Commentary on managing distributed teams

From the HBR blogs...

"Managers frequently ask for best practices for managing their global teams, and recently we've noticed some common themes. Here are the three questions that keep coming up again and again, and what the research tells us about how to address them..."
"...managers of virtual teams should have dual, complementary objectives: structure and socialize. First they must shift their teams' work practices away from the dynamic adjustment outlined above towards more structured coordination. Clear team-level work processes, output requirements, and group norms reduce the complexity of virtual team coordination from coordinating efforts across multiple sites to aligning one's efforts with a single, consistent set of expectations. Second, as the speed of today's economy means no team — collocated or distributed — can eliminate all such dynamic adjustment, virtual team managers also work to support and facilitate dynamic adjustment when it's required by promoting and encouraging informal interaction."

Reference: Managing a Virtual Team, by Mark Mortensen and Michael O’Leary (link), published: 9:52 AM Monday April 16, 2012

Mocality - crowd sourcing business in Africa

From the Mocality blog; how we built this business...

Quote: When we started this business, we knew that (unlike in the UK or US, where you can just kickstart your directory business with a DVD of business data bought from a commercial supplier), if we wanted a comprehensive database of Kenyan business, we would have to build it ourselves. We knew also that if we wanted to build the business quickly, we’d have to engage a lot of Kenyans to help us. So we built our crowd program that utilises M-PESA (Kenya’s ubiquitous Mobile Money system) to reward any Kenyan with a mobile phone who contributes entries to our database, once those entries have been validated by our team. Over two years, we’ve paid out Ksh. 11m (over $100,000) to thousands of individuals, and we have built Kenya’s most comprehensive directory, with over 170,000 verified listings. Personally, I regard the program as one of THE highlights of my 18 year career on the internet.
From day 1, we aimed to target all Kenyan businesses, irrespective of size. As a result, for about 2/3rds of our listed businesses, Mocality is their first step onto the web. That’s about 100,000 businesses that Mocality has brought online.

Links
Mocality site (link)
Mocality blog (link)

How about crowdsourcing your seed capital?

"Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform for creative endeavors, was founded in April 2009... The unique all-or-nothing approach to funding has struck a chord with both creators and funders and is allowing enterprising individuals to bypass traditional establishments to create films, music albums, events, and even products. Kickstarter helped hundreds of projects raise millions of dollars in 2010." Mashable blog (link)

Further reading
Kickstarter "A NEW WAY TO Fund & Follow Creativity". Web site (link)
Kickstarter Surpasses $100 Million in Pledges. Mashable post (link)

Microsourcing labour case

Lifebushido: The Challenge of the Microsourcing Labor Markets is available from Erran Carmel's web page under the 'Cases for Teaching' section - http://auapps.american.edu/~carmel/ The case is about a small American firm growing in a new part of the sourcing world — microsourcers, also known by other labels: micro-work, human-cloud, crowdsourcing. LifeBushido is a middleman platform that mediates between the buyers and the global supply of sellers in specialty knowledge work. The case takes place in 2011.

Localisation, Translation, Culture

Panel discussion with Damian Scattergood, Paul Quigley, and Stella Grubo, STAR Translation Services, Docklands Innovation Park, Dublin.

A discussion on outsourcing/sourcing, managing inside and managing outside; the relationship with clients and suppliers. What is culture and how does it come into the frame? How to manage the interface, who to manage, and listening or being listened to!



About Star TS (link) Star's video summary of the session (link)