Posted for Sean K.
I recently read an article that really
summarized many of the lessons taught from this semester.
It touched on all of the important
collaborative points with an emphasis on sorting and categorizing the massive
amount of tools available for the right project and team base. In terms
of ‘distributed teams’, we are talking about teams put together from potentially
across the world and thus from very different personal, professional, and
cultural backgrounds. The first point talked about the all-knowing
importance of communication, but with an additional emphasis on how cultural
diversity plays a central role – even if it means formal training in it.
The second point discusses choosing
the right tool, but with emphasis on the tool being uniform amongst the team
with sufficient training on it so everyone is effective. Another
important discussed the importance of trust amongst the team. I found it
interesting, but also quite true, that one of the best ways to build is trust
is engaging in activities outside of the regular project.
Trust then forms from the freedom of
team members to ‘be themselves’ and thus form a relationship/bond as people
external from a project. The trust can be further supplemented by the good
leadership on the team. It seems leadership on a distributed requires
more responsibility on the leader part since he has to lead ‘blindly’. He
doesn’t have the affordance of seeing and talking in person to his team
members. Instead he has to engage team members and ensure aspects of the
team are working in the background such as management support, creating a
resource and comfort level with sharing information, and working with a team
that may not have the expertise and motivation needed for an optimum
team. Many of these may not be in place whether it a virtual or local
team, however the virtual leader has to focus his effort much more on relationship
building without the affordance of a physical presence.
Out of all of these points, the most
important thing I took from it was that it was important to align and organize
the team upfront before the project even begins. This involves discussing
and agreeing on the communication standards, project vision, goals, tools, and
how decisions should be made. You in essence have to set a distributed
working framework that is agreed on by all. This may take some time
upfront, but it will pale in comparison to the time loss by not doing
it. This will greatly reduce problems and project delays later.
I can honestly say that from working on my team this
quarter, I have certainly seen the importance of each of these points along the
way. How’s YOUR distributed team doing / done?
LINK TO ARTICLE:
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