Digital Strategy, Design and Development
Digital Strategy, Design and Development
BBC Radio 4’s In Business (7 February) considered the “mysteries of teamwork”, with a strong emphasis on the social structure of teams within the workplace. It also considered how individuals can be competitive, in terms of personal progression and also collaborative. Professor Gratton at The London Business School looked at how often the best innovative teams are drawn from across the world and are highly diverse giving the example of Nokia’s success in China.
The program went on to look at the Nokia example in more depth and then considered how the Oxford Boat crews use teamwork successfully in a complex situation whereby individuals will be involved intense personal competition before being selected.
So if organisations and businesses need to bring talent together from across the world, how can it be managed? Many of the tools for doing this are already established and are highly cost-effective. Blogging for example allows a focused document to rapidly produced and distributed and then commented on. Blogs are often seen as public facing but they can be set-up to be private and located only on company Intranets. They can then be viewed throughout the whole world but privately. Another collaborative tool is the Wiki, which allows collaborative editing of documents. The most famous use of the Wiki is Wikipedia. In terms of virtual teams the world wide unpaid team that creates this encyclopedia is possibly one the largest and most loosely managed but highly effective. Wikipedia demonstrates the power of bring together people with a common interest, which can be a strong motivation itself.
Discussions Forum’s are another tool that demonstrate the motivating power of shared interest and Web 2.0 technologies. There are forums on everything, often with detailed advice and comment and so often for free. For example Digital Spy forums offers comments and opinions on a whole raft of issues relating to modern Television broadcasting. There is a high potential of the Discussion Forum for virtual teams to quickly discuss is synchronous and asynchronous time.
Then there are the social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. Many businesses dismiss these as distractions but within these tools are often complex networks that have marketing and communication potential. Even for businesses that decide that established Social Networks have no place in their workflow they can still have many of the benefits of them within their own Intranet by using tools such as Elgg, which is open source.
From a hardware perspective Virtual Teams no longer need be tied to desktop computers or large bulky laptops. Modern Ultra Mobile Personal Computers (UMPCs) and sophiscated mobile phones mean that voice communications, web and email contact are constantly available through unobstruive easy to carry hardware.
So for organistions looking to start making the most Virtual Teams there are a range of options to support their work on the Internet. Many are open source and quick to start working with. Of course 3 Sheep are here to help any organisations get started and consider their options please use the contact form to get in touch.
