Mike Gilronan, a Boston local knowledge management friend, has a nice piece on collaboration in the Boston Business Journal, Five ways to improve collaboration among remote teams. Mike has worked in the collaboration world for a long time, so these topics are familiar. Mike is currently doing enterprise content management at McGladrey.
As we learned in Boston this past winter, the ability to be productive and collaborate with team members, even if nature or other circumstances prevent us from being in the same place at the same time, is critical to success in modern business. More and more, our workplaces and teams are virtual, with remote workers and teams being asked to connect and collaborate. Teams that do so effectively can build a real competitive advantage by providing access to the best resources, delivering products and services more efficiently, and accelerating the pace of innovation.
His five items are sometimes obvious, and yet do we use them all?
- Hire for it.
- Foster a culture of collaboration.
- Connect securely, from any device, anywhere.
- Invest in tools that work the way your teams do.
- Know when to escalate.
And of course, other people write about this stuff as well, such as my friend Johanna Rothman's thinking on remote Agile teams, where she focuses on trust, flexibility and internal cohesion.