Posts tagged collaboration
What exactly is collaboration?
Dec 17th
Recently I have been part of few discussions on how to increase collaboration within enterprise. The forum was volunteered by enthusiastic professionals who wanted to deliver value to their work through collaboration. Excellent thought !
When we gathered to discuss about Collaboration, questions came about What exactly is Collaboration? How we can achieve it? How different is it than team work?
Simple questions, one might think, however when the question was asked to everyone round the table, we got few interesting answers.
Few of those I would like to mention as follows,
“Collaboration is what the F1 team does to ensure that the driver is on the track within shortest time. Its just another form of Teamwork”
“Collaboration is what the Power Inverter company does with the Battery company to provide the customers a full set of power solution. Its more about knowing your strengths & weaknesses and match it with someone else’s so create a powerful combination that enables more success”
“Collaboration is a process of knowledge management where people are important, but outcome is even more important. Look at Wikipedia, we have world’s biggest knowledge bank in one place, and we don’t even know who created it. Collaboration focuses on end outcome, rather than who does it.”
Interesting !
Let me know what you think about collaboration, post a comment, I would be glad if you could ! Thank you !
Adopting Enterprise 2.0 for managing my project teams based across continents
Jun 4th
Continuing from my earlier post on using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams and taking it one step further, I have been contemplating on actually adopting an Enterprise 2.0 software stack for real time collaboration, better communication, effective knowledge management & idea generation amongst my team.
The obvious problem at my hands is lack of budget to actually look for and adopt any proprietary software that would solve our purpose, thus a little more intelligence & effort is needed to ensure we have a good set of working processes, software & tool to enable us become an effective project team.
Being into production support and providing critical support to few prime portals of one of world’s leading telecommunications company, the need of time is for the team to have an effective collaborative tool at their hands which would allow them to exchange short messages via web based intranet portal.
So to cater to this requirement, we decided to install Laconi.ca and try that out. Hopefully we will have something to work on by end of this week.
By the way, after my earlier post, few of my team members came back to me disputing my claim of unawareness of ‘twitter’ within them. So it was good to know as well !
Another important bit was to have a knowledge management portal and for that we installed Mediawiki solution on the LAMP server I had on the Intranet. Obviously it worked as a treat so far and hopefully it would continue to serve as a KMS solution for us.
But the problem we are having is about carrying out the backup of the Mediawiki. Obviously one simple way is to back up the database tables & then back up the file system separately. However, I was just wondering if there are any ready tools available that would execute the backups on the Mediawiki installation and give me an installation kit to restore, if eventually we need !
Few things I have installed on the server are Open Office (OpenGoo) to manage the documents online for the team. However, so far never used it for a real project purpose though. I would like to see how I could use it in my project in future though.
I have also had an installation of b2evolution lying on my server which I intended to use for the team blog for spreading the news on updates and progress on various changes / issues, but as of now it looks a long shot for the team to actually start using it. Obviously it would support the RSS / Atom feeds as well. So I would have to hold on for a while.
As a part of my objective of increasing the collaboration within the team, I have created something called Ideas wall and Questions basket that would give the team an opportunity to interact with the management & post ideas for new innovations, opportunities as well as ask questions on the processes around the project. Just for the sake of mentioning, these two are plain wiki pages in a team section for me and that worked well so far.
So far I have not felt a need of having a Social networking intranet portal for the team as the size of the team is not really big and although we have resources spread across various locations in the world, its easy to connect with each other with the existing tools. So may be I can keep that idea in reserve as of now.
As usual, if you have any comments or any ideas for me to take a look, I would welcome them. So please leave a comment on my blog or ‘twit’ me on Twitter.
Using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams ..
Jun 3rd
Today, during one of my team review meetings, one of my colleagues raised an idea of having a chat server hosted on intranet to allow the team members collaborate with each other for issuing and requesting updates on various incidents, problems and their progresses. A good idea to have one chat server, but few team members were probably not pro to the idea due to the ‘push’ nature of the chat and they did not want to be disturbed with many messages broadcasted to the team if they were not of any interest to them.
Then the obvious solution to this idea was to install ‘twitter’ like microblogging software on one of my intranet server and allow teams to follow rest of the team to ‘pull’ the updates as and when they need it.
To my surprise, when I explained the concept of microblogging to the team and gave an example of ‘twitter’ to the team, none of my team members seem to know ‘twitter’. This was a shock to me, especially when my team was supposed to be pro in Information Technology !!
Nevertheless, explained them the concept of microblogging to the team and asked them to explore ‘twitter’ concepts and find out how it works.
Upon doing the search myself, I found Laconi.ca best suited to our needs of having an online microblogging and collaboration tool for the team.
I would still need to get the team explore this product and get a pilot installation tested on our intranet Linux server but by the looks of the product, it looks to be exactly what I needed for my team to enable better collaboration.
Anyways, few main expectations I am having from this kind of collaboration tool being used in the support project is to enable the disparately located team put up updates on a simple question @What are you doing?@. Obviously my team is located at various locations across India & UK so having a centralized tool would certainly help us in better collaboration.
Another important usage I envisage of this tool is to give updates to customers about any major release updates or change implementation. It is obvious that while the teams are busy doing the installation of a software on the production servers, they would not like customers or any other teams asking the questions on status updates and disturb them. So if we have this kind of tool, it would definitely enable us ‘post’ proactive updates on intranet which could be followed by various customers / teams to find out the updates themselves.
Thus, a job for me tomorrow is to find out someone in my team who could take on the job of doing the R&D and install the Laconi.ca software on my intranet server and take it from there ..