Transferring Collaboration Process Designs to Practitioners

Abstract

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to design and implement sustained collaboration support for collaborative work practices. A collaboration engineer designs a collaboration process and trains a practitioner to execute it on a recurring basis, without further support from professional facilitators. The CE design should be predictable and transferable for successful reuse by the practitioner. The documentation requirements for a CE design are addressed so it can be effectively transferred to practitioners. This documentation or script should contain precise instructions and interventions that the practitioner should make to guide the group in achieving their goals. To detail the requirements for this design document, the authors analyzed the tasks of a facilitator as a basis to derive the tasks of a practitioner. Cognitive Load Theory was used to derive documentation requirements with respect to the CE process design. The authors validated these requirements in an expert validation session and through two case studies.

On the Measurement of Participation Equality

“…Practitioners are charged with many tasks when designing, managing and executing collaboration processes and environments. This includes the successful elicitation of participation from key stakeholders and the structuring of collaboration tools to encourage open and inclusive participation (Kolfschoten et al, 2012). Our research findings have implications germane to these tasks that may be helpful to practitioners and facilitators that seek to track and influence participation rates among their users and project teams.…”

Collaboration Engineering: Reflections on 15 Years of Research & Practice

“…CE researchers crafted the specifications of the documentation from the CE design phase to minimize intrinsic and extrinsic cognitive load, while stimulating germane load. They also developed a training program structure consisting of lectures, simulation, coaching, observation and selfstudy [32]. The effectiveness of the training program was demonstrated in a longitudinal field study [31].…”

Improving Collaborative Convergence through Distributed and Parallel Sorting

“…This approach divides the overall collaborative process into separate component activities, called thinkLets, which can be assembled by a facilitation expert into various workflows depending on the context. The idea is that this experienced individual can set the workflow a priori and the semi-skilled participants are then able to follow the collaborative workflow without a facilitator to guide the interaction (Kolfschoten, 2012). This approach to collaboration increases the number of contexts in which collaboration can be successful; however, despite the improvements associated with thinkLets, the challenges of large, distributed, asynchronous groups still remain.…”