The 5 Lessons of Effective Collaboration

By Joe Morray

In the last issue of Insight, I began discussing the changes that are necessary for effective IT-enabled collaboration. I compared the plant life cycle to a wheel and its spokes. At the hub is the owner, who has taken on the responsibility of making collaboration work.

It is a challenge to overcome limitations hindering collaboration, ranging from human to technological. Humans often struggle with change, particularly when long-standing ideas about how to accomplish work are challenged. Then there’s technology. Its value will be judged by easier access, speed and information accuracy.

Through work with the process industries, particularly among those in the Owner-Operator Forum (a strategic focus area of FIATECH), we at Trinity Technologies have found five lessons that continually call attention to themselves as companies search for effective collaboration methods:

1. Eliminate bad data

There is no value in making bad — meaning out-of-date — information rapidly accessible. This has been an important lesson in capturing legacy data at an operating plant. We should hang signs that say “Cull before you capture” in every office and on every plant floor. If the data has no purpose, it shouldn't be part of the legacy. If it’s not accurate, it isn’t returning value. Once people working with this information discover that the data is riddled with inaccuracies, they will inherently distrust the entire system — and they won’t use it. Who can blame them?

2. Value 3D models

3D walkthrough models are excellent vehicles for collaboration. We have seen many times that people who look at 2D drawings do not assimilate and respond to as much information as they do during a 3D walkthrough. Owners have successfully used 3D models for ongoing project reviews, startup planning, hazard analyses and major maintenance and revamp planning, as well as craft labor deployment.

Renderings of 3D models are definitely more than just a pretty picture, and they continue to be effective throughout the plant life cycle.

3. Manage those changes

A robust management of change system is essential for collaboration to succeed. Many companies are driven by the requirement to meet OSHA PSM requirements. But there are so many more reasons to have documents modified and available to everyone in an as-built state.

Companies need to appreciate other business drivers for keeping software, work processes and information stores fresh.

4. Leverage knowledge

The industry needs to innovate new ways to reward people for sharing information, reusing knowledge, sharing lessons and documenting best practices. People in the plant business have long been paid by the hour or the drawing — not by the degree of collaboration reached or the ability to save information to reuse downstream.

Companies need to break the paradigm where people are measured by how many new designs or how much information they create. Instead, they need to move to systems where their staffs are rewarded for leveraging knowledge throughout the supply chain and the plant life cycle.

5. Define work processes

The final lesson is the importance of defining work processes that have the collaboration point specifically marked. Owners invest significant amounts of money to create retrievable information.

But more often than not, internal and external organizations do not institutionalize the steps to keep information flowing and the collaboration going. Making a significant advance is not about just changing technologies; it is also about defining and mapping work processes to innovations and establishing relationships needed to make collaboration work.

No one said these improvements will be easy. But with industry leaders, especially those involved in the Owner-Operator Forum, working toward a common goal of effective collaboration, much can happen. I’ve seen this, as well.

Perhaps that’s lesson six.

EMC/Documentum

choose text size Normal Text Size Larger Text Size