Collaboration is more than coordination

Photo by?“My Life Through A Lens”?on?Unsplash

Coordination could be passive participation, while collaboration is active participation.

Compare two teams of students. Team A coordinates the work between members, while Team B collaborates on their work together. Take a moment to think about what differences you might expect to see between the teams.

Ready? Let’s look at what each team is doing. Each of these is a composite of what might happen. As the image suggests, people need collaborate in order to create new things.

Coordination in Team A means less time together

In Team Coordination the meetings are scheduled for decision making, and alignment of who is doing what in each sprint. Each person’s work is coordinated with that of the others in the belief that it will be delivered as expected.

Each person on the team is probably working on their own for tasks and stories. A team member might check with someone else if their work overlaps. Their work will be monitored in a task board, but that might not be updated until the next team meeting.

Each person is probably working in an individual branch of the code. Individual branches might not be merged to the main branch until a task is completed. Merge conflicts might be normal as each person’s code is eventually merged into the main branch. Merge issues will require rework as issues are resolved.

Given team members are working individually, they might not have set agreements on when to ask for help when stuck on an issue. This means the team might not realise there is a problem until the next team meeting when the person mentions they are stuck.

If someone drops out of the team, then their skills and knowledge often go too. They might leave due to illness, visa issues, or other reasons.

Team Coordination is doing coordination and not much more. This team is aiming to keep working in the way they have done in the past: work as individuals and then integrate their work as and when it seems suitable. One or two people will become the ‘team leader/co-leader’ and coordinate the work of everyone. This is not an ideal way to work as I’ve explained before.

Collaboration in Team B means doing more of the work together

In Team Collaboration meetings are opportunities to decide upon the work to do, and also to do some of that work together. By doing the work together everyone becomes aware of their shared goal, and of the issues in all of the work.

Tasks and stories are often done by pairs of people, or as a mob with the whole team. This helps to spread skills and knowledge of the application within the team. It means if someone leaves, then the skills and knowledge are not lost too.

Only a few things will be done by individuals and then their work will be quickly shared with others.

Feedback in pairing or mobbing happens immediately. Feedback from clients and other stakeholders happens soon too as work is deployed frequently to keep feedback loops short. This means work can be fixed quickly.

The team also probably works only on the main branch using trunk-based development, so that everyone’s work is more visible. Code is merged more frequently and issues are quickly found and fixed

There is often a team charter, or agreement covering how and when team members should ask for help. For example, the agreement might state that a task should be pursued for two hours, and if no headway is made, then a message should be sent to the relevant team’s channel. This ensures issues are resolved sooner.

Team Collaboration is living collaboration and doing this whenever possible to ensure the work is done together. They are always looking to make their collaboration more effective. Their work should be multiplicative not additive.

Teach your students to collaborate for the win

Yes, it is more work to collaborate. Easy things are often less useful than we envisage. More effort often leads to more reward too. Learning to collaborate while a student should make future collaborations more effective, as they are never the same, and people never stop learning.

Highlight these two extremes to your students and have them discuss options they have for how they do their work using the collaboration rules. Ask them to try a few options to improve their team collaboration. This is an ongoing process, which they can do all of their careers. Now is the time for them to start exploring how they can win at collaboration.

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