The Logic House

Collaborative team work

Some projects are naturally collaborative; some achieve collaboration and the rest have collaboration thrust upon them.

The ideal of working together to bring everyone involved greater resources, recognition and reward is greatly appreciated at a strategic level where managers look to maximise scarce resources and make savings wherever possible. The why does the word “collaboration” strikes fear into the hearts of experienced managers?

Planning a joint project is easy enough, but no matter how enthusiastic people are at meetings, once back at the office good intentions are submerged under an avalanche of “priority” (or rather “regular”) workload. Emails and voicemail are easy to ignore and even the keenest and most conscientious team player has a tendency to metamorphosise into the invisible person for the duration of a collaborative project.

The difficulties of being in a different place to the rest of your team can be somewhat mitigated by software. Instant messaging, PC-to-PC calling, virtual in/out status, conference calls, video conferencing, file transfer and even remote support and whiteboard sharing give you everything you need to communicate with people in another location.

Free consumer programs like Skype and MSN provide all these features, but they cause headaches for IT departments both technically and politically. Commercial software is much safer but systems are costly, in-house support must be found and all partners in the collaboration must commit to the same system. Is it any wonder that free and quick often overrides safe and efficient? IT departments are left grinding their teeth at new vulnerabilities introduced into the network they are trying to protect because of the time/cost/quality compromise chosen because the project must move forward now.

Despite having software to help bridge the miles between co-workers, the nature of collaborative working means that teams rarely have the chance to all be together even in the virtual world. Working at different times in different locations needs much more support for both managers and team members. The need for cohesion that cannot be provided by real-time communication aids can however be met with software in the form of a community site or more corporately, a project extranet.

Extranets are secure online websites that can be used to support a project. No extra software is required to use them, just an ordinary internet browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. Your extranet can do anything that a website can: news, calendars, diaries, message boards, document libraries, videos and podcasts. More interestingly, your extranet will support your collaborative project. A technically-savvy team can publish their own documents, design their own polls and have discussions on a message board. In a more formal project one or more administrators can decide what everyone else may see and have private communications between themselves and team members.

That isn’t enough according to Richard Piotrowski, director of The Logic House who says: “An extranet shouldn’t be a website with a secret password. If your extranet only has one-way communication you might as well send everything out by email.

“Project management requires two-way communication and the ability to monitor events. Any extranet worth its salt will actively help with these things.

“Communication has to be ‘push’ not ‘pull’; that is, messages and notifications should be delivered right to your team, whether that’s by email, RSS or some other channel like SMS. Expecting people to drop what they are doing and go off and check time and time again to see if they are needed is not just unrealistic and inefficient, it’s unnecessary and very rude.”

Piotrowski thinks that extranets should be doing more for managers. “A lot of project management communication is overhead; reminders and nagging. Why isn’t it being automated? You could keep on manually emailing and calling your team, reminding them that they need to enter the latest data, or the system could do it for you instead. The reminders can be as pre-emptive as you like, but most importantly these communications only go out to the right people. If you’ve submitted your data you get a thank-you. If you haven’t then the asking continues. The system reminds according to urgency, and can also communicate why your task is necessary such as citing dependent tasks. This leaves project managers free for more useful and rewarding work.”

‘Collaboration’ remains a management buzzword with a reputation similar to that of ‘synergy’ and Piotrowski doesn’t see that changing until people’s experience of working together changes. “Collaboration doesn’t have to be painful,” he asserts. “If teams were properly resourced with the right tools for the job instead of being left to do 21st century work with 20th century tools we’d all be a lot keener on collaborative projects.”

To find out how The Logic House can bring your project working into the 21st century call us on (01223) 721643 or visit www.thelogichouse.co.uk.