SharePoint® 2007 Collaboration For Dummies®

Chapter 16. The Top Ten Challenges to Successful Teamwork

In This Chapter

• Understanding the key characteristics of successful teams

• Keeping your teams motivated and on track

• Giving your teams what they need to collaborate successfully

SharePoint services themselves can do only so much to ensure a successful collaboration. Successful collaboration also relies upon your ability to put together winning teams and support them throughout the entire collaborative project. In this chapter, I give my top ten secrets for creating teams that work well together, along with my tips for reinforcing their success and encouraging and sustaining their continued cooperation.

Unambiguous Team Responsibilities

Teams need to clearly understand their responsibilities in order to have any chance of achieving the goals of the collaboration.

To accomplish this, you need to make sure that each and every team member knows what you expect of him. Bear in mind that it can also be quite helpful for each team and team member to clearly comprehend the purpose of the collaboration and the reasons for working together.

You may be able to do this by communicating the overall goal of the project as well as the intermediary objectives that you've set for the teams (perhaps initially using the Announcements list on the SharePoint site). Of course, you can also do this later in Tasks lists that clearly spell out the steps that each team member needs to take in order to achieve the objectives and reach your goal.

Effective Team ...