Guy Martin discusses his experiences in addressing cultural and process issues before choosing a collaboration tool solution.

1. Culture First, Tools Last
Building Successful
Collaborative
Development
Guy Martin
Director – Open Source Strategy
Autodesk
@guyma | @AutodeskOSS

2. My Perspective

3. Topics
•Tool Selection Drivers
•Culture, Process & Tools
•Organizational Jujitsu
•Good & Bad Tool Rollouts
•Things to Consider

4. Tool Selection Drivers

5. Collaboration
Tool Stakeholders

6. What Drives Tool Selection?
$$ Adaptability
Productivity Standardization/Support

7. Culture, Processes & Tools

8. Culture First – Tools Last

9. Existing Culture
•Collaboration Style
• Awaiting permission vs. taking initiative
•Transparency
• Decisions/communications private or open
•Meritocracy
• Top-down or driven by valuable contributors

10. Existing Processes
•Contribution
•Tightly controlled or open
•Governance
•Tightly controlled or meritocratic
•Organizational
•Top-down, bottom-up, mixed

11. Existing Tools
•Knowledge Sharing
•People sharing or ‘documenting’
•Reuse
•Data being referenced or abandoned
•Metrics
•What works (or doesn’t)

12. Organizational Jujitsu

13. Using Hierarchies to Drive Change
“People think that mitigating the effects of hierarchy
requires working against it. But that’s not the case.
Instead, you’ve got to learn to work with it.”
- Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO

14. HR Process as Change Agent
…work still needed for other roles (product management, etc.)
New Core Competencies
for Open/Inner Source

15. Good & Bad Tool Rollouts

16. The Good
Contenders Winner Why?
Autodesk Corporate Real-time Chat

17. The Bad
Contenders Winner? Why?
• Most projects using git
• Culture of silos
• Process overhead not
aligned with the tool
Forge.mil DoD Collaboration System

18. The In-Between
Incumbents Mandated Challenges
• Culture of silos
• Process/dev practices
not aligned with tool
• Monolithic code
architectures
Autodesk Internal Source Control/Sharing

19. Things to Consider

20. Understand Your Culture
Asking Permission Begging Forgiveness
Siloed/Insular Transparent/Collaborative
Product Management Driven
Engineering Driven
OpenClosed

21. Tools Landscape
• People bringing in tools (‘Shadow IT’)
• People building their own tools
• Why?
• No knowledge of what’s going on elsewhere?
• Desire for control?
• Speed of deployment?

22. Build a ‘Pull Request’ Culture
•Shared responsibility/control
• Code
• Processes
• Policies
• Information
• Tools
•Engaged employees drive collaboration
• Review prevents ‘anarchy’

23. Align Tools with Reality
•Resist vendor pressure
• They don’t always live your reality
•Allow some experimentation/flexibility
• Cull tools that aren’t working
•Follow the community
• Explore areas of critical mass
Adapt the Tool to the User, not the User to the Tool

24. Release Early, Release Often
•Iterate as quickly as is practical
• Choose customizable tools
•Allow all stakeholders to drive process/tool customization
•Practice patience – your culture won’t change overnight

25. Questions & Discussion