The head of the Enterprise Program Management Office sat with the COO reviewing the organization’s major projects.
After the summary of each project’s green, yellow, or red status, they turned their focus to the first red.
At the last three quarterly updates, it was green.
Today, it is red.
After discussing why, they consider the consequences and how to respond.
They contemplate different scenarios and prepare adjustments to resources, budgets, and projects dependent on it.
If we were to say that the COO and the EPMO leader were collaborating, in what type of collaboration were they engaged?
The project’s implosion had occurred two days earlier.
The classic watermelon project.
Appearing healthy and green on the outside until its red interior unexpectedly burst into view.
After the portfolio review concluded, the EPMO leader strode into the project’s first recovery meeting.
Where twenty-seven senior managers, project managers, process owners, internal subject matter experts, and external consultants had gathered.
Over the next two hours, they produced a re-plan they all said should work.
What type of collaboration did the twenty-eight engage in?
When that meeting concluded, the EPMO leader, the project’s change leader, and its senior executive sponsor stayed in the conference room.
They spent an hour completing the script for the internal announcement webinar scheduled for when the project eventually goes live.
When reviewing, revising, and finalizing the webinar script with her colleagues, in what type of collaboration is the EPMO leader engaged?
Collaboration
The noun/verb that emerged with gusto over the past decade.
Almost as though it were a revolutionary new concept like the internet, e-commerce, or AI.
Forgetting that humans have tried collaborating since the first hungry cavemen spotted a woolly mammoth on the Pleistocene plain.
More recently, organizations started adding collaboration to their Core Values statements in the late 1990s, with a steady increase over the past two decades.
Why?
Primarily because we have become so good at everything else.
Our collaboration capability has become exposed.
Another example of where experience does not equate to excellence.
Our inability to consistently collaborate with calm efficiency and quality outcomes has been laid bare by what we have achieved in the tangible, mechanical, material side of life.
We can now make low-maintenance, high-quality, inexpensive cars that last thirty years.
We can now expect to receive orders within hours for products that used to arrive in days and weeks, hopefully.
We can now perform incredible surgeries with high assurance that they will be fully successful using precision technologies.
But when we do something for the first time with others, it is anybody’s guess what might happen.
Processes and Collaborations
Collaboration is where business processes were in the 1980s.
When they first emerged from manufacturing-as-usual.
When people would observe, “It’s a process problem.”
But struggle to define or draw a business process.
So, what is collaboration, exactly?
The definition of collaboration is working with others to produce something.
The EPMO leader and her twenty-seven compatriots were conducting a Strategic Collaboration.
Strategic, not using the word as a synonym for important, but Peter Drucker’s notion that a strategy is a set of goals with the means to attain them.
The twenty-eight conducted a Strategic Collaboration to define the red project’s desired future state and the actions to manifest it.
The EPMO leader and the COO discussing and adjusting the project portfolio engaged in an Operational Collaboration.
They collaborated to produce a portfolio with the optimal priorities, resource allocations, and task assignments to help implement the current business strategy.
The EPMO leader and her two colleagues creating the go-live announcement webinar script were conducting a Tactical Collaboration.
They were performing a task assigned to them through the project’s Operational Collaboration.
Its successful completion would help produce the goals from the Strategic Collaboration that first chartered the project.
Collaboration Ends and Means
Today, most collaboration discussions center on either the hard technologies used to foster ease of collaboration or the soft skills driving collaboration quality.
These are means.
Enabling the three types of ends – Strategic, Operational, and Tactical collaboration.
The keystone frame for building repeatable excellence.
