Summary
In Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workspace, the authors address the issue of communication problems between members of a distributed team. When team members may work at other companies, or other locations for the same company, it is often hard to form of visual image of who you are talking to, and keep time zones, etiquette, contact information, and calendars all in your head. Existing systems to look up directory information only allow for the viewing of one directory entry at a time, and so you cannot look at your whole team at once. It is also impossible to find the team's structure from this information. Team Analytics is an online web application that allows all members of a distributed team, no matter what location, to connect and view information about the team. The application has a few important parts:
- A picture gallery of all team members, so each member can know who they are talking to.
- An organization chart that shows visually the relationships between each of the members. This information can help a member determine what the communication style is within the group, whether formal or informal.
- An attribute pie chart that shows the relative numbers of people in each division within a group.
- A "timezone pain" chart that shows the location of each person in the group, and what times are good times to call another group member based on the current time in their location.
- A "bizcard" section, which shows more personal information about each member, along with contact information and their picture.
After doing user studies with the product, which was tested in a large global corporation, users said it really helped them visualize who they were speaking to. It helped them coordinate conference calls between members in different countries, and the addition of the pictures allowed group members to keep track of each person they are talking to. In all, the program was a success.
Discussion
I thought this seemed like a pretty good program that hopefully will be on the web soon for companies to use. I know that I have a visual memory, and I remember faces very well. If I had to be in constant contact with many group members overseas, I would have a hard time telling all the voices apart. Having the pictures and the information about each person would definitely hep me form mental pictures of each member, and so this would help me out a lot! And the timezone feature is really important. I had never thought about how hard it would be to have a conference call between members in many different countries without one person being on the phone when they're usually asleep! Hopefully this tool would help them coordinate the call so everyone does it at a comfortable time.
I too have a good memory with faces, but not so much with voices and names. I think this would also benefit universities, and possibly even some high schools with their group projects. I think it could become something very useful for all majors, and in the business world it will be something that many people may depend on to have a good team experience with ad-hoc teams.
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