Social Glass

It’s been two years since my last trip to China.  This time I’m here to conduct Agile training.  I conducted a two day workshop with practical, hands on sessions.  My team of 18 asked a lot of questions, which is usually a sign that I was getting the point across.  If we’re successful, I’ll be writing whitepapers on how to be Agile with offshore resources.  If we’re not, well, that’s another story.

And Chinese Sprite was my favorite, throat wetting drink during the session.

I manage a number of software developers and quality assurance specialists.  Most of them live and work in San Diego.  But others are scattered across various US states and in China.  It’s challenging to create a sense of culture and community given this fact, and I’d be lost if it weren’t for Skype and tinychat.  Tinychat is a free video conferencing solution that allows me to connect my teams in a more personal way.  Body-language is an invaluable communication medium (especially with teams that speak English as a second language).  I find it easier to get a read on somebody if they’re frustrated or don’t understand what is being said, and often I’ll pause and allow those who did understand time to translate to the others.  And who can doubt the communicative value of a “thumbs up” or smile?

The audio features on Tinychat aren’t stellar, so I find I use Skype for audio and tinychat for video when in a conferencing situation.  When it’s a one on one situation I’ll use only Skype.

I’ll never go back to straight audio conference calls.  It’d be like flying international business class, then going back to economy when business class is free.  Ludicrous.

We recently had a debate over whether or not we should use Confluence as a replacement to twiki, our enterprise wiki. I used Confluence at my last company, and for the most part it worked well. It’s got a great set of plugins and an extensible architecture. Most of all, it has a “near out of the box” capability for migrating in twiki content making for a smoother transition.

But the UI sucks.

Oh yeah, and it’s not people focused. Well at least not as people focused as Clearspace. We use Clearspace externally, and through our relationship with Jive also have an enterprise license. So to me it was a no brainer that we’d rollout Clearspace instead of Confluence.

But before that would happen I had to show why the “people” element was important. All the sponsoring group wanted to do was provide a space to collaborate around content. They weren’t considering the serendipitous establishment of weak ties between disconnected employees, and that people connecting around shared interests would boost efficiency at a hard-to-measure macro level.

After several weeks of debating over email we’ve decided to go with Clearspace, to my joy. I’m stoked to start using it with my China team, to find out more about who they are as people, and for them to get a feel for who we are as people too.

The one point that’s hard to drive home, however, is that knowledge will always be federated. During my consulting career and even here I’ve consistently run into people who want to create a single repository that will house all important corporate information assets, and that said repository will be the single place for people to turn to to find information. Such was the impetus behind our original corporate wiki. Although we’re not there yet, I’m starting to convince people that Discovery must be the center point of our Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

In time, I hope.

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

I’ve been in Xi’an, China this week meeting my offshore team for the first time. The picture here is of the parking lot walking into the office (the doorway is underneath the red letters). This is the first time I’ve ever been to China, and other than feeling like I’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes every day this place has truly impressed me. There is construction everywhere, and the people are fashionable and optimistic about their bright economic future.

One of the items on my agenda was figuring out how to do agile software development with remote teams. This has been a challenging task, as agile wants constant communication, and in-person at that. Time zones and language barriers are certainly enemies to agile.

But I came across a great article from Martin Fowler discussing how Thoughtworks does agile with its remote team in India. One of the many points he makes is to use wikis to contain common information:

Any common information can be put there, story cards, design guidelines, build instructions, notes on progress – anything that needs to be written down for reference by the team. We’ve found it’s very useful to use the change notification capability that many wikis have, so that page changes trigger notifications through email or an RSS feed.

I think this should be extended to include other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. One of the primary ways to be successful with an offshore team is to build personal relationships that engender trust. Social computing is a good option here. Onshore and Offshore teams should blog about what they did on the weekend, upload pictures of their pets or the vacation they just went on, discuss ongoing projects, exchange ideas, etc. These activities help project the human element of each team member and build bonds that will come in handy under work-related pressure situations.

I will leave China with a renewed passion to implement Enterprise 2.0 for my team.

I’ll also leave with renewed respect for how good the Chinese are at crossing the street at busy intersections.