Measuring Collaboration Behavior

If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it! So goes the saying. Brett Stupakevich in his post, How Analytics Can Improve Collaboration Behavior, proposes five steps for measuring collaboration behavior:

1. Determine the usage frequency of specific tools
2. Track individual approaches and actions for finding relevant documents and people
3. Document sequences of specific actions taken during a collaborative effort
4. Determine patterns of resource usage based on the user’s position or role in the organization
5. Gather user-generated ratings on the relevance and helpfulness of discovered content and individuals

I would like to now include comments on this post and a real-life example offered by Steve Lamont:

Measuring collaboration is very important and this post [How Analytics Can Improve Collaboration Behavior by Brett Stupakevich] contains some good insights. Deploying and using collaboration tools takes much time, effort, and money for enterprises -- so there needs to be top-down support and measurements to show the "needle is moving the right direction" and the investments should continue (or not).

A useful anecdote I heard from a Salesforce.com executive, just after they deployed their Chatter collaboration product in-house, was that executives' badges had a photo on them if they had registered for the product, which made the late adopters apparent and subject to peer pressure. At a subsequent meeting their lanyards were a different color depending on whether they were heavy or light users.

Sometimes it takes an extra push to get the team on-board with using new tools -- and the benefits follow.

In an earlier post, Measuring Collaboration, we identified such issues as: How to measure collaboration? How much to collaborate? When to collaborate? Does more collaboration necessarily mean better results?

How do you measure collaboration and collaboration behavior in your efforts or organization?



Update on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

See Related Posts:

• Collaboration = Cooperative Behavior + Assertive Behavior
• If You Can’t Pass the Ball, You Can’t play!
• Effective Collaboration Is More than Deliverables
• Collaboration: Building and Sustaining Trust
• Collaboration Is More than Team Building and Management
• Managing Virtual Teams
• The Four Ps of Effective Collaboration
• How’s your collaboration effort going?