|
Executive Interviews: Interview with Alan MacCormack on Collaboration
March 2008
-
By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Alan MacCormack Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management, Harvard Business School. 
- People
Effective collaboration requires
people with different skills, given
team members sit outside the
boundaries of the firm in distant
countries with different cultures.
Rather than a focus on pure technical
expertise, managers need a
broader skill set, associated with
the need to orchestrate and coordinate
distributedwork. To reflect
this emphasis, firms must change
their recruitment, development,
evaluation and reward systems. - Process
Effective collaboration requires
that firms rethink their processes.
Distributed work involves a variety
of additional tasks as compared
to single site projects, related
to dividing tasks, sharing artifacts
and coordinating and integrating
work. Rarely does a firm's
default process adequately address
these activities. Effective approaches
are discovered through
informed trial and error, using pilot
projects to test the value of specific
practices and generate descriptive
data to help assess performance. - Platforms
Leading firms invest in an infrastructure
a set of development
tools, technical standards and
working methods to facilitate
distributed work. The more complex
the project and the more the
partners involved, the more sophisticated
this platform needs to
be. We were surprised to observe
many firms pay inadequate attention to this area, causing major
problems. Consider the Airbus
380, which has been delayed for
two years, in part because two
partners used different versions of
the same design software. - Programs
Successful firms manage collaboration
efforts as a coherent "program,"
in contrast to organizations
which run each project on a
stand alone basis. To achieve this
objective, some firms have created
the post of, in effect, "Chief
Collaboration Officer," responsible
for overseeing all their collaboration
efforts. Such a move
signals the importance of
partnering to a firm's strategy, facilitates
efforts to transfer learning
across projects, and helps to standardizemethods
for selecting and
managing partners.
-
What are the potential areas of
conflict in collaboration initiatives?
Where domajor disagreements tend
to come from?
They often stemfromflawed assumptions
about the best way to organize.
For example, many partners vary the
staffing on projects to match the
workload, allowing them to achieve
greater resource utilization. But this
alsomeans that experienced staffmay
leave projects, to be replaced by new
members with little knowledge of the
project or client context. In innovation
projects, where "tacit" knowledge
is so important, this can lead to
serious performance problems.
Hence leading firms insist on greater
staff continuity, and arewilling to pay
extra for this type of relationship. Another area in which conflicts
can emerge is contract structure.
Writing contracts the size of a phone
book is obsolete in an era where the
greatest value a partner provides
comes from the ideas they possess
and not the wage rate that they pay.
Partners must be encouraged to share
ideas, an aim that is best accomplished
if they also share in the spoils
that come from their realization.
Hence successful firms look to reward
partners through revenue and
profit sharing, while also hedging
risk by asking them to absorb a portion
of development costs.
|
