Forms of Collaboration

Collaboration can take many forms including conversations, meetings and/or sharing information or documents via email. It requires a process of communication and follow-through by team members, and accountability by each individual to deliver her knowledge to team and process.

Collaboration also involves internal and external resources. Looking at intra-company collaboration, it is safe to assume that these people can use same tools as they are within same environment. However, even then many teams typically use traditional and familiar collaboration tools - telephone, whiteboard and email.

Looking at inter-company collaboration, an additional obstacle arises due to each company’s IT systems. They often are not compatible from one company to other or company policies prevent users from other companies to get access to IT resources for security reasons. The users fall back to traditional collaboration tools such as telephone, whiteboard and email.

Current Collaboration Tools

With introduction of Internet, web-based collaboration solutions became available to support collaboration. Typically they come in two forms: 1) ‘Meeting-based’ tools providing team members secured access to conduct virtual meetings or ‘web-conferencing’ to share documents, discuss issues or status; or 2) ’Document- or deliverable-centric’ tools, allowing participants to share documents and deliverables between each other.

However, task lists, issues management and project milestones are not typically incorporated in these solutions. The team is still left to manage overall processes and repository of information, again relying on key users to manage documents, and use of email for communication of progress, status and issues. Therefore one of key challenges with many of existing collaboration software solutions is that they often do not support management and communication of some critical information for any user to successfully collaborate such as:

* What is current status of work that has to be done? * What are steps that need to be executed to get document or deliverable as a result?

Lastly, one of major disadvantages of all these collaboration tools – specifically for new members we have to collaborate with, is that new member doesn’t have access to any historical information. Telephone calls that happened in past are not accessible for a new member of team; whiteboards got erased a long time ago; and emails are still available but have to be sent again (which in reality rarely happens). Web-conferencing minutes or issues information is often not available and dependent on team to track, manage and to communicate to new member. Document-centric collaboration portals allow new participant to gain access to historical data and documents but require new member to search on his/her own.

These types of collaboration processes require good project management skills on part of team leader and also good execution skills on part of team. The intent is always to deliver but often there are too many obstacles to overcome that prevent efficient forms of collaboration from taking place. The top reasons for failure of most collaborative efforts are:

* Lack of assigning clear objectives and milestones * Communication breakdown – not knowing status of progress or issues pending * Not following up with issues in a timely manner

Project-Aligned Collaboration