Critical Path Newsletter

We were Wiki before Wiki was cool

Usually the Critical Path is full of great ideas for high-tech project managers and team leaders. We work hard every month to put valuable and practical tips in your inbox.

And that's what we're going to do again next month, and the one after that, and the one after that...

But right now, we hope you don't mind if we take a break from that and toot our own horn for a second (We promise to keep it short).

Some of us here have been reading 'Wikinomics' by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

It sounds... familiar.

The four basic principles sound like what we've been doing for a long time. Openness. Check. Peering. Check. Sharing. Check. Acting globally. Check. And of course there’s our wiki.

Openness. The first point in the Mac TRACC is ‘Transparency’ (I don’t want to call the Mac TRACC our corporate values. That makes it sound like Management sat around a boardroom and decided to inflict them on us. Wasn’t like that. A bunch of people identified the things we were already doing that they felt were Important and posted them on our wiki. It built from there. The others are Responsiveness, Agility, Collaboration and Constant Improvement.)

At Macadamian, we’ve always said “Bad news travels as fast as good news.” When you work with an outsource partner, things go wrong, just like when you develop things in house. And when the bad stuff happens, we tell you.

That doesn’t sound too comforting, I suppose. But it means that you always know what’s going on—no surprises. If something unexpected happens, you’ll know. And you’ll know what we plan to do to get past the obstacle (Because another one of our principles is not to stay blocked when there’s a problem).

Peering. If you want to know more about our peer review system, download The Best Case Scenario white paper from the Macadamian home page.

Sharing: Contributing to Open Source projects. One of our first projects was contributing to the WINE project for Corel—pretty much exactly how Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams describe it working for Sun with Apache. This key project changed the way we work forever (See Stephane's article in IEEE Software January/February 2004, New Tricks: How Open Source Changed the Way my Team Works), introducing us to a system that facilitated distributed development, collaboration practices, short iterations, and information sharing.

Acting globally. We have offices in four countries and developers in five. Several years ago we were limited to finding all the talent we needed in Ottawa, or at least people willing to relocate to Ottawa. Now we find the best talent and ideas from three different continents. Our early work on large-scale open source projects taught us that you could do agile development with a team distributed all over the world.

Our wiki. We use our wiki (Once again, we use Atlassian's Confluence) for... well, just about everything. It helps capture and store knowledge. It helps us create the just-enough documentation that agile projects require. Communication and information becomes persistent and searchable.

And as a client, you get access to all of that, through the wiki page. If you want to check progress on tasks in the middle of the night, go nuts.

Okay, so we're not exactly sure about the author's theories on Intellectual Property (That IP shouldn't be protected the same way it used to be). Seems to us that if you do the work, you should get paid for it. Is that something that's really going to change anytime soon? At any rate, it's not our decision. Each of our clients make that call individually.

Wikinomics and you
A few companies, like Wikipedia, illustrate the Wikinomics principles to the extreme (and are case studies in Tapscott and Williams’ book). That might not be the best business model for everyone (After all, Wikipedia makes its money from donations).

But maybe there are some lessons for your company here. What part of your business would benefit from the new ideas/new products sparked by global collaboration?

To hear about Macadamian’s innovation on demand services, email software@macadamian.com.

Next month in the Critical Path, learn a software development lesson from shoveling the snow out of your driveway.