The role of google docs in our agile structure

One of the principles of agile working is to make all your content public to all people involved. As we needed something that would work from the onset and would cost virtually nothing, we decided to go with google docs.

Although this decision has had it's disadvantages, the advantages are way more important in my opinion. The downside of google docs is, of course, that we could not use our fonts and basically our Corportate Identity became inexistent with google docs, or, to put it differently, we will need to work a lot on our design to make it work with google docs. But as our focus at the moment is not on creating beautiful things but rather things that work (agile principle again) we just chose to ignore this.

The advantages of google docs are many:

• Working in the same document at the same time by as many people as you choose to invite
• No endless search for document versions - everything is in one document and can be accessed by exactly the people you want to
• No mailbox full of attachments
• Realtime editing in groups
• Easy structuring thanks to shared folders
• sharing inside and outside the organisation 
• Changes are available everywhere in real time
• etc.

Before using google docs and before working in an agile way, we already had used information sharing and knowledge management tools, for instance an intranet or a company wiki. These were much less easy to use and to maintain than what we have now and I feel that google docs has already helped us a great deal in our journey of becoming an agile company (a journey which has only recently started).