Today
we got the results of an external assessment that was made about our team collaboration and knowledge sharing methodes. As
we started local.ch in November '05, some ground rules were set to built-up the company. Personal and team productivity maximization was (and is) the aim.
As the team is distributed over multiple locations we heavily rely on
Skype for one-to-one and many-to-many voice and instant messaging. We use bookmarked chats like IRC channels to keep everybody involved on what's going on.
Wrote earlier about it on the local.ch blog.Use an
Enterprise Wiki to keep note of evolving knowledge - that is - basically everything. E-mails/chat-to-all are reduced to notify the right people to start collaborating on a page. No Word document shall ever be created! ;-)
To allow maximum parallelism of tasks and distributed chain of command we use a
task tracking system. That allows everybody to have a transparent overview of what's done and what's next (for the whole team). This no just for top-to-bottom planing - but more importantly - for personal tasks scheduling (people manage their own to-do list). This makes "disconnected" project reporting & controlling almost obsolet. Further it allows to keep track of future ideas, feedback and known issues without touching Excel.
Technical face-to-face communication needs the possibility to instantly visualize concepts - therefore we made sure extra large whiteboards are mounted at every white wall of the office.
Build a great team. Read rule 1 of
Guy Kawasaki's recruiting advices:
Hire better than yourself. In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, “A player hire A players; B players hire C players”--meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you'll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) I have come to believe that we were wrong--A players hire A+ players, not merely A players. It takes self-confidence and self-awareness, but it's the only way to build a great team.
Compared with other engineering companies in the assessment our methods has proven to be superior. Although - we yet have to prove this model scales beyond 20 people and allows sustainable productivity over time with the growing complexity of the platform.
Time will tell.
You have been watching "An Inconvenient Truth" - well - it's time for another good summary of a topic high on our generations to-do list: lower our dependency to oil. The documentary "The Oil Crash" just started playing in Switzerland. It definitely makes you start thinking about the next 30 years to come...
