The Periodic Table of Collaboration

Collaboration is how humans went from caves to skyscrapers. It is a blend of tools and psychology. Modern digital collaboration is no different. The psychology requires all of the same ancient practices of ritual, symbolism and story and I will discuss that another time. But on the very practical level of tooling we seem to have settled into a standard framework of collaboration tools which enable remote and hybrid working. I call this the 'periodic table of collaboration'.

This is not about naming any particular tool because they do change and there is usually at least two in any particular area. In fact the biggest question is usually about 'family', do you go Google or do you go Microsoft, it is challenging to effectively blend those two families of tools. Instead this is a taxonomy of the tools required to get the job done as a manager in the 21st century. It also presupposes relative digital literacy on the part of the workforce (i.e. they can use zoom and share a screen). There is a maturity curve along which all organisations (even decentralised or non-profit non-standard employee types) travel; starting from the most basic (e.g. email) and progressing to the rarer more esoteric and specialised tools. Each box describes function not individual process and it is not inclusive of all the enterprise software tools (e.g. it doesn't include the HR and accounting software's because they tend not to be 'collaborative'.)

This is an evolving diagram but at the time of writing it is split into 4 'orders': Knowledge, Identity, Action and communication. Going top to bottom and left to right, there are some interesting points to be made. A document repository like Google Drive, Dropbox etc is not the same as a knowledge repository; a document repository holds files like a filing cabinet (whether doc, pdf or mp4 video), a knowledge repository organises information in a structured and usually searchable way like a company manual (you tend to see these in the form of 'intranets' on wordpress and the like).

The Policy repository is a new breed of tool designed specifically for enabling compliance with the various standards. It allows the staff or team to all sing off the same hymn sheet when the compliance officer is breathing down their neck. 'Can't remember the policy on (insert problem)? No problem just search the policy repository for the exact correct response in any given situation.'

The people directory is usually contained on an organogram and often put on the public website, but most of the time the people that really care of the internal staff. And the larger you get the more important this becomes for the effectiveness of the organisation. There is also significant research to indicate that profile photos humanise and improve collaboration, so as a rule every single collaborator should be required to upload a profile photo (and it doesn't have to be their face) on every single tool used by the organisation. Password management is also severely lacking in most organisations, and this is usually because there is not sufficient cybersecurity training which would train everyone to use the password manager (I like LastPass but there are others) instead of just saving to Chrome. And the reason this is important is because passwords are always being shared when collaborating, and we need a safe way to do this without putting it in an email or chat thread that can be raided by attackers later. If you can see a password, others can too. And while you are at it enforce 2 factor authentication and use a diceware password for your masterpassword and make it easy to revoke that masterpassword as admin.

It's also surprising how many organisations still do not use KanBan economics (see the 'Theory of Constraints' and the rest of Goldratt's work) to improve efficiency but more importantly you need to make the 'bits' visible, by that I mean 'if it's not in a task, it's not going to get done.' The more you make the intangible list of tasks visible, the more obvious it becomes to everyone where the bottle neck constraints are. This can be done most effectively through information radiators like KanBan project boards which are organised in a such a way to show the pipeline of value creation and encourages conversations like 'hey there seems to be a lot of stuff piling up with testing right now.'

Service desks are also underused, people think of them as external facing but used effectively they can be used internally with internal SLA's. This is most beneficial for overstretched teams that need protecting. A service desk allows many stakeholders to have a single point of access to a maximally used resource such as the 'guys who run the servers etc.' So instead of those who shout loudest getting what they want, it becomes an orderly queue with daily triaging of the most important tasks. Early in the maturity of an organisation a single helpdesk system can be used the point of entry for everyone in the organisation to log issues, put a help button at the bottom left of your tool or software that instantly logs a ticket and everyone from the CEO down can be treated equally.

Effective Calendaring is usually down to good policies. If using Google calendar you have to deal with the annoying way it constantly adds Google Meet links and confuses everyone if you are using Zoom. If you are scheduling recurring meetings do them weekly not daily, so if someone wants to say they can never attend on a tuesday they dont have to say no to every meeting from next tuesday to the end of time (or refuse tuesday every week). Try to always allow people to edit the calendar (trust people they are not going to mess with you :) And use automated calendaring systems like calendly to make it easy for busy people to schedule with each other and stop that 'I can do x time or y' dance.

An automated scheduler like Jenkins (which is usually associated with CI/CD pipelines) can equally be used to automate all sorts of aspects of business. A little bit of shell coding and you can automate newsletters, reports turning off the lights at night, take your pick. And it doesn't have to be as fancy as Jenkins you can do a lot with things like Zapier or IFTTT.

Email is a mainstay backup but if you are still spending your life in there you are doing it wrong. I have a whole system for effectively managing email but I realised a few years ago that instead of inbox zero I prefer inbox infinite. The satisfaction of seeing an empty inbox is not really worth the emotional exhaustion of getting there every day. So instead treating it like twitter and immediately write down next actions everytime you batch process the next batch of emails. And while we are on the subject, personal to do lists (and project management boards) are not the same as team management boards. Don't dump your to dos on everyone else, instead the board should reflect common goals that two or more people want to track (and therefore more than likely the management board will be driven by the manager) e.g. reply to mary is the personal task, the management board task will likely be the project endpoint 'finish tax credits claim', and this means the CEO can once again visualise the work and see where the strain is across the collaborative efforts of the company.

Video conferencing is now ubiquitous but a key thing that is often missed is to have shared meeting rooms. People should be able to collide. Have a meetingroom.domain.com where everyone starts the day and can hang out and hear other talking while they are working. People collaborate with people (plural) not a chat screen or series of isolated interactions. The latent information sharing that happens when many people are hanging out in the same audio/visual space is vital. It will be interesting to see how 'meta meeting rooms' (that's Facebook to use oldies) manage side bar conversations in the virtual reality space but for most of us just having an open zoom room is enough. I also recommend Lucid chart for your collaborative white boarding and diagramming (but it's not cheap).

Chatops is not just having a whatsapp group with the team. It's about feeding alarms and notifications from various sensors and systems into the chat feed. So you can see when customers are pouring in and servers are down, and events in the business drive the conversation. For many organisations this is still a long way off.

Finally CRM's are more often than not a way to formalise certain business processes so that standards can be upheld while decreasing the need for constant training and quality control. However the rigidity of these systems often means that they do not keep pace with the changing business environment so they should be used sparingly.

In a world without 'going into the office' these tools become the office, and so they should not be viewed as an unneccessary cost. A simple spreadsheet that tracks the monthly cost (and also the per employee cost) is enough to control spending on these tools effectively. And if you use the collaboration periodic table you just have to look for places where money is being spent twice in the same functional area to help save cost.

I once read a paper that outlined how insects use 'stigmergy' to communicate with each other by leaving marks that communicate an action that other insects should take. We humans are not so different and a lot of collaboration is the act of leaving a mark for someone else in the team to pick up where we left off. This enables the 'sum is greater than the parts' capability of an effective team.

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