Robertson: Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration
James Robertson of StepTwo posted his slides for a recent presentation entitled, Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration (with audio). Along with the tips, he includes some background around the ideas he presents. Nice.
Here are the enumerated tips (in American English :-). And a few of my thoughts sprinkled through.
- Get ahead of the curve. "Thousands of uncoordinated wikis and blogs in your company is anti-knowledge-sharing."
- Recognize when collaboration will work. In James' talk, he gives two key criteria: A sense of purpose and a Clear sense of community. And he talks through several examples of using these criteria.
- Understand where collaboration fits in. Internet need not be in conflict with the Intranet, as the purposes are different between the outside world and the internal world.
- Establish a portfolio of tools. One tool will NOT unite them all.
- Identify an owner of collaboration. Not sure who should be the "collaboration czar" or where it should fit.
- Define boundaries and relationships.
- Establish policies and support.
- Start by 'gardening.' x
- Focus on business needs. "Pilot in an area that people care about." Don't bother piloting in IT or in the KM team. They aren't normal people!
- Don't forget it's all about the people! Of course! But I hope we can say this with a bit of a smile, as it seems a cliche. Just like "It's not about the tools."
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This was an interesting presentation; I especially liked his distinction between publishing and collaboration (and what order / how to connect the two). However, I was a bit disappointed that his reference to 'gardening' just said a lot of people are talking about this. Since I've presented on it, of course I'd like to hear more about what he thinks about what people are saying about it. :-) Also, there was an inexplicable outburst of America-bashing at the end ("Eat your own dogfood" is not just a nonsense slogan, but even if it were, how is its American-ness a factor?). Still, most of it was a good look at how to successfully collaborate.
p.s. I like the new bot-defeating test.