Transferring collaboration process designs to practitioners: Requirements from a cognitive load perspective

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to design and implement sustained collaboration support for collaborative work practices. A collaboration engineer designs a collaboration process and trains a practitioner to execute it on a recurring basis, without further support from professional facilitators. The CE design should be predictable and transferable for successful reuse by the practitioner. The documentation requirements for a CE design are addressed so it can be effectively transferred to practitioners. This documentation or script should contain precise instructions and interventions that the practitioner should make to guide the group in achieving their goals. To detail the requirements for this design document, the authors analyzed the tasks of a facilitator as a basis to derive the tasks of a practitioner. Cognitive Load Theory was used to derive documentation requirements with respect to the CE process design. The authors validated these requirements in an expert validation session and through two case studies.