Collaborative work session

A collaborative work session has a goal that blends the ideas of acquiring information, distilling information, and potentially collaboratively designing solutions to problems. It's best used when information exists in the heads of participants. While the information may also exist in documents, or across other models, the goal of a collaborative work session is to extract information from the participants of the session, distill it, and modeling it in such a way that it's easy to understand and can be communicated to others.

In addition to quickly distilling and representing large amounts of information, the collaborative nature of these sorts of sessions have the affects of:

• Building up tacit shared knowledge within the team
• Building communication and collaboration skills within the team
• Helping the team to gel as an affective workgroup

A collaborative work session follows a simple structure of prepare, perform, consolidate.

Preparation

Preparation takes a bit of time and engagement from one or more team members, ideally including the person who will later serve as a facilitator during the session. Preparation itself takes a bit of thought and creativity. Consider performing this activity with two team members pairing at a whiteboard or at a tabletop using card modeling. Capture information for later documentation.

Set goals and/or scope

For a collaborative work session you'll have some information you wish to gather or consolidate from the participants of that session. In addition you may have a goal to collaboratively interpret that information and subsequently leverage it to make design decisions. To keep the session focused, decide on the goals and scope for the session. You'll have a hard time ending it if you don't.

Try completing the sentence "this session would be successful if…" to help identify the goals.

Try completing the sentence "The information we'll need to consider is…" to help identify the scope of concern for this session.

Summarize your ideas for goals and scope in a concise statement.

Identify participants

Choosing the best possible participants of a collaborative work session is one of the most important elements of success. Given the goals of collecting and distilling information and spreading that information throughout the team, who you choose will affect the information you gather, the quality of that distillation, and the ultimate destination for that information - the heads of those who participated.

Leveraging the goals and scope for the session will help you choose appropriate participants. Look for participants that can fill the following roles.

Remember that these are roles that can be filled by anyone in the team. One team member may fill multiple roles simultaneously. For instance information suppliers will likely move to the role of modelers, and assuming they acquire information they didn't have coming into the session, they'll also be information acquirers.

However, it is difficult for the role of facilitator and documenter to be filled by someone also in the role of information inquirer. The demands of those roles make it difficult to also be sharing information effectively.

A good collaborative workgroup might contain 5-8 participants. Smaller groups might work OK, but lack the high "bandwidth" of information that can be supplied and acquired with more participants. Larger groups may also work, but take clever facilitation to make the best use of participants' time and produce useful modeled output.

Question the participation of people that don't easily fit into any role. For instance someone who doesn't have much information, won't be participating in the project longer term, and hasn't done any of this sort of collaborative modeling won't be very valuable.

Prepare collaboration supplies

Gather collaboration supplies that will help the team effectively model. It's difficult to get the right people into the room. Don't let the effort stall for lack of some sticky notes, index cards, or tape.

Schedule modeling session

A effective collaborative work session runs about 90 minutes. If the session needs to run longer schedule a 15 to 30 minute break to split the session in to two. Schedule the session in a room with a large work table to model on and/or wall space to hold models and a Use parking lots to defer discussion.

Performing

Kickoff

The facilitator should kickoff the session by reminding everyone why they're here. Review the goals and scope with the collaborative team. Adjust the scope and goals if necessary.

Make sure everyone on the collaborative team knows each other. Consider allowing time for introductions if people haven't worked together before.

Review the roles with participants: suppliers, modeler, acquirers, facilitator, and documenter. Let people know which role you think they fill.

Tell people about pace keeping tools you'll be using to keep the meeting on track - tools like parking lots and pace keeping signals.

Discuss the process you'll be following during today's session.

Model

During modeling you'll perform a variety of modeling techniques in a sequence that best suits your goals.

It's common to first engage in brainstorming or card storming to get a lot of information on the table.

It's common to then build affinity diagrams to find distill and find relationships in the information. It's common to build other ad hoc models to show the relationships of information in the model. It's common to use prioritization mechanisms to identify the most important or focal areas of the model.

While modeling you'll find that important ideas emerge that might fall out of scope for this session. Make sure you use parking lots and feed forward bins set up to receive that information.

Summarize and reflect

A few minutes prior to end the session take a moment to gather up all the elements of the model. Allow one or more team members to verbally summarize what the model represents. Allow for time to make minor corrections. If possible, record the summarization as a model movie.

If more time for modeling is needed, discuss a subsequent session.

The documenter should discuss what they will do to document and communicate the information to others.

Before parting, take a moment to gather Ask for parting takeaways from the team members.

Consolidate, document, and communicate

The documenter will have the responsibility of collecting the model or models built and communicating them back to others. A good documenter will find help or delegate as much as possible. Before leaving the documenter should snap some Model photo to help recall the exact positions of elements in the model and to help communicate the results to others.

The results of the session need to be communicated to others. This allows them to reflect on what happened after the session and add or change details if necessary. Choose a communication strategy that is most visible for the team working on the design and development of the software. A Model poster prominently displayed in a public area allows members of the team to gather around it for discussions and to easily write ad hoc changes on to the model. A presentable electronic distillation allows others to use it in meeting presentations to communicate outward to others, or for the information to be posted for sharing with others not collocated with the design and development team.