The Ten Commandments of Collaboration

Lorie Vela's latest posting, The 10 Commandments of Collaboration, is a great checklist of how to achieve great collaboration.  I will let you read the top 10 on her blog, but want to empasize several points she made that stood out for me:

• Different people and different rules.  #2 and #3 point out that with collaborative projects, the participation and leadership skills are different.  Some people who might have been effective in a command and control environment might bring the wrong types of behaviors to a collaboration project.
• Put the "tools" into context.  Selection of the right tools for the project rightly deserves mention as one of the ten commandments (#5), rather than nine of the ten as we see on other lists.  And then train your team in the proper use of the tools (#6).  None of the tools I have seen today are completely self-teaching.
• Talk with the team members about the process and their roles -- up front, in the middle, and at the end (#4, #7, #8, #10).  Collaboration is all about people, and having geographically- and functionally-dispersed teams makes it all the more important to ensure everyone is on board and contributing.  Collaboration cannot become punchlist management just because there are tools to support that.

I urge you to follow her blog.  It is good reading for anyone who values the importance of collaboration.  I track it on Twitter, Flipboard, and my RSS reader to make sure I rarely miss a post.

"Short Form" Better than "Long Form" Anyway

Some new colloboration tools, such as Manymoon and Chatter, focus on "short form" updates.  Some call this microblogging.  Many people find this limiting.  I disagree.

Most business writers would benefit from applying Ernest Hemingway's Top Five Tips for Writing Well.  Guess what?  That means they could say a great deal in a microblog.  140 or 250 characters is plenty.  The readers are happier too.

I suggest you give it a try.

Next-Generation Team Communications - A Glimpse of the Future

With my recent good experience using Many Moon, the Superbowl advertising blitz by Chatter, and the unveiling of the well-funded Asana, we have reaching the tipping point for the use of collaboration tools.  And I think we have glimpsed the likely look and feel of the next generation of tool -- which combines the short-text sharing of social media with the tracking of projects, tasks, file-sharing, and discussions.

It is way too early to pick a winner from this crowd, and it is more likely that the tools market will remain fragmented and each of us will use different tools for each of the different projects and teams we work with.  At the same time, we can predict that the prevalent style of project communications via sharing Microsoft Office documents by email is coming to an end.  These new tools have some elements in common and help us see how project communications will work in the near future:

Click to read more ...

The Power of Project Metaphors

Bas de Baar, in his must-read blog Project Shrink has an interesting post about creating and using project metaphors, called The Project Adventure Map: Go Left at Scope Creep Mountain.  Not only is the title catchy, but his ideas provide great ways to make projects more fun and make them come alive.  In fact, most of his posts have interesting titles that draw readers in.

As I think back to my most interesting projects, I usually think first about the odd metaphors or stories that helped shape them.  It reminds me of the adage about people remembering less about what a presenter said and more about how he or she looked while giving the presentation.  One project that stands out in my mind required creating basic demographic customer segments, and the team chose to use popular TV shows as the labels for the segments.  Thus the "Seinfeld" segment was upscale single people in the 30s.  Not only did this approach prove to be an ice breaker for the teams, but it created some shortcuts that facilitated the projects -- and it created one of the most-lasting memories.

My sense is these metaphors are even more powerful with geographically-dispersed teams because there is a greater need to pull the team together with common bonds.  It is good practice for the leader to inject some metaphors.  Although it is worthwhile paying attention to this warning to avoid forcing the metaphors and instead toss them out to see what sticks.

What types of metaphors have helped your projects?

Predictions for Collaboration in 2011

As 2010 comes to an end it is time for industry watchers to make their predictions for 2011.  We have assembled ours, with a view to their being straightforward to measure and assess at the end of next year so we can report on how well we scored.

Our top-10 predictions are:

1. The US government will host a successful crowd sourced or collaborative dialogue pertaining to a major policy area.  Journalists and political analysts will hail it as a good example of new-age governance.
2. At least two of Google, Skype, and Cisco will reposition their collaborations offerings as being within a cloud-based communications suite.  The suites will offer collaborative teams IM, VoIP, web & video meeting, discussion forums, wikis,  and shared files, calendar, and tasks.  They will also offer strong administration support to quickly structure work areas for internal and external projects, and to manage user permissions.
3. A respected business publication, on the order of Harvard Business Review, will identify collaboration as the essential skill for enterprises for the next decade.
4. At least one collaboration software company will get bought for a surprisingly high valuation -- perhaps over 10X current revenues.
5. We will see the creation of at least 50 more SaaS general purpose collaboration tools aimed at the general topic of collaboration.  This will be difficult to verify because their messages and value propositions will be lost in the noise.
6. At least one major international airline will blame web/video conferencing for contributing to it's loss of passenger volumes.
7. A major cloud computing or SaaS provider will disappoint in a highly-visible way.  The provider will lose data, leak confidential information, or suffer a catastrophic outage ... and fuel the worst fears of CIOs who prefer to keep all applications and data behind their firewalls.
8. Wikis will go mainstream.  A mass-media publication (such as Parade magazine, People, USA Today) will have a feature story on the topic and offer advice for first-time users.
9. A trusted enterprise or entity will announce a cloud computing certification to make CIOs feel more comfortable allowing some strategic data reside outside their firewall.  This is sufficiently complex to implement, so we may have to wait to 2012 to see it in action.
10. Three-quarters of the readers of this post will use mobile tools on a regular basis as part of a collaboration project. 

Bonus prediction: the AllCollaboration writers will complete a book!

We will report back to our readers one year from now on how well we did.  Meanwhile we want to hear your comments on predictions we missed or where our optimism is misplaced.