Collaboration Success Wizard

The Collaboration Success Wizard is an online diagnostic survey for collaborations that takes about 30 minutes. The survey probes factors that may strengthen or weaken the collaboration, and provides personal reports to help you evaluate and improve your collaborative project.

The Wizard is based on over 20-year experience studying scientific collaborations by Dr. Judy Olson at UCI. As part of the NSF-funded Science of Collaboratories project, Dr. Olson had conducted a review of more than 200 distributed scientific collaborative projects to develop a set of factors that lead to successful collaboration. This work is reported in her books, “Scientific Collaboration on the Internet” and “Work together apart”.

• At the end of the survey each participant can see a personalized individual report that contains feedback based on their answers and our research. This report is available immediately, and summarizes both the strong points and the issues at risk for the target collaboration.
• At the end of the survey, you will also receive “Building an effective research team” materials to help you further improve your team science skills. You will be listed in our mailing list to obtain the latest information on Team Science workshops and funding opportunities.
• If you find value in taking this survey, we would like you to invite your entire research team to take part in the CSW. When the whole team joins CSW as a team project, a custom assessment of your team’s collaboration effectiveness will be made and given back to the research team leader. We will invite your team to a special team science workshop with an internationally recognized expert, Dr. Judy Olson, with expertise in team communications, in order to help your team to be successful and productive.

The Wizard is designed to assess any collaboration. Nevertheless, it is especially designed to evaluate collaborative projects with team members who are physically dispersed. But what does this mean? 

• Project size: We are interested in projects at any scale, from a small group of collaborators who are geographically dispersed to large, complex, multi-institutional ones.
• Project status: The Wizard comes in three versions, depending on the current status of the project:
  • Past: projects that have been completed, for a picture of how the project fared.
  • Present: for current ongoing projects, to provide useful information about whether any mid-course corrections might be helpful.
  • Future: useful in the planning phases of a project, and can even influence how a proposal for funding is written.
• Project location: Distribution can range from project personnel located to different floors within the same building to locations around the world. We are interested in projects that span multiple institutions and that involve international participants. We welcome projects that are centered in any part of the world, though fluency in English will be a requirement, as that is the language of the Wizard.