Develop greater collaboration across your organization's geographic, business and functional borders.

1. Thoughts on
Collaboration
Strategy
TMA World
Viewpoint

2. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
Many organizations want to develop greater collaboration across
their geographic, business and functional borders.
What do they hope to accomplish?
We have to understand that collaboration can mean different things to different
people in different contexts:
Solutions
Productivity
Game Change
Coordination

3. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
As more jobs become increasingly interdependent,
PRODUCTIVITY greater cooperation and collaboration is required
between individual knowledge workers across
borders 
Greater collaborative efforts are needed to ensure
COORDINATION the efficient and effective functioning of project
teams and distributed knowledge workers 
Collaborating across the organization and even with
SOLUTIONS those ‘outside’ of the organization, is often required
to solve the problems and dilemmas resulting from
today’s complex business environment 
Diverse thinking and perspectives working together
GAME CHANGE help generate game-changing ideas and create new
competitive spaces and sources of revenue 

4. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
Different metrics are required for each of these areas of performance.
For example:
Productivity: Speed, cost, quantity and quality of knowledge
outputs, e.g., data gathering and analysis, reports, technical or
customer support 
Coordination: Speed and cost from project initiation to project
completion, quality of project outputs, knowledge sharing,
learning and application rates,
process improvements identified and implemented 
Solutions: Speed and cost from problem
identification to quality solution creation and
implementation 
Game Change: Speed, cost and quality
of new innovations generating new
competitive advantages 

5. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
Surface
One way of looking at these different
areas of performance is to think of them
as being on a spectrum between
Surface and Deep Collaboration:
Productivity
Coordination
Solutions
Game Change
In developing collaboration strategies,
we need to be thinking about what is
most important for us to accomplish
along this spectrum –
now, short term and long term.
Deep Collaboration

6. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
Let’s think about some of the potential elements of a collaboration strategy:
Culture: How to develop shared values, assumptions, norms and behaviours that
support collaborative mindsets.
Structure: How to organize to achieve our goals more efficiently and effectively
through greater collaboration, e.g., power/authority distribution, roles and
responsibilities.
Processes: How to manage flows of activities and communications between
knowledge workers and groups to generate collaborative advantage.
Incentives: How to create rewards and recognition systems to support the difficult
balancing of competitive and collaborative behaviours.
Talent: How to identify, develop and sustain competencies needed for working and
leading in a collaborative environment.
Technology: How to utilize new technologies/platforms to enable quality cross-
border collaboration.

7. Thoughts on Collaboration Strategy
Changes in the organizational culture are likely to be needed over time, but culture
change is very difficult to accomplish.
If quicker results are needed, in productivity say, it is probably best to focus your
immediate collaboration strategy on technologies, talent development and most
importantly, incentives.
Incentives don’t just mean financial rewards, but those that support intrinsic
motivational factors like:
engagement,
communication &
a sense of common purpose and identity
There is no easy formula for deriving the benefits of
greater collaboration.
But be sure to think carefully about what benefits
you are looking for, whether they require surface
or deep collaboration, what elements of a
collaboration strategy will help you achieve those
benefits now and in the short/long term and if
you have appropriate measures to support your
efforts.

8. To learn more about how TMA World can
help your organization, please contact us at
enquiries@tmaworld.com
or visit
www.tmaworld.com/our_solutions.cfm