Matt Zimmerman: Scaling Human Systems: From individual achievement to teamwork
This is part 4 in a series on organizational design and growth.
What it means
Getting things done together, as a team, achieving more than the sum of our individual efforts. Why it s important
Once a company reaches a certain size, perhaps with a substantial customer base and ambitious goals for the future, it takes a lot more momentum to move it forward. No one person can do it alone. From product delivery, to strategic decision making, to customer service, no single individual has all of the knowledge, skills or time necessary to perform these functions at the scale and velocity necessary to make real progress. Cooperation is not just a good idea: it s essential to success.
The most important system we re building is the company itself: a system of people working together to achieve common goals. Old status quo
In a startup, everyone embodies the spirit of the pioneer: passion, fortitude, individualism, daring, and the willingness to do whatever it takes to reach the goal. Individuals wear many hats: engineering, product management, marketing, customer support. We often don t even think of them as distinct disciplines. Projects often depend on the resoluteness of a single Jill-of-all-trades to drive them to completion, and the culture may reward this kind of heroism. Thanks to the relatively small scale of the company and its customer base, one person working independently can effect significant change without much risk. If what was delivered wasn t good enough, it could be discarded with no great loss. New status quo
In a growing company, we still need a variety of different disciplines in order to reach our goals, in fact more than ever. A successful product needs to be conceived, validated, designed, built, documented, adopted, supported, and we need to confirm that it satisfies customers over time. These elements are all essential, and each requires deep knowledge, expertise and practice. Good engineering + mediocre product management + inept marketing = total failure. It s not realistic to expect one person to do all of these things and deliver consistently good results, but consistently good results are exactly what we need. The solution is to organize for individuals to do what they do best, and cooperate effectively together. We also need to manage risk more carefully: our customers are depending on us. We have a lot more to lose now, and need to learn how to maintain forward progress while continuing to meet our customers expectations. Delivering sub-par products would damage our reputation and erode their trust. Most of all, we need to be getting better at all of this over time, faster than our competition. Behaviors that help
- When embarking on a new project, recruit others to your cause instead of going it alone. In particular, consider which other teams you may need help from, and ask for their support from the beginning
- Make your work visible to others (for example through a shared work board like Trello). Push context out of your head and into a workspace where others can see it.
- When you run into trouble, make a point of asking for help early. Not only does this help build relationships, it also gets problems solved faster.
- Agree on explicit shared priorities with your immediate teammates, and stick to them until the team agrees to change. Make sure that you re working on things that matter to the people around you, and that they know that s important to you.
- Heroism. There is a place for heroism in growing organizations, but save it for responding to exceptional problems. Day-to-day work and objectives should not depend on one person s heroism
- Attributing too much credit to individuals. Feedback and praise are invaluable, but be careful not to excessively recognize and reward individuals for what are fundamentally team efforts. Few things will erode team spirit faster than rewarding someone for other people s work.
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who 
And as usual, I updated Galette to version 0.7.4.2 and I filed a couple of tickets (
Someone recently asked me about the Debian Xfce 4.10 status, as
apparently I forgot to update this post series.
So, as you might have noticed, the full Xfce 4.10 desktop
environment is currently in Debian Jessie (current name for
testing). All in all, the transition went well and smooth.
One of the most regular question I get about Xfce 4.10 is the
panel behavior when it comes to the task bar expansion. In
xfce4-panel 4.8, when people wanted to have a full side panel with
a task bar plugin inside, they added a Windows buttons plugin and
configured the panel to 100% length. Then the Windows buttons
would expand to occupy all the free space on the panel. It was a
special case plugins, as usually other plugins only used a fixed
space. Now, in 4.10, this is not the case anymore. Windows button
uses a fixed size. And the plugins are left-aligned, which means
usually people end up with some space at the far right of the
panel. To restore the previous behavior back (which is actually the
pre-4.8 behavior, 4.8 was an exception by itself), one needs to add
a Separator plugin, then configure it to expand (and optionnally
select a transparent handle). Then move it next right to the
Windows buttons plugin.
Another thing which might be a bit surprising for upgrading
users is the change in the Action buttons plugin, which people
usually use to logout. In 4.8, by default, it's set to run the
logout dialog. In 4.10, by default, it's set to logout directly
(but with a confirmation dialog). If you prefer the previous
behavior, you can just configure the Action buttons plugin and
select the Log out item instead of the Log out one (I know,
it's a bit confusing).
If you have any question, don't hesitate to reach us by mail or
on irc (#debian-xfce on Freenode). Other than that remember that
Xfce really needs you help, both in Debian and upstream (and at
that point, I'd say *especially* upstream). There's a lot of
unmaintained project under the Xfce umbrella, some of them part of
the core (like xfce4-power-manager), so if you have some spare time
and some C/GTK+ knowledge, feel free to contact the Xfce team on
the mailing list.
Not so much ago, we had a boom of new enterprises offering Massive Online
Open Courses (MOOCs for short).
First were Thrun and Norvig (Artificial Intelligence), with Widom
(Introduction to Databases) and Ng (Machine Learning). Then, these initial
experiments led to the creation of Udacity (founded by Thrun) and Coursera
(founded by Ng and Koller).
I have been keeping an eye on them for some time and, in fact, I have been
contributing to a project similar to 
Half a lifetime ago, somewhere at the end of the last millennia I became a free software enthusiast. On and off, I've been working on Free Software for the past fifteen years - most of them unknown, discontinued by now; a huge part of this work was a hobby: small, infrequent contributions. But it was, and still is, something I enjoy doing, something that satisfies my hunger for knowledge, my desire to give back to the community I received so much from. Over the years, what originally started as a desire became a need. What started as a preference, became a requirement. And all through these years, I had a dream, a clear goal I wanted to achieve, which gave purpose to a lot of things I wrote and worked on.This past Monday, the goal was reached. I left the 
On Twitter, 
A few months ago, I was looking for a piece of software to spawn
long-running tasks on behalf of some daemon with the benefit of
the tasks not being interrupted when this daemon is restarted. Here
are the specifications:
