So as the leader of a technology company, how can you get the benefits of real-time technical team collaboration?

Here are some best practices I have seen that can really speed up projects and lead to true collaborative innovation: 

First: Develop a culture of frequent technical group workshops. Train and use workshop facilitators who organize and manage the agenda and draw out all of the contributors, no matter how shy. Try to get to the point where something like half the technical work is done in workshops and the other half at individual workstations.

Next: Encourage people to take risks and make suggestions on the project, technical or otherwise. Make it safe to put forth any idea, no matter how silly, as long as it relates to the project goals. Don't allow personal attacks, ridicule or any kind of bullying.

Recognize and even reward people for their contributions in these meetings. You know that people will behave in ways that correspond to how they are measured, so you should have remarks and metrics in their project plans and performance evaluations to encourage real-time, continuous collaboration.

One more point - it is increasingly common for technology companies to be spread-out geographically and culturally. Even from the start, many companies have branches, partners and individual contributors working from home or in different parts of the world. With internet technologies such as web conferencing and video conferencing ubiquitous today, real-time collaboration is still very achievable, and in fact offer some advantages to collocation. But this is the subject of a future blog.