Working Outside the Bubble: External Collaboration
Bubbles are weird. They are, in a way, a perfect form of insulation from the outside world, while also allowing you to peer out at the outside world. They are also incredibly fragile. Touch them in the wrong way or with the wrong thing and they pop, leaving you unprotected from the outside world you were trying to be insulated from.
Workplaces are very much their own bubbles — sometimes multiple interlocking bubbles. It’s easy to forget that, while the process of working together seems seamless within the bubble, outside of it things work differently. For the most part this isn’t a problem, we will work in our bubble and you work in yours and they never intersect.
But what happens when our bubble and your bubble need to work together?
Depending on how you approach it, this sort of work can be disastrous or highly successful, which one is entirely dependent on preparation.
Set the Ground Rules
Working with another team means that the patterns you usually use are going to have to, to some degree, change. Maybe it’s your stand up cadence, maybe it’s code commit frequency, or maybe it’s just the amount of cursing that happens within the chat channel. No matter what, something is going to change.
The sooner your team knows what’s changing and what’s expected the better your experience will be. There are few things more detrimental to team cohesion than a change being made and it not being communicated clearly.
Manage Internal and External Language
Every organization has a vocabulary that is unique to itself. We create shorthand phrases and terms that we know and have learned after dozens of uses. They roll off our lips or into our chat threads as if everyone knows what they mean. But when you have to work with another team that hasn’t had years to adjust to the shorthand of your organization it can become quite confusing and cause unneeded slowdowns and failures.
These shorthand phrases are what’s known as insider language — kind of like an inside joke, but instead a productivity phrase. When working with an outside team you need to adapt to using external language —at least at the beginning of the project. It’s possible over the course of the project to share your internal language, but first there needs to be agreement on common vocabulary.
External language is the most commonly used terminology for the field you’re working in. Once there has been agreement on the language being used internal language can start to be added with appropriate explanation where necessary. Of course the other team may not get the memo on internal language, so flexibility will be key in handling language differences.
Centralize Communication
As much as possible, make sure all communication regarding changes and progress flows through a set group of people. It’s fine to have teammates interacting together on chat to figure things out, but any official communication should be managed by project managers on each team. This will help to prevent misinformation or conflicting information between the teams.
More than once I’ve seen projects become unhinged because there were too many people claiming things and no official voice to validate any of them. Maintaining a limited number of communication channels for official project communication will help to make changes and progress reports more specific and help to maintain documentation of those changes and progress reports.
Finding Success Together
Above all else, flexibility is king when it comes to working with other organizations. Even if all of these steps are followed on both teams there will still be the chance that feathers get ruffled. But by following these ideas, your bubbles will be able to work together without popping.
