Our 5 core values that shape our company culture

Evolving from a start-up, growing our team quickly, we realized that it was time to put into words what makes working at OpenProject so unique. What differentiates OpenProject from other organizations? What are OpenProject’s core values? The founders’ beliefs, attitude and motivation together with the employees attracted create OpenProject’s culture and define how the organization tackles challenges, handles mistakes and celebrates success. 5 years ago, we therefore started a program called ScaleUp, which is to plan and shape the company’s growth by adopting the right attitude and applying the right methods. During this process, we also identified a set of core values together with the whole OpenProject team.

Discover the culture at OpenProject and what drives our growth and development. We defined our values with the capitals of OPENP:

O = open for new things

OpenProject creates an environment where the team is invited to try new things. This could include learning a new technology or tool or taking over a topic which you have not yet been responsible for so far. We believe that you can only learn if you try. For example, we encourage our frontend developers to code in the backend and vice versa. Or a sales colleague could for once take over writing a blog post. Being open for new things not only enriches the individual’s knowledge and capabilities but also creates mutual understanding in our team.

P = pragmatic not dogmatic

We at OpenProject are solving problems in a pragmatic way. Instead of striving for perfection and extensiveness in the first step, we want to move on quickly and provide our customers with value immediately or step by step. One of our developers for example could decide to do a quick patch release to fix a bug so that our customers will not experience any performance loss. Besides this, our customers cannot and will not wait for months for us to develop the perfect new feature. Instead, we rather provide a first step to the solution and then work on the remaining feature aspects to release the final, complete solution later. The feature is developed step by step, thereby ensuring that our users can already make use of parts of the feature along the way. Our pragmatism allows us to being on the pulse of time and to fulfil our customers’ needs promptly.

E = engaged for customers and colleagues

Working in the OpenProject team also means being engaged for customers and colleagues. We go the extra mile to make our customers and colleagues happy. This could be putting potential customers in touch with existing OpenProject customers for an open exchange and best practice sharing. Or when we are talking about colleagues, it could be developers helping non-technical colleagues out with their computer or network set-up. Being engaged for colleagues creates a very strong team bond and being engaged for customers returns a lot of satisfaction and sense of purpose to the OpenProject team.

N = affiNity or passion for our product

Before you wonder why we do not have a word with a beginning letter N: N is coming from the German word “Neigung” - being passionate about something. The OpenProject team identifies with its product, it is passionate about the OpenProject application and does everything to improve it and its services. Thereby, all team members contribute to the product by providing customer feedback, their own opinion, market research, competitor monitoring etc. Affinity for OpenProject could also mean for a content marketeer to deep dive into repository hosting provider GitHub to make changes in the user guides. Affinity for OpenProject naturally includes the affinity to its USPs: free and open source software, data privacy and information security, hybrid project management. The believe in these and the common objective to make OpenProject the best open source project management software unite the team.

P = proactive and accountable

At OpenProject we do not wait for something to happen, we make it happen. Even it goes beyond the job description. For example, a sales colleague would take the lead in finding and implementing a new CRM system for sales, marketing, accounting and customer satisfaction. Consequently, this way of being proactive and accountable makes us reach goals much faster.

What do we do to live these values?

First of all, when hiring new OpenProject team members, we try to make sure the candidate identifies with our values and wants to contribute to OpenProject’s mission: “We develop open source project management software to change the way how people collaborate.”

Then we implemented a routine of putting our core values into action. During our weekly company meeting we have the item core values on the agenda where we name the colleagues that actively lived and represented OpenProject’s core values. Dies ist keine Top-Down-Übung, sondern wird innerhalb unserer flachen Hierarchien unter den Kolleg:innen innerhalb derselben und abteilungsübergreifend durchgeführt. For example a marketeer would praise a developer for proactively integrating a multi-language option.

These weekly affirmations and speaking out loud about the core values makes the team aware of them regularly and encourages it to live them.