...
Why Collaboration matters
Agile ways of working at its heart is a collaboration model. emphasise collaboration and flexibility, reviewing and incorporating feedback and adjusting as you go. With remote and hybrid working here to stay, agile projects are better at promoting collaboration with minimum disruption.
Umano measures Collaboration to help teams understand how effectively a team collaborates to complete their work, and whether they operate genuinely as ‘a team’. Whilst it is usual practice for an item of work to be assigned to a single team member at any given time, there are instances where the assigned team member collaborates with other team members to complete the task or Pull Request within a given interval.
This provides deeper understanding of the ‘usual’ patterns of engagement, the complexity of a piece of work as signified by the number of team members interacting and the diversity of contribution across team members. It provides insight into the actual number of team members involved in completing a task, highlighting where additional support might have been required yet not planned and capacity sometimes being underestimated. Collaboration can also provide insight into team members that are generally self sufficient, and any patterns around potential skill gaps within team members partnering up with others based on the type of work being assigned. Umano’s measure of collaboration may also highlight involvement of team members not assigned to the task or pull request.
...
Mature collaboration practices will be different for each team depending on their size. Best represented by the Goldilocks principle, teams can use Umano’s collaboration measure to get the right balance that’s neither too few nor too many team members swarming over a ticket or pull request. Rather, it finds the balance of just the right amount of interaction.
Teams work collaboratively to the sprint deadline. In agile, multi-disciplinary teams refers to the relevant people working together on a specific task.
How Umano measures Collaboration
...
| Tip |
|---|
Ensure there is a balance between your team’s speed and the number of touch points team members have on a ticket or pull request so that you’re best supporting your time-to-value. |
Resources
“The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers”, Nature Human Behaviour, 1 Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA. 2 Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. 3 MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Cambridge, MA, USA. ✉e-mail: loy@microsoft.com