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

Repeatable Collaboration Processes for Mature Organizational Policy Making

“…While with ad hoc processes, the value of each process improvement will accrue only once. Again, with the improvement to repeatable collaborative policy processes, practitioners of these processes can learn to conduct them successfully without learning facilitation skills [13]. This also means that organisational policy-making stakeholders do not have to spend on professional facilitators to conduct such processes.…”

“…Better still, deploy those designs for organisational policy practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from professional facilita tors [13]. This means that CE focuses on processes for mission-critical tasks that must be executed by teams rather than individuals, and should be executed frequently, and that have a high payoff if successful.…”

“…A thinkLet is defined by [17] as "a named, packaged facilitation intervention that creates a predictable, repeatable pattern of collaboration among people working together toward a goal" . Thinklets benefit the design and transfer of collaboration processes in many ways among which include: permit ease of communication, documentation and transfer of a collaboration process to others; improving productivity of and quality of work life for groups by en abling rapid development of collaboration processes; creation of particular dynamism within groups, though each instantiation of the pattern would dif fer from all other instantiations [18,13]. Examples of thinkLets are provided in Table 1.…”

“…Collaboration Engineering (CE) therefore, is an approach to designing such recurring collabo ration processes that are meant to cause predictable and success among organ isations' recurring mission-critical collaborative tasks. CE is defined by [13] as "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" .…”

“…To design a recurring mission-critical collaboration process for execution by organisation practitioners, [13] suggest following the [14]'s five ways model that gives a comprehensive description of an engineering method or approach to be followed. When using this framework/model for CE, the way of thinking portrays the concepts and theoretical foundations; the way of working describes structured design methods; the way of modeling describes conventions for repre senting aspects of the domain and the approach; and finally the way of controlling describes measures and methods for managing the engineering process.…”