Factors of collaborative working: A framework for a collaboration model
Introduction
A critical success factor for any community – at work and outside work – is the extent to which it can coordinate itself to communicate and achieve common goals: in other words, to collaborate. A study by Frost & Sullivan (2006) sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft Corp. found that collaboration, an organisation’s strategic orientation and market turbulence were the three main business performance drivers, and that of these collaboration had the most impact. It is becoming increasingly difficult for multinational corporations to maintain a competitive edge over global competitors; companies which can create and support collaboration between departments or with supply chain partner companies can best harness their distributed resources and expertise (Hansen and Nohria, 2004). Collaboration is a ubiquitous presence in our lives and is a constant feature of modern society; ‘work is always immediately social in that the object and the subject, the end and the means, the motives and the needs, the implements and the competencies, are socially mediated’ (Schmidt, 1991, p. 2).
The advantages to be gained from good collaboration will vary according to the type of business or company, but the benefits can include: increased profit through sharing expertise across business units or companies; reduction in costs through sharing best practices; improved decision making through sharing insights and knowledge; innovation through sharing ideas; and an improved ability to pursue goals that involve distributed units or companies (Hansen and Nohria, 2004). To achieve these advantages, however, an organisation should also be fully aware that there are potential disadvantages and barriers to collaboration, in order to manage them. These potential barriers are discussed later in the paper in the discussion section.
For a concept so widely used in everyday language there is a surprising lack of a clear understanding of what it is to collaborate, and of how best to support and improve collaborative working. Definitions are often tailored to a particular environment. However, common themes do emerge from the multitude of definitions and integrating some of these (e.g. Henneman et al., 1995, Mattessich and Monsey, 1992, Meads et al., 2005, Montiel-Overall, 2005, Schrage, 1990, Wilson, 2006) gives us a simple first working definition: Collaboration involves two or more people engaged in interaction with each other, within a single episode or series of episodes, working towards common goals.
This paper presents a first framework for a model of collaborative working. The context was a major European research project concerned with tools, systems and organisational structures for co-located, mobile and distributed collaborative engineering and design (see next section). Therefore the framework applies more to IT, engineering/design and collaborative work systems design, with less emphasis on (although not to the exclusion of) work on collaboration within military and aerospace settings, or local and political communities.
In the next section we summarise the project CoSpaces, and consequently the rationale behind the framework and model. After this we identify the main factors and sub-factors which structure the model, summarising the literature in terms of evidence for each factor. In order to reduce what was an enormous quantity of documentation to a form that can be summarised in a single paper, we do this within a structured tabular format. Whilst it is clearly beyond the scope of the original research work never mind this paper to explore all the factors empirically, in the section afterwards we provide some evidence from our own fieldwork with industrial user partners and systems developers. Finally the paper contains a discussion of the framework and model development and how they have been used in a variety of ways to date; we identify potential barriers to collaboration, discuss the limitations in our work and summarise work to date on verification.
Section snippets
CoSpaces Integrated Project
CoSpaces was a large European Commission funded Integrated Project developing innovative collaborative working solutions that are responsive to industrial needs. The project had many industrial, research and business partners from 12 European countries (see http://www.cospaces.org/downloads.htm). The focus was how advanced technologies (virtual, augmented, tele-immersive, mobile, and context aware) can be deployed to create collaborative engineering workspaces for planning, design, assembly,
Framework of factors of collaborative work
CoSpaces technology will support collaboration at different levels, from small teams of individuals through larger project or enterprise groups and up to international arrangements between organisations. Therefore, our understanding of what it means to collaborate had to have the flexibility to embrace interpersonal relationships and the factors that drive people to work together successfully, and also higher level organisational and more formal aspects of collaborative engineering and supply
Evidence for the collaboration factors from CoSpaces user scenarios
We had an opportunity to test out the framework of factors for collaborative working, through the user company partners within the CoSpaces project. We had good access and close relationships with relevant groups in these companies, which either currently work collaboratively or have a requirement for improved collaborative structures and processes, and which therefore had a vested interest in helping to develop a model of collaboration. The human factors researchers were thus in a position to
Framework and model development
It is clear that collaborative work is an inherently complex phenomenon. The factors and issues which constitute collaboration are multiple, their relative importance and interactions are variable and may change during different phases of the team, project or organisational lifecycle. As demonstrated in our scenario analysis within the user companies, a collaborative working situation is likely to display a mixture of positive influences (e.g. good team spirit, high levels of skill) and
Conclusions
In this paper we have presented the structured outcomes of a review of collaboration, in the form of a framework of factors and sub-factors of collaboration as a basis for the CoSpaces Collaborative Working Model. This work has been carried out in the context of new collaborative engineering tools and a platform for use with the aerospace, automotive and construction sectors, but we believe the framework has much more general relevance. As discussed earlier, collaboration is a complex
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support of the CoSpaces Integrated Project (FP6-IST-5-034245) and the European Commission in funding this work, and the role of all CoSpaces partners in contributing to the research. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments on the earlier version enabled us to make substantial improvements to the paper.
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