By Steve Richards Collaboration is a key competency for today’s enterprises. Yet despite the fact that the Internet is awash with a myriad of different collaboration solutions many teams still struggle to be effective.

Many people assume that collaboration comes naturally — provide people with a tool and off they go. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that easy. Despite the fact that hundreds of books have been written about how to help teams collaborate and how to successfully manage projects, team leaders lack a simple framework to help them assess the scale and nature of the collaboration challenge that their teams face. One approach to assessing that challenge is to look inwards at how much common ground team members share and at the complexity of the project.

The first and probably the most important factor is the degree of common ground shared by team members. Teams with a lot of common ground collaborate more naturally together, and common ground becomes increasingly important as complexity increases. Are team members co-located or will they be a virtual team? If the team will be virtual, will they work together over different time zones? Will they be always on or only occasionally connected? How well do they know each other? Will team members have access to information on a need-to-know basis or will there be open access to information? Are roles well-defined at the start of the project, or will they evolve over time?

The second factor is the complexity of the project. Will project tasks be interdependent or independent? Must the team be innovative or can the project be completed with little innovation? How urgent is the project? Are project outputs well-defined, or will they evolve over time? Have key decisions already been made or will they be made later in the project schedule? How much negotiation with stakeholders will be needed to complete the project?

The application of this approach is best illustrated by an example: in this case, a typical corporate strategy team which is undertaking a regular yearly review cycle. The team lacks common ground in quite a few areas. The members have common goals, well-defined roles, and complementary skills, but they don’t all know each other, will be working virtually across multiple time zones, and will need to work both on and offline.

The yearly review is not particularly urgent, and the outputs are well-defined. But the review is complex because there are many interdependent tasks, the company needs to innovate to stay competitive, there are a number of decisions still to be taken, and completion of the requires different stakeholders to negotiate.

Given the complexity of the objective, the team’s lack of common ground will be a particular challenge. Understanding these factors will help team leaders to home in on the types of technology and process tools that are needed to make the team successful, especially during the storming and forming phase. Initially, the team should focus on building relationships and trust between team members. They probably should push for a kick off using a professional video conferencing session and concentrate on well-facilitated audio conferences until the team members get to know each other.

If the team wants to push the boundaries, they should consider a Web-hosted team room with offline support and also routine recording of their meetings. These will make it easier to create focus, manage information, engage new team members, and involve specialist contributors.

A refinement to this simple framework is to consider how the needs of the team will evolve over a project’s lifecycle. Longer term, the team members should consider instant messaging and establishing and subscribing to each others internal blogs, as these will allow members of the team to get to know each other much better, help them understand each other’s challenges and perspectives, and extend the strategy review process throughout the year.

Steve Richards is a member of the GIS Global Product Management group focused on collaboration and the end user experience.