Transferring Well-Performing Collaborative Work Practices with Parameterized Templates and Guidebooks: Empowering Subject Matter Experts for an Adaptation to Slightly Different Contexts

Abstract

Collaborative work practices (CWPs) package facilitation expertise and have the potential to increase team productivity up to 90%. Collaboration engineers develop CWPs and deploy them to practitioners that execute them. These CWPs, however, are typically customized to conditions of a specific use case. This creates the challenge that changing use case conditions or even small variations across contexts, hinder well-performing CWPs of being applied more often to create a long-term value. Practitioners fail to adapt existing CWPs due to missing collaboration expertise and adaptation guidelines. To address this challenge in collaboration engineering literature, we introduce a) the Subject Matter Expert role; b) the ‘CWP Adaptation Approach’ that formalizes the transfer of CWPs to different contexts with parameterized Templates and Guidebooks. To show a first proof-of-concept, we further inductively generalize from an exemplarily use case with a well-performing CWP in the educational domain.

Keywords: collaboration engineering, collaborative work practices, collaboration engineer, subject matter expert, practitioners