Creating a Collaborative Assessment
28 January 2010 How do you work with a client that might have a collaborative problem? Over the last 20 years working with Collaborative Strategies clients the best way I have found is to start with an assessment. When I started doing this many years ago, there were no tools available to do this kind of measurement, so I had to create them.
Essentially the process I have worked out to help my end-user clients (as opposed to my vendor clients) has 7 steps. Much of this has come through trial and error (lot's of error). It starts with an initial conversation with a prospect that may have a collaborative issue or wants to change collaborative software. In some cases the problem is driving adoption. Whatever the issue it is best to start with an assessment.
1- Collaborative assessment: Based on the 4 factors I have empirically found to have the most influence on the success of a collaboration project. I use TCEP as the acronym which stands for: Technology, Culture, Economics and Politics.
I have a quick assessment tool, I call the TCEP (short form) that I have used with many groups, and often when I give a presentation at a conference. This tool allows people to assign a value (on a 1-10 scale) to each of the four factors. Each factor has a weight; Technology = 1, Culture = 2, Economics = 3, Politics = 4. These weights hold true for all Western cultures, but not always for Asian cultures.
While teaching in Japan, I found the scores on the assessment were not reflective of what was going on in the organization, and that some of the cultural factors were very different. For example, if a CEO in the U.S. makes a bad decision that negatively effects the company, the board may fire him, give him a golden parachute, and with his non-compete agreement he is off to the next company. In Japan that is not the case, if a CEO makes bad decisions and brings shame upon the organization, the honorable way out is sepiku (or ritual suicide). Given these cultural differences, I swapped the weights for culture and politics, giving culture a weight of 4 and politics a weight of 2. After that the scores were more inline with where the organization was when the assessment was performed.
As I said this is only the first step, and I only dealt with the short form assessment. I will detail what you might find from the longer assessment, and how to move on to Step 2, in a future blog.
David Coleman, Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, has been involved with groupware, collaborative technologies, and knowledge management since 1989. He is a frequent public speaker, an industry analyst, and author of books and magazine articles on electronic collaboration and knowledge management. David can be reached by e-mail at: davidc@collaborate.com. Follow David on Twitter.
Collaborative Assessment, Diagnostic, TCEP in People, Process, Tools 
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Reader Comments (1)
I've been wondering how to assess collaboration, this is very elegant and easy to understand.
I wonder if there are other behavioral symptoms within an organization that would signal a problem.