Collaboration measures the number of collaborators in tickets, pull requests, wiki spaces and chat channels that belong to a team within a given interval.

Agile ways of working at their heart are a model of effective interaction between team members to deliver great outcomes for their customers. They emphasises the act of working together with flexibility, reviewing and incorporating feedback and adjusting as you go. They also rely on autonomous, flat structures where individuals inside and outside the organisation self-organise to solve problems and deliver customer outcomes. Agile projects are better at promoting collaboration with minimum disruption, irrespective of whether teams are co-located, distributed or working remotely. There is much research discerning the positive link between team collaboration and higher-quality outcomes.

Whilst it is usual practice for an item of work to be assigned to a single team member at any given time, there are instances where the assigned team member collaborates with other team members to bring the task to development and completion. Umano measures collaboration to help teams understand how effectively a team collaborates to complete their work, and whether they operate genuinely as ‘a team’ drawing on the skills and strengths of each other, or wether their patterns reflect a more individualistic approach to getting work done.
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Highlighting interactions during the lifecycle of a task provides deeper understanding of the ‘usual’ patterns of engagement:

Measuring Collaboration provides insight into team members that are generally self sufficient, and any patterns around potential skill gaps within team members partnering up with others based on the type of work being assigned. Umano’s measure of collaboration may also highlight involvement of team members not assigned to the task.

Optimising collaboration helps protect individual team members from ‘overload’ culture, ensuring team leaders understand the information flow and touch points across team members for any given ticket or pull request.

Equally, it is important to understand the costs of collaboration to a team’s way of working. Certain costs are well understood, including coordination issues, time and language barriers, maintaining momentum and the danger of group think. We all know that the flow of information across team members can be one of the most costly factors to producing great outcomes, affecting speed and timely decision making. Sometimes, the drive to collaborate can also be more about satisfying personal or self-centred motivations such as getting kudos or credit from doing so.

As companies embed remote working practices in a post global pandemic era, the casual effects on collaboration and communication show how being remote and distributed has caused collaboration to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts of the team or indeed the organisation. In addition, there has been a documented decrease in asynchronous communication. These effects can make it harder for team members to acquire and share new information across their network and work together on shared outcomes when expected.

Knowing where you’re at as a team is critical to determine the best strategy ahead and most supportive action to take. Whether you’re focus is to tackle overload culture, rebalancing for the appropriate amount of interaction or simply encouraging stronger interactions as you transition into more permanent distributed work practices, Umano’s Collaboration measure supports teams to refine their practice, adjusting interactions for effective customer outcomes.
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Mature collaboration practices will be different for each team depending on their size. Best represented by the Goldilocks principle, teams can use Umano’s collaboration measure to get the right balance that’s neither too few nor too many team members swarming over a ticket or pull request. Rather, it finds the balance of just the right amount of interaction required to deliver effectively.

It is recommended to cross-reference collaboration with other metrics to determine their impacts on speed (Cycle Time), progress (Completion Rate) and the quality of what’s being shipped (Time to Merge).
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For each issue completed, pull request merged, wiki space developed and chat channel engaged during the given interval, Umano measures collaboration by observing the number of interactions, and people interacting across the lifecycle of a ticket or pull request, or nominated wiki spaces and chat channels.
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This metric has 4 main components:

Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below a list of activities that contribute to Collaboration and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.

“The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers”, Nature Human Behaviour, 1 Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA. 2 Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. 3 MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Cambridge, MA, USA. ✉e-mail: loy@microsoft.com
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