Collaboration champions open organizations that are hostile regarding knowledge sharing, bottom-up management and knowledge centric workflows and turn them into organizations with creative and productive teams that are able to benefit from collaboration technology.
Being an collaboration champion means
"Every knowledge worker can be creative" could be the mantra of the creativity evangelist. Like the innovation promoter who promotes newly created innovation, the creativity evangelist encourages people to unleash their creativity and create innovation.
Methodologies that creativity evangelists frequently use are
Promoting innovation means not only being a technology prophet that rallies for new technologies, instead it means promoting innovation: technical and social from yourself to your team, to the whole organization. Promotable innovation for knowledge workers occurs in
A successful innovation promoter is always a information ambassador for the innovation that is promoted.Knowledge workers are workers whose work output is mainly informational nature, e.g. knowledge, documents, reports, studies, inventions or patents. Many knowledge workers are highly specialized experts in their field and able to act self-responsible, creative and rational. This high degree of specialization is accompanied by division of labor which takes the shape of work in teams or projects.
Typical job descriptions of knowledge workers contain words like
Knowledge workers work by gathering information, creating information and sharing information. The whole process is accompanied by intense communication with team members. Tools commonly used among knowledge workers are web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari, communication tools like email, chat rooms, mailing lists or VoIP. Other tools used by knowledge workers are often highly specialized like Adobe Photoshop, Autocad or the Eclipse IDE.
Because of their high expertise in their fields and the "soft" output of their work, knowledge workers are hard to manage. Managers often have missing insight into the work of the knowledge workers they manage and no metrics that are able to measure the output. Due to this fact and the fact that many information workers are self-motivated and professional, management methods like self-management, bottom-up management and unmanaging are promoted by organizations which success depends on knowledge workers.
Almost all work knowledge workers do is task-based. This means a knowledge worker maintains a todo-list with items, ordered by priority or due-date and these are fulfilled task-by-task.
As knowledge workers are human beings, there is a third scale for weighting tasks next to priority and urgency: personal preference. People who procrastinate tend to overweight the personal preference and schedule displeasing tasks until they are due or overdue, which leads to missed deadlines or important tasks that are fulfilled in a hurry with low quality.
In order to be a procrastination terminator, team members have to become aware of this problem and counter it by setting more strict deadlines, calculating the preferences of the team members when weighting and assigning tasks and developing task tracking schemes that are able to consider personal preferences.
A project manager plays an exposed role in a project team: As a manager she is responsible for setting and reaching the project's goal withing time and budget, which means neccessarily coordinating the efforts of knowledge workers in the team.
Techniques often used by project managers of knowledge teams are: getting things done for self-management, mind mapping for contextualizing the flow of information regarding the project, milestone planning and gantt charts for setting goals and team synchronization to reduce the knowledge gap between team members.
A team is a group of people working on a common goal. It describes an organizational unit, that has an average maximum size of twelve members. Teams with more than twelve members tend to become unproductive, because the communication overhead nessessary to keep the social structure working extends the benefit of division of labor and combination of skills in a team.
Teams of knowledge workers are not bound to a specific working time or place, as collaboration software allows them to work distributedly and asynchronously.
A social collaboration pattern that depends on the existance of teams is the project. Each project has a number of members, these are known as the project team.
A team communicator is the person in a team that keeps communication going by connecting to team members, even those that are not directly involved with the communicator's day-to-day work. As such the team communicator plays an important role in the social network of the team because he is able to dispatch news and requests to the appropriate team members.
Team communicators are often power users of communication tools like chat rooms or mailing lists that allow them to communicate with a large number of people at the same time, synchronously and asynchronously.
Technology prophets are team members that like to introduce new technology to improve the individual workers productivity and the team productivity by using productivity software or collaborative software.
A technology prophet can turn an organization into an early adopter of technologies which can lead to strategic competitive advantages, but on the other hand, simply introducing technology without the approriate means of collaboration and usage will lead to waste and frustration among the team members. In this case, the technology prophet should work with a collaboration champion and learning catalyst to successfully introduce new technology with a purpose that goes beyond technology for the sake of technology.
As Wikis reflect the non-hierarchical, neuronal network-style most of us think, Wikis tend to evolve into non-hierarchical, neuronal-network-style information pools that consist of many, interlinked Wiki pages that can be hard to navigate.
Some problems like orphaned pages, duplicate content, missing categorization, bad navigation can be overcome with the help of technology like powerful search, tagging or "related content" pages, in the end it comes down to human knowledge and understanding to make a Wiki an exceptional knowledge base.
People who love to organize Wikis by
In a team, every piece of information is to some degree personal. Acting as an information ambassador means not only loading information on the team, e.g. by leaving an interesting report on a shared network file, but making the source of the information and the person that introduced this information tracable.
Advanced file sharing systems that tracking version history help you being an information ambassador that takes responsibility for the information you create, manage and publish.