Collaborating within a Company
Technology officers and software architects make decisions about long-term success, sustainability, and growth for our organization and products. The ability to decide and execute lasting visions comes at the cost of immediacy but immediate decisions and iterations strengthen our market competitiveness to reach our long-term goals. Hence, we delegate immediacy and build an environment that empowers our teams to act autonomously.
Implementing autonomy requires a guiding hand. This chapter focuses on strategies to ensure we foster collaboration and reduce distractions, we manage the information to noise ratio in communication and ensure our teams have all the tools to make decisions without propagating them up the hierarchy. We lay the foundation of our software with our organization's topology and culture.
Rewrite progress
The book includes a rough draft of the chapters I want to cover. However, these mostly consist of notes and currently do not offer a coherent reading experience. I am in the process of rewriting and editing the book for an initial release version. The following chapters are in a somewhat decent shape:
- Autonomous Team Structure
- Team Interactions
- Communication Channels
- Working in Cycles
- Innersourcing
- Education and Training
Growth mindset
We appreciate that our development cycles offer a continuous learning process for our product and us personally. When we embrace change with objective acceptance we accelerate our ability to adapt and improve our work across our organization. An environment that celebrates innovation, breeds innovation; our teams quit merely reacting to change, they drive it. At which point we become vigilant not to seek change for change's sake.
Similarly, we do not accept because we have always done it this way as an argument. Exploring solutions and new avenues of collaboration potentially solves problems more effectively and at a lower cost. Sustained collective learning and development spreads knowledge horizontally, reducing the negative repercussions when team members take time off or leave entirely. Professional growth combined with transparent career progression increases employee satisfaction and retention, lowering the risk of adverse turnover rates.
The chapters in Part I - Collaborating within a Company cover topics to build autonomous teams and planning collaboration strategies between these teams. We analyze the use cases of different communication channels and cover strategies for upskilling our teams.