I had some interesting discussion last week about working together and ALM, based on what I wrote in this post Visual Studio Team System 2010 – Episode 3: The Lifecycle;
Tools can help with this goal. Having gear in place which supports and stimulates collaboration is a driver for a successful Application Lifecycle Management. But without a plan, how people should collaborate and communicate, tools are useless.
Now I’m not a Team Dynamics nor a behavioral specialist. But, I did some investigation according these topics past year for the Cloud Collaboration Book we have written.
A big word in the Book TagCloud is ‘Collaboration’ [made by wordle.net]
So, I thought [also as a trigger for the book :-) available on Amazon somewhere in March] let’s take the intro of the chapter which talks about this. The topics and main concerns fit perfectly on ALM culture.
Creating new modes of collaboration supported by technology can only be done by addressing the human aspect. More specifically, we need to address some of the worries and obstacles people encounter when collaborating using technology.
The three most important concerns are:
Trust. Trust is a condition for social interaction. People will only work with people, companies, tools and information they know they can trust. Before we can expect collaboration to take off online, there must be a way for people to get this “trust.” And a topic closely associated with trust when it refers to people is Identity.
Collaborative culture. If one individual is the greatest collaborator in the world, he or she is probably not getting anywhere. Only when all people involved are part of the same collaborative culture will new levels of creativity and productivity be reached. A collaborative culture consists of many things, including:
- Collaborative leadership;
- Shared goals;
- Shared model of the truth; and
- Rules or norms.
Reward. Changing the way people work takes effort, so it must be clear for the parties involved what they will gain, at a personal level, from collaborating in a new way. Surprisingly, a “reward” for successful collaboration is most often of a non-financial nature.
“The ways that people work together shift over time, which can affect your culture of collaboration. More important, the introduction of collaboration technologies can also change the culture of collaboration. If handled properly, the tools and the culture will coevolve.”
Dennis Kennedy