Recently Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) asked me and a few others to help collaborate on a community-based survey on measuring collaboration. One might ask, how did our collaboration measure? Pretty good I think, the survey, “Measuring Collaboration Success“, was recently completed and published online.
This survey aims to help answer three points, how do we as a whole define collaboration success, how do we measure this success, and finally, how can we deploy collaboration tools in a way that ensures we meet our goals in a measurable way.
I encourage everyone to anonymously share your experiences about how collaboration works within your organization. This is not a marketing piece, truly no contact information is required unless you want the results emailed to you. Rather this is a community effort to learn what is and is not working. The results will be shared in multiple ways as well.
The survey itself made me think about how my team and I work together to ensure the success of PixelMill. How do the designers work with the developers to create a cohesive and functional interface? How do the marketing and sales departments consistently echo the same company persona and image? More importantly, how do we collaborate on a whole, with our partners, and with our clients? These are very important questions to answer, not just for my company, but also for all businesses, regardless of shape or size.
Every company’s end-goal is to be successful. Plain and simple. But often one of the most understated and overlooked methods to success is through team collaboration. It’s a tough thing to prioritize, especially when working in a fast-paced environment. Many clients who turn to me and my team are still searching for a way to create an extranet or intranet SharePoint portal that can enable their organization to work together.
One of the most important steps is figuring out your company’s personality and culture. You have to explore that first and foremost before you can really define collaboration. But how do you define it? It’s complicated as I am sure you already know. A blend of quantitative and qualitative data, with access to the right resources, to collect each type. For each business, collaboration is unique; it’s not a one size fits all situation.
I wanted to take part in this survey because I see it as a great tool to allow us all to give and share more insight on how to help organizations succeed, and more so how our own companies can succeed. When you get a chance, I highly recommend taking this survey.
For more information about this project and survey, check out Christian’s blog post.
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