Question

Jacob and Margot are meeting again to discuss Jacob’s report on the current state of NewSky Services’ collaborative and networking practices, and his preliminary suggestions for action. Margot: ‘Firstly, thanks for all your hard work on this report, Jacob! I’ve taken it to our overseeing committee, who are very impressed with your suggestions.’ Jacob: ‘Great. I think we have a lot of room to expand our services and become more efficient through increased networking and participation. Where would you like me to go from here?’ Margot: ‘Based on your excellent work here, I’d like to put you in charge of our networking and collaborative practices as a project manager. What do you think we should do?’ Jacob: ‘Thanks very much! I’ll do my best. Taking this as a cohesive project is a good start, I think. I’d like to start by researching established networks and investigating potential collaborators.’ Margot: ‘I agree. Can you identify a number of established networks that could help us increase our services? There may also be collaborators locally that we could partner with.’ Jacob: ‘Absolutely. I’m excited to see where a commitment to networking and collaboration can take us.

8. Before undertaking a collaborative partnership with another organisation, why would Jacob have to define and document the type and level of collaboration?

(Approx. 50 words).

Answer 1

Why Is Collaboration Important:

If a business takes measures to support collaboration in the workplace it can expect to see improvements to productivity. When more people work on a project it gets more brain power and more thoughts or feedback on it. This can be effective for determining solutions to problems and thinking outside of what employees might normally consider. Collaboration tools can further aid in this process, giving employees more access to solutions and each other.

Collaboration is critical to the success of businesses both big and small that is from the newest of startups to the grandest of enterprises. It’s true that there are very few businesses that are successful without collaboration, yet on an organizational level there is a lot to consider when planning it out.

COLLABORATION - Collaboration is the act of people working together as a team toward a goal.

~various levels of collaboration that a business can use to its advantage are as follows :

Simple Collaboration: In its most basic form of collaboration that looks like quick communications initiated by instant messages or other similar technology. These kinds of tools can still be misused to create distractions but they can expedite productivity and communication toward a specific goal.

Document Collaboration: Document collaboration brings the previous concept and implements it on a document level giving multiple users the ability to work on a single document toward an end goal. This can benefit the task at hand and make sure collaboration happens whether your employees are in the same room or miles apart.

Structured Collaboration: Meetings might not be everyone’s favorite thing about the workday. but it’s inevitable that they must happen at some point or another to ensure that people are working toward common goals. Meetings give users the ability to express their feelings or ideas on certain topics and forms can be used to capture these ideas to gauge interest. By their nature, meetings are designed as collaborative exercises that promote transparency and communication but only if there is structure to them.

Types of collaboration :

Some of the most common types of collaboration include networks, coalitions, movements, strategic alliances, strategic co-funding, public private partnerships and collective impact initiatives.

The essence of collaboration processes which has been distilled into 5 key dimensions they are Governance, Administration, Autonomy, Mutuality and Trust/Reciprocity.