Adaptive Path Blog

At Adaptive Path we often talk about collaboration. It’s in our DNA. We turn down work with prospects that don’t want to collaborate with us and cherish opportunities to work closely with clients that do. The Changemakers’ team and project was the quintessential collaboration between client and consultancy, resulting in a powerful redesign meeting the needs of both the client and user. What’s even more amazing is the three parties involved in the project are spread across North America:

• Adaptive Path lead the UX design out of our San Francisco office
• Enomaly lead the development of the site from their Toronto office
• The bulk of Changemakers staff is based in Washington, DC
• Key members of the client team are in the Vancouver, BC area

How does a large team spread across three time zones and two countries successfully collaborate? The short answer is that clear and honest communication is key and online tools can help. We started the project off with some face time. Sharing a meal and a beer with team members offers you a chance to get to know them on a personal level. It’s important to know what people on the other end of an email are like so that you can properly “read between the lines” and understand where they are coming from. Unique to this project was the assignment of nicknames (I’m “Woody.”). A couple of times mid-stream we had additional in-person meetings to ensure that the personal connection is renewed.

During the five month project we held weekly status calls. When needed, we’d add a second or third conference call for deliverable review. These regular check-ins offered the entire team a chance to both review progress and to just talk to each other. Team members took breaks to get married and have babies and we shared all of this on the conference calls.

Like on many of our projects, Skype and Basecamp were our critical tools. Basecamp served at a common location for collecting our thoughts and sharing documents. All digital communication flowed through Basecamp maintaining a record of decisions. Skype was used for the occasional video call with the far flung team. More importantly however, we used Skype to interview users around the globe. The Changemakers community has members in most every country and it was crucial for us to hear international perspectives. Skype allowed us to interview users in Africa, India, Australia, Macedonia, and Ohio all from the comfort of San Francisco.

A new digital tool we added to our arsenal for this project was ConceptShare. ConceptShare allows you to upload a concept and allow others to sketch and annotate all over it. That’s the basic premise for the app. We used ConceptShare to review sketched, wireframes and final visual comps. During a conference call, the entire team would login to the tool from their remote location and add comments real-time. ConceptShare brought a whole new level of collaboration and will be used on future projects.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.