Understanding Process Differences: Agreeing Upon a Single Way to Skin a Cat

Supporting human collaboration is challenging partly because of variability in how people collaborate. Even within a single organization, there can be many variants of processes which have the same purpose. When diverse coalition members must work together, the differences can be especially large, baffling and disruptive. Coordination theory provides a method and vocabulary for modeling complex collaborative activities in a way that makes both the similarities and differences between them more visible. To demonstrate this, we modeled three very different engineering change management processes and found: (1) most of the work is coordination-related; (2) despite large apparent differences, a coordination-theoretic analysis revealed substantial commonalities among the three processes; and (3) differences in the processes were due to choices regarding coordination mechanisms. This approach has promise for helping to merge or integrate different processes and to suggest ways that agents can participate in complex collaborative processes.