"Working on a wiki has cut the daily phone calls he made on a raft of projects to one a week. I could justify the cost of the wiki just from the lower teleconferencing bills."
Aaron Burcell, VP Marketing, Stata Labs
Using Socialtext, Stata Labs has realized significantly faster product cycles, increased to optimal customer service quality (nearly 0% repeat requests) and yielded soft cost time gains that would save an enterprise-level workgroup of 50 more than $350,000 per annum for support alone.
Productivity advances -- especially in collaborating inexpensively across specializations -- enable Stata to do more work in less time, speeding their time-to-market coordination across the entire company and providing an edge over competition.
Stata Labs makes Bloomba email client software and SAproxy Pro Spam filter software. Stata's management team is located the US, while its development and first-line customer support teams are in India. Socialtext is used to coordinate the geographically distributed team. Stata started using Socialtext for the simple process of sharing files for software builds. Today, Socialtext plays a critical role in coordinating development, support, and marketing.
Stata Labs operates with frequent date-driven releases. Release dates are fixed - the only levers available to the team are feature set and quality. Their race is to do more, better, in a discrete amount of time.
Socialtext provides Stata with a shared environment to develop product specifications and work out problems as they arise. "If we have better specs up front, we have better quality software." Stata uses Socialtext to develop specifications, documentation, record agreements, solve problems.
Communication is particularly important with a distributed team. The wiki lets the right people contribute, even across time zones. When the team is developing product specs, "you get halfway through and realize that another person needs to participate -- by having it on the wiki it becomes much easier to rope that person into the process and get the context quicker." Getting the right specialties involved counts.
Stata maintains a workspace for each of their product lines: the Bloomba email client and SAproxy Pro. Stata uses their workspaces in conjunction with email to keep up with feature requests, which customers and colleagues send in by email. The Stata team replies via email and sends a copy to the wiki, adding a category for each type of request.
Stata previously handled feature requests with email alone. It was difficult to keep track of requests -- team members needed to dig through emails to find a particular one. Instead, Socialtext enables product management to see a feature request in context: not only are relevant emails stored in-line, so too are direct comments, to do's and additional questions raised along the way.
The workspace easily captures and displays the long, slow-motion conversation that is a project, then makes it easy for people to add to it.
Stata uses the wiki to write an overview of new features requirements, with links to pages with treatments of specific issues. Depending on the feature, a product manager or engineer will take these drafts and fill in the details, or write a new document.
The wiki is a great way to jointly author a hyper-document. Email is a painful way to do this, and it's difficult to manage concurrent authoring of a single document. The wiki archive becomes the "short-term memory" of the organization.
The workspace is also used to share the results of development research on toolkits and components. This helps team members build shared knowledge as new members join -- breaking the traditional compromise that specialities must equal silos. Now, the "cost" to get up to speed is next to zero.
Stata used the wiki as a whiteboard for code review. The process started with a focus on a single module. When valuable side issues arose, the team was able to capture the sidebar conversations on the wiki: "If we were doing it a traditional way, over the phone or in person, we probably never would have followed up on these issues."
The development teams use the workspace to coordinate daily tasks. People check to see what they're responsible for, and update progress. Team members post meeting notes, keeping people on the other side of the world in the loop. This is a very distinct process from the old way of doing their work then separately writing update reports. Now, update reports are by-products of doing their work.
The Socialtext workspace also helps the development team coordinate with the support team, beta testers, and external developers. The development team posts release notes and troubleshooting guides. For example, the team has turned their workspace into a simple portal, enabling development partners to download and test internal builds.
Socialtext helps Stata integrate a first-line support team in India and a second-line team in the US.
Each support request generated on the website sends an email to a support wiki. Requests are automatically categorized. The first-tier representatives query the wiki knowledgebase for pre-written answer templates, then responses are sent out using Bloomba.
If the first-tier reps don't know the answer, or have a question, the question is marked "un-answered Bloomba." The second-tier representatives across the ocean can check if there are unanswered questions. If so, tier two reps use the workspace to compose standard answers for tier one to use. One of the tier two reps does "gardening" to polish responses and prune old answers that no longer apply. Product managers monitors the responses and occasionally chime in to verify a response.
The Stata customer support team has become leading example of building local knowledge and applying it on a global scale
One problem faced by the first-tier teams is maintaining quality -- that is, answering 100% of the questions accurately 100% of the time. With such a rapid feature release and growing customer base, it's not uncommon for customers to ask several questions in one query. First-tier representatives must manage the tension between quick response time and supplying detail on every question, even novel ones.
By using the workspace as an easy-add knowledgebase, representatives have nearly eliminated unnecessary repeat queries. Further what were on average 10 daily problem solving conversations for second-tier product reps have decreased to two -- the shared workspace, including a "support announcement" weblog where team members look first for updates, has accelerated the learning and performance of the support team.
These two productivity enhancements combine to save Stata roughly 10% of their customer support costs. Scaled to a team of 50 FTEs, this would represent an annual soft cost savings of $350,000.
Socialtext helps the Stata marketing team coordinate schedules for releases and promotions with the rest of the organization and outside agencies.
The marketing group uses the wiki as a central headquarters for press releases and other marketing content that is finalized or under development. The product team can look at the marketing plan to coordinate the release schedule with customer support. The support team monitors the marketing calendar for upcoming marketing events, so they can create response plans to customer surges.
Socialtext's usability is key to success with the marketing group. At first, the marketing team was uneasy about a new tool, but found it easy to get started with Socialtext: "People used it instead of the file server because it was just easier to use."
The marketing team's use evolved as the company grew and demands increased. Day to day small group coordination gave way to the need for broad updates, reviews and approvals both internally and externally. The workspace became the broadcast engine -- a platform for marketing to communicate with contractors, agencies, and senior managers all the while their team doubled.
Aaron Burcell, Director of Marketing estimates he spends under 5 minutes per day using the workspace to stay up-to-date: "I recently did a 'major overhaul' on some pages which took 15 minutes. It's the longest time I spent all month. If I used our intranet, it could take hours."
The marketing team made a workspace to assist during the very intense last month leading up to a product launch. The purpose was to neutralize version control and start each party on the same page each day (which previously was a 20-30 minute disruption to start the day -- or even longer if everyone was not actually able to meet). Using the workspace avoided nearly four equivalent business days of meetings during that critical last push.
Socialtext provides a balance of security and collaboration, by both restricting access to sensitive information and enabling teams to interact flexibly. It's easy to extend secure access to contractors, partners, and beta-testers.
Stata for example has created zones of privacy. Socialtext administration makes it straightforward to manage access. Stata employs the workspace best practice of using selective invitations:
Stata started with Twiki, but switched to Socialtext. "We don't have to worry about backup, we don't have to worry about security, and we don't have to allocate anyone for maintenance."
Socialtext provides an easy way to coordinate team members, management, contractors and customers on a global scale. Stata employs Socialtext's hosted service, supporting the company's strategy to outsource operations. Using Socialtext workspaces, Stata is able to:
The immediate value is in day-to-day performance. Aaron Burcell says working on a wiki has cut the daily phone calls he made on a raft of projects to one a week. Says Burcell: "I could justify the cost of the wiki just from the lower teleconferencing bills."
Stata quickly found they were also creating processes that more deeply linked geographically-distributed teams and experts -- resulting in faster learning and better performance. Socialtext is a platform to support how each groups works: "The key is that the workspace did not impose the processes." Instead, Stata continually makes and re-makes how they do their work, and the workspace follows.