The tide is turning -- many more organizations have offered and/or embraced some form of online collaborative activity during the last year. One hears constantly about wikis, blogs, Web 2.0 applications, prediction markets, online data bases and libraries, as well as the old saws of surveys and discussions.
In viewing this proliferation of wonderful technologic opportunity, a major concern comes into focus for us. How are people going to use this new capacity? Perhaps a better way of stating the issue is: What should you do to make online work successful in your work area? Many worthwhile collaboration efforts will prematurely die off from lack of preparation, understanding, and feedback.
I have written quite a bit in the past on the importance of planning backward (also here and here) from a desired outcome, so I won’t wave that flag any further here. Rather, I propose a set of simple behaviors that will help to bring focus to any type of online collaboration.
These can be remembered as the Rule of Two: they are a set of prescriptions that are easy to do, easy to measure, and in our experience will dramatically increase the probability that your online activity will be successful. Taken together, they will turbo-charge your collaboration, assuming of course that a) you have an important issue to work on together, b) you have support from senior management, and c) you invite the right people to the party.
- Plan with two people. Provide a specific action to work on, which you have vetted with at least one other knowledgeable stakeholder. (Don’t break trail on your own – get another viewpoint.)
- Work on two or less items at a time. (Don’t dilute the work focus.)
- Assign two people to be gardeners for each item which is active. (Build in ownership, support and responsiveness, and spread it around.)
- Ask members to check on an active item every two days. (Make sure issues are being digested and updated.)
- Hold review meetings every two weeks. (Follow up, make decisions, and hold people accountable.)
- Conduct an audit every two months, evaluating the objectives vs. the results. (Build in reality testing and course correction.)
Of course, many principles apply to creating success online. But you can’t go wrong using these above. Here is a list of additional team management basics.
· Set a clear goal.
· Make sure you have a mandate.
· Involve the right people.
· Maintain a focus on the key issue.
· Over communicate. (Group email, subscriptions, conference calls, personal updates.)
· Give people a clear reason to do the work together.
· Gardeners are members who will do the “care and feeding” for the page. They facilitate the work by answering questions, clarifying people’s input, reminding folks of important new content and deadlines, acknowledging participation, stimulating other points of view, and summarizing.
· Review meetings are a way to draw action and accountability into remote work. Most people manage by deadlines, and making decisions based on the online input keeps it real. You also get a feel for the other members of the group by having a real-time meeting.
Here is a more detailed discussion of our Rule of Two list:
Provide a specific action to work on, which you have vetted with at least one other knowledgeable stakeholder.
A common mistake is setting up a discussion area without providing a specific action. People need to know what they are expected to do when they come to the online work area. If you are setting up a spread sheet or task list or library, be clear why others need to participate, and what they are supposed to do. A simple description of the team’s charter and objective, along with a set of process steps will create sufficient orientation.
Two heads are better than one in deciding on the task for your online space. Initiating an online project benefits from planning and critique. Make sure you have checked your idea against someone with good understanding of the issues, and make sure you have an issue worthy of involving other people. And it helps to have support from higher-ups, especially in motivating other stakeholders to participate.
Work on no more than two items at a time.
Especially with online, remote work, it is important to maintain a focus on one thing at a time. So if you have a task list and a discussion that is there to clarify the issues with those tasks, fine. But if you have three discussions for different aspects of your task, you will lose people. They don’t have time or attention – especially online on their own – to get oriented to several things.
Keep it simple. You want everyone’s energy focused on what is most important. If you have additional background material, name it as that and link to it, but don’t expect many to spend any time on it. Start with one clear, simple task, and work to build success into that. A sense of momentum will provide further motivation and learning for your group to feel good about doing more work in virtual space.
Over time, you may well end up with several tasks which the team could participate in, but each one of those needs to start as a primary task, with clear communication, and clear ownership. The long tail will take care of itself; and your gardeners should call a halt when appropriate.
Assign two people to be gardeners for each item.
You need active editor/facilitators. And if there are two of them, they can provide dialogue and energy for each other, thus supporting the work. It makes a great deal of difference to have an “owner” that people can turn to, for queries, for conflict resolution, for updates. As you build up more active items, spread the roles around so that more members of the group are involved in this function. It lightens the load and creates more participation.
The term “gardener” describes the role of care-and-feeding and weeding. This is one of being both an evangelist and a monitor, both a responder and a summarizer. Someone who keeps close tabs on the project, stimulates input by others, keeps up communication and actively moves the project from stage to stage.
Ask members to check on an active item every two days.
A key issue with online work is keeping it fresh, and not letting people forget about the space because out of sight, out of mind. Get everyone to subscribe to the active page, either through RSS or notification, but don’t count on that. Get a commitment from everyone that they will review what is there regularly, and respond or update as appropriate. The gardeners can help much by sending emails with provocative comments or quick snippets of new issues, including a link back to the site.
Periodic notes from a senior manager asking what s/he can do to clear up any roadblocks can also help to increase traffic and momentum. When people know that their project is being watched by someone with clout, they will be more motivated to participate, and to finish their piece of the task.
Hold review meetings every two weeks.
These should be short, and concentrate on making decisions. A secondary function is to check that roles or tasks are assigned to the right person. People should have done their own summaries and background reading, and the meeting should not deviate into the area of catch up. This requires discipline by the leader – “go read the posts” rather than explaining the issue to a straggler.
A distant third function is to check that people have done what they said they would do. But knowing that this is implied will do wonders toward motivating everyone to doing their part. (See Ken Ketch’s related article on Green is for Go.)
Conduct an audit of the objectives vs. the results every two months.
This function helps to keep the team honest. And it is a great way to include the customer or the sponsor of the work. It may be that the sum of the work is the discovery that this isn’t the right thing to be doing --- this sort of review and correction needs a formal accounting. When everyone knows this is built into the process, then we are working toward milestones.
Customer input in such a review can add helpful direction, and it helps to build a real sense of partnership. It is often a source of additional resources as well.
There is no particular magic to the number Two. Its significance here is as an easy mnemonic. There are two things I could say about it, however. It is a very simple number. And it connotes that collaboration is an issue between individuals, not a lone heroic pursuit (including the planning for setting up collaboration.)
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Here are some related comments, from a post by Emile Servan-Schreiber in a Google group (PMCluster), related to success in setting up prediction market participation.
** Incentives: participation will be driven by three factors, we call them the three R's: Rewards (of the material kind), Recognition (within a community of co-workers), Relevance (of the topics being traded). If any one of those elements is lacking, you have to boost the other two to make up for it.
** Introducing the idea: The more top-level senior-exec buy-in you can secure, the better. That is tightly related to the "Recognition" factor. Traders must feel that the company cares about their performance and that they'll get recognized by the powers that be if they take the markets seriously, as part of their job.
** Serious vs. fun tradeoff: That's tightly related to the "Relevance" factor. Traders have to care, personally, about the topics being traded. The ideal is when there is no distinction between serious and fun. If you're going to ask "serious" questions, make sure they are the ones that people really care about, i.e., the important questions, the ones that cut to the bone of the company. And if you're going to add some "fun" questions, make sure that they are related to the job, otherwise your market will just look like a game you should not spend your time on during work hours.
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