I recently had a unique collaborative experience on a multi-organization project that spans across a tightly regulated industry. In this post, I would like to share the 10 parameters of this successful collaboration.
The project, comprising of 16 initiatives (a few of which are training related), is a collaboration among 18 industry pioneers to standardize systems, processes, and documentation in order to improve efficiency at each of their organizations, and ultimately, in the industry. I worked on one such training initiative (the topic of this post), and am soon starting work on another.
My training initiative was quite simple: create an online, interactive, curriculum of 11 courses (called ‘topics’) in both SCORM and non-SCORM versions. But it was having multiple organizations as customers that turned a lot of the usual information upside down.
- First, it meant that unlike the usual training projects with 2-3 stakeholders from different functions within the same organization, we were now working with multiple stakeholders from different functions from within 18 organizations.
- Second, stakeholder roles were fluid, and changed with each online topic. For example, organization A might have provided an SME for course 01, but alpha reviewers for course 02, and final approvers for course 03.
- Third, we had to continuously focus on accounting for the requirements of 18 organizations. Since some of the courses addressed systems and processes, it was tricky to standardize disparate information into the same narrative.
- Fourth, we sometimes had to come up with common verbiage that all the participating organizations agreed upon. (For e.g: referring to the courses as Topics)
- Fifth, special care was taken to ensure that we came up with a unique design concept that did not, even inadvertently, replicate the style guidelines from any of the 18 organizations. This was tough. Try ignoring 18 color palettes and font styles!
- Lastly, as the organizations were geographically diverse in one of the most strictly regulated industries, we had to work extremely closely with our legal counterparts, and ensure we were within regulatory guidelines for all 18 organizations.
The scope of the project did not worry me but the change management and communication did. Amazingly, the project went smoothly, and finished to excellent feedback and with time and money to spare. It generated excitement across the industry and member companies were quick to start using the topics for their internal training.
The collective positive experience on the project started a thought process in me: what makes for good collaboration on a training project? I researched the topic and also read a few academic papers on the topic of organizational and political collaboration (let me know if you’d like the details). Based on what I learned, and on my personal experience during the project, I came up with a Collaboration Survey Questionnaire comprising of 10 subjective parameters that guide the level of collaboration in a training project:
- Presence of Shared Goals/ Mutual Interests
- Presence of a Customer/ Patient centered Approach
- Respect for Mutual Knowledge
- Trust in each other in the face of unknown/ new challenges
- Presence of Strategic Guidelines
- Presence of Shared Leadership, Responsibilities, Decision making, & Accountability
- Presence of Team support for Innovation
- Good Internal Communication Sufficient Forums/ Channels for Meetings & Communication
- Presence of infrastructure (templates, shared folders, webex & video chat, IT support, etc)
- Happiness to celebrate each other’s Success
- Personal Take-away
Click here to download the free End of Project Collaboration Survey (with instructions to use).
Of course, this questionnaire is tailored to our specific project, but I will be happy if it helps other projects as well- training or otherwise. After all, sharing is one of the many take-away from collaboration.
