Collaboration

What is Umano’s team Collaboration metric?

Collaboration measures the number of collaborators in tickets and pull requests that belong to a team within a given interval.

Why Collaboration matters

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.

As companies embed firm-wide remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the casual effects on collaboration and communication show that remote work caused collaboration to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. In addition, there was a decrease in asynchronous communication. These effects make it harder for team members to acquire and share new information across their network.

Optimising collaboration helps protect individual team members from ‘overload’ culture, ensuring team leaders understand the information flow and touch points across team members for any given ticket or pull request, impacting how fast you can ship your product to your customer (cross referenced with Cycle Time) and the quality of what’s being shipped (cross referenced with Time to Merge).

What ‘good’ Collaboration looks like

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.

How Umano measures Collaboration

For each Pull Request merged during the given interval, Umano measures collaboration by observing the number of interactions, and people interacting across the lifecycle of a ticket or pull request, or nominated wiki spaces and chat channels.

Practices that influence Collaboration

This metric has 4 main components:

1. Collaboration in tickets

2. Collaboration in pull requests

3. Collaboration in wiki pages/ blog posts

4. Collaboration in chat

What’s included?

Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below a list of activities that contribute to Collaboration and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.

Tips for improving Collaboration

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