Stu Downes

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}.

After many years I’ve finally started using one browser for 99.9% of my requirements.  Yes it happens to be Firefox 3 but thats old news for any readers here, many of you use it, but interestingly NOT a majority here.

The real benefit to me and most other Firefox users is the extensions and plugins.  Here are my favourites:

1.  Feed subscription:

Firefox allows me to choose the tool I’ll use to subscribe to feeds by clicking on the RSS Icon to the right of the URL:

2.  Evernote Integration

The ability to clip text from a web page using the “elephant button” or save a URL to Evernote (”clip to evernote”) is absolutely superb.  I’m finding evernote and increasingly useful research tool and its tablet capabilities are excellent.

3. Session Manager for Firefox

Now this is superb, I can’t fault this at all.  It gives me equal functionality to the session management in Maxthon.  It is great to open a session and be exactly where I left it, down to how far I have scrolled down a page.  You can also open the folder containing the session files and send one to someone else using this plugin, great for sharing links …. but thats where the next one comes to the fore…

4.  Sharing Sessions Online

Agglom is a superb tool that allows you to share a group of URL’s either publicly or privately (Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra).  This can be in the form of a web page, multimedia web page, RSS feed or slideshow.

Conclusions

Longer term I can see us using many tools to access the web.  I’m in agreement with Stowe Boyd, in future we won’t access the web with a single tool, it will be the correct tool for the job.  The job of research, making use of the massive overload of information on the web, is made that much easier by these tools.  I’d recommend these tools.

I regularly have to run powerpoint presentations through web meetings.  And we all know the joy that brings.  Steve pointed me to zoom-it many months ago.  Today though I want to share how I use it with my lenovo tablet.  Prior to the conference I run zoom-it and set the options to run annotation using the left arrow:

Note: when you stop presenting you may want to change this back or close zoom-it otherwise everytime you left arrow you realise that annotation has started and you didn’t move left a cell in excel

So now in presentation mode in the web meeting with tablet in tablet mode I can use the buttons available to me on my mouse to control slide flow, the left button on the tablet to trigger the annotation and the escape key to remove annotation before moving to the next slide.

Why the left arrow?  simple, there are very few buttons available when in tablet mode, the X60 has enter, the arrow keys and escape.  You may want enter to advance slides, escape you’ll need to cancel the zoom-it pen function, and there are no other keys available.  You can see a sample of the kind of annotation here.

Its a really simple yet powerful adjunct to running the slide show in the web meeting.

Even if I’m presenting in normal PC mode using presenter view I’ll use zoom-it over the in-built powerpoint pen as I find it just doesn’t work well when working in presentation mode.

Would you mind spending some time completing a survey for a friend.  He is completing a PhD focusing on agile development and wants some developers to complete a survey.  You don’t have to be using agile today, any developer is encouraged to complete the survey.

http://ou1211237011.agile-adoption.sgizmo.com