1.0.1- Benefits of Collaboration

Benefits of Collaboration

There are four major benefits from collaboration:

·  Saving time or money (tangible)

·  Increasing quality (tangible…but less so)

·  Innovating and/or providing decision support (tangible but less than quality)

·  Easing access to and interactions with subject-matter experts (intangible)

In any collaboration people are the critical ingredient. None of the above benefits can be realized without people being willing to trust and share both the content and themselves. This is true for distributed project teams as well as for tiger teams dealing with a crisis. In the work CS has done over the last decade, we have found that distributed teams need to meet together in person first, and then again in person about every 6 months to keep the trust level high and the sharing effective.

In the next section we will discuss why collaborations fall apart (from a people perspective) and introduce the idea of “sustainable collaboration” and a principle that is critical for collaboration: “the Law of Agreement.”