What is Umano’s Collaboration measure?
Collaboration measures the number of collaborators in tickets, pull requests, wiki spaces and chat channels that belong to a team within a given interval.
Why Collaboration matters
Agile ways of working at its heart is a model of collaboration. It emphasises the act of working together, with flexibility, reviewing and incorporating feedback and adjusting as you go. Agile projects are better at promoting collaboration with minimum disruption, irrespective of whether your team is colocated, distributed or working remotely.
Umano measures Collaboration to help teams understand how effectively a team collaborates to complete their work, and whether they operate genuinely as ‘a team’ drawing on the skills and strengths of each other, or wether their patterns reflect a more individualistic approach to getting work done. 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 bring the task to completion.
Highlighting interactions during the lifecycle of a task provides deeper understanding of the ‘usual’ patterns of engagement. It might also surface the complexity of a task as signified by the number of team members interacting when there are more collaborators than usual. It might also highlight the diversity of contribution across team members when completing a task. 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. Measuring 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.
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
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:
Collaboration in tickets
Collaboration in pull requests
Collaboration in wiki pages/ blog posts
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.
Included | Not included |
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Tickets:
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Pull Requests:
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Wiki Pages / Blog Posts
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Chat
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Tips for improving Collaboration
Plan for your team’s sprint or interval capacity more accurately by encouraging team members to flag where additional input is wanted, needed and or expected on a particular ticket and build it in to how much is assigned
Support the use of tools that enable distributed, asynchronous and synchronous multi-team member input to augment and amplify opportunities to collaborate throughout the life cycle of a piece of work
Discuss a guardrail on how many is ‘too many’ collaborators on a pull request before the conversation needs to be pulled offline
Encourage a culture where all team members can share in the responsibility of being a collaborator and reviewer and be proactive in picking up a PR for review
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
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