My first interaction with Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge) was the Best Practices Conference a few years back (I think it was sometime in 2010, maybe 2011) in Northern Virginia. I was incredibly sick, having come down with something on the flight out from Seattle, and yet I soldiered on with my two sessions while hopped-up on cold medicine and taking repeated hot showers to get warm. I felt miserable, and yet finished by two sessions, and then repeated ,my performance at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore. My head felt like it was floating independent of my body, and in the midst of fuzzy thoughts and PowerPoint slides, this guy at the back of the room kept asking questions and sharing his opinion on whatever the topic was that afternoon. After the session, Richard came up to thank me for my talk -- and then he gave me some thoughts on how to expand the topic. If you know Richard, it was a classic Richard moment, and I really appreciated the feedback.
Fast-forward, Richard is as enthusiastic as ever, and a newly-minted Office Server and Services MVP, as well as CTO of 2toLead based in Toronto. As I organized the Measuring Collaboration Success initiative and panel (read more here), I knew I wanted Richard to participate and provide his breadth and depth of experience to the effort. I reached out to Richard to provide some of his perspective on this initiative:
[Christian Buckley] Richard, thanks again for participating. For those who don't know you and 2toLead, maybe you could start with some personal details?
[Richard Harbridge] Sure. I am an owner and a Chief Technology Officer at 2toLead. 2toLead is a generous Microsoft consulting company. We help organizations succeed and do more with Microsoft technology, namely Office 365, Azure and SharePoint. We have been called generous by our customers, employees and peers in the community and always are trying to find more ways to deliver more, share more, and help do more – together.
[CB] Perfect. So let's start at the beginning: why were you interested in participating in the ‘Measuring Collaboration Success’ initiative? Do you think a community-driven effort in this area is even necessary?
[RH] Community driven is absolutely something that is necessary. It still requires leaders within customers or leaders in organizations like ours to help consume and make measurements actionable, but there should be way more emphasis on this in the community than there is today.
No one person or even one organization has all the answers. We are pretty lucky at 2toLead and practice this work daily with many customers. I can tell you with conviction and (I feel) a sense of authority that no matter how many times you write up a business impact, ROI analysis, or business measurement plan for a company it is always different. Surprisingly not always because the company is different and their collaboration objectives are different, but often because we find better ways to align, report, measure, prove and discover the value collaboration is having within the organization.
Take the technology changes happening within Office 365 today. For the first time ever we finally have the ability to effectively report on top contributors, or actually share data directly with users to help them make more informed decisions through Delve Analytics and Delve insights. When the technology is not changing how we can report and provide evidence it’s changing how we experience collaboration. Think about how you manage tasks, do you do it with visual buckets like Trello or Planner? Measuring task collaboration is easier in more structured environments like Project Online or in designated projects, but measuring ‘lower case p’ project tasks (for those ad-hoc projects we all work on everyday) can be much more challenging.
The net result is a good thing – technology is innovating and improving, but we have to improve how we measure, align and define new objectives just as rapidly (while still being meaningful).
[CB] What makes it so difficult, in your opinion, for organizations to define collaboration?
[RH] This is a mistake. Many organizations think defining the ‘thing’ that transforms the organization for the better is important. One of the simplest exercises you can do is stop asking a person about collaboration and instead ask them how they could work better together, what would be different than today? The issue often is creating a shared understanding and shared commitment for a future vision – one where there is some agreement. We all recognize that we don’t work together as effectively as we can – why is that? Because sometimes it’s hard to find content? Because sometimes we can’t participate due to being remote or mobile? Because some of the people we work with are outside of the organization? We need to focus on the challenges and pain points and address them, we don’t really need to define it as collaboration unless we want to brand a set of improvement activities and actionable changes together.
What’s more important is defining how the organization can/should improve, how the group or department can/should improve and how the individual can/should improve. We don’t “Improve Collaboration” we improve outcomes. Collaboration is simply how we achieve some of those desired outcomes.
[CB] Agreed. Collaboration is an enabler of business activity. Your focus should never be on the tools, but on what you're using the tools to accomplish. But even then, most organizations, in my experience, fail to come together on what it is they are collectively trying to achieve. And it often defaults back to the technology. How does the lack of a clear definition impact their efforts?
[RH] Like I said. If it’s a branding exercise I am all for it. Let’s improve collaboration by executing these 4 clearly defined projects with clearly defined objectives.
Perhaps the real issue here is prioritization. Sometimes when we blanket describe everything as improving collaboration it’s not clear what will have the biggest impact or should be done first or what should be invested in further. So in these situations define more clearly what the objectives and outcomes are, define how technically challenging it will be to improve those outcomes and try and rank it based on that – in other (simpler) words Business Value divided by Technical Difficulty.
[CB] Do you think that the increased usage of consumer-focused collaboration tools (Slack, WhatsApp, Trello, etc) is muddying up that prioritization, exacerbated by a failure to clearly define collaboration goals and measurements?
[RH] Not at all. I think their use of the word collaboration is fair as well. If collaboration is often represented as the act of being productive with more than myself these same tools can be called productivity tools and collaboration tools because they are both improving my productivity and improving how (or how I can) collaborate. I think these tools are meeting a demand people have. We want simpler and more integrated tools. We want tools that we can just ‘get’. The issue is once we invest in these tools if it wasn’t the right tool for the job, or if we have needs outside the tool we begin to bend the tool in ways it’s not designed to meet our needs.
[CB] How is that different from what Office 365 provides?
[RH] One difference with Office 365 in my opinion is it’s a suite of tools/experiences like the ones mentioned above. Due to that slight change in approach, it can scale and have more applicability. By innovating and meeting more needs across a suite of integrated experiences, you can potentially fill the need these tools support while also providing the enterprise management, and orchestration that is so necessary to do this at an enterprise level.
[CB] What are some of the common mistakes you see organizations making as they set out to establish their collaboration strategy?
[RH] Top 3? Let’s see…
- Organizations fail to understand the current state of Collaboration today.
When they don’t understand the current state it’s highly probable that the solution won’t be complete, or aligned to the organization’s needs. At a minimum it will be very hard to communicate it’s value and the outcomes you are looking to drive if you don’t have a baseline or understanding of how things are done today (based on evidence and analysis not based on perception).
- Organizations fail to support collaboration change/improvement beyond launch (of new collaboration solutions/technologies).
This happens all the time. We work so hard to launch a new solution or technology, but don’t put adoption campaigns in place, and don’t take pro-active effort after the launch to adjust things based on feedback, or train people how to best take advantage of it.
- Organizations fail to understand how they can measure, share, and improve Collaboration success.
Measurement surprisingly isn’t the issue I run into the most. It’s a failure to take ACTION and SHARE the measurement results (good or bad). Often organizations know they can measure it, but don’t have the support or prioritization to take the effort to make the measurements they have access to actionable and meaningful.[CB] In your opinion, what are the key influences that can make or break enterprise collaboration?
[RH] I’ll just name a few top ones we see.
- Lack of technology understanding. (It’s why we are in business, and it’s not easy.)
- Lack of effective feedback and measurement. (It can be scary to ask if something is working when we put so much investment into it – but we need to.)
- Lack of leadership involvement and commitment. (Throughout the organization leaders have to be examples of good collaborators and we have to create a shared belief that things can always be better and be improved. Experimentation is important in collaboration – especially when coupled with good feedback and measurement.)
- Lack of prioritization. (It often ‘feels’ or ‘seems’ to nebulous and ambiguous to prioritize over other challenges facing the organization. Not to mention it’s hard to improve collaboration because it involves people so often leaders aren’t certain it’s the right project/activity to get behind versus the much more definable and simpler alternative projects that often exist in our enterprises.)
Great insights, for sure. Thank you Richard for sharing your thoughts, and I look forward to your continued participation in the Measuring Collaboration Success initiative. If you'd like to learn more about this initiative, you can read about it on the Beezy blog.
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.
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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