Project-Aligned Collaboration

Many companies are using collaboration in their quest to become more efficient and ‘leaner’. Business demands that people collaborate within companies (intra-company) and across company boundaries (inter-company) with suppliers, customers, etc. Collaboration happens where there are two or more people that want to reach the same target and need work together to exchange information and complete tasks to achieve the goal. This paper introduces Project-Aligned Collaboration and reviews its benefits.

Forms of Collaboration

Collaboration can take many forms including conversations, meetings and/or sharing information or documents via email. It requires a process of communication and follow-through by team members, and accountability by each individual to deliver her knowledge to the team and process.

Collaboration also involves internal and external resources. Looking at intra-company collaboration, it is safe to assume that these people can use the same tools as they are within the same environment. However, even then many teams typically use the traditional and familiar collaboration tools – telephone, whiteboard and email.

Looking at the inter-company collaboration, an additional obstacle arises due to each company’s IT systems. They often are not compatible from one company to the other or company policies prevent users from other companies to get access to IT resources for security reasons. The users fall back to traditional collaboration tools such as the telephone, whiteboard and email.

Current Collaboration Tools

With the introduction of the Internet, web-based collaboration solutions became available to support collaboration. Typically they come in two forms: 1) ‘Meeting-based’ tools providing team members secured access to conduct virtual meetings or ‘web-conferencing’ to share documents, discuss issues or status; or 2) ’Document- or deliverable-centric’ tools, allowing participants to share documents and deliverables between each other.

However, task lists, issues management and project milestones are not typically incorporated in these solutions. The team is still left to manage the overall processes and repository of information, again relying on key users to manage documents, and the use of email for communication of progress, status and issues. Therefore one of the key challenges with many of the existing collaboration software solutions is that they often do not support the management and communication of some critical information for any user to successfully collaborate such as:

* What is the current status of the work that has to be done?
* What are the steps that need to be executed to get the document or deliverable as a result?

Lastly, one of the major disadvantages of all these collaboration tools – specifically for new members we have to collaborate with, is that the new member doesn’t have access to any historical information. Telephone calls that happened in the past are not accessible for a new member of the team; whiteboards got erased a long time ago; and emails are still available but have to be sent again (which in reality rarely happens). Web-conferencing minutes or issues information is often not available and dependent on the team to track, manage and to communicate to the new member. Document-centric collaboration portals allow the new participant to gain access to historical data and documents but require the new member to search on his/her own.