COLLABORATION
TOOLS and TRENDS -
Lessons learned from Silicon Valley
Abstract
This white paper provides an essential guide to improving collaboration in the workplace.
Focusing on Atlassian and Open Source solutions, discover the tools and workflows proven
to increase teamwork and drive productivity. With key insight from Atlassian’s No.1 Expert,
Clearvision, this white paper will provide you with everything you need to start collaborating
better, delivering work faster, and ultimately getting more done.
Contents
Page 2.
Introduction
Page 3.
The challenges of collaborating at scale
Page 4.
Trends in collaboration
Page 7.
Software development tools
Page 9.
Ensuring that your work flows - improve your process
Page 10.
Software development methodologies at Clearvision
Page 12.
Summary
Page 13.
The solution
Page 14.
What does the future hold?
Page 16.
Conclusions
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Learn collaboration
from the successes of others.
Developing software is big business. From gaming behemoths like Activision to financial
institutions like HSBC, they all demand a lot from their software, and the projects that they
undertake to deliver this software are on near-unimaginable scale.
But they can and do deliver.
Over the years, the big players have learned a thing or two about overcoming the inherent
challenges in being a global leader.
From adopting Agile working and continuous improvement, to picking the perfect tool for the
job, these organizations have turned collaborating at scale into a fine art.
Here’s the kicker; the beautiful thing about these practices is that they aren’t confined to
software development. Your business, regardless of industry or size, can adopt these same tools
and processes!
In this white paper we will shed light on how some of the Enterprise organizations we work with
collaborate to improve communication, drive productivity and stay competitive.
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The challenges of
collaborating at scale
We all like to think that our issues are more problematic than everyone else’s, but in truth almost
every large corporation faces the same challenges with collaboration.
Disparate teams.
Different tools for different tasks.
Your marketing team is in London, your
Even ignoring the fundamental pain in
financial team is in Luxembourg and your
the backside that administering multiple
software development team is in San
tools can be, different tools ultimately
Francisco - how do they collaborate on
lead to siloed information. Silos are rarely
projects together across different time zones
collaborative!
and with different tools?
Complex processes and
“red tape”.
Multiple projects in multiple
territories.
Business today has to be flexible and reactive
Maintaining visibility at Enterprise level
to stay ahead. If it takes you 3 days to get a
is troublesome but gaining visibility extra
decision on a project your business will suffer.
admin and reporting is far from ideal.
Unforeseen security risks.
Lack of centralization.
Siloed information leads to lackluster security
A general lack of centralization informs many
as departments try to find a work around to
of the challenges listed above, leading to a
share relevant information. User management
lack of visibility, siloed data and a stagnated
of multiple tools is tricky at best.
workflow.
Too many emails and meetings.
A burden we can all relate to! Whilst still an
essential part of modern business, often
emails and meetings give an illusion of
progress.
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Trends in collaboration
As you can see, the issues Enterprise organizations come up against in their quest for collaboration
are varied and, at times, complex.
Does this mean the solutions need to be complicated as well, in order to tackle the problems? No.
In fact, what stands out the most among the latest trends in collaboration is a welcome move
towards simplifying tools and processes. Managing teams can be tough enough on its own; you
shouldn’t be bogged down in managing the tools your teams use to collaborate as well. You need
intuitive, social software.
So where should you be looking?
The Cloud
We’ve all heard of the Cloud, and yet many businesses are still reluctant to make
the move.
Of course, it’s a well known fact that regardless of industry, failure to adapt to
changing technologies leads to being left behind. With Gartner predicting that
the majority of collaboration applications will be equally available on desktops,
smart phones, tablets and browsers by 2016 - all of which will be synced across
the Cloud - if you haven’t embraced the Cloud yet, it’s time to.
•
Teams in different locations? Access data through a secure connection at
any time, from any place.
•
Drive innovation. Cloud hosting solutions are maintained, managed and
kept up to date by expert vendors, freeing your teams from distraction.
•
Adapt and scale. The Cloud grows alongside your business, so your teams
are always connected.
Further resource: Free Hosting Whitepaper
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Open Source
The very nature of Open Source software (OSS) is collaborative in itself. Anyone
can work on its development, from anywhere - it doesn’t get much more
collaborative than that. It also means that OSS is constantly evolving, built
around a model of continuous improvement.
But it goes much further than that. After all, we’re not all building software,
but we still all benefit, as the beauty of an Open Source foundation is that
Open Source tools can be adapted as needed. Wish there was some added
functionality? Then add it. According to the 2015 Future of Open Source Survey,
over 97% of companies are using OSS, with 65% of Enterprise organizations
claiming OSS fuels competitive advantages.
Commercial vendors are also taking note of this. Without making the whole
source code public, many organizations now provide access to REST APIs, which
allow outside developers to produce plugins to customize the tools further.
Simply put, between the wide range of tools, add-ons and plugins, you can find
the perfect means of collaboration for your organisation.
•
See: Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian products themselves aren’t Open
Source licensed, but by opening up Atlassian applications’ developer
platforms and REST APIs to the wider community, Atlassian now boasts 1,800
add-ons and counting. These are built not only by Atlassian but by third party
vendors and individuals, and over 1,000 Atlassian plugins are in fact free.
Check out the Clearvision Blog for the latest trends and insights into Open Source.
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credit: VFS Digital Design
Real-time collaboration
Real-time collaboration may sound obvious (who is collaborating in fake time?),
but essentially it’s referring to the move away from file-based collaboration.
Remember file-based editing?
•
One person’s computer gets a virus. Someone loses a laptop. Say goodbye
to those files forever.
•
Make your changes. Save the file. Share it - but make sure you send the
right version, and that it’s in a format everyone can open, and that there
are no last minute changes you want to make before someone else begins
editing.
•
Open a file a colleague has shared with you. “File corrupted.” Wait for it to
be resent. Watch time tick by.
Welcome to real-time editing.
•
In the same office? Other sides of the world? It doesn’t matter. Edit files
simultaneously to avoid duplication and confusion.
•
View previous versions in a document’s revision history.
•
Track changes, make comments and discuss decisions.
•
Work more efficiently and more collaboratively; work the way that suits
your teams.
Want to get started with real-time collaboration? Discover Confluence.
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Software development tools
Software development, or ‘dev’ tools, are programs used by developers to create, debug, maintain
or support other programs.
These tools aren’t designed to be the next Apple interface - they’re powerful and simple to use
but, to be blunt, they’re kind of ugly. But It is this simplicity that is indicative of all dev tools, with
the programmers using an array of tools to write quality code and oversee the development
process.
The most successful tools are the ones that are simple in concept and usability and yet extremely
sophisticated in their capabilities and customization.
The best management tools have helped development team leaders to plan, track and work on
multiple projects, across many locations with disparate teams.
With so many different users, all needing slightly different functionality, modern software
development tools have evolved into powerful, all-encompassing solutions, with multiple layers
of collaboration at their core.
So what does this mean to businesses outside of software development?
The key thing here is that software development tools aren’t limited to software development. If
you and your organisation are keen to improve collaboration, be more Agile (more on this in the
next section) and get more done then you should consider some of the leading dev tools.
We’re not saying you should download a build tool and learn C# but borrowing the best tools
from development teams to improve your collaboration is a no-brainer.
Tools like JIRA (for issue tracking and PM) and Confluence (Atlassian’s wiki solution) have
matured well beyond the realms of software development.
Putting the case forward for Confluence is easy. Powering collaboration at over 22,000
companies around the world, Confluence makes team work easy by ensuring all of your content
is in one place, simple to access, manage and use.
One of the best selling development tools is Atlassian’s ‘JIRA’, which is a tracking tool
designed for teams planning and building big products. It helps to organize work tasks, assign
responsibility, and follow team activity.
On Fortune.com, Rich Wong, general partner at Accel Partners and a longstanding Atlassian
board member, says workflow platforms such as JIRA Service Desk are redefining business
collaboration software.
“Everything in the work world is better with teams. … A lot of this has historically been done in a
spreadsheet or a manual checklist,” claims Wong. “A lot of companies are starting to realize the
power of workflow tools [as another option]. Think of it as collaborative project management.”
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credit: Financial Times Photos
Be more Agile
Agile software development is a methodology that challenges the status quo of traditional
project management, allowing businesses to be more flexible in the face of the changing scope
of requirements within the software industry.
In more recent years businesses and departments have adopted Agile processes in order to stay
flexible and stay focused. See the next section for more on Agile processes.
A plugin for JIRA, JIRA Agile unlocks the power of Agile project management within the JIRA
framework. It helps managers to organize larger stories, build backlogs of work, organize
projects in a visual way and ultimately report on team progress.
These tools have proved so effective in both the development and non-development areas that
according to Gartner over 85 of the fortune 100 companies now use Atlassian products.
See the full Gartner report here.
“
Forbes Magazine says it perfectly;
Have no illusions, their products may not win any design contests, but they are so
easy to use that they’re flooding the world’s businesses with collaborative software.
It’s everywhere. Pervading nearly every project manager, developer, and technical
communicator – seducing code, tasks, text, and images from its creators. All functioning
to swiftly collaborate, track, document and ship software code.
Mark Fidelman. Forbes
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Ensuring that your work flows improve your process
What do we mean by software development processes?
“Software development process” is a general term describing the over-arching process of
developing a software product. While not a standard definition, most development processes
include the following activities:
Requirement gathering
Testing
Design
Maintenance
Implementation
These processes vary significantly from one software shop to the next but there are a number of
values that Clearvision has adopted outside of development.
“
Going Agile
Agile development provides opportunities to assess the direction
throughout the development lifecycle. This is achieved through regular
cadences of work, known as Sprints or iterations, at the end of which
teams must present a potentially shippable product increment.
There’s a lot of great stuff on Agile working online, including a simple intro from Agile
Methodology, who wrote the snippet above. Alternatively consider an Agile training course.
We won’t drill down too much here, but these are the main components of Agile working to
consider in terms of improving collaboration:
•
The highest priority is finished work, continuously delivered
•
Work together and communicate regularly
•
Welcome change - this often leads to competitive advantage
•
Complete work before you move onto the next task!
•
Regular retrospectives help drive continuous improvement
The shift away from multi-tasking, siloed teams and striving for perfection has led to massive
improvements in a wide variety of industries.
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Software development
methodologies at Clearvision
Among others, the most common methodologies used in software development include
waterfalling, incremental development, continuous improvement and the Agile methodology.
These are used in combination with regular meetings such as daily stand-up meetings (where
teams talk about things they are working on, tasks that are blocking progress and things to be
worked on next), or retrospectives (where all contributors to a particular product or feature review
the process and discuss what could have been done better or improved for future projects).
45%
Clearvision’s Marketing team saw a 45%
increase in work completed when they
embraced Kanban and Agile methodologies
in combination with Atlassian’s JIRA,
Confluence and Hipchat tools.
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credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg
On her own website Agile Coach Liz Sedley lists all of the benefits than non-development teams
can use:
•
Visible work “Kanban”
•
Stand-up meetings
•
Setting priorities as a team
•
Limiting work-in-progress
•
Retrospectives
•
Product Owner role (responsible for priorities)
•
Coach role (helping team reflect and improve)
•
Reviews / Showcases of work done
•
Timeboxing / Pomodoros (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/)
•
Pairing
•
Test driving without automation
•
Visible outcomes - iterating over visible product
•
User stories: Who? What? Why?
•
Frequent user testing
•
Interactive facilitated workshops
•
Shorter more focussed meetings with only relevant people
•
Balancing relevance against exclusion
•
Focus on throughput over efficiency
At the heart of software development is the idea that any process, code, product or feature can
be improved. When this fundamental principle is applied to other business areas there can be
significant increases in departmental productivity.
The biggest game changer for any team is the adoption of both the tools and the principles to
best manage those tools. This is where the lessons forged from software development can be
applied to almost any team, in almost any industry across the world.
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Summary
Software development projects can be complex, are always evolving and almost always
span multiple countries. In order to compensate for their size and complexity without losing
collaboration across the organisation, Development Managers have adopted collaborative tools
and introduced proven processes.
What can you take away from this?
These tools and processes can and do work outside of software development. To improve
collaboration you should consider these guiding principles:
1. Participation
2. Collective
The whole team (or teams) need to be involved
Reach a collective consensus and take action.
for collaboration to succeed.
3. Transparency
4. Independence
Feedback and trust are essential elements of
Don’t stifle individual creativity and input, avoid
collaboration.
groupthink.
5. Persistence
6. Emergence
Stick with it! Make sure content is accessible and
Focus on the end goal, not on how you get there.
user adoption is a constant.
You will need your collaborative community to
set their own goals and objectives.
Tools like JIRA, Confluence and HipChat are awesome for collaboration but
technology is only one part of the equation.
Enterprises should be aware that collaborative software can help teams prosper but often
requires a fundamental change in the way teams communicate and innovate. Moving beyond
data and process requirements, social software forces teams to accommodate the tacit aspects
of how work is done.
Changing a working culture is difficult. Whether going Agile or simply trying to be more
productive, managing this change is important. Obviously this whitepaper can never give you all
the answers but with the right tools and attitude you can start on the right track.
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The solution
Discover
Spectrum is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that takes the best of software development
tools and processes and aligns them with your business needs.
Spectrum is fully customisable, offering built in Agile processes that ship ready for use out of the
box or customisable to fit your exact requirements. Spectrum allows you to combine the best
of breed commercial and Open Source tools that suit your needs. Not only will you be able to
manage your tools, processes, users and permissions from one simple, responsive dashboard,
but they’ll be fully integrated and easily accessible via single sign-on.
Choose from Cloud hosting, hosting behind your firewall, or a hybrid solution - whichever fits
your business, you’ll be able to adapt with the marketplace and scale with your organisation’s
growth.
Spectrum Collaborate.
Teamwork evolved.
A cutting-edge collaborative solution for any department, any
business. Reduce emails, work faster and get more done. Forged
out of the software development industry Spectrum Collaborate
is the greatest evolution in work-based collaboration since
Microsoft launched Office back in 1980. Isn’t it time you evolved?
Spectrum ALM
For quality code you need quality tools. Spectrum ALM gives you
complete, end-to-end visibility of your application lifecycle, and
gives your team access to the best tools for each stage. Choose
from change management tools like JIRA, build tools like Bamboo
and reporting tools like Arsenale Dataplane in one solution, and
Want to
learn more?
deliver better software faster than ever.
SpectrumALM.com
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What does the future hold?
The future will be a collaborative place - it has to be. With globalization now in full swing
companies cannot afford to let communication break down. Even a company like Clearvision,
which is hardly an Enterprise organisation (yet!), has offices in the US, UK, Ireland and South
Africa. Without the right collaborative solutions in place productivity suffers.
In a recent study, 40% of Millennials (who are soon to comprise the majority of the workforce)
would pay out of their own pocket for social collaboration tools to improve productivity.
20%
50%
According to recent analysis by Gartner 50% of
By 2020, 20% of organizations will include employee
team coordination and communication will occur
engagement improvement as a shared performance
via mobile group collaboration apps by 2018.
metric for IT and HR.
All of this points to one simple and unmistakable truth - your
future employees want to collaborate better and you’d be foolish
to stop them.
28hrs
Office workers spend an average of 28 hours a week writing emails, searching for
information and collaborating internally, according to McKinsey. What if you could
reduce that by 10, 20 or even 30% - imagine the increase in productivity!
Atlassian - setting the standards for collaborative working
Atlassian has already proved itself a worthy contender in the software development space. Now
they’ve set their sights on fixing the problems around collaboration. “The biggest thing we’re
working on is proving that our model doesn’t just work for technical people,” said Mike CannonBrooks, co-founder and co-CEO in a recent Forbes article.
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In the same article President Jay Simons elaborated: “This is a logical progression of our mission
in collaboration. It is in our DNA to help people communicate with one another and keep track of
the things people do together.”
At AtlasCamp 2015 we learnt that over 30% of JIRA installs have nothing to do with software
development - a true sign of where Atlassian’s intentions lie. We also learnt that over 50% of
Atlassian customers are Cloud hosted, leading many to speculate that customers are evolving so
fast that in 5 years Atlassian might not offer server versions of products anymore.
So what does this mean in real terms? In one sentence: faster, leaner, and more user-friendly
features.
With Atlassian’s flair for innovation and determination to make the world a collaborative place,
more and more professionals like you are turning to Atlassian and Clearvision for a solution that
drives collaboration and productivity throughout the business.
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Conclusions
According to Gartner, by 2017, 25% of organizations will lose their market position due to “digital
business incompetence.” What does this mean?
Not staying competitive, not giving the right tools to the right people, not modernising the way we
approach project management, not collaborating.
The reason 85 of the Fortune 100 choose Atlassian as their Enterprise solution is because they are
built around cutting edge processes, they’re scalable and most importantly, they work.
The key to Atlassian’s success is its investment in and support of agile software development
practices. Atlassian values team collaboration above the sales-orientated status quo in enterprise
software. As a percentage of revenue, Atlassian spends 2x more than its peers on R&D and it shows.
Gartner also identified lack of transparency as an issue holding several solutions back. Again, this is
an area where Atlassian excels. After all, tools such as Confluence are directly intended to increase
transparency through collaboration, with teams across a business building a shared knowledge
base. This means collaboration regardless of team, department or location – Atlassian delivers global
accessibility at any time.
Implementing social software in the Enterprise
Ready to get started? Obviously we can help if you’re looking to go Atlassian, but in general
there are a few things you should consider, which we’ll leave you with:
•
Governance is critical. If your organisation is not ready for informal, community-centric
practices to improve communication, information sharing and collaboration, then social
software is likely to fail in a general sense (though it may still succeed if applied around
specific applications).
•
Include groups involved in organisational development and human capital management.
•
Expect a short lifecycle for any investment.
•
Continue to monitor the market and the maturity of the technology.
•
Do not standardise too quickly with a single supplier - try a proof of concept with a smaller
team and, if successful, roll it out across the organisation.
•
Investigate and document both project success and failure.
For any questions on how to improve collaboration in your business, using Atlassian
or any other software solution, speak to Clearvision today.
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