There is a great deal of hype about new collaboration tools and “collaboration 2.0″ approaches. Indeed more of us are spending more of our time in collaborative efforts with others. But a recent survey of collaboration experiences points out how much of successful collaboration requires some back to basics approaches to team management and proper use of well-established tools.

The survey report at All Collaboration points out the following:

1. Complex collaboration is already a significant work activity for many people, and will only grow in importance. Most respondents have multiple collaborative projects underway at any given time. The purpose of these collaboration projects spans virtually the entire spectrum of enterprise needs. Collaboration efforts extend well beyond a group/department to include collaboration with other departments, partners, vendors, and customers. Collaboration is viewed as being essential across the board in the future, significantly more than the reality today. Individuals as well as organizations believe that they need to collaborate substantially more than they do currently.
2. Successful collaboration requires mostly the good principles of project management applied to dispersed teams. Getting the old-fashioned basics right is critical. Most important advice from the respondents on effective collaboration is to:
   1. Define goals, roles, timelines and deliverables clearly,
   2. Communicate the process and progress frequently and clearly, and
   3. Select team members who bring real knowledge and expertise.

   Key challenges to effective collaboration include organizational culture and priorities, and collaboration process and tools.

3. Keep it simple on the collaboration tools. Email, audio and web-conferencing, and file sharing are rated the most effective tools for collaboration. Wikis, IM, video conferencing and discussion forums rank low on effectiveness for collaboration. Selection of right tools and proper training are identified as potential areas for improvement.

Are you working on collaboration approaches? What challenges are you facing?

WHAT IS IT?: Generation Y has very different needs in the work place.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO MY BUSINESS?: Depending upon your business staffing needs, recognize that the work environment you want can be different from the one you have today. If your business needs Gen Y (and even Gen X) employees then you’re going to have to change some things.

PROS: Gen Y workers can be a tremendous asset to move and keep your company in the leading entreprenuerial edge of our business times when those businesses that can be agile and evolve constantly are the ones that win. This is simply based upon the fact that Gen Y understands, uses, and lives the medium by which business is being changed today - the web.

CONS: There is a cultural challenge based upon what Gen Y would consider standard and what others may consider priveledges in the work place. There may be cultural clashes with existing employees and generally accepted business practices.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Your business needs will determine if you will need to adjust to the wants of Gen Y or if Gen Y will have to adjust to your company. In the end, as in all cultural changes in a business, it’s imperative that company leadership understands the implications of the choice they make in making a Gen Y friendly environment or not. Companies can also separate the differing generational work groups by teams or divisions based upon distinct differences in goals for the company to mitigate cultural clashes.

Notable workplace standards that Gen Y will expect as described by Ryan Healy:

• The ability to work wherever they like
• An identity that isn’t defined by a particular profession or role
• Flexible ways of experimenting with entrepreneurship even while benefiting from traditional employment

Link to blog post that inspired this discussion:

• What Gen Y Wants from Work by Ryan Healy

‘KEY’ TAKE AWAY: In a recent San Jose Mercury News article “WEB 2.0 DEVELOPERS IN GREAT DEMAND“, reporter Ryan Blitstein talks about the real world costs of hiring Web 2.0 developers today. It’s going up.. way up! And will continue to do so.

“…soaring well into six figures”

Reporter Ryan Blitstein wrote, “..salaries are soaring well into the six figures (plus stock options) for elite engineers, according to more than two dozen employees, recruiters and executives at start-ups and large businesses”

I have multiple real world examples from my own personal experiences as well. I’ve heard the same story from many different perspectives including those of a startup, a Ruby on Rails consultancy, and from friends in the enterprise world. The stories are clear. It’s getting harder and harder to afford Web 2.0 developers and companies are scrambling to figure out what to do. In some cases, even with the budget, they can’t find the quality of developers that they used to. The competition to find, hire, and retain top notch Web 2.0 developers is definitely increasing and will continue to increase for some time to come.

Be prepared.

• Obviously do everything you can to keep the ones you may have now. Make sure that you understand their work and life goals and that the company is mapping towards them if possible.
• Adjust budgets.
• Seek new talent in universities. Some of the best Web 2.0 developers are in their early 20’s.
• Offshore outsourcing is on option. Especially when the talent pool is drying up, there may not be a more viable option.

What other ways are you coping with the challenges to find Web 2.0 developers?

James Key Lim

Margie Zable Fisher who runs theprsite.com wrote a great blog (that Guy Kawasaki posted on his blog How to Change the World) titled The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work. I have been a management consultant for twenty years and I have delivered hundreds of successful strategy, planning and implementation project for clients. On the other hand, each of us have stories about real clunkers, the consulting projects that went south. Margie’s blog regarding PR deserves a corollary for consulting so here are the Top Eight Reasons Why Consulting Doesn’t Work

1. The target audience for the consulting work is not understood
   When clients and consultants are not clear on the target audience for the output of a project, consultants fail. The basic tenant of good marketing is to have a clear understanding of your target segments and their needs and focus your inbound and outbound efforts on meeting these needs. The same holds true for consulting projects. Both the client and the consultant need to understand: who will “consume” the results of the work; how they will “consume” those results; and how they want to receive the results so that they can most effectively act upon the recommendations
2. “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
   This quote spoken by “The Captain”, the imperious prison warden played by Strother Martin, near the epitasis of the movie Cool Hand Luke sums up the most common reason that consulting projects fail. Every consulting project requires some basic blocking and tackling including: scheduled status reviews with all key stakeholders participating; clear lines of communication between consultants and clients; an understanding of how (email/voicemail/blackberry/etc) each participant likes to communicate and receive communications; a well understood process to escalate when things go bad; a mutual agreement and commitment to have open and frequent communications. Yet life can get in the way and when consultants fail you can usually look back and find that the basic communications mechanisms were not in place or functioned poorly
3. It is not clear when the project is complete
   One of the most obvious and overlooked imperatives is to clearly define when you are done– to the extreme satisfaction of both the client and the consultant. Consultants and clients fail when they agree to ambiguous work products like “a completed model”, a “global market sizing”, an “industry evaluation.” These terms are so vague that it is highly likely that consultant and client have a different view of what they will deliver and when they are done. When consultant and client hold these different views in their mind the chances of success decrease dramatically.
4. Client did not understand what they bought and Consultant did not understand what they sold
   How often do clients have a clear understanding of exactly what they will get when a consulting project is finished? Conversely, how often do consultants have one 30 minute meeting with a client, develop a detailed proposal, get approval to begin work and still have no idea exactly what the client wants? I have often tried to show clients exactly what they will get at the end of a project either by sharing the deliverable of a very similar project while extracting the confidential information before sharing. However, frequently, consultants and clients enter into a project each with a clear picture in their mind of exactly what they will get or deliver and yet neither makes the time to put that picture down on paper so the other can say “yes” that is exactly what we are doing.
5. The explosion of “Credenza-ware” — failure to land the project with someone who will use it
   When consultants create a final work product that sits in a beautiful binder on the shelf of the client, never to be opened again, that is called “credenzaware”. Credenzaware adds no value to any except Acco who produces the binders. Consulting projects that have the fewest tangible results are often completed with the prettiest color, bound, large-volume reports with densely packed text, the exhaustive analysis and some of the most clever insights. Yet if consultants and clients often fail to land the report for success by determining who will received the report, how they will use it, when they will use it, why they will use it and what the results will be from this use.
6. Expectations greater than budget
   Sometimes what the client wants or needs is much greater than what they can afford. What happens? Sometimes consultants agree to maintain scope but within the reduced budget (I call this consultant value destruction). This leads to a model where the consultant has agreed to do work that does not make sense for them economically. Alternatively, the consultants agree to accept the scope and take it out on their team through evening and weekend work.
7. Measurements of success not clearly defined
   Simplistically, consulting projects have three outcomes: insight, a plan, or tangible results. Yet clients and consultants are often really bad at identifying and measuring the results of the project. If the project is a research study then the results will be insight such as go/no go decisions on markets, customers, products, opportunities etc. If the project is planning, the tangible result is an implementable plan. If you cannot implement the plan, the project failed. Finally, implementation projects can and should be measured based upon the tangible results delivered such as increased revenue, reduced costs, lower risk and costs of capital etc. Nonetheless ROCI “Return on Consulting Investment” is not a frequently considered metric; what a shame.
8. Unclear commitments
   The book The Secret is a runaway success partly because it takes the concept of the power of positive thinking and turns it into life commitments. In consulting, the law of attraction holds equally strong implications. When clients or consultants do not make clear commitments to: proactively participate in project meetings; define timeframes to deliver or review work; provide feedback; communicate; determine when the project is complete; understand what was bought and sold; create useful deliverables; align consultant and clients business needs; define and measure ROCI; consultants fail.

‘KEY TAKE AWAY’: Crowd sourcing is asking an group of ‘amateur’ people (the crowd) from the internet to do what a ‘professional’ individual or company would do traditionally. With the benefit of reduced cost and also building loyal, trusting communities, there is really no reason not to explore different forms of crowd sourcing no matter what your businesses is.

In a way, crowd sourcing is ‘open source’ for services. By bypassing the traditional structure of hiring experts in the field, businesses can benefit by paying less, but may be challenged by the quality of the work delivered. Today, small businesses to corporations are exploring crowd sourcing to produce a part or the entire product lines for their business.

In the latest Springwise newsletter, they talk about an Australian company called SitePoint and the crowd sourcing of web development services. In this case, business can bypass the need to hire a web design company or interactive firm and simply post their needs on the SitePoint to see who should literally win their business.

Here’s how it works:

1. “A business owner looking for a new design, be it a logo, website or stationery, describes exactly what she’s looking for: what the desired color scheme and file format are, what the design is for, and which elements to incorporate…”
2. “After a prize amount and an end-date have been set, designers start submitting their work for all to see.”
3. “Once the contest holder sees a design she likes, she can award the prize to buy the design”

In fact, there are many forms of crowd sourcing:

• Topix.com - an online newspaper focused on local news bypasses reporters and lets “ameaturs”write local stories
• iStockphoto.com - “Stockphoto”is the world’s preeminent collection of member-generated royalty-free images, at the world’s best prices”.
• threadless.com - where every t-shirt sold is designed by the “crowd”
• Fastmatch.com - “crowd-sourcing the creation of fashion, something that historically has been the prerogative of thick, glossy magazines”.

Big companies are now following the trend as well:

• Salesforce.com - According Denis Pombriant of CRM Buyer, ‘Spring ‘07 release of their software is built almost entirely on suggestions from customer feedback.’ In addition, Salesforce.com has asked their customers to even name their software!

MORE LINKS WORTH YOUR TIME:

• Wikipedia definition
• Excellent crowd sourcing blog
• John Bell on Crowdsourcing