It is my view that there are three pillars on which good collaboration sit. Without them it is destined to be, if not a failure, a very uphill struggle. Which may explain why so many projects suffer from drift and over complexity. It is my experience that applying agile methods to any collaborative project does in deed help support the three pillars. You could say it becomes the bracing which holds them straight.
Communication
First rule of collaboration involves actually talking to each other. If you are not talking, you are not collaborating. The problem here is more often how you are communicating. By what means and how often, this depends on the nature of the collaboration. Email is suitable for some efforts and a disaster for others. I would not suggest trying to build a website or working as a team on a marketing campaign via email. Nor would I suggest doing a sale that way. It’s fine for delivering the invoice but not the discussion.
Now I have worked on projects which had people in different parts of the world and different time zones. Trust me when I say that such projects can be a nightmare without good rules and one person coordinating. Some vendors of software and services will tell you how easy it is to “remote” work with their product. Well some of these products do help you communicate in “better ways”, but really the only way you are going to create good communication is to actually spend some time sat in the same room learning something about each other.
Honesty
Goes without saying right? Wrong! Honesty requires taking the blame for your mistakes, it requires being truthful to yourself, your colleagues and your customers. You are not going to know how honest someone is until the chips are down, or the cash has to be paid. The only way you can find out about someone’s lack of integrity is the hard way: through experience.
But there is some good news, you can take precautions such as creating a strong team, who communicate well. That will create the required empathic connections to overcome problems. Respect each other and things should fall into place.
Consistency
This is not to be confused with boring or unimaginative. For example, if part of the team supplies creative services you want to know that they will keep supplying the same levels of creative output not have off days at an inconvenient time. Unfortunately we don’t always work at 100% so, when one person is working at a low, other team members should be able to spot it and help out by being supportive and encouraging. If your team has these abilities consistency will flow.
Consistency is about supplying an expectation to your customers, an expectation of supply and quality. Customers don’t like suprises, except nice ones. And neither do people involved with collaborative endevour, although they often get them. Which is when good communication and honesty come to the fore to save the day.
