Social media tools and careful team design can allow you to create a fully functional, collaborative development environment - filled with critical thinking, and productivity.

1. Building a development
culture
Using social media tools for
development collaboration

2. Why social media tools
 Collaboration on software projects
improves both quality and productivity
 By their nature, software
engineers, and QA tend to be less
comfortable in collaborative
environments
 By providing tools to enhance
collaboration, companies will help their
bottom line
 Social media tools assist technical
users in overcoming comfort barriers

3. What makes a good development
team?
 The DISC model for personality
profiles
 The Skunkworks model for
development team roles
 DISC profiles for each role, while
not set in stone, tend to be good
predictors of performance
 What makes a well rounded
skunkworks style development
team?

4. What is DISC
 D – Decision making or
Leader/Follower
 I – Inspiration or the “Gift of gab” –
social quotient
 S – The “worker bee” factor – how
much you can tolerate doing the
same thing repetitively
 C – Calculator mode – are you a
detail person or a big picture person

5. How the scores work
 Everyone has the same total score
 Scores are allocated over DISC with some
scores being positive, others negative
 There is NOTHING WRONG with a negative
score – everyone has usually 2 positive and
2 negative scores
 Scores can be illustrated as a radar chart
showing the score in each category, by role

6. A balanced team profile
Lee - Samantha - Back Eloise - Design Helen - Customer
manager John - QA Joe - PM end Developer engineer advocate
D 6 3 5 3 6 2
I 7 2 7 2 1 6
S 1 6 2 3 4 7
C 2 7 3 6 7 4
sum 16 18 17 14 18 19
Inspiration Perfectionist Persuader Objective Thinker Investigator Agent

7. A well balanced team
D
7
6
5
4
3
Lee - manager
2
John - QA
1
Joe - PM
C 0 I
Samantha - Back end Developer
Eloise - Design engineer
Helen - Customer advocate
S

8. Unbalanced team profile
Lee - Samantha - Eloise - Helen -
manag John - Joe - Back end Design Customer
er QA PM Developer engineer advocate
D 6 3 3 3 3 3
I 7 2 2 2 2 2
S 1 6 6 3 3 3
C 2 7 7 6 6 6
sum 16 18 18 14 14 14
Inspira Perfecti Perfecti Objective Objective Objective
tion onist onist Thinker Thinker Thinker

9. An unblanced team
D
7
6
5
4
3
Lee - manager
2
John - QA
1
Joe - PM
C 0 I
Samantha - Back end Developer
Eloise - Design engineer
Helen - Customer advocate
S

10. Good developer tendencies
 Developers and QA people tend to be
Objective thinkers, investigators and
perfectionists –
 All these personality types have low I
scores – making socialization more
difficult
 This proves the “geek factor” to some
extent – people who are good at
software development tend not to be
as facile with their social skills.

11. Programmers hiring programmers
dilemma
 When we hire programmers, we mostly hire
for skills, not for personality profiles.
 A well rounded team is frequently not the
goal – people tend to hire others like
themselves, without a plan in place
otherwise
 As a result programming teams – without
outside intervention – tend to be less
collaborative than other types of teams

12. How can social media tools
help
 Technology geeks love their toys
 The very act of creative problem
solving requires taking your mind off
the problem from time to time
 Interacting with other like-minded
team members introduces new
perspectives on perplexing problems
 Development teams frequently find
that interacting electronically is less
distracting than face to face
conversations

13. Teambuilding
 Companies spend thousands on
“organized” team building activities
 Trust evolves not from an organized
activity but from building personal
relationships – if you care about what
happens to someone else – you end
up trusting them
 Being able to rely on a team member
to respond to a suggestion or provide
an alternative makes for the best
teams

14. Specific tools
 Facebook/LinkedIn
 Use private groups and pages to
communicate among the team
 Allow team members to participate
without having to “friend” each other –
but don’t discourage friending
teammates
 From an HR perspective have policies
in place to control the interaction
between superiors and their
employees.

15. Specific tools
 Wikis/Microsoft
OneNote/Sharepoint/Microsoft Teams
 Create centralized repositories for
notes, project progress updates, etc.
 Open editing allows members to contribute
at their own level of comfort
 Create standards for reporting various
types of things
 Weekly standup meetings to review
blockages
 Use Wiki-like tools to track specs and
scope

16. Specific tools
 Instant messaging
 Yes I know that your employees frequently
sit side by side
 Yes I know it seems silly to provide them
with secure instant messaging
 OTOH – allows quick and easy exchange of
info, questions, and is semi-interrupt
driven (IE you can respond when you have
time)
 Encourages interaction, overcoming the
“cube boundaries”

17. Specific tools
 Cloud or locally based shared
document repositories
 Sharepoint, google docs, office365 – all
provide a way for documents to be
shared among a number of users
 Document sharing makes information
accessible to all

18. Specific tools
 Linked in groups
 Allow professionals to interact together
to solve problems
 Many programmers motivated by “geek
one-upmanship” - allowing them to
crow about achievements improves
morale
 International interaction improves the
caliber of your employees, and the
reputation of your company.

19. Specific tools
 Twitter/G+ - Short message tools
allow “crowd-sourcing” answers
 Providing answers to questions online
improves your companies reputation
and used properly can become a source
of leads
 A programmer is only as powerful as
the network they can leverage when
they need an answer
 Why reinvent the wheel when someone
else has invented it.

20. “old” tools
 Search and forums
 Search makes forums so much more
useful
 Forums allow “niche” users to discuss
specific issues in an environment filled
with only other niche users
 Finding the answers to problems and
helping debug thorny issues is
especially effective if you can target the
correct forum

21. Dangers and pitfalls
 Social media time sink – how much
is too much?
 HR policy violations – when are you
mixing work and home too much
 Monitoring your reputation online
 Creating private workspaces and
keeping them private

22. OS-Cubed can help
 Provide personality profile analysis
 Full 360 degree team assessment
 Help and advice on setting up
productivity and social tools
 Gather professionals in HR to assist
in policy
 Coaching, goal setting, agile
implementations

23. OS-Cubed contact info
 www.os-cubed.com
 Lee Drake: ldrake@os-cubed.com