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Though collaboration being very important in business agility, but still it is misunderstood as just another buzzword. So, I decided to pen down my thoughts about it, I hope you would find it useful.
It is always very important to understand, the reason of why we do something, because it gives clarity and taps our motivation to do it more.
So, let us talk about, why collaboration is the important pillar in various facets of our life? What are the collaboration barriers? How to effectively break those barriers and eventually achieve awesome results. We shall also identify few of the instances of over-collaboration and find out, how these are overkill.
Do you ever wonder, why do we collaborate? Generally, we collaborate to achieve common goal for example understanding new technology, new market trends, create new product.
Collaboration is not only performed to integrate few parts of the system to create a product , it can as well be helping other team member in completing a task in hand, it can be discussion with senior team members before finalising few code structures, it can be frequent discussion with product owner in clarifying few user requirements, it can be attending a short demo with other product team regarding a common feature. It can be attending a common forum, to know about lessons learnt by other teams etc.
Mentioned instances give us clarity on why we collaborate, and now we know, it is not just another jargon. I heard from some people that it is waste of time, Yes, it is, if it is overdone, otherwise it generates awesome outcomes. So, we should be mindful of when we are overdoing it and when not doing it enough.
Is it enough to collaborate or there is something more to it? I think some of you guessed it :), yes right time to collaborate matter’s a lot. Think of the scenario ,where team is supposed to collaborate with other product team regarding already existing feature and failed to do it in the beginning and later finds out that most of the implementation already exists in other product, you can imaging effort gone in re-inventing the wheel and time lost in reaching the market.
Some of us might have heard in team discussions, team member A telling B, why did not you ask me earlier, I could have helped you, I have done similar task before. And B in response, says I thought let me try more, because it seemed too simple to be asked. Does it ring the bells in your ears? Yes, either individuals do not collaborate ever or do not collaborate at right time because of not so visible collaboration barriers between them.
Shall we understand those barriers and find ways to break those? Many of the readers might be thinking, of course why not? Let us look at few barriers as below.
#1 Collaboration Barrier: Hierarchy with in team; Impact: Juniors hesitate reaching out seniors; How to break barrier? a) Bring in flat structure with in team b) No special cubical for senior members in team.
#2 Collaboration Barrier: Team members do not want to expose their weaknesses; Impact: Blockers are not discussed for long; How to break it? a) Bring in a culture of accepting failures as feedbacks and opportunity to learn b) When team member asks for help, do not judge his/her competency, rather give a helping hand.
#3 Collaboration Barrier: High experienced individuals are overloaded; Impact: Due to more load, team members cannot help others; How to break barrier? a) Provide bandwidth to collaborate over problem. b) Coach team members to manage their engagements better.
#4 Collaboration Barrier: Individual’s achievements are recognised; Impact: Team members work in silos towards their objectives; How to break it a) Reward individual for collaboration b) Reward team for team goals and not individuals for individual objectives.
#5 Collaboration Barrier: Fear of becoming redundant; Impact: Information hoarding; How to break it? a) Team member, who is expected to share knowledge, should be involved simultaneously in new challenging opportunity b) Bring in culture of rewarding individuals, who are actively involved in information sharing.
#6 Collaboration Barrier: Competition among scrum teams; Impact: Information hoarding; How to break it? a) No best team awards b) We should not compare teams; different teams operate in different context.
#7 Collaboration Barrier: Bring me the solution not the problem culture; Impact: Surfacing problem is considered negative; How to break it? a) Encourage surfacing blockers in early stages, develop helping culture rather than penalizing.
#8 Collaboration Barrier: No forum to discuss cross dependency among scrum teams / products; Impact: Problems are discovered later and cascaded across features/ products; How to break it a) Set up a forum and involve team members for discussion on feasible intervals.etc.
Sometimes over collaboration can be overkill for example if forum is set up and teams are meeting very frequently, may be more than it is required and these events are not time boxed. You can imagine amount of effort goes into this, which could have been utilized on other productive activities.
I hope, this article gives your idea about collaborating early over problem eventually helps us in business agility. As a coach/Scrum master, we should be aware about collaboration barriers and find out different ways to break those. Please share your comments and I would love to respond back. If you can share, collaboration barriers you came across and how you broke those then it would be good learning experience for all of us.
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