This is basic stuff, but it is so easily overlooked in the everyday life of an organization. What do your customers really think? How are the actions of your leadership team perceived by others? Are we going to deliver our next feature or product ontime? Are we on some collision course, and don't know it? Think about your own situation -- how do you get feedback? What information should your organization know, but you don't? Who is going to tell you what you might not want to hear, and how is that going to happen?    more »

I propose a set of simple behaviors that will help to bring focus to any type of online collaboration. These can be remembered as the Rule of Two: they are a set of prescriptions that are easy to do, easy to measure, and in our experience will dramatically increase the probability that your online activity will be successful. Taken together, they will turbo-charge your collaboration, assuming of course that a) you have an important issue to work on together, b) you have support from senior management, and c) you invite the right people to the party.    more »

One of the biggest issues in getting your organization into online work is the mental shift. It isn't just a matter of "doing what we already do, but do it virtually." This shift is one of 

• being clear about the process
• building steps backwards from your desired result
• intentionally simplifying what the group does
• building in feedback cycles.

Most people using collaboration, it seems to me, are doing one of these: running surveys, conducting ongoing discussions, holding online meetings or making a list of tasks. Nothing wrong with this -- but what we advocate is setting up an ongoing workspace, and doing several of these things in context within an organized environment. When you do this, you are more likely to involve your intended audience in meaningful work over time, because you will end up doing more than one mode in order to collaborate effectively. Your people will understand the context, and therefore can be more participative.

One of the largest benefits in working online is that the work is immediately archived -- that is, it is available to everyone, anytime they want to access it. People can refer back to what happened, and the process is transparent. But this also means you need to make it

• easy for them to find, and
• easy to understand in the context of other work that is taking place.

Have simple areas to contain different parts of the work, and show links to what is current. Have one place where the discussion about that work takes place, and make sure someone is actively "gardening" the discussion and the progression of tasks in your process.

Workteam Action Updates:Rivet International, Meridian Resources and the Board of the International Feldenkrais Federation have arranged ongoing work projects around lists of key information, where team leads can update the current status of actions or programs and the entire team can review these at any time.A Regional Economic Commission in Latin America supports dispersed inter-government teams to develop policies and standards for new uses of IT across the region.
Dallas Baptist University runs a graduate level online marketing course in which teams of students brainstorm and prioritize a set of problem solving criteria with which to ...   more »