I have recently been managing a cross functional/multi site project, which creates an interesting dynamic in terms of ensuring successful collaboration.
A question arose of how to measure successful collaboration via hard data, rather than rating/opinion. My initial thoughts, were that following things occur (and increase) with collaboration.
- Number of visits/flights between sites
- Meetings held involving people from more than one sites (usually = conference calls)
- Phone Calls
- Instant messenger of discussion forum usage
However, to get to a single metric, I concluded that the atomic “transaction” of collaboration nowadays is measurable by the number/type of emails flowing between collaborators. Travel, meetings, forums are arguably higher level abstractions…Hence my metric (as I can only have one) would be:-
Successful Collaboration occurs if: The average¹ number of emails sent/received where recipients are from different team/site increases² by X% over time period.
- Average is used here to gauge the impact to the average person (or average inbox) to simplify measurement?
- Measurable by either random sampling OR selecting appropriate “target” people to benchmark.
Of course, email isn’t always the best tool (see my earlier post on BMCs rules for (ab)use of email). Higher forms of communications are definitely advised and if you probably need a second qualitative metric, but even the higher forms of communcation all impact the bottom line; i.e. the relative number of emails sent between collaborators in cross function and/or multi site situations. Hence, I think I’ll trial this as a KPI for a while as my “Currency of Collaboration”.
