The development of methodology to support comprehensive approach: TMC

This paper reports the overall approach, development and validation of the Toolbox for Multidisciplinary Collaboration (TMC) methodology that has been developed at Defence Research and Development Canada. TMC consists of processes and tools designed to support interagency collaboration and the development of common understanding of a complex situation within a multidisciplinary civil-military team. TMC addresses such interagency challenges as mutual awareness of departmental goals and priorities and potential discrepancies between them; the development of the overall and common understanding of the operational environment; and interdepartmental collaboration. TMC aims to achieve this through a progressive application of its methodology components, each of which supports a different spectrum of multidisciplinary teamwork. The TMC development has been an iterative process and it heavily relied on the feedback from a group of inter-agency subject matter experts (SMEs) with operational experience. SMEs’ feedback has been collected through interviews and workshops that exposed SMEs to the current versions of TMC and allowed for hands-on experience. Two case studies were conducted, in which small interagency groups conducted mission analysis based on a fictional Horn of Africa scenario. In the final case study the team applied TMC methodology in their work with positive results. The methodology development process and its components are discussed.