Customer Reviews

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A challenge faced by any project leader is how to lead the team without resorting to a command-and-control management style. This book's essential premise is that the project leader can do this by fostering collaboration among team members. Jean Tabaka's Collaboration Explained is really two books in one. The first explains the benefits of collaborating and why project leaders need to foster collaboration among their teams if those teams are to perform at a high level.

The second, and by far longest, part of Collaboration Explained is a compendium of techniques that will foster team collaboration and will help the reader become a more collaborative leader. Any reader will finish this part having learned new techniques. Nominally this book is about team decision making and so most of the book is about the various decisions teams make and how the project leader can ensure that the team makes the best decision. Covered are decisions about project requirements, estimates, priorities, vision, resolving conflict and more. Tabaka provides both general purpose advice that can be used in many contexts as well as very specific advice for each of the contexts or meetings she describes.

This book is well-placed in a series devoted to agile software development. However, it is important to point out that the techniques covered here will be applicable to any team with any development process. Any project leader who wants to help his or her team work better together will benefit from reading this book.

Jean Tabaka has done a great service to Software Development. The highest cost meetings where everyone is attendance can be at least twice as valuable when well run and Jean gives us some great guides to make these fruitful. This is especially true with Agile methods that recommends frequent time-boxed meetings to evaluate plans, inspect them and adapt to the changing conditions our fast-paced environments introduce. I have adopted many ideas and have found them very useful. Finally, this kind of skill is what many technically trained people need most for creating a truly collaborative environment.

Tabaka's book is part of an ongoing series on the use of the Agile software development process. It deals with a key idea of involving participants to the fullest extent. The word collaboration is used to describe this idea. The book is directed at someone who has to manage this process. Someone in a supervisory capacity. Though of course the book could be usefully read by anyone else involved.

The book has many suggestions. About such tasks as conducting status meetings during the project. Or how to distinguish between a good meeting and a bad meeting. Or supervising small group work. The advice is entirely about the human element. And not about any specific software tools or languages. If you are a supervisor from a programming background, it could be the human element aspects that you are most in need of advice about.

Naturally, the text also has numerous instances of how to deal with what it calls Agile Practices. Yet you might not need to adhere to the latter to still derive gain from the book. There is no need to buy into some or indeed any of the Agile Practices. Much of the book has useful advice (like the example above of the good and bad meetings) that is germane to whatever overarching development process you already have in place. Er, you do have one in place, don't you?

I'm not a manager or project leader or ScrumMaster, I'm just a tester on a development team using Scrum. So I started reading it with a little trepidation that it wouldn't really apply to my day-to-day work, or that I wouldn't really be able to learn the facilitation skills.

The book really opened my eyes to the fact that my team needs to collaborate with our business folks a whole lot more. It's something we know intellectually, but don't effectively do on a day-to-day basis. Ideas from the book are helping me change this. I'm also learning to be more effective in any kind of meeting, even if I'm not leading it. The book is full of examples from the author's personal experience. I learn best by examples, so this really helped me and got me charged up about the whole thing.

There's a great reference section where you can look up whatever meeting you need to plan and get a wealth of ideas. I'm looking forward to trying some of these out in our next sprint review! If you have any difficulties communicating with those inside or outside your team, or meetings are driving you crazy, you're going to find a gold mine in this book.

Jean Tabaka's COLLABORATION EXPLAINED: FACILITATION SKILLS FOR SOFTWARE PROJECT LEADERS tells how to build an agile project which fosters techniques for ensuring effective collaboration. Jean Tabaka has been studying and using agile environments since its early days: her guidelines and templates for project events cover all areas and aspects of methodology and application, applying concepts to business practices and special circumstances project managers face with their development teams. A recommended, real-world project pick.

Having had the pleasure of seeing Jean in action at a CSM class years ago and having read her book I can tell you that she is passionate about helping teams succeed. I was given a copy of the book when it was first published and it was easy to see Jean's passion play out in the book. I have used this book over the past couple of years to help me better coach teams and traditional PMs make the transition to an Agile execution model. In my mind this book should be part of every Lean/Agile consultant's/coach's toolbox.

I've been lucky enough to meet Jean Tabaka before I'd read her book. She's a very humble and knowledgeable lady, and you can see both of those attributes in her book about effective collaboration. It's probably heavy reading for some people. For the right kind of people, I imagine it's very easy to digest. If you're working on projects in a team, especially as a team leader or a project manager, it's a great book that equips you with lots of practices and tools that come in handy every single day. Even if you're not working in any of aforementioned roles, as a member of any team, it offers lots of gems worth digging for.

Don't be daunted by the book's thickness - Tabaka's laid the four hundred or so pages well with a decent index and table of contents, making it easy to jump around to topics that interest you. I fortunately had a few hours in the airport and the plane to give me a good chance of reading the detail of the sections that interested me.

A lot of the topics that Takaba covers are very relevant to any environment in which you're working and even more so in agile development teams where collaboration is key. I definitely relate to many of the stories that she talks about, littering the book and giving real examples of the tools in practice. It's well written and many of the models are useful straight away.

There's a little bit of repetition - some of it probably because it's written in a way that allows you to digest chapters on their own, and maybe so that it really lets the lessons sink in. It also talks about a number of topics that aren't directly related to facilitation though are still useful in their own way for setting a better context such as leadership and specific agile methodologies. In a way, a lot of the practices draw from many other disciplines and although not necessarily completely new, are presented in a very easy to digest manner.

I'd definitely add this to my recommended reading list, especially for people who want to improve the effectiveness of their teams.

I found Jean's book to provide a good introduction into team dynamics and fostering collaborative, self-empowered teams. She touches on topics like DISC and other personality studies. She offers some discussion on team evoloution (from formation to real high-performance).

The 2nd half of the book has a lot of perscriptive meeting formats and agendas. It's helpful for individuals who are starting out with managing a team (or experienced team members who want to refresh on the subject).

The only reason I didn't give this book a 5 star is because while it's generally informative and easy to read - I felt that it didn't offer as much value for it's price. A good majority of the book is templated agendas and meeting formats, there's a few sections on strategies within meetings (like how to handle someone not paying attention gracefully). I would of liked to of seen more in way of that for the price of the book.

This book stands out as one of my favorites on how to really build collaborative teams, and to build consensus. It is full of real-world examples and specific techniques. This is a hard topic to tackle, and I believe that the authors write from experience.

The techniques in this book are not just for "Agile" project managers. They can be applied to many different teams on how to facilitate and develop collaboration in meetings, better decisions through consensus, and generally gain team commitment.

Like most books on these kinds of topics, this book contains it's share of the blindingly obvious (meetings must have a clear agenda, people must be respectful of each other's opinions etc) and annecdotes that don't prove anything (except that the author has real world experience). There is a bit of a focus on meetings, and less discussion about the use of e-mail, instant messaging, wikis etc. Can't say that this book provided any new insights or triggered any new thoughts, though to be fair this isn't the first book I have read on this topic. The only reason I don't rate this book worse is that it's well written, and I pretty much agree with what the author says :-)