The collaboration management culture

A critical part of all technology companies or leading market competitors is the program innovation and execution. The difference that allows a company to leverage its collective strengths effectively is efficient program execution with the capture and dissemination of technology and techniques throughout the company. Unfortunately, companies sometimes struggle, and occasionally are quite poor, at completing programs on schedule with enough innovation and uniqueness to cause their customers to desire to work with them in the future. Instead, major companies remain the companies of interest by default because they, at least, completed the project, and this sometimes offsets the risk of working with another team. Even so, every engineer knows the frustration of trying to complete his work on-time and under-budget without having access to requisite material or a means of collaborating that is simple, effective, and adaptive to the users. Instead, the typical knowledge management system is a morass of repositories and inconsistent archival techniques unique to the person or program developing them. Often times they are a hodge-podge, maintained as a dumping ground of information relevant to the program of interest. Workers on these programs spend more time trying to find information than they do in generating the product on contract. They struggle to coordinate their efforts, generating large data repositories with varying search capabilities, sending data packets back and forth, editing documents and returning the document to the “keeper of the document,” and other practices that can be more efficiently done given an appropriate collaboration system.