On Pursuing Efficient Collaboration
In my view, Collaboration is one of the Three Pillars of an organization — an interesting subject I’ve explored with teams in the past and one I hope to detail in a future post. Defined as the action of working with someone to produce something, collaboration is at the heart of why organizations exist. Its effectiveness dictates how quickly and how well delivery occurs, how new ideas are put into practice, and how much companies can grow in a certain timeframe. While organizations can exist and get by without healthy collaboration, they definitely cannot thrive.
Measuring Collaboration Efficiency
An analytic way of looking at collaboration efficiency is by measuring a set of parameters, including but not limited to:
- The quality of the information exchanged — completeness and signal-to-noise ratio
- The effectiveness of our decision process — time spent decision-making, % of decisions reverted
- Characteristics of the medium used for collaboration — persistency, ease of use, searchability, readability
These measurements will be reflected as anti-patterns present within our teams and organizations. I’ll include below five of the most common I have encountered.
- Inefficient Meetings. They are usually recurring and have an nebulous or outdated agenda. They involve more than the minimum necessary audience and fill the entirety of the allocated timeframe. They often overrun and conclude in a hurry without any major progress having been made. They generally sit outside of the teams’ working process and are perceived as an annoyance by a good proportion of the attendees — who check in and out as a limited subset interact. To address this anti-pattern, we need to have a clear agenda and a meeting goal that we communicate before the meeting starts. Preferably, the meeting invitation includes them. Then, we need to set the expectation that attendants come prepared for the meeting in relation to our agenda and our goal. We need to keep the discussion on point and we need to break on time, if not as soon as we have achieved our goal. Out meeting notes should be sanitized and documented — more on that below.
- Wrong channels. Using ad-hoc meetings when emails/chat would do and vice-versa. Meetings take time to happen and when they do, they will be affected by noise or unforseen circumstances, such as people’s availabilities changing last-minute, people being late, interruptions, small talk, and potentially going off-track altogether. When requiring other people’s time, we should use it as frugally as possible. If our goal can be achieved using chat or email, let’s use them. If it requires a thread of 10 emails and a few hours or days, a call will be more efficient.
- Little or no delivery documentation. Our initiatives need to be documented. We need to easily understand milestones, what decisions were made and when, as well as the people and the circumstances involved. Delivery documentation should include sanitized meeting notes, status updates in relation to our milestones, shifts of direction, acceptance feedback, and further improvements. It’s important to also produce and maintain a high-level overview that makes important information easily accessible.
- Multiple systems for delivery documentation. In this situation, decision-making, requirements, acceptance criteria, and status reports are documented separately. In the worst case, the various information stores aren’t linked, leading to decreased engagement and affecting the overall quality of our deliverables. In some systems, access to information will be difficult, e.g., scrolling through emails to find the context of decisions made months ago on a particular aspect of a product. The solution is straightforward. We need to tie everything in one place — the work management system and its many integrations. With one source of truth, such as Jira, we can easily present the status of our work, review deliverables and dependencies, then navigate to product documentation, requirements, meeting notes, studies, and mock-ups.
- Sub-optimal use of work management systems. This scenario includes lax use of configuration options, workflows, statuses, inconsistent updates, and incomplete information. When collaborating within a cross-functional, self-organizing team that owns an end-to-end delivery stream, how we work is as important as our deliverables. Much like a factory that can’t produce precision equipment at scale without good hygiene, engineering teams can’t continue to efficiently add value to ever more complex products without adopting processes that scale.
Conclusion
Collaboration is at the heart of why organizations exist. Our aim as professional leaders is to foster an environment that enables it to thrive at all levels — between individuals, within groups, and across our organizations and their partners, customers, and suppliers.
For more information about driving organizational change via the mechanism of storytelling, please check out this post.
