The power of your team

I posted earlier this week on The Macadamian Files blog. 

Beside the technical lesson in there, this post if omitting - by design -  a gem that jumped right in my face the minute I got my answer. 

The hidden gem is a practice that consists of leveraging your entire team experience.   This is how I got the answer to my question.  Powerful collaboration. 

Here is the practice definition:

Description

• Offer a mechanism to reach out to the experts in your organization.

When to Apply?

• Knowledge exists in the org but it is not maximized and software errors or delays are caused due to that. 
  
• You have a distributed team.

What needs to be done?

• Define communication channels, it could be mailing lists, IRC channels, forums, etc...
  
• Ask your experts to participate and offer to everyone else to volunteer.

We did not set up that system from day 1 at Macadamian, it's only when we started to be distributed and somewhat larger that it became clearer that we needed channels to our collecctive brains.  

At Macadamian, we created 3 specialized mailing lists: engineering, usability and quality assurance. 

This is the mechanism that allowed me to get the answer to the problem I was blogging about on The Macadamian Files.   These mailing lists are now part of our problem solving process.

While you dig on the web you also email the group,  you are likely to be surprised by the volume of knowledge of your organization.