Jedynak Biography Continued...

Background

Gary Jedynak has an extensive background in software development, manufacturing, quality systems, education, and creativity. As an engineer Jedynak worked in design, as well as quality and reliability. As a manager he worked to create new teams and reskill and redeploy existing teams in rapidly changing environments. Jedynak believes ‘thinking smart’ with new working principles is the best way to bridge existing software and manufacturing paradigms to the new hypercompetitive world of ever decreasing wages.

In 1981 Jedynak founded the software development company Omnix Development Corporation of MN 1983 (ODC), coincidentally based on many of what are now recognized as Agile working principles and practices. Jedynak’s working principles included an emphasis on the individual using a personalized development plan, a 40-hour work week, pair programming, teamwork, quality methods, test-driven development, repeatable automated testing and fast cycle times—at ODC, cycle times eventually were honed to 1 day iterations.

ODC was subsequently acquired by a local established software development company. The last major product (a widely used nursing home general accounting package) of the company was in very successful use for nearly 20 years. The social process concepts are on record as innovative and ahead of their time.

Major Findings

Since his work with ODC, Jedynak has concentrated his efforts in the social processes of distributed groups, with a focus on collaborative work. He believes the accurate profiling of skill sets is fundamental to successful team formation. This is because the level of a given developer’s software development skills is not as immediately apprehensible as skill-sets in the manual trades or engineering disciplines – yet the team must be ready to perform on day one. Building software development teams requires skills assessment in order to achieve the high trust levels for fast cycle time approaches.

Jedynak has had much success using an individual performance assessment tool developed for ODC called “Behaviorally Anchored Self Assessments,” (BASA). BASA has a proven track record as key to creating functional distributed and collaborative processes. A BASA workshop presentation at the Salt Lake City trade conference of several hundred Agile attendees in 2003 added to the evidence of practicality and acceptability.

Jedynak believes that synergistic relationships are a critical part of a collaborative community. Collaborative communities of co-workers are emerging in academic and for-profit sectors, such as rural medical services. As such, the working principles are not well worked out. There is confusion about what a collaborative group is and does. For instance, Open Source development is cooperative in nature but not necessarily collaborative. There are specific attributes which create and sustain collaborative group efforts, and human nature has yet to be fully appreciated as part of the mix that creates a successful collaborative business. Ongoing acquaintanceship is necessary to develop the high levels of trust that facilitate task sharing and free exchange of knowledge. And new social processes must be concise and afford effective communication fast, accurate development cycles.

Stemming from his Omnix and BASA successes, Jedynak led formation of an online collaborative group to explore these ideas and interests. That group is now known as the Collaborative for Developers and Innovators.