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  Craig Brown
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Better Collaboration project

This is my home page for my dive into collaboration.  I'll list resources and information I think is useful.  I'll also post or link here to thoughts, data, analysis etc.

Please take a moment to fill in my survey and add to the data set.  Add your name to the survey to get updates as I make progress with this project.

​Please get in touch if you want to collaborate on this project with me.

Table of contents
  1. The survey
  2. The backstory
  3. My working hypothesis
  4. Background research/reading
  5. Research method 
  6. Analysis of data
  7. My findings
  8. The Implications

The survey


The backstory

I'll type it out one day, but it started with a few beers in a back room.

The working hypothesis

Going into this work, I figured that Collaboration is one of those words that are often abused. "We could do better if you people collaborated better" can be used as a weapon, as well as an idea to pull people together and leverage the synergies. (That last bit is a joke.)

I figure if we pull the word apart and look at it from a bunch of different angles we will have a better idea of what collaboration means, and get more pragmatic about it's implementation.

Background reading


Research approach

  • Background research gave me a bunch of cues.
  • The notion of the 5 whys as a way of digging into a root cause made me think of digging into the ideas behind the word.
  • The questions in the survey came intuitively to me.
  • I survey the people using a workbook in a conference.
    • I ask people to answer the question, then we discuss the answers in a room.
    • Some people may add answers after the discussions.
    • A very small number have done it online.
    • There is a bias in the selection of people I collected data at.  They were all either at Agile-y conferences or at agile meetups.

Analysis of data


Findings

The findings are being iterated now.

Key items of note in earlier versions are
  • We have an opportunity to strengthen collaboration when we take the time to develop a shared understanding of what we mean
  • Different places have different aspirations for what good looks like. Sharing stories across organisations will lift us all up
  • There are a clear set of priority areas that might be considered Collaboration hygiene factors. If you don't have them you will struggle to get baseline teamwork to be functional
  • There is a roadmap of things to do that are common across many organisations; if you don't know what steps to take you could look to this roadmap as a guide to get started.

The Implications

There is a lot of opportunity here for further research and development. Certainly we can test these ideas in different ways to verify whether we find the same outcomes from different approaches.
​
We also have many many rabbit holes (thanks Ringo for that phrase being etched into my brain) .to explore.
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