An Interview Protocol for Discovering and Assessing Collaboration Engineering Opportunities

Collaboration engineering (CE) projects can run for months and can require substantial expenditures of effort and resources. CE is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transferring those designs to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Because CE projects can entail considerable cost, it would be useful to establish a basis for predicting whether such efforts would be likely to result in a self-sustaining and growing community of practice for the resulting work practice. In this paper we use the value frequency model (VFM) to derive an interview protocol to identify new CE opportunities and to assess whether a CE solution would be likely to succeed. We then test the protocol in two cases; one with experienced collaboration engineers in a large multinational organization and a second with a group of knowledge workers with no CE experience working with a variety of profit and non-profit organizations. The findings appear to be consistent with the theory, suggesting that the interview protocol may be a useful tool for discovering and assessing CE opportunities. We propose several directions for future research.