Working with Global Teams: Not all in the same room

This is part of the Working with Global Teams series

Previous Post: Working with Global Teams: Pesky Time Zones Revisited

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A friend of mine,Shoaib Ahmed, has an excellent blog on Agile, and Project Management. 

He’s based in New Zealand, and as New Zealand is literally so far away from “the rest of the world” (said with a cheeky wink), he has a pretty good idea of some of the challenges that are met when working in a globally dispersed group.

Shoaib’s latest post goes into this in more detail. He mentions things such as time difference, culture, and reporting lines. Click here to read what he says.

Related posts:

• How do I manage a distributed team? (Shoaib’s original post)
• Cultural Dimensions – How people from different countries and cultures are…different
• Working with Global Teams: Date Formats
• Working with Global Teams: Pesky Time Zones
• Working with Global Teams: Pesky Time Zones – Revisited
• Working with Global Teams: e-mail confirmation

 

Related articles

• 8 Tips for Teaming Across Time Zones (openforum.com)

Agile & Prince2 – do they work together in a crisis?

Shoaib Ahmed has just written a post about Prince2 and Agile.

In it he describes how he uses Prince2 as the project management methodology with Agile practices to deliver each part of the project.

Shoaib lives in New Zealand, and is working with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (the agency established to coordinate the recovery effort following the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011).

Can the two (Prince2 and Agile) be used to deliver a project in a time of crisis?

Read his post here.

 

 

Relationships in social media

Seth Godin was asked about the value of social media in business.

In response to this Seth discussed the “value” of having so many “friends” on Facebook, or “followers” on Twitter.

He goes on to say question whether these people would go out of their way to help you. One interesting example he gives is that he knows people in NZ that, if he needed it, would give him a place to stay. He’s never met these people, but a strong relationship has been built up online because they have helped each other at some stage. They have taken the time to do something for the other.

Seth’s comment really resonate with my thoughts on relationships in Social Media. I don’t want to have hundreds of “Friends”, or thousands of “Followers”. I don’t want to be a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker).

I want to have a solid connection with someone that is based on more than just the effort it takes to click on a button.

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Seth Godin On Social Networking, posted with vodpod

The public-sector digital landfill

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve just read an article in the May edition of the NZ CIO magazine.

The article describes a problem where 74% of the local public sector organisations admitted to holding some digital information they can no longer access”. This is incredible!

This means that out of every 100 pieces of digital information that they are holding, they can only use 26 of them! Why? Because they do not have a defined method for retaining and storing their digital information.

Archives New Zealand (a government organisation that is the “official guardian of New Zealand’s public archives) have been tasked with creating a digital continuity strategy. This will ensure that valuable information is preserved and migrated when necessary to the latest formats and media, appropriate metadata is attached, and documents that are no longer relevant are securely deleted.

Wow – that is precisely the way that they can improve the “findability” of digital information. Metadata that describes the information (whether it be film, document, etc) is essential.’

However, further to that, there are a couple of other very important things to take into consideration. One is the “vocabulary”. Do all departments/organisations speak the same language? All the various departments involved need to ensure that they use a common vocabulary when describing something. Otherwise, there will still be a very large documents that are “unable to be accessed”.

Another thing that is very important is “buy in”. With many different departments, it is important that they all agree to the above-mentioned strategies. Having only 2 out of every 10 organisations following the new strategy means that there is still a lot of information that can’t be found.

Fortunately Archives NZ has addressed these extra points of consideration. They have drawn up a Digital Continuity Action Plan. The focus of the plan in the first year is to raise awareness and understanding of the problem. Excellent! Communication and awareness are critical for success.

Part of this communication process will involve “refining the language used”. This will be done by looking at which words are used by CIOs, technology managers, record keepers and so on.

I am very keen to see how this initiative transpires. I’ll be watching with interest, and if I see anything of note, I will let you know.

SharePoint 2010 Unveiled

Yesterday I drove from Rotorua to Auckland (in New Zealand) to attend an event – “SharePoint 2010 Unveiled“. This was held by a company called Intergen.

Intergen are a Microsoft Gold Partner who provide information technology solutions based exclusively on Microsoft’s tools and technologies. They are also are a SharePoint Elite Partner - one of a handful of companies in New Zealand that are the best of the best when it comes to SharePoint implementations.

The event was held at the Microsoft building, and was introduced by Steve Letford, a SharePoint Specialist at Microsoft. He gave a brief rundown of the history of SharePoint and highlighted the changes between each version that came out.

Then Toby Spendiff, a Practice Lead, at Intergen took up the banner, and used the 5 top questions that the people attending the event had about SharePoint 2010, as a way of introducing some of the new cool features about the latest version of SharePoint.

The areas that Toby covered were:

• Social Networking tools – SharePoint 2010 now includes better Web 2.0 features.
• Governance & Control – workflows, records management & smart metadata.
• Sandbox Solutions
• Heath Monitoring – better ways to monitor the health/performnce of the SharePoint system.
• Business Intelligence
• Document Management
• Search Improvements.

These new features have all been covered in-depth by other bloggers so I won’t repeat it here.

All in all, SharePoint 2010 is looking like a good product. I see a lot of “new” functionality in 2010 that you used to only get in some of the “big boy” document management systems (Documentum, FileNet, etc).

I will be watch SharePoint 2010 closely to see how it fits into some real-life situations. (Especially in the Pharma world).