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Over at Projects@Work, there’s an article by end-user analyst Cathy Webber about “Making Collaboration Work”, in which she outlines a roadmap for collaborative success with five suggestions for managing that process. It’s a very well-written and cogently-argued piece – well worth reading – but stops short of being too prescriptive about how to go about putting those suggestions into practice.

I thought it would be interesting to map the tools that we use on a daily basis with our clients to the suggestions that Cathy makes. It’s probably worth a read of the article first, but here’s my take on where weblogs and wikis could fit in.

Define A Team-Project Framework: A framework can be applied throughout an organization to guide teams along their pathway to success. This can be as simple as process mapping, flow charts, or lists of procedures. In all your processes, include steps for setting measurable goals, analyzing results, and for making improvements. Continuous improvement is important for a sustainable framework.

This is vitally important in our experience – do what you do well, and document what you do. Too often, problems arise because teams become reliant on the expertise of a single individual who then becomes a single point of potential failure. While capturing this information can become onerous, there are ways around this – a wiki, for example, is an incredibly flexible way of capturing and keeping updated vital configuration or process information.

Use Collaborative Technologies: To help your teams organize, exchange ideas and knowledge, share documents, track progress, and build mutually beneficial relationships, technologies of various sorts are crucial to implement, support and promote. These “tools” can include the use of computer technologies such as web conferencing and document management systems, as well as organizational tools such as group facilitation techniques for consensus building, problem solving, action planning, and information analysis.

Clearly this is one that we’re going to agree with. We’ve got practical experience of how this can help – and we’d emphasise the point that Cathy is making regarding organisational tools. It’s all-too easy to be dazzled by the technology at the expense of the processes, so adding to the online tools with offline techniques is vitally important.

Create Team Champions: Team Champions educate and inspire your teams to use the framework and the tools that your organization provides and supports. Include Team Champions on your senior management team. Allow these people to have access to their stakeholder groups. Hold them accountable for management of the framework process and its continuous improvement.

This is an area that weblogs can be a tremendous help with. They give your team champions a platform to communicate from, particularly if they are operating in a large or geographically dispersed team. The way in which weblog archives build over time can help them to build up a profile with their stakeholder groups in a way that wouldn’t be possible with email.

Include All Stakeholders: Ensure that every stakeholder group is represented and has a voice in the decision making process. Conduct inclusive meetings. Use methods for brainstorming of ideas, analyzing information, and building consensus to gain their input and to encourage their ongoing participation with your, and their, projects.

Again, weblogs have a part to play here. The key word used here is “inclusive” – so the way in which blogs can be used to start and maintain conversations aids this. And once that participation has taken place, there is a permanent, archived, searchable record of the interactions.

Reward Teams: Celebrate and acknowledge teams for their effectiveness. Create criteria against which teams will be evaluated. At certain checkpoints along their process, support them with tools for self-evaluation and scoring. At the end of each project, or on an annual basis, create an event to reward your high performing teams.

If you’re celebrating success, then let people know! Something that we encourage internal service functions to do is to publicise their activities on the organisation’s intranet with a team blog – letting your internal customers know what you’re doing, so you’re not just a department that people only think about when they need something from you. Marketing your capabilities is a great way of demonstrating how you add value – and if your activity is something that often gets outsourced, then building a functional brand is one way of counteracting that threat.