Guiding the Journey to Collaborative Work Systems is a hands-on, practical guide for dealing with the challenges of designing and implementing collaboration in the workplace. People working in groups and teams, team-based organizations and networked organizations, and value chains and strategic alliances understand that effective collaboration is mandatory for success in today's business environment. Change leaders— such as organization development managers, steering committee members, design team members, line managers, and others— will find this workbook an invaluable source of help, as it provides a step-by-step planning process to transform an organization to better support collaboration. Teams and groups can use the workbook to improve their collaborative processes, and elements of the workbook can be applied to a wide variety of situations where collaboration is needed.


Critical Success Factors In Team-Based Organizing: A Top Ten List
By Michael Beyerlein and Cheryl Harris
A chapter in The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook: Strategies, Tools, and Techniques

A full redesign effort produces a team-based organization (TBO). However, that term connotes an ending point. The term “team-based organizing” represents continuous improvement and continuous re-invention. This chapter identifies the top ten principles of the design and implementation of team-based organizing in the form of critical success factors.


Keeping Teams Afloat:
Critical Coaching Competencies in Today’s Team-Based Organizations
By Sarah Bodner and Lori Bradley
A chapter in The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook: Strategies, Tools, and Techniques

Managers and coaches play a crucial role in the success of teams. This chapter focuses on the critical coaching competencies that organizations should be a developmental priority for team coaches. Those competencies and their subsequent skill sets fall into three groupings—knowledge, tools, and actions. The knowledge grouping comprises the theory component while the tools grouping is the skills component and the actions grouping is the application component of the coaching competencies. A coach with a solid foundation in the knowledge, tools and actions of coaching has a much greater likelihood of “Keeping Teams Afloat.”


Developing Team-Based Support Systems:
Conceptual Overview And Strategic Planning Workshop
By Cheryl Harris and Sarah Bodner
A chapter in The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook: Strategies, Tools, and Techniques

Every organization has support systems; but in organizations using teams, support systems must incorporate and reinforce collaboration and cooperation. The emphasis of this chapter is on helping organizations to design team-based support systems. In order to assist the reader, the chapter is broken into two distinct sections. The first section presents a conceptual overview, which explains the concepts behind team-based support systems and provides some examples of common team-based support systems. The second section presents a workshop that can serve as a tool in the initial stages of developing team-based support systems.


Team-Based Organization: Creating An Environment For Team Success
By Cheryl Harris and Michael Beyerlein
A chapter in International Handbook of Organisational Teamwork and Cooperative Working

Team-based organization (TBO) shifts attention from teams to their context and integration. This chapter reviews the essential components of TBO’s. Although redesign of a traditional organization to a TBO is an expensive and risky undertaking, attending to the key components ought to increase the probability of success in using teams as a mechanism for achieving strategic goals of the business. The claims below are based on a review of a small literature and projects at the Center for the Study of Work Teams including: 610 interviews with team members and leaders, 28 conferences on teams for 16,000 participants from 350 organizations over 13 years, field work with the steering committees in TBO’s, and interviews of 21 recognized experts. The result is thus an integration of findings from the Center’s work, the experts, and the several scholars who have published in the area, particularly Susan Mohrman of the Center for Effective Organizations.


Navigating The Team-Based Organizing Journey
By Cheryl Harris and Michael Beyerlein
A chapter in Team Based Organizing: Advances In Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams

Teams often fail to achieve expected levels of high performance. The primary cause of failure is context. The team-based organization (TBO) focuses on the creation of a context that enables teams to achieve their potential. The challenge is the transition from a traditional, hierarchical organization based on command-and-control management to a TBO focused on teams, empowerment, and involvement. This chapter focuses on the steps involved in a successful transformation process. The TBO change initiative is complex and requires years of learning and redesign to reach maturity. Illustrative excerpts from an interview study of 21 experts in the field are used throughout this chapter.


The Realities of Developing Support Systems: A Case Study
By Sarah Bodner and Cheryl Harris

This is a case study of a small manufacturing company’s development of team-based support systems. After a strategic planning workshop where the steering committee leading the teaming transition effort created an overview of the changes needed in support systems, committees were formed to implement the changes. Steering committee members and appropriate organizational membership comprised the committees that were organized to focus on four areas: learning systems, leadership and group design systems, performance management and reward systems, and communication systems. The steering committee was the mechanism for integrating the four committees.