Technology, culture and collaboration

THE EVOLUTION OF A
DIGITAL WORKSPACE
Technology, Culture and Collaboration
Andy Yates

CONTEXT ONE - ThoughtWorks
● WHO: Community of passionate individuals whose purpose is to revolutionise
software design, creation and delivery, while advocating for positive social
change.
● WHAT: IT Consultancy: Disruptive thinking and empowering technology for
people with ambitious missions
● WHY: Roy Singham - both a technologist and political activist - founded the
company in 1993 as an organisation that assumes the best of its people -
attitude / aptitude / integrity - give people autonomy, and the tools to do
their job, and they will excel
● HOW: Social focus - A company that turns ‘traditional thinking’ on its head: Right
thing for society > right thing for client > right thing for TW > right thing for
individual
● Nearly 3500 people, 32 offices, 12 countries - have (and have maintained) a
flat structure - little / no hierarchy - decentralised decision making - ‘4 CEO’
model

AGILE DELIVERY
AGILE WORKSPACE

CONTEXT TWO - Software development
Perhaps contrary to the stereotype, we believe that building software is a process
that is inherently a collaborative process
The approach that we take has been labeled ‘agile’ - light on formalised process,
instead focused on high touch communication, with feedback loops at every
level:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come
to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

CONTEXT THREE - Our people
A company that assumes the best of its (super) people - hires for attitude /
aptitude / integrity - and gives them the autonomy, and the tools to do their
job - and they excel
Nearly 3500 people, 32 offices, 12 countries - have (and have maintained) a flat
structure
● decentralised decision making - little / no hierarchy - 4 ‘CEO’s
● operations teams are distributed across regions
● large number of multi-site projects, with many people working outside of our
offices
● Technically savvy and very demanding (OUR PEOPLE really are super-heroes :) )

ANDY YATES
IT Business Partner
@yrnclndymn
ayates@thoughtworks.com

I’m part of our IT organisation - TechOps.
We provide our superheroes with the tools, gadgets, gizmos they need to get the job done.
We are organised along business lines - there are teams for each of the functions (sales, marketing,
finance) embedded within those functions.
One function, mine, that is perhaps a bit different from those in similar companies, explicitly are set up to
serve the needs of ‘all our people’ - and we settled on the idea that this was a ‘communications and
collaboration’ function.
As well as teams of people with special powers, one of the values that consultancies can bring is the ability
to tap into ‘organizational knowledge’ - bringing together teams of people, working across a number of
clients - it’s key to be able to share 'lessons learned’, etc.
We focus our efforts on improving the following tasks:
- Finding someone to ask a question
- Finding out what’s going on in the organisation
- Setting up, hosting or attending distributed meetings
This means I look after:
email, document sharing, intranet, video conferencing
(currently Google Apps, Box, myTW, Fuze)

“This is a crazy company, and we live and
breathe the same craziness.
In the face of this - in the rapidly changing organisation that
results - our mission is to evolve core technical services and
empower our colleagues and the company to achieve their
ambitious objectives”

LIKE ANY GOOD GROUP OF HEROES
WE (IN TECHOPS) CAME UP WITH A MISSION STATEMENT
Our internal IT function - ‘TechOps’ - is both (a service) for the company, and of the
company - we need to respect and reflect that same flat decentralised ‘crazy’
structure.
“This is a crazy company, and we live and
breathe the same craziness.
In the face of this - in the rapidly changing organisation that
results - our mission is to evolve core technical services and
empower our colleagues and the company to achieve their
ambitious objectives”

Solve business problems, not technology ones
Connect with our colleagues
Service design
RECOGNISING
THOUGHTWORKS
‘CRAZINESS’
INFORMATION
THOUGHTFULNESS
Self-service
Enable “shadow IT’
Regional variations are important
Transparency in communication
Open by default
Individual privacy is a consideration of everything we do
WORKING IN A
THOUGHTWORKS WAY

RECOGNISING
THOUGHTWORKS
‘CRAZINESS’
INFORMATION
THOUGHTFULNESS
WORKING IN A
THOUGHTWORKS WAY
TECHOPS THEMES **Provide an environment for successful “shadow IT”**
Everyone thinks their company is special - perhaps we are not unique in this regard?
But there are elements of our organisational make-up
- flat structure
- empowered individuals and teams
- open by default
that mean we’ve been fighting this reverse-superman syndrome for some time now
I want to share what happens when folks start wearing a cape to work
Some of the new problems arise, as they start to form their own “Justice Leagues”
And whilst we are switching old problems for new ones, the hope is that this is a
positive step. That it makes the problems more tractable.
And some of the ways in which we can work with this new normal

So, we’ve long been encouraging super powers at work: our people, projects, teams
have a great deal of autonomy in their choice of tools.
This works well where those choices only affect the team that chooses them.
But people on project teams sometimes need to work with other project teams
To ask for help, to share experiences, or simply to meet and talk.
And project teams are only one kind of group that needs to work together - in
general, we see 4 distinct kinds of groups in our organisation:
● as well as Accounts / Clients / Projects
● Functions (marketing, sales, finance, legal, immigration, etc)
● Regions (offices, countries, regions)
● 'Practices' / special interest groups / communities of interest (testing,
experience design, LGBT, etc)
And typically, when supporting cross-team collaboration and sharing of knowledge
at this scale, you need tools to help you.

A “dirty little secret” :)
<500 people, early 2000s
One application. Lotus Notes.
(sometimes this is talked of in hushed tones - but it was the right thing at that time -
and it served us well)
everything was in this system
As we grew, we were on more client sites, checking email at home, on a browser,
soon on a mobile becomes the norm
Notes was a bit of a dinosaur
Notes - never the most delightful UI - didn’t support this new way of working - we
moved to a tool that many had already adopted for personal use: Google Apps
Superman stepped into the office.

We’re pretty technical
We’ve been using wiki’s on our projects since there was ‘the wiki’ - and there have
always been a variety of collaboration tools of various forms in our environment
(and on our projects)
Extremely open / permissive culture (our people all have admin rights on their
laptops)
You can choose the bus that’s right for you
This sounds great, right? but it turns out that it creates a new set of problems
With Notes gone, it left a bit of a vacuum.
Superman got to work - our people set up wikis, shares, as they needed - and we
encouraged and supported this.

Fast forward a couple of years.
At around the 2000 people mark - we now have a huge amount of information we
are creating - but it exists in silos
A sprawling market of ideas
But without curation, there were many dead ends, areas filled with TO-DOs and
tumbleweed.
Each silo in turn was branded “where information goes to die”...
There was much debate about why - which tool was at fault - or whether it
was indeed a tooling issue.
We decided it wasn’t about the tools. It was more about information
management - and after debating whose job it was to sort things out - things
culminated in the decision to hire a ‘librarian' ...

Interestingly, we hired that person, and they came and then made the case
that we didn’t need a librarian, but rather we needed tools that made the
collection (and curation) of knowledge a side effect of using it - he introduced
Jive
By this point, everyone was complaining of email overload - distribution lists were
viewed as the only way to capture attention - and everyone sent everything
everywhere.
Jive has variously positioned themselves over the years - now they seem to describe
themselves as the social hub or social layer - connecting the LOB apps with the ‘out
of band’ conversations where exceptions are managed - and in a business like
ours, these exceptions are where much of the work gets done
Previously, they called themselves ‘FB for the enterprise’, but they distanced
themselves from that as people equate FB with ‘not doing real work’.
Initially, however, they were the email killer, and our Librarian was on a mission to
kill email.

This began by shutting down the various wikis, intranets, sites, pages and groups, and replacing them with
new shiny Jive equivalents
People were up in arms!
● This was a set of folks used to mailing lists and groups, they have been doing this for years. with very
advanced mechanisms for managing their emails (particularly given GMail’s toolset for this)
● Email works anywhere and everywhere. Every device has support, and there are many apps / clients
to choose from. For a company that has many folks ‘on the road’ - at client site or travelling around -
this is critical.
and Jive’s email notification mechanism was (and is) primitive at best.
And of course, I’ve set him up as a bit of a villain - it’s in keeping with the theme - but (important) truth be
told, it was entirely reasonable to assume that this was the right thing to do:
● our people are at the cutting edge of collaboration
● email overload was a big problem
● the new tool was best-of-breed, ‘consumer grade’, new and shiny
But by forcing all of our superheroes to use the same tool, the same gadget, the same power
Unwittingly, we had taken a Clark Kent approach.
AND IN DOING SO, WE HAD FAILED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE ORGANISATIONAL CONTEXT AND
CULTURE

SO NOW WHAT?
Change is hard - Changing culture is really hard (and not really desirable in this case)
So looking at our other levers. We can’t really move people around. Is there a technological solution?
● We experimented with ‘improving’ the Jive software, so it worked more like email
● We experimented with running Google Groups and Jive simultaneously and giving people the choice
between the two (will come back to this point)
● We experimented with tools to synchronise information between Jive and Google
Rather than improving the one tool, we invested our efforts in making a choice of tools work better together.
Jive provides the means to capture information as work happens, and we can rely on Google’s excellent
email handling capability - folks can work anywhere
This has been extremely successful - those who want to live in email can do so; those who want the
richer social interactions can have them
PROVIDING CHOICE / FLEXIBILITY ALLOWED PEOPLE TO CONTINUE FLEXING THEIR SUPERPOWERS

Think of this as focusing on the core infrastructure compatibility - similar to how a city has standards
for electricity, or plumbing, or which side of the road to drive on
● don’t plan every detail
● focus on the infrastructure
● know the cultural contours
● Watch where the cows go, then “pave the cowpaths”
Spend your efforts on ensuring that choices are compatible
But perhaps we have been too successful - the social interactions rely on that data getting into Jive - and if
everyone lives happily in email, then perhaps we’re back to square one? email overload.
Much like the city planners that built more roads and more lanes, we’ve not seen any improvements in
‘traffic’ - perhaps we’re simply enabling more ‘bad’ behaviour? There’s good and bad planning too - c.f. Jane
Jacobs etc
Is email what is really desired? Or is it ease of access? Newer tools, with zero email integration (but really
nice mobile clients) are receiving a lot of interest from our folks … did we not truly understand the
landscape, or is it that the landscape has changed again?

Our superheroes like to keep in close contact - when not using telepathy - they tend to use some other form
of real-time chat.
Historically, everyone used Yahoo messenger (we never did set up SameTime)
there was a *natural* tendency towards a single tool - and this did a lot to set expectations going forwards
(BYOD, shadow IT)
The move to Google apps meant some folks switched to Google Talk
Other personal tools, such as Skype started showing up for 1x1 video calls
We installed Vidyo in conference rooms - costly, complicated, confusing
Experimented with a number of services - Skype over livestream for all-hands, webex for webinars,
people were expensing Skype for group calls (probably a bunch of others too)
Once again, we find the completely ‘laissez faire’ approach results in disconnect.
This time, we think - aha - what we need here is a light guideline, but choice dependent on need and context.
Evaluated a number of services, and narrowed down to two - Citrix GTM / Fuze
- GTM seemed more stable, but also more stable
- Fuze was on a better trajectory, but less tested and less reliable
So we selected both. The thinking was that our people like choice, that they each had their strengths and
weaknesses, and that we could let a natural winner emerge
AND AS WE DISCOVERED, CHOICE - YAY, CHOICE! - IS A GOOD THING, RIGHT?

NOT ALWAYS, NO!
That wasn’t quite what happened.
● Silos, negotiation, politicking continued regardless
● One tool had lower usage, but broader coverage of the various scenarios they
were both used in
● Subtle pressures in how accounts were being issued skewed the numbers (and
subsequent network effect further drove that difference)
● We surveyed our people - and consistently got the feedback that the *choice*
was damaging to the user experience. The cost of frequent negotiation over
which tool to use was high. It wasn’t clear to users which tool should be used
when. (refer back to Google / Jive)
● Performance issues came in different times and different places
So we decided to choose one tool. We’re going to go the Clark Kent route.
(sometimes you have to own the decision)

So sometimes you need the Clark Kent one-size-fits-all any-colour-as-long-as-its-black approach
People who have chosen something are invested in making it work. People who have things chosen for
them are happy to ‘throw it over the wall’ - you chose it, you fix it!
So we had to communicate that decision, and roll it out
● loss of user ‘agency’ meant we’ve seen a little bit of pushback
● whilst we think the tool is better for all of us / the organisation, there are those who now have a worse
experience - a particularly hard message for those, esp. in a company where our business is about
custom solutions that fit *everyone*. Superman sees value in being Clark Kent at times too.
● very open communication about the thinking, what got us here
○ not a final decision - but a re-balance - reduce one tool, increase another - but never get to zero
- and be prepared to switch again (but avoid people waiting for the next switch)
○ starting really early - with volunteers - and being clear that people have this time to try and find
issues
○ not necessarily the best tool *right now* but the one that is most responsive - as there is more
life in this choice
○ Sharing the success stories
● Looking at where the tools address an additional common pain point - use this to tempt potential
adopters - eg. Fuze Rooms - (where software change leads to physical change leads to cultural
change?)

“Our true culture is made primarily of
the things no-one will say ...
Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and
beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms,
creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control
inside companies.”
-- Shanley Kane | @shanley | Your Startup is Broken: Inside the Toxic Heart of Tech Culture

“Our true culture is made primarily of
the things no-one will say ...
Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and
beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms,
creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control
inside companies.”
-- Shanley Kane | @shanley | Your Startup is Broken: Inside the Toxic Heart of Tech Culture
ON ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE (BEING CLARK KENT?)
Friend and former colleague - Jez Humble recently keynoted at Chef Conf
He shared this quote - from Shanley Kane - https://modelviewculture.com/
I think perhaps it comes across a little sharply
I think the message is an important one.
It’s worth reflecting on what it is we are referring to when we put things down
to ‘culture’

So what are the things we see when looking at both of these stories?
● We didn't get it right 1st time
● We didn't get it right the 2nd time either. Likely we won't have gotten it right now.
● But perhaps it is right for now?
● You need to keep trying things out
●
Understand what works for you, and what doesn’t work for you - in your context, with your culture
(it doesn’t make sense to simply buy a tool, a solution; no silver bullets)
Recognise that we are (to some extent) different - but so is everyone else - and as long as you work within your set of
‘differences’, the thinking still applies - decisions need to reflect the company values, ethos and processes
(for us, we can’t unilaterally roll anything out - we have our own constraints)
it’s not a destination, but an ongoing process
● marketplace is rapidly shifting
● get out there, and see things from the users perspective - you need to uncover the true culture, that no-one will talk
about
it’s about putting structures in place so that it’s easier to adapt
preparing everyone for perpetual change
● Gather feedback (measure, if possible, although we are bad at this)
● Keep an eye on the changing market - and changing expectations
● Design for that change make change normal (not exceptional)
● Recognise that choice is complex
○ User experience, Agency, some vs. many
Tools must fit the culture (as well as the problem) - this is where we have spent our efforts
Culture continuously changes - so must the tools
Tools change the shape of the problem (ideally making it more tractable)

“There are changes happening in our world, in the world of work
Out of the fortress of solitude, hand in hand with the Justice League
and as we look around the office, we are seeing those S’s shining through”
This doesn’t mean our work is done - it’s just the beginning
We all work together in teams, in groups, form organisations because there is a
benefit to doing so
there are also trade-offs to be made
(I hear an echo of another superhero tradeoff - “with great power … comes great
responsibility”)
We need to put structures in place that help us find a way to balance the needs of
the individual (superman), with those of the organisation (clark kent)
and here there are no easy answers, even for superman
we just need to keep on experimenting, and learning, and evolving our approach

THANK YOU
For questions or suggestions:
Andy Yates
@yrnclndymn
ayates@thoughtworks.com

Technology, culture and collaboration

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