Discovering and Evaluating Collaboration Engineering Opportunities: An Interview Protocol Based on the Value Frequency Model

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and transferring those designs to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Because CE projects can entail considerable cost, it would be useful to have a way to predict whether a group would be likely to adopt a collaborative work practice were one developed for them. In this paper we present an interview protocol for that purpose. Using the logic of the Value Frequency Model (VFM), we derived the protocol with two layers of questions. The first layer is for discovering potential collaboration engineering opportunities; the second is for evaluating the degree to which practitioners might be willing to adopt a new work practice were one offered. We used the protocol in two field studies; one with a team of experienced collaboration engineers working in the headquarters of a large multi-national organization, and one with a group of students with no CE experience working with a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations in their community. The qualitative and quantitative outcomes of these studies suggest that the interview protocol may be a useful means for discovering and evaluating CE opportunities. Outcomes also provide support for VFM, the theory from which the protocol was derived.