Does the Team Need to Track Collaboration?

Feedback and coaching improve a team’s collaboration capability. Team members don’t need to track their collaboration. However, if explicit collaboration is a new practice for your team, they might want to track their collaboration.

Tracking collaboration helps if the team members don’t collaborate to take stories together, or if they optimize in some other way for individuals and not the team. If the team wants to track collaboration, it might start with designing its own board, such as the example board shown in the figure.

The team on this board started to track with A (Ask for help) and O (Offer help). They decided different-colored stickies would be even better. Because this is data for the team and no one else, they could change their data collection at will. They found different colored stickies better than As and Os. The stickies helped them see the distribution of asking and offering help more easily than the As and Os did.

Encourage your team to find a way to track how well it collaborates as a team. The team members might decide to start with creating WIP limits to see how well they—as a team—move work across their board. I have worked with some teams that decided to track asks and offers for help as a way to encourage the team members to work together. Your team might need something else. You and your team might see other possibilities.