At Collaboration Matters, we always try to get into the mind-set of the users of any new technology - that's your employees, colleagues, customers or partners.  Our aim is to exploit their intelligence to add value to your business through any new solution we design, rather than enforcing a rigid set of processes to "drive" people's activities.

Each project we run begins with a high-level analysis exercise that identifies business objectives, success criteria and sets out a plan that brings together strategy, technology, design, user engagement and other stakeholders.

Once this plan has been agreed and approved, we discover and document the use-cases, scenarios and workflows that our project can improve for people who will use the eventual solution. This might involve working alongside users to understand how they work currently, or it might be that we do a wider study of email usage or perhaps some social network analysis to provide an overview of the current situation.

Usually, we will use this knowledge to construct a rapid prototype that can give us a glimpse of how the solution might look, feel and behave in your environment. Then, when we know what we want the technology to do, we can put together implementation options that might include selecting and using existing products, integrating external services such as cloud computing or SaaS, or perhaps building custom software or extending existing internal systems. Whatever delivers the most effective solution.

Finally, and most importantly, we think about how to engage users and how to help them change their behaviour (and if necessary, the culture of the organisation) to drive adoption and to get the most out of the project. Ideally, we try to help users do what they already do, but in an improved manner, rather than requiring them to change overnight. We find that building a bridge between existing practice and new ways of working can provide a gradual transition that has a better chance of becoming sustainable.

At Collaboration Matters we love engaging direct with the end users in this way - delivering technology solutions that deliver exciting benefits for both users and the organisation alike.