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Applied collaboration – dont always blame me

Image by Pirkka2 via Flickr

I just came back from vacation and there are not so many but still far too many emails asking for things that should not have waited for me. “Could you fix this, do you know how to do that, what’s the name of the guy who works with…” – I’m not the only person around who knows this, but I’m probably the one whom others suppose to know this. There are a lot of colleagues whom you could ask, and I bet you can find a lot of the requested information in the blogs, wikis and other information sharing services I’m running.
I like the idea of collaborating not only in dedicated collaboration environments, but also – or rather way more – in environments that strongly support networking. Yes, information should be tailored to a certain audience – but everybody should have the possibility to be part of that audience.
Public information provides better accessibility, not only of the information itself, but also of the possibilities and responsibilities: Who did what? Who can fix what? Who knows what? I don’t want to skip hierarchies or substitute managers, I’m mainly thinking about intra-team collaboration: Some colleagues have a sense for what’s going on, others simply don’t. They always need help and guidance, especially if they are supposed to get in touch with people they don’t have to deal with every day.
And that quickly leads to fear, prejudice, stubbornness – which again reduces the quality of information. Actually it even reduces the readiness to look for any information at all.

We know the consequences: Colleagues start to blame each other, questions are understood to be suspicions and wrong information becomes harder and harder to fix – you start to believe in things you know just because you know them, and because it seems to be more comfortable than questioning them.

And maybe the colleagues who asked so many questions during my vacation did not want to blame me… , but they really just needed to know something.

What’s the end of it: Collaboration does also stand for networking and documentation; collaboration tools should also provide information on who did what. Or the other way round: every tool that is of value for the community or is used by a community should provide collaborative features that

• provide public information
• show who did what and who can be addressed for what
• are easily accessible and not just an administrator’s secret.

Then we can clearly say that collaboration adds tremendous value to media.

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Productplanner.com – an online process design facilitator

Productplanner.com is a great service. Maybe it’s not a fully flavoured design tool yet, but it does provide good support for many basic steps in interaction planning. It allows you to combine the most common steps that every online product has to perform, split into several usecases.

The visualization is nice; it allows you show overviews (that tell you how many steps are in that process) and details. Great add ons would be the possibility to attach documents to the single steps or to add more descriptions.

I plan to use it to prepare some standard processes that I need always and always again – productplanner should allow me to have them with me whereever there is an online connection, and to edit them without anything else then a browser.

A nice benefit besides that could be the public process library: watch and compare processes others have designed.

I’m curious if that service will take off and in which direction it will develop. And I support everything that fosters some process-oriented focus in online design and product development – everythingh else is just plain scribbling.

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