Jon Stahl's Journal

A while back, I promised to write a bit more about some of the practices we use here at ONE/Northwest to collaborate amongst our staff of ~13 scattered across three offices. Here’s a first installment.

Building awareness and transparency

For our first few years, we were 4- 5 people crammed into about 800 square feet with no doors and no walls. So it was easy for each of us to be aware of what the others were up. Perhaps a little too easy; my former colleague Eva, who sat two fee away from for 8 or 9 hours a day, used to call me her “day spouse.”

Now that we’re larger, simply maintaining a solid awareness of what we’re all up to is a big challenge. And it’s absolutely critical, because there’s very little work we do that doesn’t require collaboration amongst two or more people. Even worse, we’re constantly changing and improving how we do things, which means that we need to rapidly spread new ideas throughout our organization.

Here are two things we do to promote a culture of transparency and awareness:

1) Weekly plans. At the beginning of each week, each of us takes 15-30 minutes beforetackling that pile of email to write up a short plan for the week ahead. Our plans are all in the form of a table with the following columns:

Project | Moving Part | Outcome | Staff Involved | Priority | Completed?

The purpose of this plan is to for each of us to reflect a bit on what we need to accomplish this week and who we need to work with in order to get it done. We then publish our plans on our internal wiki site and circulate them to all staff via email.

Weekly plans have turned into a great focusing device for us indvidually, but they also help us maintain “team awareness” that’s critical to letting us tackle complex, fast-moving projects together.

2) Today Messages

The Weekly Plan’s little sister is the Today Message. At the end of each day, we take about five or ten minutes to record our major tasks for the day in our time tracking system (which is powered by DotProject). We click a little button in DotProject, and it generates a short email that summarizes our day in bullet points. We then email that around, thereby providing our teammates with a quick summary of what happened in our lives that day.

Again, it’s simple, fast, and high value.

Real-time communication

3) Skype

We’ve become really addicted to Skype — free, online phone calls and instant messaging. Unlike most of its peers, Skype is cross platform, requires zero setup and is extremely easy to use. We use it to send each other instant messages, and as a substitute for the telephone. Not only does it save us a bundle on inter-office long distance calls, it makes it really easy for us to ask each other quick questions without the interruption of phone call or the clutter of email.

We also use Skype a lot to communicate with our far-flung network of consultants and peers.

Project Management

4) Basecamp

We use Basecamp, an inexpensive web-based project management tool as a lightweight project management (task tracking) tool. It’s quick and simple, great for short-term projects with multiple people including some folks from outside the office. It’s not great for complex, long-term projects.

5) DotProject

We keep a lot of our long-term information, including our time tracking data, in DotProject, a powerful, flexible open-source project management tool. Its UI is a little clunky, but it’s got a great model for tracking time.

6) Salesforce.com

We use Salesforce.com as our internal database of people and organizations. Salesforce has some amazing reporting tools, so we actually use it to build detailed reports on our DotProject task data.

Tags: Collaboration, groundwire, NPTech