importance that the development software be
immersed in the work group perspective, where be
possible to include mechanisms that support groups
dynamics in an appropriate way, including people of
different knowledge disciplines and where the user
participation be the central point of the design
oriented actions (Granollers, 2004). In a multidiscipli-
nary team with diverse mental models and working
ways, it is possible to find difficulties associated with
communication and information sharing among these
persons (Sutcliffe, 2002), MPIu+a brings some
guidelines in order to support the sharing information
and therefore try to reach an effective work.
In the Requirements Analysis Phase proposed in
MPIu+a the necessity of participation as team mem-
bers as system representative users is evident, phase
in which is high-priority to identify suitably who will
be the users and system stakeholders, as well as to
establish an effective communication with them with
the purpose of determining their real necessities. For
this paper we have selected the activities Stakeholders
Identification, Stakeholders Meeting and Users
Classification of the Requirements Analysis Phase,
designing collaborative processes, because they are
activities that require a work team and contribution of
different people in order to reach the final goal.
Stakeholders identification: the objective of this
activity is to determine all the stakeholders of the
interactive system development. From base line, all
the “stakeholders network” is generated (Sharp et al.,
1999).
Stakeholders meeting: once the stakeholders
have been identified, it is necessary to know their
influence in the development project, for which a
meeting must be planned, the key points to be
treated are identified previously (they are related
with objectives, possible users, technological
restrictions, usability objectives, etc.).
User classification: the objective of this activity
is to classify to the users in user profiles and roles,
and to make an association between these profiles
and roles, with the purpose to identify clearly their
characteristics and their roles within the system.
2.1.1 Collaboration Engineering
Collaboration Engineering is defined as “an
approach to designing collaborative work practices
for high-value recurring tasks, and transferring
those designs to practitioners to execute for
themselves without the ongoing intervention of a
professional facilitator” (Kolfschoten et al., 2006).
Researchers over Collaboration Engineering have
determined some similar behaviors in the way
participants work in order to achieve group goals,
these behaviors have been called: collaboration
patterns, which are defined as “moving a group from
some initial state to some end state” (De Vreede and
Briggs, 2005). The collaboration patterns are
(Kolfschoten and Vreede, 2006): generate, reduce,
clarify, organize, evaluate, build consensus.
Once obtained the collaboration patterns, it is
necessary to identify the way to perform them. In
that way, the thinklets may be used to create
repeatable, predictable patterns of thinking among
people making an effort toward a goal (Briggs et al.,
2003, De Vreede et al., 2006). A thinklet is the
smallest unit of intellectual capital to create a known
pattern of collaboration her in order to achieve a
goal (De Vreede and Briggs, 2005).
2.1.2 Collaborative Processes Design
The collaborative process design was made based on
the design methodology for collaboration
engineering proposed by Kolfschoten et al. in the
HICSS-39 Workshop on Collaboration Engineering
(Kolfschoten and Vreede, 2007). The task
Stakeholders Identification has been selected as
example to show the application of the propose
methodology for the collaborative processes design,
next the results obtained in each phase are presented.
Step Task Diagnosis
In this step it is necessary to identify the objectives,
deliverables and requirements of the task from
which the respective collaborative process is
designed. The identification would be made with the
Table 1: Task diagnosis of the stakeholders identification.
Stakeholders Identification:
Objective: identify all the project stakeholders
(even those that could influence negatively)
(Granollers, 2004).
Deliverables:
List of Categories from which the stakeholders
will be identified.
Stakeholders classified in the identified categories.
Role Description of every identified stakeholder.
Requirements:
Knowledge on the Stakeholder concept.
General Description of the system to develop.
Information about the proposals to classify
stakeholders of an interactive system (Newman et
al., 1995).
Information about the methodology for the
classification of users, propose by authors of
Center HCI Design and Computer Science
Department (Sharp et al., 1999).