Away Month Planning

by Cory Zue on February 15, 2012

Even with any amount of planning, often it's better to just jump right in.

In the last post I introduced the idea of our “away month” and how it grew from a simple conversation over drinks to relocating much of our team to Brazil for a month. Here I’m going to talk more about what we’ve done to plan and execute a successful away month.

(It should be noted that it’s currently only week three out of five, so take everything here with a grain of salt. If this idea crashes and burns somehow, I’ll be sure to write a retrospective about what went wrong and why we should have known this was a terrible idea from the start.)

Here were some of the guiding principles we followed while planning the away month.

Delegation of Trust and Responsibility

In his book “The Four Hour Work Week”, author Tim Ferriss talks a lot about working from home. One of the points he makes again and again is that when trying to justify to your boss/team that you should be allowed to work from home you should be so obviously over-productive that it would be impossible for them to complain. In a way, this whole experiment is like one big period of “working from home” for the six of us currently here. Everyone knows that we’ve been given a lot of trust and a special opportunity to prove that we can be productive despite being geographically separated and in an environment where it would be easy to slack off. The handing over of trust creates an intrinsic motivation among us here to prove that we deserved it, and because of this, our productivity has remained high thus far – possibly even above average. It also helps that the evaluation of the month and possibility of continuing the tradition next year hinges on us getting some awesome work done.

Along with trust comes the delegation of responsibility to the right people. The people who were most vocal about leading the away month were also tasked with making sure it works out. This puts the incentive to make sure things are successful in the hands of those people most able to make it happen (even if they’re not necessarily “in charge”).

Taking Advantage of Local Context

Poolside brown bag talks are one of the best ways to take advantage of our local context.

Being an organization that does a lot of international work, we’re using being in São Paulo as an excuse to reach out to Brazilian organizations that we may be able to collaborate with and as a jumping off point to do more work in Latin America. It’s possible that nothing will come out of it, but if anything does it will be great to remember how our new projects came out of this trip.

This principle also manifests itself in more fun ways. Many of the team is using the trip as an excuse to learn rudimentary Portuguese. Weekend beach trips, poolside brown-bag lunch talks, and eating insane amounts of grilled meats are also a plus.

Experimentation

Despite the fact that most of us already work out of the same office every day, being in Brazil makes the work day seem different, somehow. We’ve taken advantage of this by trying out new things that we wouldn’t do in Boston. Probably the best example of this was a “field day” last Friday, where everyone on the team was only allowed to work on bugfixes or features specifically requested by our field staff (no client deliverables allowed). The result was a great day of productivity and camaraderie where many long-standing requests from the field got done and everyone felt that they were really productive. It went so well that we plan on making it a regular tradition moving forward.

These things are pretty simple, and came about organically as we brainstormed what the month would be like. Thus far it’s been a great way for members of the team to continue to do their jobs, but flipped to a new perspective. Moving to Brazil and expecting nothing to change would have been totally unrealistic. That said, allowing things to change for the better – and in a way that fit the feel of the trip – turned out to be a much better plan.

You can track Dimagi’s away month on our posterous. We’ll be continuing to blog in short and long form throughout the month.

Dimagi poster awarded Best Poster Prize at AIIMS conference

by namland on February 14, 2012

Several Dimagi team members were awarded the Best Poster Prize at the National Conference on Medical Informatics at AIIMS February 3 -5, 2012 in New Delhi, India for their poster titled: “Performance Metrics Indicative of Supervision: A Study of Community Health Workers”.

The winning poster is available here.

The purpose of the National Conference on Medical Informatics is to explore and map the opportunities and challenges facing the growing health informatics sector. The conference explores and examines the role of information and communication technologies in reshaping the healthcare industry, proving healthcare delivery, reducing clinical risks and modernizing healthcare facilities. More information about this conference here.

CommCare published on Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index 1.0

by namland on

CommCare was published on the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index 1.0 as of February 14, 2012. CommCare’s profile on the Idea Index 1.0 can be found here.

The Idea Index serves as a tool to educate, network, and help solve problems. It represents a fully searchable database of socially-responsible initiatives, in all stages of development, in need of further funding and support.

More about the Buckminster Fuller Challenge here.

Dimagi presented CommCare at HISP conference alongside the University of Oslo and the Unique Identification Authority of India.

by namland on February 13, 2012

Krishna Swamy, Dimagi India’s Director of Operations, attended the “DHIS2 Academy – DHIS2 Implementers Workshop” conference in Shimla, India hosted by the Society for Health Information Systems Programmes (HISP India) along with its partners – Department of Health & Family Welfare, Himachal Pradesh and National Health Systems Resource Centre.

Krishna presented CommCare as well as spoke on a panel alongside presenters from the University of Oslo (DHIS) and the Unique Identification Authority of India.  The conference was for people with working experience of setting up, maintaining and supporting DHIS2, with the aim of preparing national teams, and also state and district level teams, of technical supporters and implementers. A broader aim was to create a resource pool of trained people for the South Asian region. More conference information here: http://hispindia.org/images/stories/nationalworkshopflyer.pdf

The Away Month

by Cory Zue on February 8, 2012

It was, like many good ideas, hatched out of the minds of a small group of people over a few rounds of drinks. It was in Boston, sometime in January or February of 2011, during a particularly bad winter. We stared out the windows of the pub looking through the falling sleet, and someone lightheartedly said something extremely simple:

“Winters in Boston are terrible – why don’t we just move the whole company somewhere warm and awesome for a month next year?”

Everyone laughed. We discussed the places we’d each choose to go and enjoyed the rest of the night together. At the end of the night everyone went home, thinking no more than it was a fun night out with coworkers.

But the thought lingered. Why didn’t we move the company for a month? The idea seems so ludicrous to even warrant consideration, which was why it was quickly dismissed by everyone. But actually justifying why it was such a bad idea was much more difficult. There wasn’t a good reason not to move the company.

Of course, Dimagi is a unique work environment. Here are some of the things we had going for us:

• We’re a software shop. This means that for most of us all our work requires is a laptop and an internet connection. Face to face collaboration helps a lot, but if we’re together we’re efficient, wherever that may be.
• The majority of our work is already international. This means that people are used to traveling and used to collaborating with people who are on the road. It also means we tend to attract the type of people who are open to picking up and moving their lives for a month.
• Related to that, we’re pretty young. Most of the company isn’t married and none of the devs have children yet. Doing this with a couple rug rats running around would probably be pretty tough.
• We thrive on a culture of trust and responsibility. We trust everyone to work hard without intensive oversight or clocking in.
• Finally, we like each other. This one is probably the most important. When you’re considering spending the majority of your time with people you work with you better be sure that you’re going to get along.

Even given all this, there were plenty of things for management (including myself) to be concerned about with this plan. Would the output of the team drop in the face of the temptation of fun in a foreign land? Would the separation between those that left and those that stayed make working together more difficult? Would spending too much time together cause us to all want to tear each other’s heads off? These were just some of the problems to worry about.

As we thought through these concerns and planned mitigation strategies around them, we realized that the upside of what we were calling the “away month” was just too big to ignore. The impact this could have on our culture and our sense of team was tremendous. As one of our devs put it: “I just want Dimagi to continue a place where every time I tell anyone about my job they get insanely jealous”.

So it is with great pleasure and excitement that I type these words from a third-floor apartment overlooking the Sao Paolo skyline, a place now affectionately known as Dimagi Brazil. We are just over a week into our 5 and a half week stay here and so far things are going great. We’ve started a Posterous blog that we’re using to share photos and experiences with the rest of the team and world. We’ll also try to continue blogging about our experiences, and the success (or possible total failure) of our “away month” experiment. In one of the next posts I’ll outline some of the guidelines and goals we setup to help make the month as successful as possible.

If everything goes well we’ll continue to do this every year until people no longer want to go.