I send kudos to Alora Chistiakoff for her recent post titled The Brutal Reality of Collaboration.  In this post she offers five useful tips for teams to manage their collaboration better.  The tips include:

1. Ask for preferences about how people wish to communicate.  Some prefer phone, others email, and others use different tools.
2. Define groundrules — and get agreement.  Her list of groundrules she has encountered are instructive, and amusing.  I especially endorse: "Any meeting without a distributed agenda 60 minutes prior to start time will be canceled."
3. Don’t get tech crazy.  This one is consistent with our other postings that warn about overuse of collaboration tools.
   
4. Pay attention to communication styles.  Ensure the process, style, and tools include everyone in the group.
5. Bad news doesn’t get better with age.  Collaboration can go bad for the same reason as any other meeting.
   

What is interesting to me is this list is standard Meeting 101 applied to collaboration in the technology age.  What we say again and again is that the basics work.