Knowledge Base

“Paper is here to stay”. Are you curious to know why? And do you want to know what lessons can be learned from the use of paper - for example, to improve digital systems for document management? In this presentation, Olha Bondarenko (currently working as a Productivity Professional at Philips) summarizes the results of seven years of research into this subject, carried out at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Océ, and Novay.

Cross-posted from Mathemagenic

With the holidays I somewhat took a break from blogging on our work on the distributed Agile case, but there are still quite a few things there that I wanted to share to hear what do you think. This one is a bit scary since I picked up some ideas from linguistics without having a proper reading of the work behind it, but at times this is the price to pay* for sitting between research and practice.

So, the picture on the right is a simplified version of the work of Herbert H. Clark:

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this “common ground” from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. [This is from a back of Clark's book "Arenas of language use"]

In my terms: communication is enabled by the common ground between the participants and, in turn, contributes to building more common ground over time. Taking it a bit further, it is useful to distinguish between two components of the common ground:

• information that the participants share (not necessarily explicitly, as it is often assumed that others know about X because of shared cultural, educational or work background) – I talk about shared knowledge and awareness of the bigger picture here
• relationships between the participants – knowledge about each other and trust

Now to the distributed Agile teams. At a starting point there is a big distance between the team members:

• different locations that make it difficult to rely on team-building and ad-hoc interaction that naturally happens in a co-located team;
• time differences that in some cases provide only a small window of opportunity for interactions;
• different cultures, organisations and levels of technical expertise create difficulties of getting a team “on one page” needed for seamless work.

Distance between team members across different locations creates a vicious circle:

• lack of common ground, the need for using technology and addressing time issues make communication challenging
• challenges in communication make it difficult to overcome initial differences between teams, to build relationships and shared understanding of the bigger picture behind work

This picture is not that far from what you can learn by reading about the challenges of distributed Agile and solutions to address them, but hopefully it can help to address the problems in a more systematic way: spending time on establishing shared understanding and relationships in the team (especially in the beginning) and finding ways to shape communication processes and tools that not only allow to get things done, but also contribute to growing awareness and relationships over time.

My personal “hobby horse” is around the last point. From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

* The ideas behind this post are grounded in insights coming from research on computer-mediated communication and distributed teams, but I need more time to read papers and to integrate research ideas in a systematic way. Hope to blog about it soon.

Zoals aangekondigd in een eerdere blogpost hebben we dit jaar een korte reeks experimenten met sociale media uitgevoerd bij de afdeling Projective van Rabobank  Nederland. Het doel van de experimenten was om te leren in hoeverre sociale media een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan verbondenheid en kennisdelen in een afdeling van verspreid werkende project management professionals. De sociale media die voor dit doel zijn geselecteerd en gebruikt zijn Twitter, Sharepoint discussiefora, en een Buddyspotter variant (Hi WaarZitWie).

Onderstaande presentatie vat de aanleiding, uitvoering, en geleerde lessen van de experimenten samen. Enkele interessante uitkomsten zijn:

• sociale media versterken de informele kant van een organisatie;
• sociale media faciliteren het leggen van contact en het elkaar weten te vinden (oftewel het versterken en verrijken van je netwerk);
• sociale media versnellen het op zoek gaan naar informatie ten opzichte van het omslachtige via-via doorverwezen worden naar anderen.

Twitter en discussiefora blijken complementaire meerwaarde te bieden voor kennisdelen. Twitter is georiënteerd  op personen; het faciliteert daardoor het leggen van contact en het versterkt de onderlinge verbondenheid. Discussiefora zijn daarentegen georiënteerd  op onderwerpen, ze faciliteren het elkaar informeren en het terugvinden van informatie over een specifiek onderwerp. Een hechte en gebruiksvriendelijke integratie van Twitter en discussiefora, zoals deze bijvoorbeeld in Yammer te vinden is, lijkt daarom voor het bevorderen van verbondenheid en kennisdelen een zeer geschikte optie.

Cross-posted from Mathemagenic

As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams. One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else. I drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is.

You can look at communication in a team across two axes. The first one (horizontal) is about what triggers it. I find it useful to distinguish between goal-oriented and opportunity-driven communication:

• Goal-oriented communication is about work-related problem solving and coordination. It’s the task at hand that forces you to approach others to sort out things with them. This is the case where you wouldn’t hesitate to plan a meeting, send an email or pick up the phone to call.
• Opportunity-driven communication is about things not 100% necessary, but potentially useful, or, even, not very useful, but just said at the moment (“good morning everyone!”). Think of the cases where you wonder if your email is ’spamming’, add “by the way, do you also know…” or most of the conversations at the coffee corner. In this case communication is triggered by an opportunity – bumping into people, interesting things happening, ideas floating by or just an awkward silence that forces you to look for a topic to continue. This type of communication is piggybacking on something else: either happening around goal-oriented communication (e.g. side conversations at a meeting), other activities (having a coffee together) or observing others (e.g. seeing a colleague and remembering to ask them about something).

Vertical axis is about the ‘pre-arrangeness’ of communication (I’m not sure with the terms here, so any suggestions are welcome):

• Structured communication is expected and, to an extend, formalised. Planned meetings, promised memos and status reports are here. In this case there is time, space and resources needed to communicate (or, at least, nobody questions that they should be there).
• Informal communication is about everything else. It’s also expected, but in a more fuzzy sense (“let me know if there is a problem”). It’s not likely to be known in advance when and how it will happen, so it’s more difficult to allocate the resources for it.

In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg . There are enough triggers for an opportunity-based communication and being in front of someone makes negotiating about time, space and channels for informal communication easy (you rather make a minute to talk about the thing, say “no” or make an arrangement about communicating later on).

In a distributed team communication shrinks to the basics (egg yellow . From one side, when there is no “easyness” of face-to-face settings, we are likely to rely on structured communication, since negotiating time and resources for informal communication is more challenging (e.g. email might be not read for a while, phone is interruptive and costly, etc.). Informal communication is still happens, especially in the goal-oriented space, but the chances for it are lower, because it’s extra taxing (e.g. questions that would be asked in a meeting may not get get asked in email or IM chat). For opportunity-driven communication it’s even worse: lack of shared physical space results in far less triggers that might turn into a conversation: there are not many non-essential activities (no drinking coffee online , it’s more difficult to observe others and even goal-oriented communication mediated by technology tends to be more “on topic” (from my experience “social talk” at a face-to-face meeting happens much easier than in a phone conference or email exchange).

There are quite a few more things to add here (in particularly about the negative effects of shrunken communication and ways to extend it), but nobody likes very long blogposts

The bias storm is a method we apply at the start of collaboration, when the people who have to collaborate come from different backgrounds, cultures or organizations. The method aims to get prejudices they might have about the other in the open. Talking about these prejudices helps to understand the other and clears the road for fruitful future collaboration.

How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti

Within Future Workspaces, Jennifer Curtis conducted a study of mobile workers in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Professional Doctorate in Engineering in the area of User-System Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology. Her findings are summarized in this post. The complete project report can be found here, and corresponding presentation here.

The two main goals of Jennifer’s project were to: (1) Identify the consequences and challenges of mobile work – particularly with respect one’s ability to stay up-to-date (i.e., in sync) and connected (i.e., in touch) with his or her distant colleagues; and, (2) come up with potential design solutions to address these challenges.

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Steven Haveman, Industrial Design Student at the University of Twente completed his master’s graduation assignment within FWS on a study towards new ways of working for system architects. This post is a roundup of the results obtained in this research project. It shows the general findings and the findings regarding the concepts that were developed.

Steven’s research project has been a study towards new ways of working for system architects. System architects are responsible for the architecture of complex systems, like printers, MRI-scanners or radar systems. A series of interviews has been conducted with system architects at Océ, Philips and Thales to discuss concepts and obtain insights. This resulted in Project Buzz Tracker, a tool that couples activity information to project and workflow planning. Persons frequently give an update on their actions, thus showing the Buzz in a project. By observing this overview, the system architect can see concentrations or a lack of Buzz. These can be indications of problematic issues. Project Buzz Tracker will further strengthen team cohesion, especially if distant workers are involved.
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We are proud to present the Future Workspaces booklet series!

The booklets illustrate insights, best practices, and lessons learned during two years of research, concept development, case studies, and special interest sessions with experts and industry. We plan to regularly update the series with new booklets.

Currently, the series contains the following four titles:

• Connecting professionals: How to stimulate corporate conversations through social media by Robert Slagter
• Lab: New tools for new ways of working by Geke Ludden
• Generations@work: Embracing young talent by Ellen Szwajcer
• Four challenges for knowledge workers: Effects of working anytime, anywhere by Ruud Janssen

We hope you like the booklets and we welcome any feedback.

Exactly two months ago our expertise group started an experiment with Twitter to see how it could facilitate knowledge sharing in between the monthly group meetings, and to see how it could improve social cohesion in the group.

Some characteristics of the expertise group

• 14 researchers with a shared interest in how ICT affects work, life, and society;
• they are working in the same research institute, but located over various parts of the building;
• they frequently work elsewhere, for instance during client visits, workshops, conferences;
• they are all working on several different projects at a time;
• they are well acquainted with one another, though not co-working on a daily basis;
• they share a feeling that cohesion and knowledge sharing in the group could be improved. 

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Future Workspaces applies a Living Lab approach in its pilots. This means that, in contrast to traditional research approaches, the experiments are performed at the customer site: employees do not have to come to a lab to experiment with new technologies, the experiment takes place in their normal work setting and as part of their normal work activities. This way, a Living Lab becomes a co-creation environment for human-centric research and innovation. (more…)