Exercise: Experiences on virtual teams

Exercise: Establish the level of knowledge and experience of virtual teams and their supporting tool-technology combinations among the survey group.

The following survey is an adaptation of the one carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit in the report "Managing virtual teams Taking a more strategic approach" from 2009.

Click here to take survey

Do virtual teams perform better?

In early 2013 Yahoo hit the tech headlines by changing its workplace policy and placing a ban on teleworking (link). On the other hand the 2013 winners of the DARPA FANG Challenge were a team of three who had never met before collaborating on their proposal (link).

Do virtual teams perform better or worse than collocated teams, or what about teams that meet intermittently or partially? This is a really interesting question.

On the one hand common knowledge understanding (and research) overwhelmingly states that face to face contact is an essential component for effective distributed teamwork. On the other hand, a narrowly focused and relatively sparse body of research has highlighted a number of cases where high performance, multidisciplinary, virtual teams completely outperform in-house teams e.g. (Malhotra, 2001).

J. Mike Smith has also noted the experiences in pharmaceutical R&D projects, where small, distributed, virtual, multidisciplinary teams exceed the performance of the traditional in-house projects (link).

"Performance of the virtual teams within the portfolio companies has not gone unnoticed, as potential partners to the these virtual team portfolio companies have marveled at the work. When presenting results of proof of concept studies to a potential partner, the CEO of a potential partnering company noted “It would take three times as many people and twice as long to achieve these results in my organization”."

What tools, or technological infrastructure enable high performance virtual teams? One way of anticipating or evaluating these tools ahead of their potential adoption in mainstream IT enabled organisations is to assess their development and uptake within the emblematic knowledge intense virtualised digital media production industry, software engineering. The provision of technologies by software developers to support distributed software development has ended up having wider application in mainstream industries. For example source code control systems have been adapted for general versioned document control. The 'comment' feature for source code commits percolated into web pages and Blogs and has ultimately defined the basic functionality of microblogging services like Twitter. Wiki's comprise an entire subculture of the editable web and gave the impetus for the Through The Web (TTW) editing function in all other Content Management Systems (CMSs). SMS originated as an engineered test application on early GSM phones. Feature applications like conversational technology and email, in use since the dawn of the internet, are now general services for wider populations.

Technological Infrastructure

The following products and services represent a snapshot of such key technologies today. In no particular order:

Functional communication services and devices (largely standalone elements)
email
fixed phone
mobile phone
SMS
instant messaging
blog/microblogs
any CMS
http://www.skype.com/en/
File and document versioning systems (for managing/storing finished product)
https://github.com/
http://dropbox.com/
http://drive.google.com

High Tech design and visualisation tools
https://pidoco.com/
http://www.balsamiq.com/
http://www.sketchup.com/


Work-task-systems (largely standalone elements for coordinating, communicating)
http://www.planningpoker.com/
http://cardmapping.com/ and/or http://www.cardboardit.com/
https://trello.com/
http://teambox.com/
https://podio.com/
Integrated enterprise functional systems (ERP, CRM, Issue Tracking etc)
http://basecamp.com/
https://jira.atlassian.com/
http://www.mantisbt.org/
http://www.x2engine.com/
http://www.sugarcrm.com/
http://www.sap.com/
http://www.salesforce.com/
SNS (social network service) and/or Integrated enterprise communication environments
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/sametime/
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

Reference: Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., Carman, R. & Lott, V. (2001) Radial Innovation Without Collocation: A Case Study at Boeing-Rocketdyne. MIS Quarterly, 25, 229-49.
Further reading: Consider the controversy that erupted in 2013 when Yahoo's Marissa Mayer ordered an end to `remote' work. How did employees react? Did the ban stand the test of time? What other drivers could have motivated it? (the original `leak' on AllThingsD)

Links between crowd funding and Islamic finance?

The idea of Crowdsourcing sometimes sits uneasily with the general sourcing literature. The sourcing literature seems to focus on inter-organisational and/or intra-organisational relationships, market-style arrangements for containing specialised value-added links in a production chain, and ultimately the commodification of work. Crowdsourcing in contrast focuses on mutuality, creativity, on unlocking the potential of dispersed though like-minded individuals to address needs that they agree on. Crowdsourcing is, perhaps, more like Islamic finance than Sourcing or Outsourcing in general.

Another way of interpreting, or adapting the Crowdsourcing concept is the idea of Islamic finance. Yomken (yomken.com) is a crowdfunding platform for financing projects and business ventures. They employ a crowdsourcing model utilising social networks as communities for gathering funds for new projects and solve problems. The net result is to release capital to entrepreneurs, and generate value while adhering to the founding principles of Islamic finance.

The underlying concepts of Crowdsourcing seem to reflect the principles of Islamic finance which, simply put, does not allow interest to be charged for loans. Similarly, betting on the result of a race, speculating on interest rates, hedging contracts and other instruments usually associated with the conventional global finance industry are disallowed. That doesn't mean that Islamic law eschews involvement in finance, raising speculative capital, or realising returns on investments. Instead Islamic finance treats ventures as joint endeavours or partnerships. For example, if you need to raise money to buy a house, you and the bank become joint partners in a contract to buy the house; you both contribute funds while you agree to pay the banks share plus a pre-agreed fee, not interest. A consequence is that it impossible to collatorise these kinds of joint-endeavour contacts. One line of thinking suggests that Sharia or Halal finance could be used as a principle based remedy to avoid collapses in financial markets like the sub-prime lending crisis that spread from the US in 2008.

In conclusion, Crowdsourcing is built on the ideas of community, of shared interests that capitalises on the potential of social network services to enable nascent communities to coalesce and persist in spite of the spatial-temporal isolation of the individuals who join them.

Contradictions in the High Tech Economy...

Observations from the recent article in The Register (www.theregister.co.uk)
Regarding the recent Corporate IT Forum Report, stating that:

"a quarter of businesses believe the biggest bar to developing future IT leaders is “too few opportunities to gain experience due to outsourcing to other economies”. A larger proportion, 27 per cent, said outsourcing to other economies needs to be tackled to address the skills gap, while a third say it's the university courses that need to change to plug that gap."

yet...

"17 per cent of university-leavers were unable to find jobs in 2011. This is a market in which the demand for qualified IT staff has increased by 23 per cent since 2010, and bosses at 59 per cent of ICT-dependent businesses said their firms are experiencing an IT skills shortage."

Why?

"...57 per cent of companies complained of a shortfall in technical abilities, while 26 per cent said it’s business skills that jobseekers are lacking. Executives are struggling to fill the following roles: enterprise architects, product-specific jobs, solutions architects, application development and security."

Humour: Outsourcing a core business process...

The risks of outsourcing a core business process.

(humour): Impact of BPO

Seriously though, if the organisation hasn't solved it's internal business processes how can it expect the outsourced business process to be any better when serviced from a remote location or automation?

Crowdsourcing news

The incredibly successful Pebble project organised through Kickstarter has reached two important milestones! Shipping the physical units and getting the complementary Apps into the Apple App Store and Google Play. (link).

In other news, consider the implications for new kinds of user generated data in services such as ESRI's Health Information Map (link).

And Crowdsourcing.org is currently running an industry survey of the crowdfunding phenomenon (link).

Exercise: What is Crowdsourcing?

Goal
Come up with a working definition of crowdsourcing.

Comments
Can be run in groups or as class exercise with someone writing up definitions and examples on blackboard. There are no wrong answers, just build up a list, tabulate and provide back to the class

Instructions
1. Ask members of the class to brainstorm the meaning of crowdsourcing. (3 minutes)
2. Write down and display this list of definitions and examples.

Definitions
Quotes below from (Howe, 2008).

"Crowdsourcing isn't a single strategy. It's an umbrella term for a highly varied group of approaches that share one obvious attribute in common: they all depend on some contribution from the crowd."

"A community that forms around a shared interest, shared passion, hobby, craft"
"When a company takes something that was once performed by employees and outsources in the form of an open call to a large group of undefined group of people, generally using the internet"

"Crowdsourcing is Wikipedia with 'everything'"

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Examples
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References:

• Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business.
• Crowd-sourced gamers advance AIDS research (link) By Ben Coxworth, 16:45 September 20, 2011