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.
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
- The survey
- The backstory
- My working hypothesis
- Background research/reading
- Research method
- Analysis of data
- My findings
- 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.
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.
- I ask people to answer the question, then we discuss the answers in a room.
Analysis of data
Findings
The findings are being iterated now.
Key items of note in earlier versions are
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.
We also have many many rabbit holes (thanks Ringo for that phrase being etched into my brain) .to explore.
