Collaborating Up

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

Collaboration is hardly a new concept. In recent years, organizations have increasingly recognized the improvements in efficiency and effectiveness that can come from better collaboration and have evolved their businesses to integrate collaboration best practices into how they work.

On projects, this has resulted in better collaboration tools, closer integration of those tools with other project management software, and changes to the physical environments teams work in. However, the focus has always remained on improving how team members work together, and perhaps how the team and project manager interact.

There has been very little focus on how the organization can improve collaboration between project teams and other stakeholders and business areas. That’s what I want to consider in this article.

The power of the project team
Project teams are interesting entities. Unlike many organizational groups, they are transitional—they exist for the duration of an initiative and then disperse. Some of those people may come together again on the next project, but they aren’t a permanent group. As such, they are often overlooked when the organization is looking to bring groups together to collaborate on a new idea or to solve a problem.

For example, if a product owner is looking to bring a group of stakeholders together to prioritize a list of features for…

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