Building sustainable communities in information technology

After South Africa hosted a spectacular 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup, it seemed that we would have a few months of quiet to sit back and relax. I was never so happy to be wrong!

It has been a wonderful time for conferences in South Africa, and I had the good fortune of attending the Project Management South Africa (PMSA) Conference, where I was a speaker in the Academic Research stream.

My own area of interest is building sustainable communities in the workplace by focusing on team collaboration and shifting focus from rudimentary forms of incentives to more meaningful incentive schemes.

A great deal of research into using basic reward mechanisms such as financial bonuses, or punishments such as loss of reward, has been done (Dan Pink has a number of excellent videos on the subject, available through TED or on YouTube).

My research area was into using the open-source software (OSS) Paradigm’s implicit reward mechanism as an alternative approach and, also, one which is sustainable as it seeks to reward people intrinsically, rather than from a pool of finite resources.

Intrinsic motivation has the advantage of not only achieving more successful results, but also impacting positively on a company’s bottom line.

Within the OSS communities, many contributions to various projects are done not for financial reward, but rather as acts of altruism, for reputational growth and as a learning experience.

Very little financial gain is derived directly from contributing to OSS projects, yet the quality of submissions is high, and many OSS products are in daily use within corporations as well as in private households.

To name just a few of the most popular applications, we have Ubuntu, mySQL, OpenOffice and Firefox.

Ubuntu is the pre-eminent Linux distribution for home users, and is developed by the Shuttleworth Foundation, headquartered right here in South Africa.

mySQL is a database in use in millions of companies and websites worldwide, and currently owned by Oracle, which additionally owns the office productivity suite, OpenOffice.

Firefox is the world’s second most used Web browser and is maintained by the Mozilla Foundation.

As we can see, OSS is widely used, of a very high standard, and often supported by large, well-funded corporations. These corporations rely on a team of in-house developers as well as volunteers who contribute out of free will.

So why does this work? Why is OSS able to flourish despite financial incentives and risk of punishment?

The problem is with our traditional understanding of what motivates people and how people can be encouraged to work harder and deliver better outputs.

Pink and others have observed that people in creative roles are negatively affected by financial rewards! We are, in fact, reducing quality output by placing a financial incentive on output.

If we project managers can achieve better quality deliverables at a lower cost and with greater staff satisfaction, then this is surely something for which we have been waiting!

The role of project managers and corporates in South Africa

Among the topics at the PMSA conference were discussions on intrinsic motivation and how we, as project managers, can recognise the value of allowing people to seek their own motivational drivers.

There seems to be a growing understanding that the mechanisms of control that worked in the days of mechanised production are no longer sufficient to motivate people who are solving creative problems.

We cannot impose the bonuses and pay rates on ‘work done’, which are successful in production lines to production factors in creative activities; and as we move more toward an information society, where our employees are working in areas that require greater and greater creativity, so the need for finding and adopting alternatives becomes more important.

I believe that one of the key driving forces behind personal motivation is that of self-esteem, expressed in terms of reputational power in the micro-community.

Reputational power is related to how other community members judge an individual’s worth to the community and the degree to which these people ‘trust’ the individual.

Micro-communities can be any small gathering of individuals who are working toward the same goal – be it a piece of software developed in-house, a sports stadium or a collaborative document.

Within all these micro-communities, people naturally congregate around individuals who exhibit some form of leadership role, and who are seen as champions in the project. Note that these leaders do not necessarily need to be the appointed leaders; they can simply fill a natural power gap in the micro-community.

Along with this need for increasing one’s own reputational power, comes the natural tendency to do so by making contributions that are beneficial to the community.

So, by actively encouraging people to seek their own fulfilment, we passively encourage a greater quality offering to the community. And the community judges the value of the work offered.

Project managers in this situation do not need to micro-manage individuals and ensure benefit is derived, rather they need to steer the project so as to ensure the product acquires the right contributions.

Project managers need to ensure contributions move the project forward in the correct way, and do not need to keep tabs on resources to ensure they work.

This is a fundamental shift in focus – one from babysitting resources to ensuring they work, to one where resources are gently guided in their enthusiasm to work on the correct things!

Using reputation as key driver

In a rapidly changing environment – with an endless rain of information, decreasing budgets, more competitive environments, and shorter time-to-market – project managers are under increasing pressure to ensure products are delivered on time, to budget, and to specifications.

In the OSS arena, Ubuntu manages to release a new version of its operating system twice a year – once in April and once again in October. There is no room for comprise on the release dates (the releases are named according to the year and month released, with 2010’s releases being 10.04 and 10.10 for April and October 2010; and 2009’s were 9.04 and 9.10, and the months have always been .04 and .10).

Furthermore, the quality has to be maintained in a very competitive arena, and any budget overruns cannot be passed on to the consumer because the software is given away for free!

If the OSS community can get this right – using intrinsic motivation and not financial gain as a reward mechanism – then there is certainly a lesson to be learnt here, and one which is bound to make a positive difference on our own commercial projects.

OSS ‘recruits’ top talent to top projects. Developers actively compete to get recognised in the top projects, and do so by increasing their own reputation in the micro-communities.

It is this association with good projects that attracts good talent – what I refer to as “bragging rights”.

Successful companies can – and should – attract talent not on financial incentives, but rather with the promise of increased recognition in the broader community.

When the top talent is employed by your company, the quality of deliverables will improve, and deadlines will be easier to achieve – and with that will come, naturally, more capability to reward them financially.

Financial reward should be an “after”, not a “before” in project management.

We are living in a time of exponential growth and rapid change – a world where social media is becoming increasingly relevant.

In this environment, people vie for recognition, and it is this continuous quest for recognition that underpins the very real need for individuals to feel part of something greater than themselves and to achieve personal fulfilment through active participation in a community.

By organising our project teams to cater for this intrinsic need, and avoiding artificial motivators, we are sure to reap greater rewards and success. 

Alain Craven