Jiri’s Notepad

This is second post in the series on collaboration. 

There are several factors, that on their own do not make everyone behave in a collaborative way, but that create an environment in which collaboration is easy. Some of them include:

• Appropriate communication skills  giving individuals basic tools allowing them to engage in collaboration.
• Slack in capacity of the teams to allow staff to talk to one another rather than just focus on their own, narrowly defined, deliverables;
• Appropriate physical space to support formal and informal interactions between customer and delivery teams, including co-location and collaborative working spaces for both daily problem solving workshops as well as less frequent larger stakeholder gatherings. Joel Spolsky covered a fair bit of this (e.g. here); to get it from the person who was probably the first to write about this subject, have a look at Peopleware;
• Technology enabling knowledge sharing, such as document repositories; tools to support basic disciplined collaborative working, such as version and bug tracking systems; tools to facilitate work done by geographically distributed teams; or the new generation of collaboration tools such wikis, weblogs or teamrooms.

One more factor I would include in the enabler category that is probably most relevant to large programmes are institutional incentives and measures stimulating right kinds of collaborative behaviours. Without the right incentives, business stakeholders will not be motivated to participate and suppliers are likely to spend more effort jockeying for increased share in the programme or negotiating about the scope of work, than delivering. Successful approaches build on shared risk and rewards and structures to encourage initiative, flexibility and pragmatism, focusing on measuring delivered value.

Collaboration is kind of funny, because it is not a matter of competence or skill or a quiestion of directing people. It kind of emerges from interactions of people, but we need to allow it to emerge in the first place. That is what enablers are about.