Stu Downes

Made me smile when I plugged the power in last night.  Although you never know, this may be commonplace in 5 years.

A lot of my work doesn’t rely on a fixed location and as with many of us required me to maximise productivity when on the road.  Here are the common things I carry around with me:

Technical bits

• BlackBerry 8800, couldn’t be half as effective during travel without this - knocking emails, scheduling tasks and contacting people while waiting for trains, planes etc.
• Standard wired headset and bluetooth headset for the Blackberry
• X60 Tablet - I’m a real tablet fan as it gives me the widest choice of input types and is much more acceptable in physical meetings than having a screen open.
• A spare battery (and if possible charged!) so as to last a day if at conferences.
• Mobile data card (invaluable!)
• A portable mouse, the Logitech VX Nano.  I would not be without this portable mouse now.  The only pain is that I have to unplug the receiver before standby otherwise it wakes the laptop up - not good if like me you prefer not to toast your laptop in your bag.
• A standard telephone headset.  When away I still have to do many conference calls, and you can never find a desk with a headset so I now just take one.  Its really changed my comfort levels during calls and takes minimal room in my bag.
• Logitech presentation wand.  This is worth every penny!  I even find myself using it when talking just using my screen.
• Several USB memory sticks.

Tools I use to stay effective on the road

Corporate stuff (in no particular order):

• Lotus Notes
• Lotus Sametime (IM and presence and sometimes web meetings)
• AT&T Connect for integrated audio and web meetings (my preferred virtual meeting tool)
• CSC’s PC backup and restore service
• Confluence Wiki
• OneNote
• Mindjet Mind Manager Pro
• Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000
• Our Office Communication Server lab environment for one-to-one video calls with team members.

Consumer stuff:

• SkyDrive to share selected files with people
• Twitter - more colleague focused updates
• MSN Messenger and Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for calls back to home (I find its really nice to see the family when away - especially when abroad).
• Facebook to keep up-to date with friends (on both web and BlackBerry)
• Googlemail to keep up with personal emails (again on both web and BlackBerry)
• Newsgator Feeddemon
• Twitterberry
• Twhirl
• Ultramon (for when I can find a monitor on travels)

Important non-techie stuff

• Pencils
• Hard backed notebook (even with a tablet I still need pencil and paper at times)
• Travel sickness tablets (tilting express trains and flights sometimes set me off but the tablets control nausea and maintain my effectiveness)
• Flyers about our services.

Desires for the future

• A folding screen
• Better bag storage (thats mainly down to me!)

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Jessica wrote earlier this month about some research and her personal experience which suggests that war rooms and reduced face-to-face activities will result in leaders closing war rooms for collaboration.

“We’re wrapping up a project where we’ve been working with a crack team charged with developing a handbook for leaders who have to work in this new way - across organization, culture, timezones - AND with peers. Command and control, obviously, doesn’t cut it in situations like this so what’s a “virtual leader” to do?

For one thing, get rid of those long-standing war rooms, skunkworks, as per the scent that arises from people working in windowless settings dressed in flip charts and armed with magic markers.”

The survey Jessica referred to was from the Institute of Corporate Productivity:

“more than two-thirds (67%) [of companies surveyed] foresee their reliance on virtual teams mushrooming in importance. In companies with more than 10,000 employees, the virtual team concept jumps to more than 80%.”

Do I agree?

I believe that it depends upon the organisation, the team formed, and the culture.  In some cases the best team possible for a task will be co-located.  We support customers with tens of thousands of people working in offices on the same site.  In those cases a number of war rooms will remain.

In other situations organisations will be large enough to sustain regional sites, and if I consider many of my customers they will have multiple sites in the UK with potential for people to be at a regional site within 2 hours.  If that is the case then war rooms can be adapted to link them between those regional centres and support remote users.  Thus encouraging teams to maintain relationships through regional centres.  You’ll note I use the word maintain because I do feel where possible teams should initiate face-to-face.

The final situations will require completely remote tools and giving everyone a level playing field.  I still remember a phrase Jessica used at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in 2005 which was the “disadvantaged participant”.  Its important in virtual teams that a common baseline is met and those working above that baseline (perhaps being co-located with others) don’t forget the limitations of those on the baseline.

Conclusion

We have 3 key working styles here:

• co-located
• regionally based with very rich collaboration tools
• remotely located with less rich tools

Each will require different leadership styles.  A lot of the tools, methods and processes will be defined by the remit the team has, i.e.:

• do they have travel budget?
• do they have a carbon budget for the project?
• where are the key people?
• the motivation and requirements of the individuals concerned

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Not much of a surprise, and who has a BlackBerry Bold??? Hey come on, own up!

The September edition of CSC World has some interesting work from colleagues in the areas of:

• Behavioural adaptation within cross-cultural virtual teams (pdf)
• Managing the multigenerational IT workforce (pdf)
• Developing strategies for successful enterprise collaboration (pdf)

The cross-cultural virtual teams article was really interesting to me, I manage a team like that.  The article was based on some research carried out by Danielle Anawati (CSC) and Annemieke Craig (Deakin University).  Some interesting quotes:

“Team members with different cultural backgrounds
can have communication styles that differ and
can have different ways of conveying information.
This can lead to team members struggling
with cross-cultural communication, as they have
not considered cultural differences nor considered
that this may affect the team’s performance”

The research also included a survey as well as a review of papers.  When we look at how we adapt during meetings, look how we adapt for time zones compared religion, or the way we write:

And when the respondents were asked about the media of communication look how basic most of the communication mechanisms are, and also that 95% of the communication is by email yet almost 40% of respondents made no change to their writing to deal with the cultural differences:

I’d recommend anyone who is part of a cross-cultural remote team to read the research.

The final note I’ll select from the paper and something that is close to what I try and do is to socialise to understand more of the people in my team:

“participants believed socializing was
“important” (Participant 63) and would benefit the
team by opening a “window into the other team
members’ cultures” (Participant 8). Weather, religious
holidays, music, food, movies, personal activities,
priorities, and interesting cultural facts were
suggested as good social topics to assist in cultural
understanding”

Only today I learned something of the festival one of my team would take holiday to attend in November.

Verizon recently estimated that:

“a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting”.

Graham responded that by commenting on limitations of virtual meetings:

“With all of these limitations I wonder whether the value of many virtual meetings is so low as to make them more expensive than face-to-face meetings.”

Graham also gave the example that:

“In one particular occasion we were working on a technical problem for over three weeks before a face-to-face meeting resolved the problem in under 2 hours.”

I agree face-to-face has a place.  I estimate that I could reduce around 60% of the travel I perform by using:

• HD Video
• Whiteboarding
• Document interaction

The remaining 40% being initial first time meetings, customer meetings or staff sessions where nothing but face-to-face should be used.  I use one short haul return flight about  15 times per year - not counting my other flights and driving for meetings - and I’m not one of the heavier users.  It is about the same as a Manchester - Heathrow return.  The chart shows information from atmosfair.de and estimates 1 flight, the 15 flights I take, after reducing flights and compares the fact that effectively my flights today are equivalent to an additional car.

When considering the cost of a meeting, the value of a meeting, we should also consider the impact of a meeting.  I wonder how long it will be before there is a cultural tipping point, when will it be frowned upon to travel to a meeting?  Longer term will this lead to a reduction in travel?  I hope so because I’d much rather be sat here at home typing this than in an airport or on a flight.

Stuart French recently commented on a post here.  I’d recommend reading his blog if you are interested in reading articles on the blur between collaboration and knowledge management.  Here it is.

Steve has reminded me that he posted here on Maslow with collaboration and I think it compliments my post well.

The point of this being that for example:

• people won’t be interested in collaboration when they don’t have a stable PC
• people won’t be interested in knowledge management when they are running out of email quota every day
• people won’t be effective coaches when they are so overloaded with email that they don’t have time to think
• people won’t be interested in sharing when their PC is infected with malware or viruses

If you forgive the simplistic nature of the example,  hopefully you can see the power of the model.  It goes further through, again some simple examples:

• once a person has a working PC, Internet connection, storage space, virus and malware protection they will take it for granted and not consider it of value (unless you take it away) so you need to move up the hierarchy and provide higher value services.  But don’t move up until you have satisfied more basic needs!

Also from Steve’s original post:

I must credit Phil for starting this train of thought in my head.  He had some thoughts around Maslow and collaboration, for those in CSC and customers I’d recommend asking Phil to present his thoughts.  But it immediately triggered a thought.  Back in 1994 we had a superb lecturer in our final year at uni -  a real motivational guy.  He had to be!  They stuck him in front of all the final year science and engineering undergraduates to give us a semester about management and project management.  I still remember the main assignment he set and going off to research motivation, I was really excited by what this dude Hertzberg had to say.  He was a dude because he really stood for the fact that we all need some things but those things actually dissatisfy, yet other things really act as satisfiers, take a look:

Much better description here.  But Hetzberg being the great guy that he was also realised that the two are linked, you have to deal with dissatisfaction factors while trying to emphasise and work more on satisfaction.  Enough of my drivel -what has this got to do with collaboration.  Well I feel the same is true in that collaboration tools offer both dissatisfaction and satisfaction:

There are essential tools for collaboration which we hate.  Graham talked recently about the concept of email being addictive, you need it for the odd “win” but like gambling most of the time you “lose”.  We need email as its always going to be an essential form of asynchronous communication, even Luis still gets some and I have great respect for his attempts to remove it completely.  For me satisfaction from collaboration comes from using tools to allow excellent interactive remote meetings, co-creation of content and actually delivering things, talking about those things, building links with people and maintaining strong professional relationships.

For many years I’ve managed teams of one form or another. I’m no guru, I’m no expert, but I feel the methods that I use help maintain morale and minimize attrition - cue leavers and morale issues next week My first tasters were real people in a single location. Now its different we are scattered to the corners of the globe, the only physical contact for most involves aviation fuel. The only way to bridge the divide is to use the collaboration techniques and tools we are all familiar with. The key strategies and tools I use for this are:

Regular 1-to-1 Meetings.  On a weekly basis I try and have a short session with each person who reports to me, normally less than 30 minutes.  This is generally done using AT&T Connect to integrate audio with a web meeting.  The most important elements are sharing a mind map of activities between myself and the people concerned.  The general aim is to catch up on what that person has achieved, what is planned, assisting with priority setting and understanding workload and any issues.  Each month I try and extent those calls to a full hour to give more feedback, mentoring and coaching as required.  I also have a wiki page where we can co-edit and keep lists and any other information - access to this is restricted to me, my report and my manager (the latter in case I get hit by an absence for any reason).

Regular team Meetings.  In my case I try to do this weekly again using an integrated web meeting and audio tool (AT&T Connect) which comes more into its own the larger the audience as you can easily see who is there and who is speaking.  I employ 2 strategies to try and keep these meetings interactive and interesting.  Firstly only very brief updates from people, no more than 2 minutes.  Then there may be announcements which we will discuss and finally time for discussion - and importantly I use a significant time in the meeting to discuss things that although related to collaborative technology may not be what we are doing today.  So for example next meeting we’ll discuss how to support high performance teams with collaboration technology.  The other key, especially with cross continent teams is to draw everyone into the discussion, its really hard but we do have some good discussions and it means that we also encourage concentration on the meeting - something I think is most difficult to control.  I do try but summarily fail to keep impressive minutes of team meetings - to be honest though how many of us refer back to them: these meetings aren’t project status meetings they are calls for us to get together as a team partly structured partly unstructured.

Open Doors.  Now how do you have an open door when no-one can physically see the door.  For me presence awareness and an up to date free/busy time is important for all the team, everyone.  Instant messaging is a really important communication media for me and the team as a whole, Sametime is out corporate tool.  I also don’t mind people taking themselves offline for periods to get things done without distraction.  In today’s world this is easier than it used to be.  With the lack of interruption from colleagues because the people around you are in other remote teams its great to be able to give yourself and team the opportunity to switch off from the world and do.  Remembering that it isn’t the conversations and interruptions that motivate people, its the doing and sense of achievement.

Banter, status and announcements.  For me these are really important “going for lunch now”, “feeling grotty today”, “its cold here”.  These are vital to assess mood, feeling and help initiate conversations.  None of us like a conversation which starts straight on the work front we all like a moment to say hi and have 30 seconds talking about things, and Twitter really helps here because in many cases it gives the subject for the ice-breaker.  I also don’t mind if team members don’t use twitter, I advocate it but no one can dictate its use.  So as such you have to accept different people will use if for different purposes and give it different attention.

And all this I hope leads to better motivation … which leads nicely to my next blog post {gimme 10 to write it}.