Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Alan MacCormack on Collaboration

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Alan MacCormack on Collaboration
March 2008 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Alan MacCormack
Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management, Harvard Business School.


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  • You mention four areas in which firms invest to build collaborative capabilities. What is the aim of the investments made within each?

  1. People

    Effective collaboration requires people with different skills, given team members sit outside the boundaries of the firm in distant countries with different cultures. Rather than a focus on pure technical expertise, managers need a broader skill set, associated with the need to orchestrate and coordinate distributedwork. To reflect this emphasis, firms must change their recruitment, development, evaluation and reward systems.

  2. Process

    Effective collaboration requires that firms rethink their processes. Distributed work involves a variety of additional tasks as compared to single site projects, related to dividing tasks, sharing artifacts and coordinating and integrating work. Rarely does a firm's default process adequately address these activities. Effective approaches are discovered through informed trial and error, using pilot projects to test the value of specific practices and generate descriptive data to help assess performance.

  3. Platforms

    Leading firms invest in an infrastructure a set of development tools, technical standards and working methods to facilitate distributed work. The more complex the project and the more the partners involved, the more sophisticated this platform needs to be. We were surprised to observe many firms pay inadequate attention to this area, causing major problems. Consider the Airbus 380, which has been delayed for two years, in part because two partners used different versions of the same design software.

  4. Programs

    Successful firms manage collaboration efforts as a coherent "program," in contrast to organizations which run each project on a stand alone basis. To achieve this objective, some firms have created the post of, in effect, "Chief Collaboration Officer," responsible for overseeing all their collaboration efforts. Such a move signals the importance of partnering to a firm's strategy, facilitates efforts to transfer learning across projects, and helps to standardizemethods for selecting and managing partners.

  • What are the potential areas of conflict in collaboration initiatives? Where domajor disagreements tend to come from?
    They often stemfromflawed assumptions about the best way to organize. For example, many partners vary the staffing on projects to match the workload, allowing them to achieve greater resource utilization. But this alsomeans that experienced staffmay leave projects, to be replaced by new members with little knowledge of the project or client context. In innovation projects, where "tacit" knowledge is so important, this can lead to serious performance problems. Hence leading firms insist on greater staff continuity, and arewilling to pay extra for this type of relationship.

    Another area in which conflicts can emerge is contract structure. Writing contracts the size of a phone book is obsolete in an era where the greatest value a partner provides comes from the ideas they possess and not the wage rate that they pay. Partners must be encouraged to share ideas, an aim that is best accomplished if they also share in the spoils that come from their realization. Hence successful firms look to reward partners through revenue and profit sharing, while also hedging risk by asking them to absorb a portion of development costs.

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