By collaborating people can accomplish more than they could as separate individuals. Yet, achieving effective team collaboration remains a challenge. Organizations struggle to make collaboration work. They often resort to implementing technologies, while experiences show that technology alone seldom is the answer. Collaboration processes need to be explicitly designed structured and managed to maximize the focus of purposeful effort. This is at the heart of a new area of research: Collaboration Engineering - designing recurring collaboration processes that can be transferred to groups that can be self-sustaining in these processes using collaboration techniques and technology. Through a number of action research studies with a host of organizations we developed a Collaboration Engineering design approach. This paper presents and illustrates this approach in terms of its way of thinking, working, modeling and controlling. Finally, an agenda for future research is defined.

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Collaboration Engineering: Designing Repeatable Processes for High-Value Collaborative Tasks

Broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes intended to aid collective decision making and learning are rarely initiated, designed, implemented, and managed by one person. These processes mostly emerge from some form of collective planning and organization activities because of the stakes, time, and budgets involved in their implementation. Despite the potential importance of these collective processes for managing complex water-related social-ecological systems, little research focusing on the project teams that design and organize participatory water management processes has ever been undertaken. We have begun to fill this gap by introducing and outlining the concept of a co-engineering process and examining how it impacts the processes and outcomes of participatory water management. We used a hybrid form of intervention research in two broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes in Australia and Bulgaria to build insights into these coengineering processes. We examined how divergent objectives and conflict in the project teams were negotiated, and the impacts of this co-engineering on the participatory water management processes. These investigations showed: (1) that language barriers may aid, rather than hinder, the process of stakeholder appropriation, collective learning and skills transferal related to the design and implementation of participatory water management processes; and (2) that diversity in co-engineering groups, if managed positively through collaborative work and integrative negotiations, can present opportunities and not just challenges for achieving a range of desired outcomes for participatory water management processes. A number of areas for future research on co-engineering participatory water management processes are also highlighted.

https://en.vedur.is/media/loftslag/Moellenkampetal_etal-2010.pdf

Co-engineering Participatory Water Management Processes: Theory and Insights from Australian and Bulgarian Interventions

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks, and deploying those designs for practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from professional facilitators. CE is a fast-moving field of research and practice that has not yet reached maturity. A growing community of researchers is actively contributing to the CE literature. To establish common language among CE researchers in, and to focus the research efforts in this domain, this paper documents the current definitions of key concepts in the CE domain. This paper also examines the scope of CE as a domain of research and practice.

Defining key concepts for collaboration Engineering

Organizations increasingly use collaborative teams in order to create value for their stakeholders. This trend has given rise to a new research field: Collaboration Engineering. The goal of Collaboration Engineering is to design and deploy processes for high-value recurring collaborative tasks, and to design these processes such that practitioners can execute them successfully without the intervention of professional facilitators. One of the key concepts in Collaboration Engineering is the thinkLet-a codified facilitation technique that creates a predictable pattern of collaboration. Because thinkLets produce a predictable pattern of interactions among people working together toward a goal they can be used as snap-together building blocks for team process designs. This paper presents an analysis of the thinkLet concept and proposes a conceptual object model of a thinkLet that may inform further developments in Collaboration Engineering.

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A conceptual foundation of the thinkLet concept for Collaboration Engineering

Collaboration engineering is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaboration processes that can be executed by practitioners without the support of collaboration professionals such as facilitators. A critical challenge in collaboration engineering concerns how the design activities have to be executed and which design choices have to be made to create a process design. We report on a four-year design science study in which we developed a design approach for collaboration engineering that incorporates existing process design methods, pattern-based design principles, and insights from expert facilitators regarding design challenges and choices. The resulting approach was evaluated and continuously improved in four trials with 37 students. Our findings suggest that this approach is useful to support the design of repeatable collaboration processes. Our study further serves as an example of how a design approach can be developed and improved following a multimethod design science approach.

/pdf/a-design-approach-for-collaboration-processes-a-multimethod-3600a7r1l4.pdf

A Design Approach for Collaboration Processes: A Multimethod Design Science Study in Collaboration Engineering

In the past decade, there has been a steady increase in the importance of collaboration to value creation in organizations, which has given rise to a new research field. Collaboration Engineering aims to model, design, and deploy repeatable collaboration processes to be executed by practitioners themsleves of high-value recurring collaborative tasks. Thus the aim of collaboration engineering is to create ready made designs for group processes. A key concept in Collaboration Engineering is a thinkLet – a codified facilitation intervention in a group process to create a desired pattern of collaboration. This paper presents an analysis of the thinkLet concept and possible thinkLet classification schemes to support collaboration engineers in effectively designing collaboration processes.

ThinkLets as Building Blocks for Collaboration Processes: A Further Conceptualization

Now that GSS (group support systems) have been commercialized and are present in an increasing number of organizational settings, sustained use of GSS within organizations is an important subject of research. One of the aspects of GSS use that clearly poses challenges for organizations concerns GSS session design. ThinkLets are chunked facilitation techniques that can be used as building blocks for GSS sessions. In order to develop a library of useful thinkLets for organizations to use, this study researched patterns of thinkLets use in a large number of GSS sessions. We identified which thinkLets were used most and which patterns of thinkLets in terms of a fixed sequence emerged as 'best practices'. By identifying such sequences, called modules, we can offer organizations powerful capsules of knowledge to wield GSS effectively. The results of our study represent a first version of a lexicon for the discipline of collaboration engineering with thinkLets and opens various avenues for research on making organizational collaboration more productive.

Recurring patterns of facilitation interventions in GSS sessions

The main challenge in the first phase of designing mobile services is eliciting user requirements. We propose a repeatable process for eliciting user requirements based on the literature on requirements engineering and group support systems. We applied the repeatable process in three sessions to elicit user requirements for a mobile information service on a UMTS testbed. The sessions resulted in ideas for services that are highly valued by potential users and criteria for when they can or can not use the service.

Designing mobile information services: user requirements elicitation with GSS design and application of a repeatable process

Group Support Systems (GSS) are increasingly present in different organizational configurations. One way to stimulate sustained use of a GSS is to consciously design recurring processes that support mission critical tasks. Based on this notion the first two phases of a crisis response process in one of the main harbors in the world were modeled and redefined in terms of thinkLets. This delivered a process design that was supported by a GSS. The aim of the project was to design and execute the situational awareness phase in a distributed fashion and to do it faster and more effective than the current same-time same-place process.

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Jaco H. Appelman

Papers

A conceptual foundation of the thinkLet concept for Collaboration Engineering

ThinkLets as Building Blocks for Collaboration Processes: A Further Conceptualization

Recurring patterns of facilitation interventions in GSS sessions

Designing mobile information services: user requirements elicitation with GSS design and application of a repeatable process

Crisis-Response in the Port of Rotterdam: Can We do Without a Facilitator in Distributed Settings?