The Jazz platform is designed to improving collaboration across the software and systems lifecycle, and it seems to hit on all the foundational dimensions of success: Human needs and capabilities, appropriate technology features, and effective organizational support are all working together as a thoughtful mix.

The Jazz platform helps teams:

• Collaborate via social networking and virtualized team memory to overcome geographic and temporal gaps in the software lifecycle (addressing human needs and capabilities)
• Automate individual and team workflows throughout the software lifecycle, enabling standardized processes without adding overhead (technology features)
• Report on the overall process with real-time insight into programs, projects, and resource utilization (providing organizational support)

Gina Poole, vice president, Rational Marketing, IBM Software has been with the company for 25 years, starting as a developer. Much of that time she has worked on projects focused on increasing the quality of collaboration in the development process.  She says,

It’s not about teaching people how to use the tools, but understanding the people, their roles, their objectives. We focus on the build, working with clients to help them create new things: Design, develop, test — as well as embedded systems all along the application lifecycle…  including business alignment.

We have a pretty big software development team all over the world. The key is to make it easy for these teams to succeed. Make it easy for them to collaborate and integrate the roles and the processes across the lifecycle — provide a single version of the truth.

IBM also understands that the skills of collaboration can be helpful before entering the professional world. As a case in point, the company worked with Prof. Christelle Scharff of Pace University as she used JazzHub to support five grad students (two in the United States, two in India, and one in Senegal) using agile development methods to create a mobile phone app for first-graders to practice their skills in reading, writing and math. Poole noted that JazzHub provided the real-time daily communication flow needed for agile development.

These tools and methods are able to support agile development practices and agile’s strong focus on quick communication and incremental decision-making even in virtual teams. While agile development is seen as an effective practice, many have noted the problems with teams attempting to be both agile and virtual at the same time. Organizational practices and technology tools have to be ramped up when distance and time zones make communication more difficult. Rarely can a system sustain a big change to one dimension without needing to adapt across the remaining dimensions. The Jazz focus on community and collaboration seems to be meeting that need.

As we closed our conversation, Poole provided this key point: “Successful software development isn’t about having the best tools. It’s about the strong integration and optimization of the tech and practices, and finally, insuring that [the result] really supports the business outcomes.” This again highlights the foundational dimensions of success: Human needs and capabilities, appropriate technology features, and effective organizational support  working together as a thoughtful mix.

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RedCriter Tracker makes skill sets visible on employee profiles to make it easier for management to select appropriate team members. They app comes  with a default “master list” of typical software development and management skills but these can be customized to match company needs. Skills can also be embedded in email signatures and blogs so that competencies are kept top of mind during communication.

Management can guide employee activities through awarding of points: do this, get these points. These points can then be used in a “reward market,” with rewards determined by management. Rewards could be as simple and inexpensive as a gift card or office toy, or as heavy-duty as a trip or ticket to an event; it’s up to the company. Long-term efforts are acknowledged by cumulative points.

The badges (of which there are 50 different types) show off accomplishments automatically. Some expire (such as the “weekend warrior” badge, which expires after the week), while others can only be held by one person at a time, or may take six months to earn.

I love the transparency and self-selection of rewards that RedCritter Tracker supports. This approach takes a formal business need — project management — and integrates it with human interest in games and rewards, enabled by a clean-cut collaboration platform. The approach is thoughtfully applied in a way that allows management to guide efforts but still allows individuals to make their own choices.

Beatty offered this explanation as to the app’s approach, “Engage employees, support workplace morale, and subtly drive behaviors that affect the bottom line.”

RedCritter Tracker is set to launch later this month. If you provide your email address pre-launch, you’ll be offered a free four-user license.

See this video for a walkthrough of RedCriter Tracker and its features:

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This is what a day in my hectic life looks like — a never-ending game of Tetris (in which colored blocks are work and black are non-work). It’s probably a lot like yours, but with different labels:

The Millennials, for better or for worse, have grown up living like this, and apparently it comes pretty naturally to them. But what if you are from an earlier generation, or if you had crunchy granola parents who had a “Kill Your TV” bumper sticker on their old car and whose most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment was the toaster?

I think there are certain personality traits that many of us share that can help us to capitalize on the principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto. And they might not be what you expect:

1. You have to be lazy. Yes, lazy. Because lazy people find the most efficient solutions to problems in order to get the job done. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.”)
2. You have to be easily bored. Because then you’re exhilarated and stimulated by the constant turmoil rather than overwhelmed by it. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Welcome changing requirements.”)
3. You have to be curious. Because then you’ll always be increasing the breadth and depth of your knowledge, which will give you more/better marketable skills and enable you to diversify when the opportunity arises. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Continuous attention to technical excellence…enhances agility.”)

These are only a few of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. I encourage you to read them all and envision how you can integrate these principles into your business practices.

What other characteristics do you think we need to deal with life and work in our constantly changing world?

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Here’s a few interesting notes from of Cagle’s analysis…

• Roadbumps On the Virtual Commute – social media, presence-based communications and web applications are helping to minimize the some of the issues around how people work together from different locations and time zones. Cagle goes on to point out the the technical limitations are now largely moot, with social limitations being of concern to most teleworkers.

• Telework and Agile Development -the notion of agile development, pairing experienced and inexperienced programmers through a mentoring relationship is beginning to spread to other non-software disciplines such as writers and marketeers.

• Risk Mitigation Through Telework – dispersing the physical and human assets of organizations can help build resilience and continuity into a business, mitigating the risk of potentially disastrous scenarios. Conversely, casting a wider net for talent and personnel opens new opportunities and ensure the best people can be engaged.

• The Green Telecommute – There’s a growing anxiety that teleworking simply shifts the carbon debt from organizations to individuals homes; however studies from Sun illustrate that 97% of an employee’s carbon footprint was simply due to commuting. Sadly, here in the UK telecommuting isn’t even part of the political debate on greening British cities.

• Telework’s Future - a rethink is required in how organizations manage people. Teleworking demographics polarize around those close to retirement and those early in their careers, each demanding a degree of flexibility in their lives. With estimates that around a third of the US workforce will demand to telework within the next four years, it’s clear organizations aren’t culturally attuned to manage a distributed workforce. I’d go further and state that government is tone deaf to the possibilities of incentivizing teleworking as a means to reduce the burden on congested transport networks.

Read Kurt Cagle’s full report here…

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