Culture Initiatives

This is a list of culture initiatives we can invite teams to participate in. The barrier to participate should be low: Activities should be short and asynchronous where possible.

One prerequisite for many initiatives is that we’ve chosen a suitable documentation/collaboration environment where teams can freely collaborate.

Reward strategy

We should reward teams that engage with these initiatives, perhaps with some sort of gamified setup. As a starting point we could host a scoreboard and periodically reward the teams that perform best here with recognition or some kind of prize.

Initiatives

Add your team to the IT teams index

One barrier to cross team collaboration is incomplete knowledge of what teams work on and how. Teams add a short overview of their teams including the following information:

Domain/responsibilities within the company
Way of working (Scrum/Kanban)
Brief architecture overview (Lambda/ECS? Which programming languages?)
Overview of team practices regarding development (Code review/peer programming/Automated deployments)
Open slack channels to ask questions

By sharing knowledge across teams we can reduce waste and make better decisions about our products and services. You could organize a session when

Your team needs to adopt a new technology and you’re not sure what the best choice is
Your team had a major breakthrough or a positive experience with a tool other teams are using
You have a great idea that needs support from outside your domain

Make a cross-team pull request and integrate it

In line the idea of inner source, we encourage people to make changes outside their domain through our collaboration tools. The goal is not just to make the pull requests, teams are also encouraged to review them and work pro-actively on getting them integrated.

Engage with customer support regarding your domain

The mission of Storio Group is to brighten up people’s lives, and as engineers we should always keep that in mind. Reaching out to the care agents is a great way to find out what customers are loving, and where things could be improved. Regularly reviewing usabilla or other platforms also falls under this unitive.