Many of us have come across companies trying to sell a product that they themselves don't use, because unfortunately this is not uncommon.

It's unsettling when companies don't think enough of their own products to actually use them. I understand not all companies can use their own products within the business because of the nature of some products. But, by and large, many, if not most, can be integrated into the business. And should be when they can.

That was one of the things I really liked about CollabNet. We actually do use our own platform and tools, and in a variety of ways. Yes, we eat our own pet food, and that has many benefits:

• You discover the strengths and weaknesses of your product
• You are better able to help customers understand the product and why they should use it
• As your needs grow, you build those solutions into the product, giving you much better empathetic understanding with the customers
• Everyone benefits from the companies product, because everyone makes requests to improve its quality

The CollabNet platform has evolved greatly over the years, and we have used all iterations of it along the way. The CollabNet site resides on the platform, as do all of OCN projects, and all of our internal projects.

For instance, our group of community managers use a CollabNet TeamForge (CTF) project called community-management. Having this project allows us to share documents, use a wiki to share links and miscellaneous stuff, and have discussion areas we can use to help and advise one another, brainstorm, and discuss various topics of interest. Monitoring enables us to receive changes and discussions via email.

I set up a similar project for CollabNet bloggers. With 16 of us, and growing, it's just a pain to email, attach documents, track changes to those docs, etc. through the mail program. This CTF project allows us to do that and more. If we want to set up trackers and project folders, we have that available to us as well.

In addition our web production team, marketing, sales, etc. all also use our platform similarly. And, of course, so does our engineering team. They use it for their development of CollabNet platform and tools.

Recently, with the acquisition of Danube, we'll incorporate more Agile processes and scrum into our work flow. CTF was always Agile-ready, but now we'll be using it more and learning scrum for our own business tasks. It's exciting to have the product evolve in a way that is not only useful to our customers, but to us as well.

Eating your own pet food, or rather using your own products, adds empathic understanding to customer needs, but also adds a great amount of sincerity and enthusiasm, assuming you have a good product. When a company uses it's own product or platform, that product is bound to improve because there is more invested in the quality of that product.

By now, I'm sure most readers of this blog have seen the announcement of CollabNet's acquisition of Danube Technologies, Inc. Our CEO, Bill Portelli, posted a blog entry here yesterday addressing the strategic reasons behind the acquisition, but I wanted to write a note to welcome Danube into the CollabNet team, and talk a little bit about how I think they will make our services offerings stronger.

In its coverage of the announcement, Forrester Research penned a great blog post with a lot of details of why they think this is a key acquisition in the Agile ALM space. While there will be forthcoming discussions of how the CollabNet TeamForge and ScrumWorks products will be integrated, I'd like to focus on another area that Forrester called out in their blog:

"One of Collabnet’s largest implementations is the Forge.mil site which provides a community oriented development space for defense projects to share development assets. Increasingly these projects are looking to adopt Agile methods, but in a controlled and distributed way. The result of Collabnet’s acquisition of Danube is a large amount of Scrum best practice [which] will slowly percolate into this community."

This is a key and fundamental strength this acquisition brings to the CollabNet services portfolio. Danube has an awesome array of talented Scrum Trainers and consultants that will be able to bring solid experience in explaining the details of how to take advantage of all that Agile development has to offer. Where I'm most excited is in how that combination of 'how to do Agile' intersects with CollabNet's own community management consulting practice. A lot of what we do in the community consulting area is about explaining the 'why' of new methodologies such as Agile. Having our new Danube colleagues on board to help us deep dive into the 'how' of Agile will undoubtedly help us as we start to engage additional teams both within and outside of the DoD.

Forrester is absolutely correct that in the DoD space, the move to Agile is all about doing this in a controlled manner that makes sense. There is a long established culture in the department that doesn't exactly embrace this 'new-fangled' way of doing things. Thankfully, the experience of building out Forge.mil has proven that amazing things can happen (180 days to launch initial revision of software.forge.mil) if you apply Agile principles to new projects in the DoD space. With that being said, we've had to build out a 'hybrid-Agile' approach in this space, to account for certain 'back-end' processes like Change Control Boards (CCBs), but we are still moving the department forward and saving taxpayer money in the form of reduced redundant efforts.

I look forward to working with my new colleagues in the services space, and would love to hear from any readers on what kinds of things you'd like to see the combined talents of the community consultants and Scrum Trainers take on. Hopefully, we'll be able to integrate the Danube blogs into this space soon so that we can continue to drive these discussions forward...

By Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO & President

I am proud to be sitting here in Frankfurt making my way to Davos, Switzerland, where I will accept a Technology Pioneer Award. While there, I will also participate in a number of working sessions and breakout groups along with hundreds of technical, business, and social leaders from around the globe.  Although I will have the pleasure of accepting this award and participating in these sessions, I accept this on behalf of the hard work, passion, and vision of the current and past employees of CollabNet who have made globally distributed software development a reality. The community of World Economic Forum (WEF) Technical Pioneers was established by the WEF in 2000 in recognition of the importance of small companies that create impact through technical innovation of entire industries.  Since 2000, a rigorous annual selection process by the WEF in cooperation with a host of strategic partners identifies hundreds of companies worldwide, and eventually selects about two dozen companies each year. 

When thinking about why CollabNet won this award, a couple of things struck me.  First, it takes a certain kind of company to win.  Klaus Schwab, founder and still the driving force behind the WEF, founded it in 1971, based on the stakeholder theory, which states that the management of an enterprise has to serve all stakeholders.  In a 2008 London Times opinion piece, he wrote:  “ . . . the management has to lead the enterprise as the trustee of all stakeholders . . . in order to secure the long term prosperity of the company”.  By “stakeholder”, Schwab means all constituencies – both internal and external.  I’d like to believe that CollabNet management has operated in an open manner with this long-term view of serving our stakeholders since we founded the company in 1999 - both internally among our employees, as well as externally with our clients and business partners.   And of course, we need to look no further than CollabNet’s founding of Subversion and continued corporate sponsorship and leadership of it over the last 10 years to see that this multi-stakeholder long term view of the world is a core value of our company.  Perhaps it’s the open source gene coming through….

The second aspect that struck me even more was that the companies honored as Pioneers are recognized for creating “impact through technical innovation of entire industries.”  CollabNet, and our nearly 1,000 customers, have blazed the path for industry to define and adopt industry-changing software development paradigms -- from fractured and decentralized to collaborative and distributed.  We have done this across every industry, and often with award-winning results, such as the recent recognition by the US government for DISA’s CollabNet-based implementation of forge.mil.  Certainly, great technology is critical to winning such an award. Even more important is the ability to have the long-term vision and perseverance to identify an industry opportunity, and to work within that industry to bring to bear that technology for transformative gains for all that participate in that industry.  That’s exactly what CollabNet, DISA, and other companies have done in the past year - but more about that in a blog to come.

About the Author

Bill Portelli is CollabNet's CEO. Read his full bio here.

(Posted by Dana Nourie)