This issue starts the development of ideas on how to position your team to both use and provide collaborative tools.

Collaboration: Word-Of-The-Year...

While people have always worked together on projects, many new tools, when combined with internet connectivity, are changing how we work together. Collaboration is defined as: 1) to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor or 2) to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected. The third definition is to "to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy"; we'll skip that one.

New tools for collaboration affect you in two different ways. First, collaboration is an essential feature of many new products or services you build or provide. Secondly, as you look for tools for your team to use, you should opt for tools that provide collaborative to accelerate your project. Future newsletters will provides ideas on how to categorize and position your product offerings and how to judge tools you purchase to take advantage of new collaborative work styles.

Basic Requirements...

Location transparency means people working together as if they were side-by-side. Location transparency is probably the most common motivation for collaborative tools. People want to be able to work together efficiently without having to travel to be with their working partners. New tools allow people to work together effectively using applications that combine internet, video-conference, and telephone tools.

People sometimes want to work real-time, but often they want to work asynchronously. Asynchronously means working on the same topic, but not at the same time. When you and I talk on the phone it's real time; this newsletter is asynchronous communication. Many project, sales, and management tasks are better handled real-time, but many tasks are better handled asynchronously, allowing for individuals' diverse work schedules, meeting schedules, and time zones.

Communication Skills...

The effectiveness of these tools still depends on the communication skills of the people involved. For complex communications viewing the other person's body language is critically important to understanding the complete message. I believe that teams that engage in complex communications will be most successful if they have previously met face-to-face.

After 5 years of struggle with one east-coast west-coast team I was part of, we all wished we had all spent a few days partying together in St. Louis at the beginning of the project to jump-start personal relationships. That social time would have made the weeks of telecon, videocon, and email much more effective and would probably have shortened the project.

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