Two Case Studies of Achieving Repeatable Team Performance through Collaboration Engineering

Executive Summary1 The Collaboration Engineering approach enables organizations to design and deploy processes using professional collaboration techniques and technology for recurring high-value collaborative tasks. The full article describes pilot Collaboration Engineering projects in two organizations. Based on these cases, recommendations are given for applying Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is based on three foundations: ● Collaboration is multi-dimensional—the people who work together, the process they follow, the information they use, the collaboration technology they use, and the leadership or facilitation that guides them. ● A focus on recurring collaboration processes—collaboration engineering is appropriate for recurring processes, rather than ad-hoc, infrequent collaboration ● Process design uses a pattern language— Collaboration Engineering uses a design pattern language called thinkLets. Patterns are capsules of expertise that can be reused to solve similar challenges. ThinkLets codify aspects of the five collaboration dimensions into design patterns that can be used to “click together” to design a collaboration process.