Assessing the Quality of Collaborative Processes

Use of effective and efficient collaboration is important for organizations to survive and thrive in today’s competitive world. This paper presents quality constructs that can be used to evaluate the success of a collaboration process. Two types of collaboration processes are identified: 1) processes that are designed and executed by the same facilitator who designed them, and 2) processes that are designed by a collaboration engineer and executed many times by practitioners. Accordingly, the quality constructs have been divided in two categories. Constructs within the first category apply to both types of collaboration processes. This category includes constructs such as process effectiveness and efficiency, results quantity, results quality, satisfaction, and usability. The second category contains constructs that are useful from the perspective of the collaboration engineering approach: repeatable collaboration processes executed by practitioners. The three constructs important for this perspective are reusability, predictability, and transferability.