In the wake of Agile’s success and the benefits it offers organizations to help them achieve faster delivery, happier customers, and more engaged teams, “Collaboration” has become a buzzword. However, the way I see most teams practice collaboration is not in the sense of collaborating with customers; their focus is on the internal collaboration necessary to get work out the door. Because it helps speed up delivery, teams get the idea that collaboration is a universal positive, and they promote it so much that they forget to ask why they need so much collaboration to get anything done in the first place.

Without taking the time to consider why teams need to collaborate and when they should or shouldn’t collaborate, they end up maximizing collaboration. Collaboration becomes a band-aid remedy for all dependency-based problems and stops organizations from addressing deeper root causes, such as slow for handoffs, needing information, or waiting for approvals.

The Collaboration Band-Aid

Collaboration has become the go-to solution for any dependency problem, and when organizations celebrate collaboration, it can be challenging to do anything else.

When teams collaborate, the effort is immediately visible. It’s easy for teams to jump into meetings, and seeing people working together satisfies the sorts of managers who want to know their people are busy working. Investing in long-term solutions to resolving dependencies, such as designing clean team and system boundaries, cross-training, or creating platforms to enable teams, have a slower pay-off and run into resistance and comments like “I agree we should do that, but right now, we just need to focus on delivering this project.”

The push to handle dependencies with more and more collaboration takes the opportunity away from understanding and resolving the underlying issues, be it team structure or value stream design. Instead of addressing these root causes, organizations throw more people at a problem and call it collaboration.

The Hidden Costs of Excessive Collaboration

While collaboration can be valuable, it’s important to recognize the costs of relying on it too much:

• Reduced total output: Collaboration often involves lots of meetings and richer interactions between multiple teams, which are time-consuming and have the opportunity cost of temporarily reducing total output.
• Expensive interactions between teams: Organizations might conflate “Collaborating” with “Getting work done faster.” It can lead to teams choosing to collaborate to solve problems it’s not suited or required for. Unnecessary collaboration is expensive and wasteful.
• Collaboration as a best practice: The spotlight sometimes shines on the act of collaboration rather than on how effective it is. Management might push teams to collaborate or question teams who don’t. When collaboration is treated as a best practice, addressing the fundamental problem of blocking dependencies is impossible.
• Optics: Collaboration often results in visible activities, busyness, and meetings. When organizational recognition is based on visibility and optics, it can promote goal-seeking behaviours where people prioritize collaboration for the sake of what it represents instead of how effective it is.
• Meeting creep: Collaboration heavily utilizes the biggest source of corporate waste: Meetings. Despite their high cost, meetings are easy to implement, and there’s no stopping how big meetings can get. I was once in a project where one meeting series with a regulatory team for a single feature eventually grew to include 30 people from six regulatory teams and two development teams.

Understanding Dependencies

How teams approach collaboration is rooted in how teams understand dependencies. In my experience, teams tend to have a singular view:

• A dependency is when I don’t have the people I need in my team.
• The two ways to resolve dependencies are to add more people to my team or borrow people.
• Dependencies cause delays, and we should always work to eliminate them.

Part of the solution starts with broadening the options available for three categories:

• Types of dependencies: There are multiple types of dependencies besides not having the right people in your team.
• Team interaction modes: Collaboration is only one possible way for teams to interact
• Dependency management: There are other tactics to improve flow than only trying to eliminate dependencies.

Types of Dependencies

Even though most teams resolve dependencies by adding or borrowing people, dependencies are never on people. This simplistic view ignores the nuances of different types of dependencies:

• Strode and Huff, “A Taxonomy of Dependencies in Agile Software Development.”
  • Knowledge dependencies
  • Task dependencies
  • Resource dependencies

Your dependency on a person could be on their domain knowledge. It could be on a task only they can complete. It could be a business process like an approval or review for which they are responsible.

Team Interaction Modes

Similarly, there are various ways to resolve dependencies beyond just collaboration:

• Team Topology’s Team Interaction Modes
  • X-as-a-service
  • Facilitation
  • Collaboration
• Temporary, fully-embedded team members

Dependency Management

Trying to eliminate all dependencies is a noble goal, but I’m more interested in practical and helpful guidance. Instead of trying to eliminate dependencies, I want to start by helping my teams do their work and not get blocked.

• Dependency Management and shared services:
  • Dynamic Reservation Systems
  • Kanban’s Dependency Management Poster (PDF)
  • Kanban University – Managing Dependencies

• Eliminate blocking dependencies.
• Mitigate slow dependencies.
• Keep healthy dependencies.

Matthew Skelton & Manual Pais, Remote-First Team Interactions with Team Topologies

Flipping the Collaboration Paradigm

Instead of defaulting to high-touch and high-cost collaboration to resolve every dependency, we should consider a spectrum of approaches to team interaction:

1. No collaboration (Ideal): No collaboration is the ideal where teams don’t have any dependencies. Teams can independently deliver their work.
2. X-as-a-service: Platforms provide teams with self-serve options, comprehensive documentation and knowledge. Teams are able to accomplish more, independently, thanks to the work of others.
3. Facilitation: Facilitation is a temporary collaboration where one team imparts their knowledge to another before moving on.
4. Collaboration: An intentional short-term collaboration between teams to solve a complex and novel problem. The collaboration should pursue a clear and valuable shared goal.
5. Temporary, fully-embedded team members: Individuals from elsewhere in the organization join a team for some duration as full team members. Individuals leave their previous teams and any of their old work and responsibilities. It uses temporary team design to make up for dependency problems.

This incomplete and partial ranking of approaches to team interactions recognizes the cost of close collaboration between teams. This ranking encourages teams to escalate to more expensive forms of collaboration only as necessary.

Teams that rely on expensive forms of collaboration to accomplish their goals have more risk than those that can act independently.

Practices to Better Judge Collaborative Efforts

To improve how you handle dependencies and better judge opportunities to collaborate with your teams, consider these activities:

1. Map the system: Map work streams, teams, and systems to get a clearer picture of your organization’s structure and the nature of dependencies.
2. Develop a better understanding of your team’s dependencies: Who depends on whom, for what, and how healthy are these dependencies?
3. Break work down into smaller, more independent pieces: Scale the work down rather than have large batches of work that span multiple domains. Design work in a way that promotes team independence and reduces the need for collaboration.
4. Assess each situation individually: Before defaulting to collaboration, ask what type of working model is most appropriate for the work at hand. Does the problem cross domains? Is it complex and requires different perspectives? Are we creating something new and novel? Will other teams also need to do this?
5. Look for the root problem: Consider each request to collaborate as a potential sign of some deeper systemic issue in your organization.

When Collaboration Shines

In the right circumstances, collaboration is the right tool for the job. Collaborative modelling, for instance, can lead to unique solutions that no single perspective could develop alone. The key is identifying when collaboration will genuinely add value and when it only adds unnecessary complexity.

Collaboration is most valuable:

• When two teams collaborate to create something new, which neither could do alone.
• For complex problems that require diverse perspectives.
• When the benefits outweigh the costs of coordination and communication and reduced output.
• When the speed is important.

Conclusion

By understanding the real costs and benefits of collaboration, recognizing different types of collaboration, and approaching each situation critically, you can create more effective interactions in your organization.

Avoid the mentality that “More collaboration is better” and develop a more nuanced, thoughtful approach to teamwork. The goal isn’t to eliminate collaboration but to ensure that when we do collaborate, it’s purposeful, effective, and beneficial to teams and the organization as a whole.