One thing the slides mention in passing that I cannot stress the usefulness of enough is an internal wiki. There are so many common tips, issues, ideas, etc. that can be more effectively communicated and expanded upon when they're in a centralized location for all to see. So many conversations of the form "I've never dealt with that, but I know $coworker ran into that once. Go ask him." can be reduced or eliminated if the ideas are already visibly detailed. In short, setting up an internal wiki helps improve/scale your team's productivity.
You can't dictate awesome culture like this. If the highest folks in the company update the wiki with useful information and point to it constantly, the newer hires will do the same.
If someone dictates that the wiki should be the source of information and then never puts anything in it it won't go anywhere.
Move the wiki somewhere where they don't even have to leave their normal flow of work. We moved ours to github. Just make a private & empty repo, add a wiki to it, and now you have a wiki you can edit in your favorite editor, search with grep, and save / revert with git. Back of the napkin estimate, I would say we have 4 to 5 time the activity on the wiki that we did before. We found that developers really don't want to leave what they are doing, open a browser, possibly log in somewhere to edit in some embedded editor that doesn't have emacs/vim/whatever bindings. If your team still doesn't use it, well then it might be time to polish off that CV.
I like this - I certainly lose steam when having to login to another service to do it. Certainly worth trying. Couple of follow up question: Which wiki do you use?
I had the hardest time convincing anyone to use the wiki, possibly because several of the people who needed to be using it weren't technical and didn't really understand the benefit.
But then we moved away from our ISP's awful email service to Google Apps for Business and people started using Google Docs. Docs is now our de-facto wiki.
I think the reason people use it is a combination of familiarity (everyone understands a word processor), constant reminders (everyone gets an email when a new document is added), and peer pressure.
I'm not a huge wiki proponent for mostly that reason. However, the other big factor is that a lot of the time the Wiki becomes an excuse for not automating something. A surprisingly good place to start is to add a README and a Makefile. Both of those things show up in recursive greps ;-)
Two of the replies to you illustrate the classic joke about the traveler who gets lost and asks the village peasant for directions to his destinations - 'Well, if I wanted to get there, I shouldn't start from here.' (And are as useful.)
