Collaboration has been a buzz word for quite a while now, the holy grail of any business team is to me more collaborative. With the tools now available through the Power Platform (seriously you didn’t see that coming….check the name of the blog), we see more and more organisations really delivering real and valuable team collaboration.
So, what’s next…
Well, when looking back at other systems and how they have developed over the years, it seems that once we reach a point of true collaboration this will lead to an increase in activity that can only be managed by Co-ordination.
Imagine any massively adopted process. Many examples spring to mind;
- E-commerce
- Road Infrastructure
- Social Media
- Power Platform Adoption
In the early stages the process is easily adopted, and a few people collaborate easily. Once the process is adopted by the masses the whole game changes.
Using the Road Infrastructure as an example (yeah, didn’t see that coming did you). When not many cars were on the road it was a polite and collaborative structure of vehicles & pedestrians sharing the same space. Collaboration meant you simply dodged each other, walked quickly to get out of the way of traffic or timed your interaction with each other in order to avoid mishap.
As millions of users hit the roads this self service collaboration could not be counted on – users needed more rules, better tools and a reason to work together. Traffic laws, lights, crossings etc. emerged and before you know it the whole system is now Co-ordination rather than collaboration. In fact, the only time the systems implemented for co- ordination go wrong is usually when someone tries to collaborate!
E-commerce had a similar pattern, with more sites looking to allow you to buy the more types of payment collaboration were needed – until the speed and expected efficiency of the mass buyers meant that laws improved, methods standardised and co- ordination processes overtook the more ad-hoc methods. With the exception of the off disruption, we are clearly all aware that buyer protection means use your credit card or Paypal, right?
So how will this pan out for the Power Platform I hear you ask. Well we already have intelligent groups looking to help us through this. To name a couple that I’ve been impressed / involved with;
PowerPlatform Adoption FrameWork – started by a small group and now on GitHub for greater consultation and input (speed) of development
PowerApps Center of Excellence – another similar group making sure the right tools get developed to govern the citizen developer movements.
Flow Online Conference 2019– stronger than ever with over 25,000 attendees to the recent online event hosted by Jon Levesque
User Group Communities – from users groups for PowerApps and Flow, Dynamics 365 online communities, SharePoint Saturdays, Collaboration Summits, Teams Virtual Events, Hackathons and just plain old You-Tube content, we are awash with support ad advice on how to use and adopt the tools from a really strong and engaged community of sharers (one I am very proud to be a part of).
The most interesting thing about this for me is the speed that we transitioned from starting to adopt to helping each other regulate and head toward co-ordination .
So, Co-ordination – not such a sexy aspiration but inevitable.
