Git -Culture

Source Control

SVN, Git(Hub,Lab), AzureDevOps are all implementations of Source Control. It is generally accepted that source control is #agoodthing (Thank you Martha). It allows you to share work, check code and share a workflow on your team. One of its strengths is sharing. If you are on a small team or don’t have experience with it, its worth a look. Google is your friend.

Again, the important thing is sharing. For our team it was a bit of a lift to get everyone into the same place for source control, but we got there. One of the big changes was the ability of all folks to see what folks down the hall were working on. Sometimes it lead to hall way talk, or a conversation. For me, it kept the team on the “same page” and awareness of shared suffering…I mean work.

A Bit About Norms

Not just an accountant from Cheers. Here’s an definition of norms:

• Informal guideline about what is considered normal (what is correct or incorrect) social behavior in a particular group or social unit. Norms form the basis of collective expectations that members of a community have from each other, and play a key part in social control and social order by exerting a pressure on the individual to conform. In short, “The way we do things around here.”

• Formal rule or standard laid down by legal, religious, or social authority against which appropriateness (what is right or wrong) of an individual’s behavior is judged.

From : http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/norm.html

Following Norm-an

How do you get an entire organization to follow a norm set by a small team? Maybe the folks in Shipping and Receiving came up with a really good idea, how do you get it over the wall to the folks in Product Design.

Big P, little p, what begins with P?

It’s policy. To most, imo, (p)olicy exists outside your work life. Its something that might get referenced around backup, business continuity or the way that the garbage bins get cleaned up. Point is, it doesn’t exist alongside the people who work in the environment.

Well, I imagine that your thinking: “How can policy live along side people who don’t use source control in their day to day lives?” Easy* answer: Knowledge Bases or Intranets.

How can a company conduct itself, without easy transparent access to its norms?

Answer: poorly

How can they be more harmony with where the company is heading?

I would argue that Norms beget policy, and policy with enough refinement and a bit of legitimacy can be Policy <- Note the capital “P”

It’s Transparent

Wrapping up, if you want an idea of how to feed norms, and encourage collaboration; I would propose an adoption of a policy and operation site, accessible through source control and a GUI. More importantly, share it and make it accessible to everyone. More brains, more people, different folks = better ideas.

For us, and our improvement, we’re moving our KB out of our KB application, converting it to Markdown and putting it in Git. It seemed to work for Microsoft and Docs, it might work for us.

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