There are three distinct types of organizational collaboration — Strategic, Operational, and Tactical — and understanding which one you are in changes how you design it.
The head of the Enterprise Program Management Office sat with the COO reviewing the organization's major projects. After the summary of each project's status, they turned their focus to the first red. At the last three quarterly updates, it was green. Today, it is red. After discussing why, they consider the consequences and how to respond. They contemplate different scenarios and prepare adjustments to resources, budgets, and dependent projects.
If we were to say that the COO and the EPMO leader were collaborating, in what type of collaboration were they engaged?
The project's implosion had occurred two days earlier. The classic watermelon project — appearing healthy and green on the outside until its red interior unexpectedly burst into view. The EPMO leader strode into the project's first recovery meeting, where twenty-seven senior managers, project managers, process owners, and consultants had gathered. Over the next two hours, they produced a re-plan they all said should work.
What type of collaboration did the twenty-eight engage in?
When that meeting concluded, the EPMO leader, the project's change leader, and its senior executive sponsor stayed in the conference room. They spent an hour completing the script for the internal announcement webinar scheduled for when the project eventually goes live.
In what type of collaboration is the EPMO leader now engaged?
The noun/verb that emerged with gusto over the past decade. Almost as though it were a revolutionary new concept. Forgetting that humans have tried collaborating since the first hungry cavemen spotted a woolly mammoth on the Pleistocene plain. Organizations started adding collaboration to their Core Values statements in the late 1990s — primarily because we have become so good at everything else. Our collaboration capability has become exposed.
The EPMO leader and her twenty-seven compatriots were conducting a Strategic Collaboration — in Peter Drucker's sense: a set of goals with the means to attain them. They defined the red project's desired future state and the actions to manifest it.
The EPMO leader and the COO engaged in an Operational Collaboration — producing a portfolio with the optimal priorities, resource allocations, and task assignments to implement the current business strategy.
The EPMO leader and her two colleagues creating the webinar script were conducting a Tactical Collaboration — performing a task assigned through the project's Operational Collaboration, whose completion would help produce the goals from the Strategic Collaboration that first chartered the project.
Today, most collaboration discussions center on either the hard technologies used to foster ease of collaboration or the soft skills driving collaboration quality. These are means. Enabling the three types of ends — Strategic, Operational, and Tactical collaboration — is the keystone frame for building repeatable excellence.
