Trying Collaboration Tools

Collaboration is critical to business analysis success. It’s about working

together with other people to accomplish common goals whether you’re all in
one location or dispersed across many. To collaborate well, team members
must understand the goal and purpose of the collaboration and actively
contribute to the efforts by freely sharing info, talents, and context. The good
news is that tools are available to help with that! Although collaboration tools
don’t supply your team members with an individual desire to contribute (a
key collaborative ingredient), they can eliminate the big obstacles and
facilitate the most-critical working-together needs.
Collaboration tools’ primary purpose is to help people work together. They
give you a place to work together, providing features that enable collective
contribution and work-product development. Tools come in general or
specific forms, enabling people to make progress toward a goal at the same
time (synchronously) or at different times (asynchronously), virtually or in
person.
Collaboration places are typically represented in one of two forms:
An event-type place: A room where collaborators “go” (remotely or
actually) to attend a synchronous collaborative session such as a meeting,
a presentation, or a training opportunity
A repository-type place: A display or data storage area where
collaborators can display, store, or request contributions, including notes,
comments or documents (tangible or electronic), folders, web pages, or
text/multimedia information or databases
Each kind of place can be physical or virtual/electronic. The following
sections discuss the pros and cons of each setup.
Physical places
Employ physical places when you have face-to-face or collocated
collaborators (those who work in the same building), because everyone is in
the same setting and can easily meet and see the information whether they’re
collaborating synchronously or not. The downside is that you can’t access
information stored or displayed physically while working from home or
traveling away from the office, unless additional support is provided (like
shared copies of stored or displayed information).
Face-to-face collaboration is especially valuable when issues are complex or
teams or team members are new. If some of your collaborators have never
worked together before, or if you have a particularly challenging topic to
manage where constructive debate and resolution require a view of body
language and vocal tone, then consider a set of initial in-person working
meetings.
Live meetings must be designed to get the team comfortable with their
project topic as well as each other. Team members should spend a good deal
of time on building relationships, cultivating trust and openness, and
exploring and resolving the most critical or contentious project issues.
Of course, in-person collaborators also typically need electronic
storage or event options in cases where not everyone who needs to work
together is present at a given time.
Electronic places
If you’re working with a dispersed and/or virtual team, electronic places are
absolutely critical for you. Electronic repositories in particular (such as
through a wiki or shared network drive) are useful when you’re hosting
asynchronous collaborations and for keeping deliverables and outputs
available for future reference.
Team members that can self-retrieve information from a repository
tend to be much more engaged and effective than those who get stuck
waiting for another team member to send information out to them.
Virtual collaboration works well when your collaborators have worked
together before, share a sense for each others’ work style and personality, and
feel a trust-based, collegial relationship. That doesn’t mean people need to
have met in person before, but they must have had a positive prior experience
together. Lacking that, they need a simpler problem to solve and an
agreement that all participants will approach collaboration with a spirit of
positive intent and openness and an initial giving of trust (instead of
reserving
trust until someone earns it). That history or start-up agreement provides
collaborators a foundation on which they can successfully discuss and debate
their project issues without animosity.
Popular virtual collaboration tools provide key techniques and experiences
typical to in-person collaboration, so you should look for features such as the
following:
Recording or viewing notes such as you would on a flip chart
Drawing on a virtual whiteboard together
Viewing the same thing at the same time, whether that’s a computer
screen, document, presentation, demonstration or simulation, or an
individual
Seeing which team members are present or speaking and/or seeing their
faces
Chatting or discussing topics and getting or giving feedback vocally or in
writing
Splitting into break-out groups for focused discussion and then coming
back and sharing results with the larger group
You can also use specialized collaboration tools among your fellow
BAs to improve your own analysis productivity and quality.