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.

Comments

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