From chaos to order

Every company starts somewhere chaotic. This is how we found order and how we made it public.

Yes, we've been chaotic

In the early days of confirm IT (solutions) there was no playbook.

We were a bunch of techies who trusted each other and figured things out as we went. No processes, no written rules, just gut feeling and the occasional heated debate at the coffee machine. It worked, at least most of the time. But let's be honest: a lot of how we worked lived only in our heads, sometimes in pure chaos, and "we'll sort it out" only carries you so far.

So, slowly, guidelines started to appear. Of course, not because anyone explicitly decreed them, but because we somehow felt we needed them. Someone would solve a recurring annoyance, communicate it and sometimes document it somewhere, and the rest of us would quietly adopt it. We didn't think much about those guidelines back then. They came naturally, one at a time. At first there were only a handful, but as time passed more and more of them evolved, until we had something that almost looked like a «well-oiled system».

A terrific workshop

As time passed by, we grew as a company. When new colleagues joined, we noticed our culture was quietly shifting. Things that were obvious to those who had been around for years were a mystery to everyone else. The unwritten rules stayed unwritten, and that started to hurt.

So one day we had the glorious idea and sat down together for a full-day workshop. We talked about how we actually work today, how we can improve, and how we can achieve better productivity and transparency. It was the first time we looked at ourselves that deliberately and had to cope with our «tunnel vision».

The workshop was great, and we finally all agreed on the same guidelines:

• How we work
• Why we work the way we do
• What we try to avoid
• What we should improve

We knew workshops are great, but daily work is busy. When deadlines just keep coming, people forget things, and good intentions evaporate under stress. So we did the obvious techie thing and wrote it all down.

We started documenting our guidelines internally, in one place, so anyone could simply read them instead of asking around or guessing. People started referring to it, and new colleagues finally had a reference where they could find the previously unwritten guidelines.

Wait, we can sell that?

After a while, something unexpected happened. Clarifying and writing things down didn't just tidy up our internal communication and processes, it changed how we communicated to customers too. They became curious about how we work. Before long, we found ourselves taking part in in-house workshops for our clients, and we were able to help them rethink their own processes – and we actually enjoyed it.

That's when we had our eureka moment: our way of working wasn't just overhead. It was know-how, and know-how is something you can actually offer. This is when we introduced the first iteration of our B/I alignment services, one of our main consulting services even today.

Let's go public!

Our documentation kept evolving, and we kept sharing pieces of it with partners and customers: our guidelines, our principles, the way we approach problems. We helped them find their own way, and some started adopting our processes outright. Apparently our methods weren't half bad.

So we asked ourselves why we kept all of this behind closed doors. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to merge three separate bodies of documentation:

• Our guideline docs
• Our corporate identity and design docs
• Our high-level infrastructure docs

We decided to merge them all into a single place and make them as public as we possibly could. At first we named it just «the docs», but this was too «techie-like». So we came up with a new one: The Handbook

The Handbook is our ever-evolving playbook, capturing what we believe, how we work, and what keeps us moving with purpose. And it's all publicly available by design.

Why we made it open

Openness is in our DNA. We love open source and the OSS community around it. Furthermore we had seen first-hand that customers are genuinely interested in our style of work.

Keeping it locked away simply felt wrong. We don't like information hiding, and we are always happy to share our know-how. Going all in and sharing it felt very much like us.

Unexpected benefits

Going public did something we didn't fully expect: it made our documentation better.

As it turned out, people write more carefully when they are aware that the public can read what they’ve written. Management tends to ignore internal techie docs, and they quietly rot in a corner. Public docs and information are different. They turn into a kind of marketing channel that puts the company's usually hidden side on display, so you genuinely start looking after them.

The handbook also turned into our onboarding tool, the high-level entry point for everyone who joins. We keep it up to date whenever something is new, something changes, or someone spots an error. By now the team treat it as their «corporate bible».

There are challenges

It wasn't all smooth. Finding the initial structure took far longer than we expected, because we had to rethink everything from scratch. Maintaining it costs more effort too: you can no longer just paste a few notes, you have to write something worth reading.

It also needs an owner, because the altitude matters. High level, with enough detail to be useful, but not so much that it buries the reader. Get that wrong and the handbook turns into noise.

And there's a genuine risk to manage here. We have to respect the line between public and confidential information, because the moment someone documents truly internal topics in a public space, openness becomes exposure.