When it comes to launching a collaboration site in your company or team, you may think that as the site gets older and more people use it, contributions to the site go up. However, of the nearly 1,000 active collaboration sites studied, it's clear that the amount of contributions being made are heavily stacked in the site's early days.

In this study of active EditMe collaboration sites, we found that as the age of the collaboration site increases, the average number of contributions in a 30 day period decreases from 93 contributions per month to a low of merely 3 contributions per month when the site reaches it's 3rd birthday.

Two Phases of Collaboration

The data suggests that collaboration falls into 2 distinct phases. The first phase is dominated by a pioneering effort to catalog business processes and document all standard operating procedures. The team makes constant contributions to evolve those ideas and shape best practices within the team or organization. After this period of continual collaboration, the site matures into a codified business process document that does not change often, presumably because the team has captured the most efficient and effective work habits from everyone. It can take upward of 1.5 years of active collaboration before the team arrives at completed business process documentation.

Consider the way work gets done in your company or team. How do you know that there's not a better, more streamlined way of doing the job? It could time to re-evaluate old processes and consider what can be improved about them.