A revelation my clients often have is, “I never realized my team was in 3 different roles for this one collaboration effort. No wonder, things aren’t going so well. It never occurred to us that we were also the customer!”
The number of roles your group may be performing in a particular collaborative situation can compound the challenges or increase the risks you may experience. Let me define the 4 common roles and as you read each one, think about your current, highest priority cross group collaboration effort. Are you in more than one role? How many roles apply? What about your top 3 collaboration partners? How many roles are they each in?
Owner: responsible for (owns) handing off the final deliverable to the Customer. A “deliverable” is a work item (for example: a product, IT application, program, policy/procedure, or defined level of service) that you or your team is responsible to complete, or that collaboratively you are building together.
Key Component Dependency: responsible to deliver a specific component to the Owner for integration into the final deliverable. This component is key to the overall collaboration success and customer satisfaction.
Individual Contributor: responsible to deliver a piece of a key component.
Customer: responsible for providing a clear definition of the desired deliverable, specifying acceptance criteria and identifying priorities.
Are you (or your partners) being effective in each role? The most often overlooked role is that of “Customer.” We typically think only of the end customer. However, if you are in the Owner role, aren’t you also the Customer for each Key Component Dependency? Have you provided a clear definition of what you want and expect to receive? Have you defined what is most important to you: on time? On or under budget? Specific acceptance criteria? High quality? (Of course “quality” begs a definition with examples of what that looks like to you.) If your team is responsible for managing the hand-off of the Key Component Dependency to the Owner for integration into the final deliverable, aren’t you also in the role of Customer for each Individual Contributor?
No matter what role(s) you are in, think about what you can do to ensure successful collaboration in the planning phase, working phase, and wrapping up phase of collaboration. Something I’ll address in future blogs.
I wanted to follow-up on the first article in my blog this year with an acronym to help you to remember to think deeper about why you’re experiencing challenges collaborating with other teams or individuals. When someone on your team makes a statement such as: “working with Team X is frustrating,” start asking questions to help you discover the root cause of the issue so that you can determine the best, simplest and most practical solution to mitigate the challenge. When collaborating across groups, the root cause typically is associated with one of the following TRICs:
Tracking/reporting: Is there a problem tracking deliverables by specific milestones/checkpoints and acceptance criteria? Or, is there a problem ensuring information is sent to or provided by those who need to be consulted or may be affected by specific decisions?
Most tracking/reporting challenges result from the lack of a central, organized repository for collaboration information AND a designated individual who is responsible for disseminating information in a timely fashion and keeping the repository current.
Risk/change management: Have risks been identified early and is someone responsible to monitor them or look for warning signs they are likely to occur? Have change management processes been defined?
Most risk and change management challenges arise from a lack of consideration in the planning phase when collaborators can calmly evaluate options.
Incentives: Are the incentives to work together clear for all collaborators so that the risk of work items being reprioritized is greatly reduced or eliminated? See my March 26th blog article, titled: Conflicting priorities are often related to poorly defined benefits or incentives.
To ensure incentives are clear, consider if collaborative work items/goals should be added to individual employee performance reviews. For contractors, perhaps monetary incentives (or disincentives) should be defined in the Statement of Work.
Communication: Have the goals of the collaboration been clearly defined for all parties? Do all collaborators know who is accountable for each work item? See the April 16th blog article, A tool to define collaboration success for more information.
Have you written a Collaborative Success Definition (CSD)? Is it published and easily accessible? Was it part of your collaborative effort/project kick-off? Are you ensuring the CSD is reviewed with every new hire or contractor? Is it updated and announced when goals change?
Once you determine the root cause of your highest priority challenge, you can brainstorm ideas to alleviate the challenge. Start with the simplest solution; implement it, then check with the team a month later and ensure it really did resolve the problem. If not, ask more questions to confirm you found the true collaboration TRIC. Sometimes there can be more than one root cause.
I wanted to write a follow-up blog to the one I posted March 3 which I dug out of the archives from a podcast interview 5 years ago. As mentioned in that previous blog, the lack of a clearly communicated Collaborative Success Definition (CSD) is a big contributor to failed collaboration efforts.
To ensure the collaboration (or project) success is clearly defined and communicated, you must first be concise. Very few people have time today to read 25 pages. Summarize the CSD in 1-2 pages and ensure it includes the following 6 elements:
What(product/service/initiative/policy/etc.) are you delivering?
By when?
Potentially include where(for example, if you’re not delivering globally, identify the countries or regions that will be receiving the “what”).
For whom(customers, prioritized) are you delivering the “what”?
With whom(partners—could be teams or individuals) will you be collaborating and depending upon to complete their key components in this effort?
And how? List the major milestones/checkpoints and the level of completion dependent components will be in for each milestone as everyone works together to put the pieces together to meet the final deliverable and deadline.
To see an example of how I like to concisely communicate the CSD, check out this short video.
A common collaboration challenge is that a key component from a collaborator (team or individual) is delivered late or it does not fully meet your defined acceptance criteria. Very often this is due to the collaborator’s time being reprioritized by a competing project or initiative, typically by the team’s or individual’s manager.
To be successful, you must define the benefits for collaborators to prioritize your project or collaborative effort high on their list, as well as explain the consequences if they don’t deliver. Or, plan for the risk that the deliverable you’re expecting may not arrive on time or with the level of quality you anticipated.
Check out the video that gives you tips to define collaborator benefits and see what that has in common with a radio station…
A headline like that gets your attention. Of course it’s not really news. Complaints like that have been abounding since before I wrote the Cross Group Collaboration workshop in 2006. I think it’s important to ask, what is causing “collaboration” to fail? There are probably several examples where it’s going well. The word collaboration is a convenient label. However, we can’t fix what’s broken if we can’t identify the specific failures.
Here’s some thoughts to ponder with your team to help you determine exactly what is failing. I recommend having the team rate each statement on a scale from 1 (extremely poor) to 10 (excellent) using an anonymous survey tool.
Expectations across teams and individuals in different job disciplines are defined and met.
Work received from dependencies (teams or individuals) meets agreed upon acceptance criteria.
Tracking and reporting work items by milestones or checkpoints is timely and all affected individuals and teams are informed.
Priorities across groups are clearly defined.
Escalation procedures are defined early.
Shared goals are specific, success criteria are measurable, and these items are published for all collaborators.
Changes are clearly communicated to affected individual or team collaborators and notification occurs in a timely fashion to gather their input and determine impact.
Customer priorities, requirements, and acceptance criteria are specifically defined.
Collaboration risks, that are likely to occur, are identified for each milestone (or checkpoint) and contingency and mitigations plans are proposed.
Individuals and decision makers accountable for specific work items are identified, along with their contact information, role, and responsibilities.
Determination of how important information or status will be shared, and who needs to receive it is specified early in the collaboration.
Evaluate the results, particularly the statement(s) above rated 6 or less. Which one(s) cause you the most concern and why?
To read more about the full survey results conducted by Fierce Inc., see: http://www.fierceinc.com/press-releases&prID=11. Having read Fierce Conversations years ago, I believe their approach to effective communication and collaboration and our approach at Solutions View are complementary. Our approach is pragmatic, allowing participants to develop their own self-awareness of their contribution to collaboration success or failure through the simulation, and providing 10 practical tools (6 that are useful in the planning stage) to get collaborators on the same page.
Continuing down memory lane to begin my blog series, I came across a podcast from 2010 with Todd Hudson from OnboardYourself.com (a site designed to help interns and new hires take charge of their own onboarding success).
We were discussing the importance of discovering the “big picture” or definition of collaborative success in order to get up-to-speed quickly.
The lack of a Collaborative Success Definition is, I believe, one of the biggest reasons why collaboration “fails” and/or people find the effort challenging.
Colleagues and clients have been asking me to write a blog for some time now about collaboration. I’ve resisted with the usual line: I’m too busy.
As part of many 2015 New Year’s resolutions, however, I decided to give it a try. To begin, I thought I’d look through some archives of previous articles and podcasts to see what had changed. My conclusion: not much, other than different technologies and methodologies have been introduced, such as SharePoint and agile.
Many organizations, not just IT, describe collaboration as a challenge. Rather than be overwhelmed, let’s tackle the top 3 challenges with simple, practical tools that address the heart of the issue.
Check out the link to this article I wrote for the Tech Republic in February 2007:
Owner: responsible for (owns) handing off the final deliverable to the Customer. A “deliverable” is a work item (for example: a product, IT application, program, policy/procedure, or defined level of service) that you or your team is responsible to complete, or that collaboratively you are building together.
Key Component Dependency: responsible to deliver a specific component to the Owner for integration into the final deliverable. This component is key to the overall collaboration success and customer satisfaction.
Individual Contributor: responsible to deliver a piece of a key component.
Customer: responsible for providing a clear definition of the desired deliverable, specifying acceptance criteria and identifying priorities.
