Collaboration IS

Collaboration IS 

Our team uses both collaboration and cooperation. Collaboration is the activity of two or more people working together to accomplish a prevalent objective via a procedure of feedback and iteration. Cooperation is the process by which a group of people who share the same skills work in parallel to shorten the time required to accomplish a job. Two characteristics that tie in with collaboration are feedback and iteration. Without critical feedback, a team cannot collaborate.  To the other extreme, a team that is too critical and/or negative will not be able to collaborate either. Successful collaboration requires a happy medium. Our team makes sure to vocalize our opinions and ideas without coming off too strong to maintain a happy balance and effective collaboration.

There are three criteria for successful collaboration: Successful outcome, growth and team capability, and meaningful and satisfying experience.  For a successful outcome, a team must accomplish their goals to make a decision, solve a problem, or create a work product. For growth and team capability, team members must teach task skills and give knowledge to one another. For meaningful and satisfying experience, recognition for work well done is crucial for a purposeful work experience.

There are four primary purposes for teams to accomplish when collaborating: become informed, make decisions, solve problems, and manage projects. These primary purposes apply to our team because they are the core commitments in a positive outcome for a project.

Examples of synchronous collaboration tools are office applications, shared web boards, conference calls, multiple party text chat. Examples of asynchronous tools are email, discussion forms, and team survey. Our team will utilize both synchronous and asynchronous communication tools by emailing one another, using office applications, and multiparty text chats.

For this project, we will use OneDrive to share and edit office applications with each other as well as email. These tools provide version management and no control.

A Gantt chart is a timeline view that makes it easy to see how a project is tracking. You can envision project responsibilities and see how they correspond with each other as projects progress over time. Our team will use this tool to simplify tasks and details with a visual project timeline by transforming task names, start dates, durations, and end dates into cascading horizontal bar charts. With a Gantt you can plan out all of your tasks, so complex projects are manageable and easy to tackle.