One familiar face within the SharePoint community is Adam Levithan (@collabadam), a Director of Product Management at Metalogix, and a well-known speaker, business strategist, and SharePoint evangelist. I got to know Adam a few years back while he was a practice lead at DC-based Portal Solutions and I was Chief Evangelist at Axceler, and we've regularly collaborated ever since -- including a blog post here on SharePoint-Community.net a year ago where we talked about his move from consulting into product management. When putting together the panel for the Measuring Collaboration Success initiative, Adam was one of the first to agree to participate.
I recently reached out to Adam to discuss the status of the anonymous #MeasureCollabSuccess survey (take survey here) and some of our early results, and to better understand his perspective on the need to better define and measure the factors that make collaboration successful.
[Christian Buckley] Adam, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Of course, I'm very interested in your perspective on the initiative, as viewed through the lens of Metalogix product management.
[Adam Levithan] Stop the presses, this is the first time that I'm using my new title: Director of Product Management at Metalogix. This means that I get to not only work directly with the community to understand our ever changing needs within SharePoint, Exchange, Office 365 and other file sync and share, but also guide the creation of solutions to meet those needs. Metalogix as a whole is aligning those evolving collaboration needs to ensure that the right content is secured in the right place/ at the right time, for you to get your work done.
[CB] So Adam, why were you interested in participating in the ‘Measuring Collaboration Success’ initiative? Do you think a community-driven effort to understand how organizations define, monitor and measure collaboration is something that is even necessary?
[AL] The SharePoint community has grown to be an asset for individuals to find their passion, organizations to have access to new ideas about technology, and Microsoft to gain feedback about the systems that community members use every day. The amazing thing is that all levels an outsider can see how the community as a whole has fulfilled its promises. As a result, there's no other way to perform a survey like this than to turn to the people who care the most about the results.
I am interested in participating because I started my career as a consultant in the SharePoint space and know that "collaboration" is a human effort, and as such, varies based on the specific culture of each organization. I also think we've reached a tipping point in technology where the physical aspect of what we do (aka servers, network cards, storage, firewalls, etc) has been pushed behind the focus on managing content and data.
[CB] So you think adoption is up, across the board?
[AL] There is no trend anymore of "adopting collaboration" in my mind, instead it's "what collaboration are you using". So I'm really excited to see the varying answers that we'll get from the diverse community.
[CB] And yet when you ask two people, even in the same organization, what they think "collaboration" means, you'll get varying answers. And if you don't begin with a shared understanding of the definition, how can you be successful? What makes it so difficult, in your opinion, for organizations to define collaboration?
[AL] It's all about perspective. In my daughter's kindergarten class they are teaching the students several pillars to be a good student. You guessed it, one of those pillars is collaboration. When asked to draw an image of collaboration my daughter drew a picture of helping older (by 10 years) sister play soccer. This was her understanding, and I believe similarly that each person has a different definition of what "collaboration" means to them. I like the Wikipedia definition that includes "A recursive process to achieve a goal", but that's the act of collaborating not the description of collaboration technologies.
So we're on this endeavor to put context around the question, build a common set of terms, and at the end we will be able to communicate as a whole on how to make our daily lives better through this thing called "collaboration".
[CB] How does the lack of a clear definition -- and a lack of context -- impact their efforts?
[AL] I have witnessed an exchange between a SharePoint analyst and an IT Director that demonstrates the impact.
SharePoint Analyst "Boss, we've been successful at increasing collaboration across the organization by more than 20%"
IT Manager "That's nice, how much did it cost"
Unfortunately, while a little bit of an exaggeration, this is based on reality. Even though this organization had a business plan to purchase and implement SharePoint within their organization, nobody followed op on the described benefits and turned back to old habits of measurement - cost.
[CB] And the conversation gets even more clouded (pun intended) by the various tools finding their way into organizations. Do you think that the increased usage of consumer-focused collaboration tools (Slack, WhatsApp, Trello, etc) is exacerbated by a failure to clearly define collaboration goals and measurements?
[AL] In the technology marketplace, I don't think start-up entries demonstrates the lack of definition, however, it is a result of larger organizations not focusing on a human behaviors. As a product manager, I'm acutely aware of the difference between building technology because it's really cool, and building technology because people will want to use it. There is a lot of room in the collaboration marketplace for making people's lives run smoother.
[CB] Ok, so what are some of the common mistakes you see organizations making as they set out to establish their collaboration strategy?
[AL] A boiler plate collaboration mission/vision is found and used to describe the organizations individual culture. A plan must be designed that is not a fixed document, but a process of governance and decision making to be able to adapt to the actual usage of the systems.
Commitment. It's not a nice to have, collaboration in its many forms is the way people work. There must be IT and business representatives that have responsibility for the success defined.
[CB] Agreed -- commitment, especially at the executive level, will make or break your collaboration effort. In your opinion, what are the key influences that can make or break enterprise collaboration?
[AL] I can think of so many, but I'll focus on one key area which is to spread the experience from one department to the next. Within the 1000s of implementations that worked on or learned about I can promise you that there is always a department that jumps deeply into the use of collaboration technologies and builds their own definition and measurements of collaboration success. What organizations lack is the mechanism to educate other departments, in business language of the achievements that the practitioner has achieved. If it's a marketing department that has to build a scheduling application, I'm sure the finance department would be interested in doing similar. If HR builds a form that everyone uses and that saves time, organizations don't follow up and socialize that the benefit was brought through a collaborative technology.
Thank you Adam for taking the time to answer my questions, and talk about your involvement in the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative.
If you would like to help the community better understand and develop repeatable best practices around defining and measuring collaboration, please be sure to take the anonymous survey at http://bit.ly/1TKeUbu. This survey is NOT for sales or marketing purposes, and no personal information will be captured. You can read more about the initiative and our panel on the Beezy blog.
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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