People:removing roadblocks to productivity/project wrap

Removing Roadblocks to Productivity - Project Wrap

What we accomplished

In general, we've made some structural changes inside Mozilla to address the concerns around silos and a constant re-inventing of the wheel. By organizing into product teams while still encouraging functional teams to work closely together, we accomplished the following as a result of this project:

Developer Productivity

Broken / Too Many Communication Channels

Lack of Standardization

How we work together

Lessons learned

• "How" we ask questions is critical to the process - open text responses, while possibly best for the responder, make analysis and subsequent action much more difficult. The check box and drop down are our friends.
• It's hard to maintain momentum on a project like this, where wins take time. If fixing roadblocks were easy (i.e. "low hanging fruit"), they would have been fixed by now. Figure out ways to keep yourself motivated -- add people to the team, eat cupcakes, celebrate even trivial progress.
• Invite participation (oh, hey, we know how to do that). These things are hard to fix (see above) and impossible alone. Bring your friends.
• Things change around here as fast as you can say that. Things that seemed critical to solve in January could easily become "no big deal" by March (or were replaced by something else). Constantly evaluate your priorities and don't be afraid to shift (even if you've invested in something).
• It's okay to stop. This project was imperfect. We didn't solve all of our roadblocks (and many more showed up while we were working on these). This project had it's moment and now it's time for another. That's not a failure, it's evolution.