Workplace Collaboration

Workplace Collaboration

Advantages and Disadvantages of Collaboration in the Workplace
Team B
COM 525
19 July 2006

Advantages of Collaboration in the Workplace

From Wikipedia.com, the free encyclopedia collaboration (co+labor+ation) refers abstractly to all processes wherein people work together applying both to the work of individuals as well as larger collectives and societies. As an intrinsic aspect of human society, the term is used in many varying contexts such as science, art, education, and business. (Webster, 2002)
In certain political contexts (such as a state of war) the term "collaboration" (ism) or "collaborator" may refer (pejoratively) to individuals who are claimed to have been working with an outside entity against their own societies.
When co-workers work with several highly technical people, they commonly find that no one wants to document any processes, procedures, hints, tips, or truly anything else. They want to be technical and do there work. Our work group of system administrators on the base launched several projects to store documentation in the past few years, but in reality it did not worked at all. Documentation was still most commonly found in old emails and occasionally on a Windows shared drive that I could not always get to in the server rooms because the system was down.
Then I got the idea to try a few things. We tried weekly meetings on Mondays and Fridays but that did not work out because of different schedules. To collaborate with each other it took a question and answer format which was not exactly what our team was driving toward. We wanted the Q/A methodology, but also just general documentation.
We created an internal web site that provided a method to document procedures and tips, via article entries, and question and answers, which works with the discussion tabs. The real glory of this was that anyone was able to update the content. This is the greatest feature, and the worst feature of an open forum. I wanted my...

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