The Bumblebees Top Collaboration Techniques Mini Site

Overview of The Bumblebees Top Collaboration Techniques Mini Site

This mini site provides concise and well tried techniques in the areas of Team Mobilisation and Team Operations for a wide-range of collaboration scenarios including:

• virtual teams
• cross-functional teams
• collaborative business networks
• virtual communities
• supply chains and clusters

Each tool in the toolbox includes:

• An Introduction to the topic
• The overall process for introducing and using it
• A Detailed Checklist
• A Worked Example/Supporting Spreadsheet

The current toolbox contains the following items:

1. Introduction and Overview of all techniques
2. Defining team objectives, success criteria and required outcomes
3. Establishing Team Capabilities for the job and spotting the gaps
4. Defining Team Ground Rules
5. Assessing Team Culture and new required behaviours
6. Agreeing the Team Karma ("what’s in it for me?")
7. Effective Personal Collaboration Strategies
8. Conducting Effective Team Meetings
9. Good Team Decision Making
10. 360 degree team member review
11. Creating network collaboration opportunities
12. Assessing a teams beliefs versus High Performing Teams
13. Profiling a virtual team
14. Collaborative Document Development
15. Autonomous Behavior Modelling
16. Team Social Network Analysis

Establishing Team Capabilities for the job and spotting the gaps

This technique is used by a business network or organisational team to assess its collective capabilities and then compare this with what capabilities are required to achieve its objectives.

There are 4 main steps

Step 1 – Create the Blank Capability Matrix

Step 2 – Consolidate the Team Capabilities

Step 3 – Review and refine the Consolidated Team Capabilities

Step 4 – Identify the required capabilities

The technique is supported by a spreadsheet to a) gather individual capabilities, b) consolidate them and c) create a visual capability heatmap

Agreeing real and effective team ground rules

Keywords

Ground-Rules, Etiquette, Norms, Standards, Sanctions, Trust, Issues, Conflicts, Information-Sharing, Decision-Making, Meetings, Induction, Mentoring, Communications

Context

It is important for a Team to establish ground rules for how it intends to operate

In my approach to teams I split this into two:

Ground Rules

Covering in general the negative team member behaviours we wish to discourage – this tool addresses Ground Rules.

Team Culture and Behaviors

Covering in general the positive team member and group behaviours we wish to encourage and adopt. Team Culture and Behaviors are covered in a separate tool (Tool#8).

Applicability

* virtual teams

* cross-functional teams

* collaborative business networks

* virtual communities

* supply chains and clusters

Click here for a spreadsheet of typical ground rules which you can tailor for your group.

Instant Team or Network

The Collaborative Opportunity Mapping Process

Objectives

• To find if real collaboration opportunities exist within a potential network
• Motivate the network companies to consider collaborative networks
• Create new potential channel partners for the companies

Format/Approach

A full day (10-4pm) workshop or two half-day (3 hour) workshops

For overview click

For full process click