderful things will be happening during the week.