"Through collaboration, we can find how to deliver the right results for all stakeholders in the organization, for as the Japanese proverb says, `None of us is as smart as all of us.'"

Collaboration Wastes Time

Not another meeting! All that collaboration takes too much time. People need to stop talking and start building.

Collaboration Delivers

When the right people get together, obstacles are removed, solutions are found, innovation happens. Collaboration ensures better, faster delivery of business value.

Opening Statement

There are two strongly held opinions on the issue of collaboration: "collaboration takes too much time" and "collaboration delivers." We can eliminate the apparent conflict between these opinions if the time spent in collaboration actually ensures better, faster delivery. In my experience, collaboration is a powerful tool that does deliver proven, measurable, and reliable business results, particularly in highly dynamic environments.

IT leaders are faced with serious demands: deliver today what we need internally to deliver externally; meet market windows and stop going overbudget; bring innovative solutions to market ahead of the competition; find new ways to improve efficiency and productivity. Yikes! How are we still standing? Fortunately, the answers are found in your organization. But how do you discover them and get them implemented? Through collaboration. To build effective collaborations, leaders must:

• Create a safe environment.
  
  
• Get the right people together. Focus on who needs to be in the room to make the decisions and to deliver. Ensure all your stakeholders are included.
  
  
• Let the team decide together what the strategy, solutions, and ideas are -- what needs to happen. Then let team members volunteer for what actions they will take and when they will deliver.
  
  
• Stand back and let them deliver their work, in their way. Provide what they need to succeed.
  
  
• Be transparent; share all information with everyone.
  
  
• Focus on results.
  
  

IT leaders are faced with competing expectations and agendas. However, everyone in the company has the same goal: deliver business value that builds a sustainable competitive advantage. Keeping key deliverables on this track requires everyone to understand the business value of each feature. It is this exact communication that seems to fail in busy companies. Are decision makers aware that they are often the bottleneck to progress when they do not participate in collaborative decisions? Are marketing people communicating the change they see in the marketplace to the developers? Is the business value assessed and adjusted continuously over the lifetime of the project? Are those changes communicated to the development teams?

Assessing business value requires four inputs: costs, benefits, purpose, and market considerations. As we move through the development of the product or service, these inputs rarely stay constant. At key points in the cycle, we must ask: "Do we have enough business value to go to market?" "Has the definition of business value changed?" and "Do we have enough 'business value velocity' to continue on this project?" With the right people in the room, we get the answers to these questions quickly, in one meeting, not in 10 separate meetings or multistage, multiday e-mail chains.

With technology changing around us, our marketplace changing beneath us, and constraints tightening ("I want it now at the cheapest cost"), how do we lead change? Companies can no longer just respond to change. Steve Jobs is putting out new, innovative products before we know we want them and before the market has been saturated. That is leading change. Before the reviewers had a chance to criticize the iPhone, teams had let it leak that the new version was in the works with new features and corrections. Apple collaborates with users to discover what comes next, and as customers we are pleased that the company has discovered what intrigues us. I pay more attention to what comes out of Apple than any other company because it uses collaboration to deliver.

Innovation is essential to corporate survival. Innovation fuels both operational improvement and new products and services. I am certain that your teams know exactly what is working in the day-to-day functioning of your business and what is not -- and they can most likely tell you how it can be fixed. Collaboration is diverse and inclusive. Everyone has a chance to be heard and will speak up if the environment is safe and trusting. In fact, as conversation becomes valuable and when collaboration includes the right people, outcomes are relevant and people want to be there.

The right kind of collaboration reduces meetings and, as a bonus, reduces miscommunications. This raises the probability that we will deliver the right results just as the market wants them, not merely needs them. This in turn puts the company in the position of leading change.

COLLABORATION CASE STUDY

I know collaboration works because I saw it in action when I brought the principles of collaborative leadership to the development of the Swiss Electronic Stock Exchange. When I arrived, the project had already failed twice, silos had formed, and team leaders were not talking to each other. They communicated through a single point of contact: the functional specification team. My first step to ensure project success was to collaborate so we all could understand what needed to be developed and then decide how we were going to get there.

I brought team leaders together and asked, "What do we need to do to deliver?" and I was adamant that we needed results. The requirements were clear: electronic exchange with a two-second throughput from the keystroke that initiated a trade to the match appearing on the screen, total redundancy (hardware and software), and "lights out" operations. Most important, the system had to make the lives of the traders better.

I was long past my coding days and thus had no answers as to "what" and "how." But I could lead through collaboration. So I stepped through the principles, one at a time. Was the environment open? The development environment was reasonably open but lacked trust. Through the startup phase of the collaboration process, it became apparent that some of the leaders were in the wrong role. I switched the organization around and got the right leaders in place. I based my decisions about leadership roles on how well individuals collaborated. I trusted them and communicated everything to everyone on the team. Trust began to arrive.

I brought the leaders together, and they sorted out the functionality, volunteering for each feature in their area of responsibility. I stood back, an action that convinced these leaders of my trust in them. I roamed the floors, letting people bounce ideas off of me, and I interfaced with the board and the traders. Agile practices emerged. Three-month iterations, while long, delivered working code that was ready for delivery. People wrote tests first and automated them. Pair programming happened. Documentation was kept to a minimum. When people wanted an interface to another module, they walked across the room and asked the relevant person.

The Swiss Electronic Stock Exchange is a successful working system today. Recently, I heard that upgrades were in the works. At first, they tried the old methods -- and failed again. They went back to the collaboration methods and are now achieving the results they expect.

HOW DO WE LEAD COLLABORATION?

From experiences like these, we know that collaboration delivers results and saves time. So how do we put it into practice? Fortunately, the six articles in this issue present us with the latest on how to create business value results through collaboration. Every article is insightful and practical, based on the authors' own experiences. Today's leaders need tools, and here our authors provide them.

We begin with Ellen Gottesdiener's article on trust, the basis for collaboration. "Trust" is an elusive term, but she puts it into focus by outlining three types of trust that are important in organizations: contractual trust, communication trust, and competence trust. Better still, she offers practical techniques for fostering these kinds of trust within your teams. As Gottesdiener observes, "Trust isn't 'a feeling' that 'just happens.' Rather, it is the result of specific actions team leaders can take in a systematic way." After reading her article, you'll have a number of good answers to her final question: "What can you do today to build and sustain trust on your team?"

In our second article, Tim Shultz tells us about a three-year project that went awry in one year's time, only to be restarted by a new team and delivered in 10 months, 20% underbudget. Shultz, the project lead, unfolds his story with artistry, telling each step he took, unflinchingly exposing the setbacks, and discussing how the team took the project over -- ensuring its eventual success. His suggestions? Collaborate all the way, maintain an open environment, encourage flexibility, and -- most important -- let go.

Next, David Anderson shows how collaboration reduces the "transaction costs" in most marketplaces and tells us to stop negotiating. How do you go about doing that? As Anderson gleefully puts it, "Just saying 'No!' won't cut it. You need to get naked!" Lest you think he's proposing really casual Fridays, he hastens to explain that what he's advocating is true transparency -- no hidden agendas, no hidden information. While you might feel that laying all your cards on the table will make you vulnerable, Anderson argues that the reverse is true. He proves his point with a discussion of how he implemented this approach at Corbis. The results? Positive behavior change across the enterprise and new valuable software released into production every nine days.

Of course, most people won't "get naked" unless they feel they're in a secure environment. In our next article, agile guru Alistair Cockburn reveals exactly how to create a safe space for innovation, creativity, and new thought. He takes the novel approach of parsing evaluations of past collaborative work sessions to "unravel the mechanisms" that improve the atmosphere for collaboration. He finds four of them: lift others, increase safety, make progress, and add energy. As he describes different ways to enact the mechanisms, he shows how "violating decorum" and creating that "10 pm in a bar" sensation can be key to breakthrough results.

Next up, Jenni Dow and Kent McDonald discuss how to keep projects focused on delivering optimal business value by bringing together all relevant parties to collaboratively develop and monitor a project value model. As with any collaborative venture, however, this model-building effort can't succeed without open communication and trust. The authors offer a number of ways -- from sussing out people's information filters to reading their nonverbal cues -- to achieve the mutual understanding on which collaboration depends.

Our final article takes a decidedly different perspective. Where our other authors discuss how to bring people together for collaboration, Charles Bess and J. David Gibson of EDS discuss how to bring tools together to enable seamless collaboration. A mobile workforce using a growing array of devices, enterprises bound together in federated value chains, increasing regulatory audit and logging requirements -- these are just some of the trends that, according to the authors, call for a new approach to integrating collaboration tools. Their "action as service" approach helps us see the information we need in context and connects us both within and across organizations, thus enabling rapid response to business events.

COLLABORATION DELIVERS

When done effectively, collaboration does deliver. Through collaboration, we can find how to deliver the right results for all stakeholders in the organization, for as the Japanese proverb says, "None of us is as smart as all of us."

We need to listen to our teams and let them do it their way, even when that feels like a huge leap of faith. Collaboration is the fastest way to achieve focus and understand the business value in every development step. Through collaboration, you can get more done by doing less. As the authors in this issue show, there are tools to help. Read on and skip your next meeting!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pollyanna Pixton is the founder of Evolutionary Systems, a business consulting firm that takes companies to the next level through collaboration and collaborative leadership. Ms. Pixton is also the cofounder and Director of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership. She brings more than 35 years of executive and managerial experience from a variety of successful business and IT ventures to her company and the institute.

Ms. Pixton was primarily responsible for leading the development of the Swiss Electronic Stock Exchange. In addition, she has developed control systems for electrical power plants throughout the world and merged the technologies and data systems of large financial institutions. Most recently, she has formed Accelinnova, a consulting group that helps companies to lead change through collaboration. Ms. Pixton speaks and writes on topics of collaborative leadership and business ethics and is currently working on a book focusing on collaborative leadership. Her education includes a master's degree in computer science, three years of graduate studies in theoretical physics, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

Ms. Pixton cofounded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and serves as the secretary on that board. She chaired the Agile 2006 Leadership Summit and presented a tutorial and workshop on collaborative leadership at Agile 2005. Ms. Pixton can be reached at p2@ppixton.com.