Who’s on the team?

Ross Mayfield noted today that one of the biggest challenges with collaboration among distributed teams is actually agreeing on who is actually part of the team. Larry Irons quotes research from Distributed Work to that effect:

Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members. 

We see this all the time in real world BPM projects. Agreeing on what the process is is often the easy part. Identifying the who is can seem nearly impossible, especially if a single team is attempting to define a process that is executed in many different locales all over the world.

A distributed, collaborative environment such as Lombardi Blueprint is key to solving this challenge. Having a structured repository to identify and maintain the players and relationships involved in a business process promotes visibility and knowledge sharing among those involved. Discovering the who in a process becomes far easier when all those that are involved can both document their own role and see how where they fit inside the grand scheme of things regardless of what office or time zone they happen to be working in at the particular moment.