Yesterday, Dirk Swart, a project manager at Cornell University, presented a session titled “Sociological Aspects of Web Projects.”
This is Christian Burk’s second scheduled post.
As part of his presentation, which was in the middle of the afternoon, Swart passed around what he called “clickers,” which allowed people to answer in real time questions he had prepared in his presentation. In order to keep people awake, he said.
Swart’s presentation broke down into three parts:
-a preamble
-details
-abstractions
It was by far the most academic presentation I had seen at the conference, with footnotes and sources identified for further exploration by the audience.
The essence of the presentation was this:
many web projects use virtual teams, where one or more members is off-site. Virtual teams acts differently. Understanding the differences will help them work better.
Preamble:
Swart’s presentation was a literature survey, not any primary research that he has conducted. He cautioned against acting on his generalizations from the research, suggesting that the audience members generalize the findings themselves.
Details:
Trust
When teams go virtual both creativity and trust suffer. Trust, however, seems to be recoverable. One of the ways to increase trust is to give virtual teams more time for socializing (“water cooler” talk). Even off-site events, beers and bowling, will create or increase levels of trust as people get to know each other.
Communication
In order to better communicate in a virtual team, keep in mind that people use the tools of communication differently.
-email is good for facts, not complex information or ongoing issues
-phone is better for expressing e-motions and complex information
-reply to
-move up the chain of communication, e-mail-IM-phone-face to face as issues become more difficult or complex
Team member behavior
-Bad apples (audience member called them “well poisoners”) make the team more inefficient, even if they are productive. The literature says to get rid of them.
-Superfluous behavior can be both good and bad, leading to more esprit de corps but less efficiency.
Shared Mental Models
-I don’t really get this. It seems to be about a way to describe how groups cohere or fail to.
Abstractions:
Communications models
-starting in the 1940s, describing communications as transmission (worked really well as a metaphor when in a war, dealing with encryption, etc.)
-today, communication and meaning can be better described as shared creation (think Web 2.0)
-more on shared mental models and the role of the leader
–leader can either do it all (doesn’t scale well)
–leader can try to get others to do it (harder to enforce)
–leader can determine how the technology is used
–groups are better kept small, as it’s easier to know what people are thinking when the group is small