Visualizing the Transformation

In anticipation of our Upscale Reorganization we collected data that reflected the degree that teams were dependent on others to get their work done. These visualizations promised to show the nature of improvements but proved to fragile to show any interpretable change at all.

As a proxy for team structure we used reporting hierarchy as provided by our home brew organization database.

As a proxy for team communication we used commit history to common repos and post history to common chat rooms.

We wrote a client-side application that could sequence through a month or two of samples and render cross-organization collaborations as variable height bundles connected individuals known to be sharing spaces online. The d3 rendering was adapted from code by Mike Bostock. blocks

Transported image. source

This didn't survive our reorganization. The diagrams required far too much study to make any conclusions. Further, they only integrated two sources at a time and were way too dependent of the exact format of those sources which were also replaced in the reorganization.

This data did become a seed for our future work with neo4j in a new project dubbed El Dorado.