First off, I must confess that my contribution to this post is nil. As you know, we offer our commentary and points-of-view here, with the opportunity for others to provide feedback. For this post however, many have contributed – except yours truly - in offering their real-life experiences and advice on collaboration.

I started discussions in LinkedIn Groups and Q&A on the following topic:

Do you have real-life collaboration stories/case studies? What was the level of success? What are the lessons learned? What would be your most important advice?

Below are some valuable contributions, with my gratitude to the contributors.

Michael V Littlejohn, Vice President and Partner, IBM Business Consulting Services

One of the best examples I have seen of technology-driven collaboration has been around the mining of innovation in companies. Here is an answer I provided, a while back, to a question asked by Mark Turpin...

The concept of an Innovation Jam has been deployed in various situations - including internally here at IBM - to help align broad, extended, organizations and communities around mining innovation. Here is a somewhat dated article but it serves as a good historical perspective on IBM's shift towards a more innovative culture. See: Big Blue Brainstorm: IBM is putting some 100,000 heads together for an online Innovation Jam

We have also teamed with trade organizations to create a "contest" to help mine solutions to complex issues. Here is a press release from a recent successful effort we launched with ITS Americas around intelligent transportation problems. See: ITS America, IBM, Spencer Trask & Partners Announce the Winner in Challenge for Traffic Congestion Solutions

Debbie Payne, Leadership and Organizational Learning Consultant at DP Leadership Associates, Author, Coach, Facilitator

I did my masters thesis on collaboration, "Creating Community through Collaboration and Technology". It was a specific project with a group of 9 people. However, the lessons learned on the collaboration side was that spending time upfront on defining what collaboration looked and felt like, what behavior would be demonstrated when collaborating, what the level of trust needed to be, sorting out ownership issues and task delegation, plus communication strategies should all be done up front, prior to launching into the collaborative task. We found that collaboration means so many different things to different people- once we had all this cleared away the task was easy. The contributions and expectations need to be all laid out; this foundation then makes for effective collaboration. Whether you use technology or not, the people need to define the relationship as well as the work!

Linda Naiman, Corporate Alchemy: Helping people and organizations turn leaden thinking into gold

I collaborated on a book with Arthur VanGundy called Orchestrating Collaboration at Work: Using Music, Improv, Storytelling, and Other Arts to Improve Teamwork. He died last year and in my tribute to him on my blog, I described how we collaborated and what I learned in the process. See: Dr. Arthur (Andy) VanGundy passed away May 5, 2009

I also wrote about collaboration in one of my Working with Wisdom columns: Orchestrating Collaboration at Work. Coincidentally Debbie Payne commented on my article and other LinkedIn folks as well.

James Beeler, Owner, Acquired Consulting

More than probably anywhere the military is a perfect example of collaboration. It can happen in the private sector but many times it becomes a union issue. My organization became very unionized and it is difficult to get the collaboration needed on project until one or the other starts losing hours.

There are schools of thought that using collaboration becomes territorial between departments because of notoriety and costs. Example: Metal shop personnel will not drill holes in metal for electricians because the lead is the electricians so the metal workers do not get credit for the work (seen this happen.) Machine shop personnel will not help subcontractors because they "are not paid for the work." (Seen this happen too.)

For the first example, losing the contract because of delays over inability to meet deadlines is bad on the company. Neither the electricians nor metal workers are spotlighted as much as the total organization. The issue over being paid is silly. If the subcontractor fails to deliver it may be all future work because the customer loses confidence.

I heard one manager state taking work on from another craft does not match their pay scale so the fear of losing money is silly. What I told them was the option of losing future business AND the overall minor cost of shuffling people around is far cheaper than losing the contract.

My cut? Do not let the pay of a few overshadow the overall gains for making the contract work, deliver on time, and when the day is over the contract met budget without more money from the customer. Another benefit I learned in the military comes from the added skill sets in the event there is an injury or absence.

PACO Pratapaditya Chakravarty, Head - EDGE Learning Academy at Reliance Capital AMC

I went through the responses, and my example is going to be a little different than those mentioned. We have started using collaboration in learning programs, and in particular, there is a program called 'Sell Out Of Trouble' (SOOT), wherein we use the experience & learning of all participants to collaborate and resolve problems emanating out of a live case study ('personal financial planning' interaction).

The process is tedious for the facilitator, but the application of learning in the simulated environment is quick-effective-efficient, disparity in learning comes out and can be fine-tuned, seeing the learning being applied in action builds conviction; all of this leads to a higher probability of the learning being applied in the workplace.

It is also important that the case study being used to collaborate is live in nature & spirit. For example in SOOT, facilitators use their own life as a case study, and become the subject whose financial planning needs to be done. The collaborative effort in unearthing the exact problems, their implications and finally the solution to payoff their need, builds conviction in the learners that the discussed methodology of sales 'works', and its OK to give it a try in the field.

Collaboration has been used in learning environments for a vey long time.

Steve Case, Expert eLearning, LMS's, LCMS's, Social Learning

Yes, there are a few real life case studies. The results were amazing.. that is one stories shows a costs savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars. My friend John Darling could detail them all in a virtual meeting if desired. He could also detail the lessons learned. If interested email me with some potential dates and times and I will make the arrangements for you with him.

The lessons learned include, just building and hoping they will use, will not work. The social learning tools must be easy to use i.e. one Login and P/W combination, all the same look and feel, and all navigate the same, Most important the social learning tools must be able to be structured into a training continuum, be able to be monitored and reported on. This changes the role of the ISD to a Learning Architect.

Steve Willis, Innovative, Creative, Leader and not much of a sheep

I was working for a large Life & Pensions provider benchmarking Innovation across the company. In parallel I was in the process of being headhunted for a Programme Test Manager role in a large retailer.

During the course of one interview I invited the retailer to:

1. Send representatives to an Innovation Conference I was organising.
2. Try out my Innovation benchmarking in their IT Division.

The retailer did this and shared the results of their IT benchmarking so I was able to perform a comparison with the IT Division results of the Life & Pensions provider.

End results:

1. I was able to perform a good benchmarking comparision and make interventions in response.
2. I was offered a job in the same week by both the retailer and the Life & Pensions provider (I took the latter, because it was my dream role - even though the other was worth an extra £20k per annum.).

Learning:

1. Agree clear rules of engagement to establish trust.
2. Deliver on promises.
3. Be as open as the rules of engagement permit.
4. Understand the constraints under which others may be operating.
5. Always remember to say; "Thank you." and "Well done."

Other:

The Innovation Conference was a success. I was invited to meet and talk with Senior Management in a number of organisations. Some of my stuff ended up on other company intranets. I led a circle of work on benchmarking Innovation for the Innovation Exchange which was based at the London Business School. I was also invited to be a member of a project board at the Department for Trade & Industry (DTI) overseeing the work of consultants inputting to the Knowledge Economy White Paper.

All in all, collaboration is good!

Martin Stein, Consulting Company Executive

I have an article that is published on Strategic Adaptation. The case study describes a culture change in a franchise organization where sharing of best practices, transformation of the value chain and cross functional workshops created a reduction in operating costs of 50% and increased sales and profits. Please send me your email to receive a copy of the article.

Eugene Yee, Lead Engineer at AEPLOG, Inc.

From my experience:

• Bad news only gets worse with time. When you have to report a problem to somebody, do it asap. If you're too embarrassed to present that problem now, you'll only be more screwed later.
• Learn how to not be a perfectionist. Trust others and learn how to allocate work to the correct channels... or simply suffer the stress and hardship of doing everything yourself.
• Let others save face.
• Smile a lot.