Formal Collaboration with Distributed Teams

The most common method of formal collaboration is through a scheduled meeting. Have you ever been the only person to call in to a meeting, where everyone else is physically in the room, and everyone (including you) forgets that you are even on the phone? Even when you have something to contribute, good luck getting anyone to hear you. Next time you have a scheduled meeting, especially if one or more of your participants will be remote, try to incorporate one or more collaborative tools. Since you have to schedule your meeting in advance, you usually have time to do a little set-up. That gives you a lot of options in your choice for collaborative tools for your meeting. Some examples of tools and practices are explained here.

Group Scheduling

The first collaborative thing to do for your scheduled meeting is to use a collaborative tool to schedule it! I hate the ~17 emails that sometimes happens when someone sends a note out to all of the attendees asking when is a good time to meet (e.g., "I'm open Thurs pm and Fri am;" "I'm open Fri 11-1, but not on Thursday," etc.) Just schedule it for Tuesday at 3pm and be done with it! Get everyone to use a group calendar (and keep it up to date). Here is a sample using our group calendar:

Using the group calendar, you can look for an open time, as shown above. Just add all participants, and look for the opening. Once you find it, you can add it to everyone's calendar automatically, as well (once they accept it). Some group calendar applications can automatically go out and find the next open spot in each person's schedules. Not only is everyone saved the aggravation and rapidly filling Inbox of the back-and-forth emails, they also get the meeting itself, with all its details, added right into their schedule. In addition, you can make changes and additions to it (e.g., dial-in number, agenda), and everyone will always see the current information.

Meeting Collaboration Suite

Once you have your meeting scheduled, you need to decide which collaboration application you are going to use. Some good choices are Vyew (below) and WebEx. Our team likes to use video (more on that later), so we usually use an application with the following features (some applications have even more features than those listed below, but these are the ones we use all the time): 

* upload of documents

* list of attendees (who is currently in the room/ meeting)

* in-room chat, separate from our usual IM-based chat

* video (webcam displays from all participants)

* shared whiteboard

* ability to add comments, highlights, etc., to uploaded documents

* asynchronous support, to allow comments prior to the meeting, as well as for the session to "live on" from meeting to meeting

However, because audio support in web-based applications can be spotty, our team still tends to open a bridge line to handle the audio. I expect that audio capabilities will continue to improve, so we will keep trying to use the integrated audio features. It does seem that, as you add more people (more than three), the audio can degrade too much. 

We use this application even if we are all in the same room, and of course it is perfect for a distributed team.

Video Only

If for some reason, we don't need the document collaboration features, we may decide to meet with just audio and video.

If it's a small group (four or fewer), and they all have Macs, we can meet using iChat and our IM server (below) , and we will use the built-in audio. We also get some nice additional features like desktop and document sharing:

If it's for a bigger group, we'll use something like MegaMeeting (below) or MeBeam, but we still usually need to open a bridge line to handle the audio:

High-Definition Video

We have high-definition video systems available for some of our locations. If you are going to hold a meeting where the remote people have access to an HD video system, use that! The quality of both video and audio are just excellent, and people both in the room, and out of it, are full participants in the meeting. This probably has a maximum of 4–5 locations, as otherwise the images just get really small.

In addition to the video connection methods listed above, you can still use a collaborative suite to handle your document collaboration. Also, we are currently experimenting with using a meeting room in a virtual world (Second Life),with either the built-in audio support, or a bridge line. Although not as rich as high-definition video, it can support an almost unlimited number of locations, as each virtual person in the "room" can be connecting in from a separate location. More on this as we work with it more, but here is a screenshot of a meeting we held recently in our virtual meeting room:

Preparation

When you are planning a meeting, think about some good ways to use collaborative technologies, and make sure you have enabled all of your attendees to fully participate in your meeting. After all, isn't that why you invited them?

Posted via email from dianaf's posterous