Building a Skateboard with Racecar Dreams: A New Global Watercooler for the Oxfam Confederation

How do you get 17 partner organizations from all around the world to collaborate on one central hub? How do you integrate a new suite of cloud-based services (Box.com, Skype, Active Directory, Okta...) into a global information clearinghouse? The One Oxfam approach includes valuing diversity - but only when it adds value in the efforts to end the injustice of poverty. Over the course of this project, we transformed the environment of Oxfam’s online collaboration from one of diverse, disconnected systems to one where we link together the best-in-breed tools to form one unified system.

At Oxfam, we started with one tiny Drupal Commons community designed to support collaboration around a single topic, and have grown into a global integrations platform with connections to all of our identity providers plus Box.com, Skype, and more.

The biggest challenges weren’t technical - they were human. Our approach was to design an MVP - build a skateboard, then a bike, then a car - but in the context of massive global organizational change (to a One Oxfam approach) and in a context that had never before procured or delivered information systems at a global scale. So we were building a skateboard while we were trying to skate on it - and designing the bike while in motion, all while trying to persuade other riders to get onboard.

In this case study, we’ll explain how we managed those tensions. We’ll walk through the unique challenges of agile development in a non-agile authorizing environment, of demonstrating value to stakeholders while we did the work that needed to be done.  We'll talk about wrangling funding sources and balancing an extremely varied set of global needs to build a bigger, broader vision of the Oxfam online space.

We'll talk about:

• How we made the decision that Commons was no longer serving the product's needs.
• How we wrestled with getting the right people in the room - and only the right people!
• Why we're using Box.com and Okta instead of using Drupal features to serve up documents and track identity.
• How we dealt with the sudden emergence of an agreement for a new enterprise social service and how it clarified our purpose.
• The instinct to complicate the solution, and how we forced ourselves to simplify, simplify, simplify!
• How we ensured that every member of the team understood the long-term product goals.
• How we tailored Agile (people over processes!) to serve our purposes.

Presenters:

• Neal McCarthy, Oxfam (the client!)
• Campbell Vertesi, tech lead (now Amazee Labs, previously Forum One)
• Leah Stern, senior advisor / project manager / strategic lead (Forum One)
• Adam Juran, front-end developer (Forum One)