The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• To build better virtual team performance, focus on and talk about the similarities between people. “This model tells us that the leader of a virtual team who wants to build team spirit, cohesion and trust should consistently cue team members to focus on a shared identity. For instance, team members may have experience with new product development. When team members cannot see each other, their attention is taken away from individual differences and they latch on information that highlights their shared identity. They begin to see others in terms of this shared identity. Team members are likely to see this shared identity positively because they are themselves associated with it. Furthermore, to be consistent with how they feel about having this identity, they are also likely to have a more positive view of their team mates who share this identity. In such a climate, team members are likely to cooperate with each other, trust each other, and be more influenced by each other.“
• Macalester College has been having problems with Oracle Collaboration Suite (a power outage led to a major ongoing outage), and the College is switching to Google Apps for Education. “The switch from Oracle Collaboration Suite to Google Applications for Education has been accelerated from occurring within the calendar year to happening within the next few days, Associate Vice President of ITS Jerry Sanders said Wednesday. ITS plans to have everyone signed up and using Google Apps by March 31.“
• Using a months worth of data from MSN Messenger conversations, researchers at Microsoft Research have confirmed that we’re 6.6 steps away from any other randomly selected person. The 1967 study that found a similar number was based on letters being sent by postal mail.
• Roger looks at the challenges of capturing the passion and enthusiam of workers, and how collaboration tools can help with that. And he’s questioning the concept of “assigning tasks” within the context of innovative work. “I believe it means that employers must do a better job of creating an interesting environment for employees. In the past, management selected workers based on their skills and assigned them tasks. In the workplace of the future, where data flows freely and knowledge, not information, is the coin of the realm, leaders must adapt their styles to the reality of a much more informed and mobile workforce. Give too many unpleasant tasks to one worker without considering the ramifications and you may unwittingly thrust her into the arms of a competitor. So, rather than thinking of collaboration tools as a way to assign tasks, I think of them as a way to unlock potential.“
• Chris summarizes a conversation with Tom Malone about when collaboration is the wrong design strategy. Two key times: (1) when an individual can accomplish the work at hand without a team, and (2) when there is no clear outcome for the collaboration, which results in “activity with no focus or purpose.”

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Susan has some ideas about how to use Meeting Workspaces in SharePoint, and in particular where meeting workspaces should live in the navigational hierarchy. “From the team site home page, we created a sub-site called Meetings where we added a calendar from which the team will create Meeting Workspaces. We used a “blank” publishing template to create the Meetings site so that the left hand navigation would be “empty”. We also added a Table of Contents web part showing just one level of navigation so that we would have a “security trimmed” directory of meeting workspaces. Each new meeting workspace creates a link in the left hand navigation, an entry in the drop down list of sub-sites on the Meetings tab, and an entry in the “meeting site directory” on the main Meetings page. We also created a link in the left hand navigation called “Add New Meeting” to make it easy to create a new calendar entry.” Susan is offering a PDF of the steps involved (PDF, 152KB, 3 pages).
• ActionThis added some new capabilities over the weekend, including support for using Outlook for personal tasks, improved printing from Outlook, and more.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• It takes time and effort to make a great presentation. Are you willing to do what is necessary to make it worthwhile?
• Be present in your business or team. Know what’s going on in the industry, follow the key blogs, read books in your industry, and go to the key industry events.
• Scott argues that one way to overcome procrastination is to embrace schedule calibration. This involves two things: (1) picking the right size of workload, and (2) replace hard deadlines with soft ones.
• Innovation is often stiffled because people fall in love with their ideas (and stay that way for too long). There are a variety of ways to keep innovating, however: (1) challenge and re-challenge the idea, (4) seek constant improvement, (5) give up control, and more.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Keys to being a successful freelancer: (1) focus your offering … you can’t do it all, (2) develop your business skills, (3) ensure your cashflow is enough, (4) more work from fewer clients is better than less from more, (5) you don’t have to work for bad clients (fire those that aren’t working out), (6) add some structure to your work and time and you’ll get more done, (7) you need less “stuff” than you think, and (8) keep building your skills and don’t forget your friends.