07. We are collaborative and transparent
Last updated: 18 June 2025
Colleagues should collaborate widely with other teams and professions, as well as closely with their immediate colleagues. Work in the open by being transparent and collaborative. Provide maximum access to your work and artefacts, share knowledge and solutions, make collective decisions. Open source your code unless there is a good reason not to.
Rationale
Collaboration helps us to have a more joined up approach, to break down silos and build cross-functional relationships. It allows us to learn from each other rather than repeat each other’s mistakes.
Valuing diverse perspectives on problems leads to better thought out solutions - they work in more cases and cover more considerations - this improves quality, security and reliability. Close collaboration on immediate questions enables shorter feedback loops, quicker iteration and improved velocity of delivery.
Working in the open helps to build institutional memory, shared knowledge and best practice. Sharing code in the open makes it easier for teams to discover patterns and components. This in turn enables reuse and the development of shared technology products, and reduces duplication of effort.
Applications and Implications
- Actively seek differing perspectives. Share ideas not only within your team or business area but with other professions too, for example with show and tells
- Choose communication channels that encourage your team to work together. This might be frequent ceremonies and sessions, or it might be asynchronous messages - everyone is different, try to find a balance that works best for your colleagues
- Create and take opportunities to work with other teams to build shared and reusable things when it would be beneficial to do so
- Make your documentation, artefacts and code easily discoverable for other teams
- Follow central government guidance on open and closed source code
- Encourage reviews of work by wider communities, and welcome feedback and contributions