WMBA 6010 Week 8 Final Collaboration Plan Example

Four Practices Instead of Seven, Each Priced in Hours: The Final Collaboration Plan for a Three-Site Localization Team, With Fixed Measures and a Reflection on What the Draft Got Wrong

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6010: Managing People and Promoting Collaboration

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Four Practices Instead of Seven, Each Priced in Hours: The Final Collaboration Plan for a Three-Site Localization Team, With Fixed Measures and a Reflection on What the Draft Got Wrong

Summary

This is the final collaboration plan for my seven project managers at Larkspur, the course's invented localization firm, and for the Lisbon translators and Manila typesetters who work alongside them. The Week 7 draft proposed seven separate practices. Feedback on the draft said it was too long to carry out, carried no costs and left out the two site leads whose cooperation it needed. The final plan keeps four practices, prices each in hours of people's time and my attention, brings the Lisbon and Manila leads into one of them and fixes four measures with baselines and targets. Its total cost is about 25 hours a month across the team, roughly one percent of the team's working time.

What Was Cut and Why

Three practices from the draft are gone. Cross-site feedback twice a year is folded into the quarterly three-site review described below, which gathers the same views with less paperwork. The team's self-chosen annual goal is dropped for now; the project managers said in discussion that they would rather choose it after the first quarter of monthly reviews, once they have worked together on something. Individual written notes after every project are limited to projects above 40,000 words, because at the team's current volume notes on every project would have taken eight hours of my time each month. Pairing for the two new hires continues, but as part of standard onboarding owned by the experienced project managers, so it is no longer counted as a practice of this plan.

The Four Practices

Table 1

Practices, Owners and Monthly Cost

Hours are estimates from the past quarter's project volume.

The monthly review is the center of the plan, because it gives seven people who share a manager one piece of shared work, the condition Hackman (2002) treated as the foundation of any real team. Each month a different project manager chooses one completed project, presents what went well and badly, and the group settles on a single shared change in practice. I attend, ask at most one question and do not chair.

Each month one project manager receives a stretch project, chosen together and routed through the scheduler's complex-project setting. The account director has agreed to honor the flag for one project a month on a trial basis for two quarters. The cost is extra hours on the stretch project, since a less experienced manager on a complex project takes longer, which I estimate at six hours a month.

Written feedback follows the rule from the draft: two things that worked and one to change, with examples, sent within a week of the project closing.

The quarterly three-site review is new. The Lisbon lead linguist, the Manila layout lead and I meet for ninety minutes each quarter, with two project managers by rotation, to go over the three-site working arrangement from Week 6: the decision table, the handoff times and the query log. Each lead brings the hours their site lost to waiting. Cummings et al. (2009) reported that coordination delays in globally spread projects rise as more time zones separate the people involved, which means the arrangement needs regular tuning rather than a single design.

Costs in Attention

Hours are not the only cost. Each practice also asks for attention from someone who is already busy. The monthly review is the most demanding, because the chairing project manager prepares it in the same week as client deadlines. To protect it, the review is scheduled in the second week of each month, when deliveries are lightest, and the chair's project load that week is reduced by one small project. My own attention is the other scarce resource: the plan asks me to write ten feedback notes, attend the review in silence and hold one quarterly meeting. That is less than the draft asked and, I think, about what I can sustain.

Fixed Measures

Table 2

Measures, Baselines and Twelve-Month Targets

Baselines come from project records and my notes; the case is composite.

The measures are fixed now so that the results cannot be chosen after the fact. Each is linked to a problem identified earlier in the term: cross-site delays from Week 6, my habit of taking work back from Week 1, lost discretionary effort from Week 2 and my habit of jumping to fixes from Week 1.

Risks

The plan faces two main threats. One is a busy quarter in which the monthly review is canceled once and never restarted; the rule is that a canceled review is rescheduled within two weeks, never skipped. The second is that I return to old habits under pressure. The plan's response is structural rather than a matter of willpower: I do not chair the review, and escalation rules agreed in advance decide when I may step in. Deci et al. (2017) describe autonomy support as something managers provide through structures as well as attitudes, and the plan relies on the structures.

Reflection Post

Looking back at my Week 7 draft, I think I made three mistakes. First, I treated every weakness I found as needing its own practice, and the result was a plan no busy team could carry out. I now think a plan that people will actually follow is better than a complete one. Second, I left out cost entirely, which made the draft easy to approve and impossible to fund. Pricing each practice in hours showed me that individual notes on every project were costing me more than the rest of the plan combined. Third, I wrote a collaboration plan for three sites and included only one of them. The Lisbon and Manila leads were described in the draft but had no role in it, which repeated, in a small way, the headquarters habit the Week 6 arrangement was meant to correct.

The draft's reflection also relied on my changing my own habits by trying harder. I no longer believe that will work under pressure. The final plan builds rules around my habits instead, and I suspect that is the most useful thing I learned this term.

Did anyone else find that their final plan got shorter rather than longer?

References

Cummings, J. N., Espinosa, J. A., & Pickering, C. K. (2009). Crossing spatial and temporal boundaries in globally distributed projects: A relational model of coordination delay. Information Systems Research, 20(3), 420-439. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1090.0239

Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H., & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-determination theory in work organizations: The state of a science. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 19-43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113108

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.