Can there be too much collaboration on a project?

Collaboration is gold in projects. Collaborative stakeholders produce better requirements, provide support for your solution, and rarely raise issues when accepting deliverables. Even with these benefits, there can be too much collaboration. Here are symptoms of too much project collaboration and how to correct them:

• You have more stakeholders than necessary. Environments that are extremely collaborative can bring a wide variety of hopes, expectations, and opinions – more than needed for success. When many stakeholders want to collaborate, assign primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders (more like interested parties). Restrict project authority like submitting formal requirements or decision-making to your primary stakeholders.
• Decisions take too much time.  As stakeholders seek to include others, decision-making can get dragged out. While including everyone can help produce better decisions, timeframes for reaching those decisions can be too long. Lack of consensus can cripple a project. To address this, include review time and decision-making tasks in your project schedule. Emphasize when decision-related tasks are on your critical path and discuss the impacts of extended decision-making time.
• Scope increases. As stakeholders participate in requirements sessions and your solution comes to fruition, new ideas for adding business value can arise. The more the collaboration, the more this will occur! While business value is a good thing, your scope might grow beyond your “minimum viable product.” Ensure your change approval process focuses on limiting project scope to what’s needed to deliver business value. Remind stakeholders that Phase 2 of the project can be evaluated and cost-justified to accommodate the new business value ideas.
• It’s difficult to get approval to proceed or implement your project deliverables. If you hear lots of “it’s ok with me, but please check with x” responses, you may have an approval process issue. Ensure you have agreed upon processes for approvals built into your Project Charter, including who has final approval.

To learn more, see “How organizational culture affects projects” in my LinkedIn Learning course, Project Management Foundations.