The Key To Effective Risk Assessment & Cross-Team Collaboration

Being agile is essential for organizations to run smoothly and achieve innovation. If you want your organization to be as efficient as possible, you need to have processes in place that facilitate collaboration. By collaboration, we mean more than just individuals collaborating. We really mean that teams that span your organization as well as those that lie outside of your company should be able to communicate easily and efficiently. This level of collaboration is important for a variety of reasons, including reducing errors, ensuring the best project outcomes, finding the best solutions for the project, maintaining owner values, and keeping the project on track.

By working together, teams can share knowledge and ideas, which helps to identify potential risks and develop solutions that maintain design and what the owner values most – at a much faster pace. With this type of framework, teams both inside and outside of the organization can minimize the amount of time spent on tasks that are not essential to the organization’s and owner’s goals and spend more time on driving innovation. 

But how can you do this? In this article, we will go over some actionable steps you can take to enable cross-team collaboration and maximize your ability to minimize risk and maximize efficiency. 

Why risk assessment and cross-team communication are important

Communication is essential for teams to communicate properly – and this is especially true for teams trying to collaborate across different organizations. This communication is paramount to ensure that everyone is on the same page and understands the team’s goals. When there is effective communication, it allows for a smooth flow of ideas and allows teams to be more productive. In addition, it builds trust among project stakeholders, which is essential for a successful project.

If there is poor communication across members of the team that lies outside of the organization, it can lead to key details being overlooked, frustration, and conflict. This can hinder the team’s ability to work together and achieve their goals – both with themselves and other teams. In order for a team to be successful, it is important that everyone is able to communicate easily and effectively with each other. 

An efficient and modern risk assessment and cross-team communication practice is important for several reasons. First, it ensures that everyone involved in a project is aware of potential risks and how they may impact the business. This allows teams to develop mitigation plans and respond quickly if a risk event occurs. This can include events such as a last-minute request for a change by a contractor or a permit not being approved. 

Second, a good risk assessment process also encourages and facilitates collaboration across organizations. By working together, these teams can share knowledge and best practices, which helps improve overall organizational performance. Finally, a well-run risk assessment process builds trust among team members, which can be essential for successful collaboration.

How to improve cross-team communication

A key part of risk assessment is proper communication between teams. In order to properly assess and mitigate risks, all relevant teams need to be able to share information and collaborate. Establishing tools for cross-team communication is essential for achieving this goal.

Leverage Design-build

Design-build is a project delivery method where a single team, operating under one contract, provides design and construction services to an owner. In contrast to design-bid-build, where design and construction aren’t unified, design-build allows you to make project decisions earlier on to maintain costs and project schedules.

The highly collaborative nature of the design-build delivery method delivers better results, faster – which is why it’s been growling in popularity over the years.

Join is a real-time decision-making platform for negotiated project deliveries like Design-Build, CMAR, TVD, IPD, and more.

Utilize helpful communication tools

Some common tools for cross-team communication include:

• Email
• Chat software (e.g., Teams or Join)
• Collaboration software (e.g., SharePoint)
• Conferences/meetings

Each of these tools has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to select the right ones for your specific organization. For example, if your team relies heavily on email, you may want to use a tool like Join to supplement that communication. Or, if you have a lot of remote workers, then you may want to use a tool like Zoom to allow everyone to participate in meetings. 

Communication technology like Join is an incredible tool that can help connect team members that may lie outside of the organization and enable seamless communication. Join makes it easy to tag stakeholders, connect information, set deadlines, and much more – all in one central location.

The key is to find the tools that work best for your organization and make sure everyone is using them. This means that team members are on the same page when it comes to assessing and mitigating risks and understanding where the main communication is occurring on a daily basis. 

Provide clear expectations

Another way to improve communication is by establishing clear protocols for how communication should take place. This includes setting expectations for when team members should communicate with one another, as well as what type of information should be shared. By having clear protocols in place, individuals will know what is expected of them and will be less likely to miss critical updates or information.

Be open and flexible to improvements

One of the best side effects of a great communication system is that all ideas and feedback are welcomed. This should be an essential part of any organization that wants to maximize innovation and reduce redundancies and risk. Feedback on how the current processes are working should be encouraged, and new ideas/recommendations should be as well. It’s important to remember that improving communication and reducing risk is an ongoing process.

Join makes it easy to explore and incorporate ideas. Everyone across a project team can get involved to make the right project decisions, at the right time, for the right reasons. Because everything is stored in one centralized location, there are fewer miscommunications and better project outcomes.

Maximize efficiency and push boundaries with effective cross-team collaboration

When it comes to risk assessment and collaboration across teams, communication is key. By establishing streamlined communication processes, corporate organizations can reduce the amount of risk associated with miscommunication or lack of information with team members that may be more difficult to reach such as contractors and architects that lie outside of the organization. For more information on how you can employ these tactics in the most efficient manner for your organization, reach out to our team today.