Technology and Organizations

Really.  Not the kind of firefighting we generally talk about in organizations, but really fighting fires.  I’ve been following the “Gnarl Ridge Fire” updates since my cousin Daniel is part of the fire crew.  It occurred to me today that their InciWeb interagency information portal does in fact provide consistent, timely information (its stated goal) — and that less exciting organizational projects could benefit from this approach.  The system is basically a blog of the fire.

Credit: Graig Edberg

I’ve written about the value of using portals, pages, and applications rather than email for project management.  I am still working on the promised “audit” strategy to help guide possible implementations, but I found value in this simple example.  This is a one stop shop for information transfer.  Interested parties can find the data they need and coordinate their own efforts as a result.  I’m going to try and find out how the system is perceived by the insiders and will post if I do.  I expect they have more detailed and integrated systems for internal parties.

I wish a safe night to the multi-state crews working on this fire.

This is the first of at least two posts on designing communication and workflow infrastructure for multi-organizational project teams.  Here I’ll speak to the general features needed.  In the next post[s] I’ll focus on how to do a system “audit” of what is available in a particular setting and the roles of adoption/implementation for both the technology and the team practices.

How will this discussion differ from project management applications?  Project management systems (Basecamp being one that gets solid reviews) are a commitment to a particular system, and at least one of the users must be footing the bill.  The licensing has improved in that, using Basecamp as an example, they allow unlimited clients/users and bill by the project, apparently without limitations as to organizational boundaries.  (In the old days, many of these systems were “site” licenses and so not appropriate for multi-organizational teams.)

How does this go beyond my earlier posts on visualization for teams?  There the focus was more on team member activities, here it is more on organizing the work, with team member activities as a part of that.  While this style of project management is a start towards full-blown visualization, I think we still have some distance to go to provide full visualization to virtual groups (e.g., anticipation of availability as discussed by Begole and Tang at Sun Labs.

Now we have the ability to design our own tools.  Both Google Sites and Facebook provide a “lego” style capability of clicking together electronic file cabinets, pages of links, discussion forums, and applications/widgets to suit your team’s needs.  Yes, both of these systems are in their infancy when it comes to being full-fledged enterprise-ready platforms (see 2007 discussion of why Facebook isn’t ready for business users) but they give us the ability to design on the fly and adapt the systems as the groups and tasks evolve. 

Last week I built a prototype Google Sites platform for SCU’s Technology Entrepreneurship programs.  I spent 45 minutes talking with the leadership for the program, colleagues who will be teaching in the program, and administrators who work with students like those in the program.  We thought hard about building the first prototype on Facebook given its high level of adoption among the students.  However, the low level of adoption among faculty, and our limited understanding of its possible document and project management capabilities pushed us to Google for this first design.

It then took me 2.5 hours to build the initial site.  This included backtracking when I realized that I would need to build a separate “Site” for each program to manage the permissions such that some materials are available only to the specific program (e.g., the Fall 2008 group, the Winter 2009 group).  This is either a weakness in the Google Sites feature set, or in my conceptual understanding of what a “Site” should be.  Initially, I designed a single “Site” for the Technology Entrepreneurship overall program.  The idea was that access could be “provisioned” such that general materials would be available to all participants and faculty, but that specific readings, discussion forums, etc. would be available to only the individuals in a single program.  Instead, it seems that each program needs to have its own “Site,” those these sites can be linked via URLs.  Thus my backtrack.  I had to disassemble the overarching structure and put the separate parts into separate Sites.  What I have yet to formally test is whether there is a “single sign-on” capability such that once you have logged-in, you are in to all “Sites” in your “My Sites” section.  If so, the process of moving from one Site to another should work just as well as if there were a single Site with webpages provisioned to the individual user.  (Downside is that the Site map obviously only maps the single Site – so the overall architecture may need to be explained to the users – or we may need to draw our own general site map that covers the linked Sites. 

I’ll stop here and ask for advice. This prototype provides the ability for password protection, social networking, filesharing, discussion forums, calendaring, and announcements. Are there missing features that multi-organizational project teams are likely to need?

Footnote to the Title: Yes, I know Yahoo Groups was a later addition to the party that is “computer supported cooperative work,” but Yahoo Groups was the first major free tool I saw with mass adoption in the MBA student ranks.  These students often had access to more powerful systems at work (e.g., Lotus Notes), but they couldn’t use them with outsiders.  The students also had access to purpose-built systems provided by the university (in our case, Prometheus and now Angel).  However, the students never took to these systems in the way they did to Yahoo Groups (also possibly because each faculty member could configure the system differently, sometimes even turning off the ability for students to provide attachments or to start their own discussion threads).  Yes, Yahoo Groups went down one day when final papers were due, but the students soldiered on.

A few months ago I wrote a post called “Group Mind and Memory with Duct Tape and Twine.” My goal there was to highlight some easy actions and tools for supporting teams. In that post I was focused on helping virtual teams overcome some of their weaknesses in terms of having common ground across the members, as well as some other meeting basics. Here I’d like to hit on the flip side, how can we do better by integrating technology into our face to face meetings?

John Sawyer, Maggie Neale, and I have written about hybrid teams: teams that meet face to face but also make use technology support. I have a hard time imagining a setting where some form of technology wouldn’t provide value in a face to face meeting – even if the technology is just a piece of paper (a weak option as it’s hard for everyone to see) or a white board (better). Seems pretty easy to take team notes on a big piece of paper or a white board, but I’ve attended a number of face to face meetings recently where no notes were taken that were visible to the participants. “Poof” went many of the ideas – for those of you on Macs, think about the animation and sound when you drag an icon off the taskbar – “poof,” it’s gone.

Sure, some individuals were taking notes, but in these instances none of those notes are available to the meeting participants. The leader in each case was clearly taking some notes, but in all the instances I’m thinking about they were also the main meeting facilitator, meaning their main focus wasn’t on note taking.

Frankly I don’t like my ideas going “poof,” so I emailed the leaders with the ideas I thought best. This made the best of the situation from my perspective, but isn’t the best group outcome as I know I filter my notes as I go.

I’ll quote from my earlier post about the benefits of notes that are visible to the meeting participants: “If the team rotated who took notes (perhaps using the agenda as the base for the notes) – and more importantly, took notes in a way that all could see them as they were being taken, they would gain at least four benefits. First, the real time nature of the notes provides a visualization of what one member thinks is being said. The rest of the team can then chime in with corrections, elaborations, agreement to action items and the like. There is stronger engagement as the team is going to be held to their immediate agreement about the outcomes of the meeting. Second, once the meeting is over, value added work can begin, rather than spending time typing up notes from work that has now past. Third, since the team lead isn’t trying to take notes and run the meeting, both activities should be of higher quality. Fourth, the minutes are a living document versus an attachment that seems to just get archived and not looked at again.”

As I watched our process over these meetings, another benefit to “group” notes came to mind – progress can be dynamically tracked. If we get bogged down or aren’t addressing the goals of the meeting it will be more apparent through the artifact of the notes. The notes begin to serve as a way to hold the meeting participants to their goals. Without the group notes, the conversation can digress without evidence to the contrary.

The benefits of agendas, having materials available in advance, and note taking are as old as meetings (what do you think those cave drawing are?). Let’s move into the 21st Century and make use of the technologies that are available to us. In each of my example meetings we had access to projection systems and could easily have used a projected agenda as a template for our notes. Yes, as noted by an astute colleague of mine, agendas and notes could provide so much structure that they hamper creativity, but in each of these cases I would have been willing to take that risk over the ideas going “poof” and us having to cover the same ground again in the future. Let’s help our meeting leaders by offering to set up the computer and take the notes.

“..43 Folders, Merlin Mann’s family of websites about stuff like personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better.” Lifehacker “features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently.” Both of these blogs provide great tips on a variety of topics – often stretching how you might think about using the technology you have and use everyday (i.e., duct tape and twine).

In this post I apply the same perspective to helping groups get things done just a little bit easier – without having to learn or buy new tools. Recently I posted about the kinds of things groups might gain from visualization of their processes. The more I thought about it, the more I thought there might be lower hanging fruit – actions that are a touch easier to apply and still may provide great benefit in your teams.

Scenario One. A friend of mine runs a weekly conference call managing a medium sized project. She sends out an email including the agenda and an email attachment of the prior meeting’s minutes. She runs the call and takes careful notes as the meeting progresses. After the call she spends at least 90 minutes creating the post meeting notes (minutes), formatting, and the like.

Good for her and the team that they have an agenda for the call. Basic team meeting 101 – otherwise how can people have access to the material they will need to contribute, when they need to contribute it? Where I think there is low hanging fruit is in the minutes: If the team rotated who took notes (perhaps using the agenda as the base for the notes) – and more importantly, took notes in a way that all could see them as they were being taken, they would gain at least four benefits. First, the real time nature of the notes provides visualization of what one member thinks is being said. The rest of the team can then chime in with corrections, elaborations, agreement to action items and the like. There is stronger engagement as the team is going to be held to their immediate agreement about the outcomes of the meeting. Second, once the meeting is over, value added work can begin, rather than spending time typing up notes from work that has now past. Third, since the team lead isn’t trying to take notes and run the meeting, both activities should be of higher quality. Fourth, the minutes are a living document versus an attachment that seems to just get archived and not looked at again.

Free tools that might make this work: Any wiki (depending on your need for privacy, you might pay a monthly fee – see WikiMatrix for a list of many options), or Google Sites.

Certainly there are caveats: For example, how comfortable will people be at having their initial typos and typing speed observed? In this last sentence I had to backspace for corrections twice (coffee hasn’t kicked in yet…) For this issue I do think there will need to be some social adjustments as well as the technical and practice ones. See my comment on “alpha drafts” – short version is that perhaps we can adjust our expectations for real time versus finished product.

Scenario Two. My colleagues and I were running a four-hour workshop at this year’s HICSS conference. We had about 50 people in the audience and were hoping for an interactive event. We’d also put together a wiki (with multiple pages so multiple people could contribute at the same time) with the idea that people would add to the wiki as the discussion progressed. It became clear that this wiki mode wasn’t working (I have successfully used this “live” wiki approach at another conference, but it didn’t work this time – another possible post topic). Instead of forcing the wiki, I started taking notes on the presentation PowerPoint slides. We had created a simple set of slides to lead the discussion so it was easy to just add the notes from the computer running the presentation – and then all the room could see them and elaborate. It was then a simple task to cut and paste those notes into the wiki after the session ended.

Three take away points and a question:

1. Simplify the meeting process by doing note documentation during the meeting rather than taking up time after the fact – yes it may make the meeting a bit longer, but I think the benefits will outweigh the cost.

2. Engaging participants in the live creation of a single set of notes enhances engagement, and provides an opportunity for elaboration, action item creation, and error correction.

3. When the notes are a live work product they are more likely to be recycled – the whole group created them (generating greater commitment and understanding) and will be more likely to effectively search for the content when needed.

Question: Given the ubiquitousness of powerpoint and projection in large meetings, why ever use a flipchart or whiteboard? Flipchart sheets, for example, are then either transcribed (adding effort), or thrown away. While they provide the value of the “at the moment” representation of the group’s thinking, their value sharply decreases after the meeting. Electronic notes can work face to face or in a virtual setting, can be searched and archived without additional effort. (For smaller meetings or cases where you don’t have access to projection, a variety of products let you easily – and in some cases for free – take a picture of the notes on the whiteboard, chalkboard, flipchart, marble tablet that you were using and through OCR have that material transformed into searchable notes. I’m just beginning to use Evernote (free) for this purpose.)

Thank you to Michael Griffith (my brother and Director, Application Development Group for the U of A College of Medicine) for comments on an earlier draft.

Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman describe visualization as “The use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition.”

Long long ago I was an undergraduate research assistant at UC Berkeley. Because of my job and ability to scrounge, I had a few “accounts” (at the time, computing wasn’t a free good) that let me access one of the mainframes used to run statistics packages. Other RAs, some of them my good friends, also had accounts. These were the days of terminal rooms and we were often working in different buildings in the middle of the night.
We would use the “who” command to see who else was working (and thus who could either help with a problem or go for coffee). This was a primitive form of creating situational awareness in a virtual work setting. Note that this required an action – issuing the command and then looking for the arcane login of your friend. The only representation of the data was what could be gleaned from the particular processes they were running at the time.

More modern approaches are to watch team members’ IM status (immediate feedback, can include what music they are listening to), blog updates (see description of how SocialText does this — generally longer cycle time), facebook or myspace postings (cycle time varies), Twitters (see this real estate example), and the like. Some of these may require action on the part of the tracker, trackee, or both, depending on how the systems are configured. More to the point, they require some kind of effort, and are not specifically designed to support team situational awareness through visualization.

Certainly technology provides us with the ability to create visualizations of teamwork, but what visualizations are useful?

The following are the first entries in my notes on this topic. Briefly, explicit and implicit coordination of communication and tasks may be the most mature areas of study and examples. Both have the ability to support coordination based on either direct or anticipated actions and needs of teammates and task demands. Visualization around mutual awareness, accountability, social dynamics, and work patterns (e.g., editing patterns in Wikipedia) appear fruitful, but also more complex and idiosyncratic in terms of what would be valuable for team performance.

Comments appreciated on other sources for extending this review and/or on examples of how your teams use visualization for fun or profit.

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Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness – current and future availability. Begole and Tang describe the use of “Lilsys” and “Awarenex” within a research group at Sun Labs. Awarenex showed an augmented IM contact list which provided location, keyboard idle time, whether engaged in instant messaging, phone conversation, or scheduled for an appointment in the calendar. “The design of Awarenex transmitted awareness cues so that people could interpret the information to infer whether it would be a good time to interrupt…” (p. 12). (They do discuss the tradeoffs regarding privacy issues.) Lilsys used a sensor-based system (motion, sounds,phone, door, computer) to link to Awarenex and add machine interpretation of whether or not the person was likely to be receptive to communication. Later stages of the research used logs of this data to create visualizations of (for example) day-of-week rhythm patterns of activity. They note that this information could support contact coordination.

Coordination Requirements – “Who must coordinate with whom to get work done.” Cataldo, Wagstom, Herbsleb, & Carley report on their efforts to design collaboration and awareness tools. They developed a technique to measure task dependencies. Among other things, they created a coordination requirements matrix based on software modification request reports from a software development project within a large data storage company. They offer that a tool using their approach could provide stakeholders with visualizations to trigger facilitation of appropriate flows of communication. TUKAN and Palantir are mentioned as tools for supporting collaboration and awareness in software development – and that these tools could be augmented with better understanding of congruence between coordination requirements and coordination activities.

Team Implicit Coordination Processes: A Team Knowledge-Based Approach – Rico, Sanchez-Manzanares, Gil, and Gibson describe implicit coordination as “when team members anticipate the actions and needs of their colleagues and task demands and dynamically adjust their own behavior accordingly, without having to communicate directly with each other or plan the activity” (p. 164). Team situation models “are dynamic, context-driven mental models concerning key areas of the team’s work, such as the objectives or roles of colleagues.” The “sharedness and accuracy” of the team situation model feeds into implicit coordination (with a feedback loop), which is expected to support team performance.

Social Translucence — IBM Watson Research Center’s Thomas Erickson, Christine Halverson, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, and Tracee Wolf note that “humans are remarkably skilled at using subtle cues about the presence and activities of others to govern their interactions.” They describe how people make decisions based on their being able to see “traces” of others’ activities. They propose digital systems that support mutual awareness and accountability. Social Translucence (not transparence) – visualization that people are doing something (e.g., participation in synchronous or asynchronous conversations, interaction in a lecture), but not exactly what they are doing/saying.

Augmented Social Cognition (blog) — Ed Chi and Peter Pirolli of PARC describe ASC as “the enhancement via technical systems of the ability of a group of people to remember, think and reason, acquire and use knowledge.” They have created a tool called wikidashboard that they hope will “surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.”