Collaboration Matrix

An agency is simply a group of people collaborating. The challenge is in getting them to collaborate effectively.

That becomes even harder now that agencies are rarely run with everybody in the same office at the same time.

So we need to get everyone collaborating in different places at different times — on a whole range of different things.

A collaboration matrix is a useful tool.

It helps us design a spectrum of communications channels that can be used in the different contexts — and

Then, it helps align everyone in the agency around how to communicate what, when.

How to design a collaboration matrix

The matrix is simply a table, with collaboration channels along the top, and contexts down the side.

Columns: Channels

The columns, labelled along the top, are the various channels of collaboration you use in your agency, organised on a spectrum from ‘fleeting’ to ‘lasting’.

Fleeting collaboration is generally synchronous. Examples are an in-person meeting, people chatting on a videocall or in a chat app like Slack. This stuff just lives temporarily in the heads and personal notes of the people who took part, and then vanishes. There should be no expectation that anyone will see this, take part, or remember anything.

Lasting collaboration is generally asynchronous, with people reading and contributing at times it fits into their schedule and they can focus on it. It can be posts on an internal blog or forum, shared documents, or the company playbook. These things get memorised in the ‘agency brain’, becoming browsable and searchable — so the work can be reused or referenced in the future. People should be expected to read, understand, discuss and collaborate on this where it relates to their work.

Rows: Contexts

The rows, listed down the side, refer to the contexts in which you need to collaborate in the agency. In the example we’ve used each section of the SPARK framework to cover all the AgencyOps work, plus ‘Leadership’ to cover the FLAME framework. In addition there can be temporary contexts for individual Agency Missions and Client Projects.

Then, in each of the squares in the matrix you provide details (with a link) of any topic/folder name, plus how this collaboration channel is intended to be used.

For example, in Sales/Forum you may write “Generate, discuss and plan marketing campaign ideas. Plan proposals and pitches. Discuss improvements to our sales and marketing proposals and templates.” and in Sales/Handbook you might say “Our processes and templates for all marketing activities, generating proposals and pitches, and other new business activity.”

The further to the left a communication happens, the less people are expected to see it and act on it. The responsibility of those involved in collaboration towards the left, then, is to capture anything important and move it to the right.

Any meeting should result in notes, or even a recording, that gets shared to the forum, or at least the chatroom.

Any chat that comes up with a good idea, should be moved to the forum, so others can collaborate on it.

And, in reverse, it can be useful for the channels on the right to post notifications of new posts/documents/pages/updates to channels over to the left, such as into Slack.

That way you begin joining up collaboration across the channels.

You’ll notice too that the idea is to have the same contexts used to define areas to collaborate in on every channel. This way, everyone knows how things link up and where things should go.

So, if you have an additional channel for Google Docs, say, then your folder structure would match the context lists above.

A collaboration matrix template

To get you started we’ve prepared a simple Collaboration Matrix template in Google Sheets that you can copy and adapt.

Once you have things mapped out and described as you like, you can have a designer make it more visually appealing to circulate round the agency, or to publish in your agency handbook if you’re being really smart! :)