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.