The Collaboration Engineering Approach for Designing Collaboration Processes

Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy collaboration processes that can be executed by practitioners for high value recurring tasks. A collaboration engineer designs collaboration processes and transfers them to practitioners in an organization. Through the recurring nature of the task, combined with lower investment in training, the approach is more likely to be successful in organizations because it is easier to adopt and sustain collaboration support in this way. In order to be successful, collaboration engineers need to develop collaboration process designs that have many more functions and requirements than traditional process agenda's of facilitators. This paper describes a step-by-step approach for the design of such collaboration processes. The approach was evaluated in a number of iterations. The evaluation results provide support for the usefulness of the approach.