Measuring Collaboration

Al Taylor - April 4, 2016

A clear consensus in PM literature is related to the importance of the communication activity in projects. Ask a PM professional how much time should be spent on the communication activity, and you will often get an answer in the 50% to 75% range.

One could suggest that in fact the substance of the communications is more important than the amount of time that one spends on the activity. One could further suggest that communications that represent the output of collaborative activities have much more meaning and a much higher degree of influence and effectiveness than communications that do not.

A fun and interesting activity would be to measure your project’s level of collaboration by developing a metric. Three numbers are required:

  1. The first is a number on a scale of 1 to 10, representing how well you would like your team to collaborate.
  2. The second is a number that represents how well you think your team is currently collaborating—be reasonable in both cases. These are the easy numbers.
  3. To determine the third number, you need to gather up information that will allow you to accurately measure your team’s actual current level of collaboration. This can be done by defining a set of variables, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10 and calculating the average. You can assign a weighting to each variable that shows their relative importance in your collaboration model and calculate a weighted average.

You will want to define your own set of collaboration variables to measure and weigh:

  1. The source of the communication is a possible indicator of the level of collaboration. Identify how many communication threads are started by the business stakeholders, PM, the team leads and all other categories of resources. It is possible you will find that that the majority of threads will be started by the PM and the leads; this may be an indicator that the level of collaboration is not where you would like it to be.
  2. The number of times business stakeholders participate in the communication thread.
  3. Team members’ ratings of the team’s level of collaboration.
  4. The tone of the communications. Are they inclusive? Do they seek input from others? Do they indicate a willingness to compromise? Do they seek consensus? Do many look like orders, possibly indicating a top-down environment that may not be conducive to collaboration?

Once you have your variables and weightings in place, you can make your measurements and calculate the team’s collaboration metric. Depending on the results, corrective action may be required. The exercise can be repeated on a regular basis to measure the impact of the corrective actions.

For even more fun, engage a PM colleague to do the same exercise and then compare variables, weightings and metrics. Sharing the variables and weightings that you both applied could improve your collaboration model. To maximize the learning opportunity, you could seek out one of the more successful PMs in the organization to partner with.

The findings coming out of this exercise and the results produced by any corrective actions that you take could be useful material to be stored in your lessons learned repository.

Other Collaboration Considerations

You may find that during meetings, some individuals are very vocal while others are quiet. Take some time to find out why that is. Some people are natural speakers, may genuinely be interested in many of the project topics and have a high level of confidence in their opinions; that is fine. Others may be more introverted; we need to ensure that team meetings are a forum for everyone and that all get a chance to collaborate by speaking, and that all voices are heard.

Is there an optimum level of collaboration? In other words, is it possible to collaborate too much? Probably. Like many other project variables, we will want to find a happy medium. On one hand, we want our teams to collaborate; on the other hand, we want them to be decisive and innovative—and sometimes those need to be solitary activities.

We should keep in mind that the value delivered from a collaborative activity can be constrained by the least engaged member of the group. This is a reminder that the PM and/or leader needs to be conscious of and monitor all potentially conflicting project variables, and influence the respective outcomes for the betterment of the project. Metrics can also assist this challenge; the PM and/or leader can define all of the team attributes that matter the most then measure and monitor.

The relative importance for specific project variables can vary across the suite of projects, and the PM is well advised to tailor their approach accordingly. On my current project, there is a high level of collaboration, which is great; but we also see relatively low levels of ownership and decisiveness.

This often manifests itself as follows: A team member shouts out for input on a project opportunity; the team delivers many opinions, but often the consensus around the next step is the need for more discussions and additional meetings—and almost never do we see an individual assuming ownership and/or offering up a recommendation or a decision.

The fact that the team has been engaged for almost one year and there is no firm plan for delivery of the project on the table strongly suggests that the PM could use less collaboration and instead needs more ownership and decisiveness. Ideally, we would all have optimum levels of all project variables. But as we often say in the context of the traditional project constraints, “You can’t have it all.”

You can find this article and many others at http://www.projectmanagement.com.

About the Author

taylor al    Al Taylor is an independent IT contractor in Ontario, Canada.