Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of different ways to collaborate with your project team and as a project manager, it’s important to know which ones are able to provide the type of collaboration you want your team to be involved in. There are a lot of options and they are listed below. These different options enable your team to do different things.

Group Communication – interaction between 3 or more people. Usually small groups are from 3-20 people and large groups could contain as many as 3,000 people.

Private Social Networking Platforms – Social networking platforms are popular these days and enable a group of people to act as a community online. Private platforms enable groups to do this without anybody else having access to their information.

Document Sharing – Creating and sharing work online and being able to access these documents elsewhere and enabling others to access the same documents either to view or also to modify.

File Sharing –  The same thing as document sharing but with files.

Workgrouping and Team Collaboration Workspace – A virtual workspace that’s online and enables team members to work together as a group. It’s basically a workgroup collaborative environment.

Web Presenting – Presentations that are placed online and watched by people elsewhere. This is using technology to deliver your presentation, powerpoint or other types of visual presentation to your audience that’s internet-based.

Whiteboarding – When you place files on a whiteboard that’s online. This usually refers to an online white board and is to be used the same way as a traditional white board.

Co-Browsing – The same thing as web-browsing but you are doing it with other people too not just yourself. Usually this occurs when two or more people access the same website at once.

Large-Audience Webinars (100+) – Webinars are web conferencing that enables live meetings, trainings, and presentations via the internet. When this occurs, people receiving training and so forth are at the computer and the presenter is presenting via the internet.  These softwares enable you to present to more than 100 people at once.

Clearly there are many other ways you could collaborate with your team online and they are the following:

Virtual 3-D Immersive Collaboration, Web-conferencing, Screen-Sharing, VoIP – Audio Conferencing, Instant Messenging, Video Conferencing, Chat, Event-Scheduling, Project Management, Collaborative Writing, Collaborative Visual Reviewing, and Mind Mapping and Diagramming

While these are other ways to interact with others online, there are limitless ways to communicate with your peers at work, it’s up to you to find the best way to work with others and figure out the most useful way to complete a project.

For a list of options for each of these different Collaborative tools online go to Best Online Collaboration Tools.

Look, Run, Manage, Feedback, and Build

Ok so I don’t know what the name of this game is but basically the positions of the game have been summed up to 5 words.

Look, Run, Manage, Feedback, and Build.

We have five positions for this game and they are to create a lego structure that is identical to what they see but the trick is there are five people to do this activity:

The Looker –  The looker will look behind a divider and see the structure that is complete and is only allowed to talk to the runner.

The Runner –  The runner is the person that will communicate with both the Looker and the Builder. He is to share information between the looker and the builder but is not allowed to see what the Looker is looking at or what the Builder is building.

The Manager – The manager is the person who will determine if there is communication issues and will discuss strategy and methods with everybody both, before and during the activity. If they need to stop and get together and discuss their methods, the Manager is the one that determines that.

The Feedbacker – The feedbacker can see both the structure already built and the structure that is being built. The only 2 things they can say is, “That’s right” or “That’s wrong”

The first team to construct the structure is the winner.

I’d like to give credit to Sara Cegelski for this activity!

and The Builder.

Introduction to Thiagi Method

Thiagi method is focused on “after the fact” when you have done a case, event, or even activity.

“Learning is reinforced through after-case debrief. Show how two or more experts analyzed the case.” (Thiagi on Twitter)

I have been recently introduced to the Thiagi method for debriefing. When we are debriefing, it’s a way for people to re-cap on what they have recently done, how they feel, what it has to do with anything, and how to apply it to their lives in the future. The activity I did that led me to learning about this method was a communication activity.

The activity was incredible and I’d highly recommend it to anybody that wants to emphasize teamwork and communication.

I’ll include a description of the activity in my next post, look for it!

Thiagi method is used by facilitators to ensure that the activity they just had the group do doesn’t go to waste. The reason why this method is recommended is because when we are re-capping, we are able to sit down, take a breath and review what has just happend. It may not be rocket science but it’s still something that not everybody thinks to do. The method is more focused on the strategy of asking questions.

Part of facilitating a meeting, we need to be sure that things that have been mentioned and done are put to good use for the people that are there learning or experiencing the training that is being provided. If you want to strengthen your training for people, doing something along these lines would be one of the best ways to make it memorable. It’s not so much what answers you get but how you ask the questions and in what order.

If somebody asked you at the very beginning, how do you feel, that’s the first thing to do because when you are fresh out of the activity, there’s a chance you might be angry about something and getting that out of the way is very important so you can focus on the big picture and re-structure yourself for the rest of the discussion. Discussing your anger may be the only way to get things out but then you’ll be able to calm down and enjoy the rest of the discussion, especially if everything is to be taken lightly.

Obviously we get competitive and if we lose, nobody is going to be happy about that but then again, is it really the purpose of the event to win or is the purpose to learn something and learn about yourselves during an activity? Training is not winning, it is learning. Expression of feelings enables you to remind yourselves of that and re-focus.

What Thiagi method really focuses on is the idea that open-ended questions are important and imperative in enabling people. “The use of closed questions conveys a strong impression that players are incapable of producing or recognizing creative responses to open-ended questions.” Thiagi

Knowledge is Power

When we are learning about what we want to learn for the possibility of owning a business, one of the most amazing things we can do for ourselves is to learn from other peoples mistakes. When researching what type of business plan we want to do, we need to be also looking at business plans that failed. I wonder how easy that is but then again, how hard is it to find information on the internet these days?

Go and look for information on what specific business you want to run, figure out what is working for everybody else and then figure out why companies failed. There are several things that are pretty obvious.

1. Not enough start-up capital. Sometimes when we are starting a business, we don’t have a lot of money to start up but we do need to be sure we have enough to live off. After all we are supposed to be sleeping, eating, breathing our new business for the first year maybe two. The best best would be to have 2 years worth of savings for you to live off so you can focus on your business. People suggest six months worth but I’d say  2 years would be best. You are not paying yourself until you make a profit.

2.  Overconfident with one idea. Sometimes when we go into something and we decide being stubborn about our idea of how to run the business is the best way to go, that’ll probably drive us into the ground. Not having a full understanding and full comprehension of what we are supposed to know before setting up a business is not uncommon but learn as you go.

3. Not picking a good partner. There are times where we pick somebody we think would be amazing for what we are doing but then afterwards, we realize that the person is nothing like we thought they would be. It’s importan to get to know your business partner before getting into anything. If you’re lucky, the farthest you guys went was spent a few hundred dollars on incorporating and taxes before you realized that the person doesn’t have the same vision as you do. Not fun but also important to catch before big decisions are made.

Those three are general reasons why small businesses fail but there are thousands of reasons. You just need to go out there and figure it out!

Understanding Cultures

When getting ready to go to work, we are constantly trying to understand what we are getting into especially since we are working for a company and the company has their own culture however lets look at something even harder.

Suppose you were an international project manager. Not only do you have to understand your own company’s culture but you also have to undersand the culture of the place you are going or where the project is to be taking place. Not only that but if people from all over the world are coming to work with you, you’d need to be able to understand their individual cultures in order to avoid misunderstandings and unnecessary conflict.

When we are getting into something as confusing as that, we need to sit down and figure out our game plan. Are we going to understand everything from each and every culture, no, but we need to have a basic understanding of common curtesy and norms. One example would be going to another country and desks are messy everywhere but back home, it’s considered unorganized and you’d naturally assume the person is not getting anything done.

Clearly in that case, you need to be sure that you are not taking that the wrong way. We as people need to understand that no 2 people are alike and if we were to come across somebody that had those type of desk habits, we’d need to be able to adopt an understanding that it’s part of their culture and vice versa. Nobody is to be expected to change overnight to fit a single culture.

The respect that we practice enabling people to continue to be comfortable, as they have traveled abroad to work with you and are in unfamiliar territory, is something we’d expect in return if we were in their shoes. It’s always wise to practice the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated. If you do that, you’ll go a long way in the business world! This is true, especially with the understanding that you take the time to study individual cultures and their practices.

Type of Learners

When writing a presentation or talking to a group of people, we often think about what we want to hear and how we want to present it but then again we are forgetting something important. These people are here to learn something. Not everybody is there voluntarily of course but you want to make it easy enough on them that they’ll learn something and stay in the room while you are teaching them.

There are three types of learners (a 4th one has been recently recognized as reading/writing) which include visual, auditorial and kinesthetic learners. Generally we are all of the above but for arguments sake, people have preferred learning methods.

Auditorial learners are people that enjoy to learn things from tapes, listen to talking, auditory methods including discussions and speakers. People that read/write learn through reading things, and writing things down. Visual learners learn from pictures, diagrams, graphs, and illustrations. Kinesthetic learners learn through motions, touching, and feeling. We usually expect that we have a dominate way of learning however 60 percent of the population actually have a multimodal (VARK) learning preference.

A great website to go to for more information would be www.vark-learning.com They have questionnaires, sheets, products, and information on VARK (Visual, auditorial, reading/writing, and kinesthetic)

Ok so we have the 4 learning types so lets say we want to incorporate these learning skills into our presentation or training session. It’d be fairly easy for you to do that because generally we think to have a visually appealing presentation, something with words and clearly you’ll say the words to the audience and then we’d usually have dialogue or group discussion. You’ve already covered all four. To make it even clearer, you decide to have a ball that you have passed around the room as people speak so people know whose talking and when.

It’s important to appeal to peoples’ learning skills so that the presentation was not a total waste but then again group dynamics is important but that’s another post!