Collaboration Tools

Last week’s Calgary APLN meeting was on Team Collaboration and afterwards an attendee volunteered a really neat and useful team assessment questionnaire. Gerard Meszaros (author of XUnit Test Patterns) who also has strong project management and team collaboration knowledge, presented on “Using Collaboration to Build Team Commitment”. It was a great presentation and referenced some of the Jean Tabaka’s work from the book “Collaboration Explained”.

I have known Jean since her facilitation work with DSDM in the mid 90’s and she really knows about teams, motivation and working effectively with people. Chapter 4 of her book talks about characteristics of high performance teams. After the presentation, Edgardo Gonzalez sent me a spreadsheet based on these criteria that allows quick and easy team assessments.

As seen from the screenshot above, the tool is a one page Excel sheet that assesses the team’s abilities in:
• Self Organizing
• Empowered to Make Decisions
• Belief in Vision and Success
• Committed Team
• Trust Each Other
• Participatory Decision Making
• Consensus-Driven
• Constructive Disagreement

In our example of a fictitious project, four people completed the questionnaire. The collective team score is shown on the left hand radar chart (indicating a weakness in the “Consensus Driven” field) and the individual scores are shown on the right hand radar diagram. Colour coding flags areas as “Red” for concern, “Yellow” for warning (“Trust…” in the example), and “Green” for good.

Not only is the spreadsheet an effective team diagnostic, but a good lesson in Excel spreadsheet formatting and validation. Thanks Edgardo for agreeing to make this available to everyone and to Gerard and Jean for their work in this important field.

You can download the spreadsheet for your own use below:

Collaborative Team Assessment.xls

Books

PM Illustrated 2026

Beyond Agile

PMI-ACP Exam Prep

Agile Illustrated

Agile Fundamentals

PMI-ACP Workbook

20 Years of Leading Answers

Twenty years ago today, on August 29, 2006, I published the first posts on LeadingAnswers.com. That sentence makes me feel old. I started the blog to write about leadership and agile project management, share ideas I was experimenting with, and hopefully connect with other people interested in the same things. At the time, agile was still sufficiently new that explaining it to traditional project managers was a large part of the job. My first real article was called “What has Leadership got to do with Agile Project Management?” My argument was that effective agile project management was much closer to leadership than traditional project management. It emphasized people over tasks, empowerment over control, effectiveness over efficiency, and direction over speed.

Leading a Team That’s Part Machine: 4) Agent Orchestration for Project Managers

Today we explore agentic pipelines, loops and recursive self improvement (RSI) via our old friends, PMP Questions. This is article 4 in my AI agents series. Start here for an introduction, see here for an explanation of what constitutes a real agent, and here for a discussion of how I use them and running AI locally. This article gets into how to plan and manage agent work; that’s what “agent orchestration” means. As a project manager, I suspect you already have the thinking skills required. You already know why one person can’t do everything on a project. You staff a project with specialists, engage each of them in the correct piece of scope, and put reviews between the stages that