Insights in Implementing Collaboration Engineering

Collaboration Engineering is an emerging discipline to design and deploy collaboration processes and technologies for repeatable tasks performed by groups. This paper documents the early efforts of one implementation of Collaboration Engineering within the military. The effort is currently ongoing within the staff of the Product Manager of the Global Command and Control Systems - Army (PM, GCCS-A) to define, improve, and modernize their internal business processes. The effort used principles of Collaboration Engineering to design a process to be executed using a Group Support System. Additionally, the effort integrated a collaboration-based facilitation technique into the execution. A contract document review meeting was the field test intended to develop a repeatable document review process. The meeting reduced a previous four-week effort to less than three days and was considered an outstanding success. The paper summarizes insights from the practitioners in attempting to implement these concepts.