Cloud principles

Principle 4: Build your skills

Statement

Build your cloud skills and experience to deliver high-quality outcomes.

Why?

The success of your cloud adoption effort is rooted in your team’s expertise, and ability to communicate and manage change. Build your cloud skills and experience to deliver high-quality outcomes.

Critical roles with specific training requirements include:

• cloud Architects
• cloud Engineers
• developers
• programme and project managers

What does this mean?

• invest in training and hands-on experience for internal technical staff to build your capabilities
• learn by doing, because training alone isn’t enough. You must allow staff to play and experiment with cloud services in a safe environment
• supplement your internal staff with external expertise by partnering initially. Strengthen internal skills over time through training and knowledge transfer

Digital Scotland Service Standards

Applying this principle helps you to meet the Digital Scotland Service Standards:

6. Multidisciplinary team: the skills of your team lay at the heart of your cloud adoption success. By implementing this principle, you are demonstrating a commitment to developing your team’s expertise and experience, and delivering excellent outcomes to your users.

Guidance

Get ready for change

Ensure the ‘soft skills’ and change control processes needed to enable continuous innovation are in place. Create, record and clearly communicate your change practices.

Challenge constraints

Critical thinking and constructive feedback are skills. Encourage team members to apply them to challenge project constraints and the status quo. The real promise of value from the cloud can only be realised if we have the courage to challenge decisions to drive better outcomes.

‘False’, or insufficiently considered constraints lay at the heart of many failed or sub-optimal programmes of work.

Be open

Consider expanding your skills by using non-proprietary and open source services as alternatives to offerings from major vendors. Platform-as-a-Service offerings – for databases in particular – have greatly reduced the complexity of managing alternatives to commonly used choices. Open source technologies now represent a compelling alternative to products from major vendors, at a lower cost point.