I posted recently on collaboration perhaps being an unnatural act for some activities in some types of organization. I want to come back to this topic and look at it through the lens of one team’s experiment with a new IT-enabled (Web 2.0) approach to collaboration. We will discuss the results and potential implications of this experiment. I will do this over several posts.
The setting is a virtual team, geographically distributed but well-supported by an IT infrastructure including high speed DSL or equivalent, VPN, laptop PC’s, and so on. The team members were part time on this project (mostly 10% or less) over a period of about 90 days. Most of the team members were reasonably IT literate – at least competent users of MS Office products and the Internet. Most of the team members also traveled substantially and were in other meetings, so there were periods of time (sometimes for the whole day) where they did not have Internet access via their laptops. The team included senior executives and mid-level managers, and a couple of people who were external to the organization.
The project was of a type that most of the team members had previously experienced – even if this group had not all worked together before as a team. The project had a well-defined process, one worked out over several years of similar projects, and all the team members were familiar with, and, perhaps more importantly, trusted the process – it worked well. Collaboration had always been important to this type of project, and the process followed a mix of individual knowledge work (interviewing, thinking, writing, exchanging ideas) in-person team meetings (very few of these), teleconferences (many), and some WebEx sessions for those points in the project when a broader base of participation was needed. One of the final stages of the project was the creation of a major report that would be distributed quite widely, both inside and outside the company and would generally represent the culmination of the team’s work.
The report writing part of the project called for an initial table of contents to be brainstormed and agreed – there was a standardized template for this, and principles for designing the non-boilerplate sections – the bulk of the document – to be worked out. Individuals each agreed to take one or more sections, or to work in pairs – their common practice on such projects. Traditionally, MS Word and PowerPoint documents for graphics exchanged by Outlook mail messages were the primary tools used for this type of work. Recently, the team had begun using a company collaboration hub – there was still a great deal of learning going on, but by and large the hub had taken hold, and it was becoming a true part of the infrastructure. One of the newest capabilities available to the team was a Wiki.
The team discussed at length the implications of shifting one or more of the writing, editing and distribution of the report from MS Office tools and email, to a Wiki. They reached a decision to try the Wiki as an experiment, and some principles were worked out about how they were going to do this. One of the team members took the initiative and jumped in, laying out the framework, style-sheets, setting up quick links to glossaries and help aids, even jump-starting most of the sections. He quickly figured out how to do some very useful things such as create a macro that would at a click pull all the sections together into a complete report, so any member of the team could quickly see how the whole report was coming along.
In theory, the Wiki offered a host of advantages over MS Word and email. Writers or editors did not need to worry about turning on or off “Track Changes” - the entire history of changes and who made them was always visible. Team members could insert comments – either as in line text or as a box to be attached to an entire page or section. There would be no emailing with the risk of messages being missed or stuck in in-boxes of busy traveling people. The biggest benefits, it was believed, would come later. When the report was released, the whole thing could be made available as a Wiki, with all the benefits of hyperlinks within the document and to the outside world. The team believed this would be an advantage for people interested in reading or using the report. They also believed it would be an advantage for the team’s or company’s ongoing use of the material – the report as a whole, and individual sections or subsections that could more easily be enhanced over time, reused or re-purposed.
All-in-all, once they had decided to do the Wiki experiment, they jumped in with apparent enthusiasm. So, what happened? Stay tuned…
Filed under: Change Management, IT Maturity Tagged: | Add new tag, collaboration, Web 2.0, Wiki
