Collaboration
At Velrada, we recognise the significance that collaboration plays in ensuring organisations remain competitive and productive. Many companies today struggle with being too compartmentalised, divided into distinct autonomous business units with rigid internal processes that hamper time to market and poor communication and information flow both internally and externally.
By contrast, the ability to flexibly and dynamically collaborate, both across an organisation and beyond it, offers the opportunity to form and disband new workgroups at will, across different functions, locations, even different companies helping to make better use of available resources and increase the speed that decisions are made.
While technology tools are essential for successful collaboration to take place, changes to culture and processes also play an important role in improving business performance through collaborative practices. In addition to looking at how your technology architecture enables collaboration, it's important to consider whether your corporate culture and processes are conducive to effective collaboration in order to avoid wasting time and resources.
Recent research highlighted the influence that organisational culture and processes have on successful collaboration:
- Executive buy-in: Leadership teams serve as good role models for using collaboration tools effectively
- Formal collaboration processes: Processes help employees to understand how and when to collaborate
- Effectiveness tracking: Use metrics and KPI’s to track collaboration effectiveness e.g. time to market, regulatory compliance, supply chain etc.
- Direct rewards: The level of collaboration is directly correlated with rewards
Velrada provides practical advice for implementing effective collaboration strategies including:
- Breaking down the communication barriers
- Gaining executive buy-in
- Evaluation of suitable technology platforms
- Establishing metrics to measure performance and results
- Recommend appropriate change management policies for company-wide adoption