Learning Collaboration at BIMTECH

Learning Collaboration at BIMTECH: Collaboration Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Reuben) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 04:35:00 +0000

Learning Collaboration at BIMTECH: Collaboration Technologies: Ninth Class: IBM - Google - Microsoft Collaboration Platforms IBM, Microsoft and Google are three major players in the field of Coll...

Collaboration Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Reuben) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 04:33:00 +0000

Ninth Class: IBM - Google - Microsoft Collaboration Platforms

IBM, Microsoft and Google are three major players in the field of Collaboration Technologies. They offer complete end-to-end collaboration technology solutions. Each company has a very different history and market strengths. While studying the subject of collaboration Technologies, the comparison of these 3 companies and their products/solutions provides some very interesting perspectives.

IBM is more than 100 years old Technology leader and even today the largest technology company in the world (more than US$100 billion in revenue). It dominates Hardware, Software as well as Services business. IBM pioneered collaboration by connecting computers to computers by dedicated connections. Thereafter the technologies have grown exponentially and IBM has kept pace with the technology and offered products at each level of technology growth. Lotus Notes is main collaboration product but there is a complete suit of products that integrates with each another.

Microsoft had identified the power of collaboration and the role of PC technology. A book by Bill Gates, titled "Business at speed of thought", describes Microsoft's vision of DNS (Digital Nervous System). Microsoft entered PC world with it's single user PC Operating system but soon moved on to offering multi user operating systems and all related administrative and management tools. Microsoft Ofice, MSProject and various other products are now available in multi user versions enabling collaboration. Share Point is a product that enables integration all other Microsoft products to enable collaboration and integration of all products from Microsoft.

Google is the most recent entrant among all these three giants. Google has acquired it's leadership role in Internet world. Cloud based, email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, Calendars alkong with a host of web2.0 and open sourse applications have creatde huge market niche .

Eleventh Class: Team Collaboration Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:07:00 +0000

Prof Eugene Rueben will discuss the technologies available for collaboration between virtual team members. Skype became known for it's VoIP solutions, providing long distance telephone services over the Internet. Webex was introduced as a tool to organize Conference meetings for team members who are separated at long distances. Teamviewer is a product to help share screens and provide remote control of desktop.

As these products have matured they provide more functionality and overlap their offerings.

Ninth Class: IBM - Google - Microsoft Collaboration Platforms

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Course Assessment

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:47:00 +0000

The Collaboration Technology course offered to 1st trimester students is primarily a Practical Laboratory course. The learning objective is to help students gain hands on practical knowledge of using modern collaboration technology tools for execution of a real collaborative project.

Therefore, we will measure the students success in execution of such a project than measuring the theoretical understanding of the subject. How did you execute each step of the project execution and what is the quality of all deliverables produced in this project?

You will be provided quality standards. You will be expected to execute all your tasks to meet these standards. The quality will be measured primarily on 3 parameters - OnTime Delivery, Quality of Content and Quality of Presentation.

OnTime Delivery: Each task to be performed has a deadline associated. Any task completed on or before the deadline will get full 10 marks. Task completed after the deadline will loose 2 marks for each day of delay. Any task completed 6 or more days late will get zero marks.

Quality of Content: This will be based on joint recommendation of Teaching Assistants and Quality Analysts. What is expected in the content will be explained in class, lab sessions and you can always approach TAs and QAs for any clarification required.

Quality of Presentation: How you present your findings is equally important. The method of assessment will be same as Quality of Content.
The proposed final students grades will be based on the following criteria:

40% for the internal assessment at each stage of the project execution
60% for the final assessment of the quality of the book chapter you produce at the end of the project
The course will not have OLT as well as final examination.

Fifth Lab: Starting with the specialized team tasks

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:08:00 +0000

During last few weeks, you all have been doing same or similar tasks. Learning technologies, team assessment, Team Research etc. etc. But the real power of collaboration comes from each person doing some specialized tasks. Each team member specializes in one type of task and when we work together our joint efforts can produce much higher quality outcomes.

To start with in the Fifth Lab, each team is expected to come prepared with finalized Chapter Outline and assignment of one team member for each section of the outline. Team leaders should submit the online form for Chapter Outline well before arriving at the Lab session.

Assignment #16
Each team member will now create content for the section of the chapter that is allocated to him/her. Upto about 2 pages of content by each team member is quite adequate. You will get 45 minutes in the Lab to write these 2 pages of draft material for the section allocated to you. You should create a word document in your team's shared document folder. Your document should be shared with all your team members, so that they can review and make the necessary modifications to improve quality of your initial draft. This editing and refining these documents can continue through the week at your free time and place. Team Leader should decide if the document is ready to pass on to Author.

Assignment #17 for Authors
After all the section draft documents are received by Author, the control of the shared document is transfered to the "Author" in the team. The Author will have the rights to edit the document, all other team members will only have "view" previledges. The authors will thoroughly edit the full chapter. Author will make all the necessary formatting changes, grammar and language corrections, improve readability etc. The Author will need to use full skills on Word Processing. Microsoft Word is recommended for use by the Authors. Follow the QA standards that will be released by the QA Team. Now you have a basic backbone of your product.

Assignment #18A for Artists
Artists will identify the images and other graphics that will be required for the Chapter. We also need the design ideas for Book Cover. We need photographs of team members doing their group activities, which we can include in the book.

Assignment #18B for Other Team members
Now you clothe and add ornaments to your backbone. Create sections like "Learning Objectives", "References", "Diagrams", "Figures", "Illustrations", "Review Questions", "Bibliography" etc. etc. The content for all these add-ons will be created by team members and passed on to Authors to integrate it with the basic backbone of teh chapter.

Assignment #19 for Marketeers
While the rest of the team members are busy building the chapter, the Marketing people will refine the marketing messages that have been created for each category of prospects. Marketing people should create mail merge documents and mailing address lists to get ready for email campaign.

Assignment #20 for Team Leaders

Starting this week, Team Leaders will start submitting weekly project status report

During this week, each specialist group will use some advanced features of technologies. Authors will require specialized Word Processing skills, Artists will use image processing, Marketeers will do mail merge etc. etc.

Eighth Class: Collab Tech Applications in Marketing Management

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:07:00 +0000

This is one of the chapters in our book. Many of you are wondering what will you cover in the chapter. In this class, you will see how a professional marketing management expert will address this topic.

Prof Dinesh Kumar is a marketing management expert and is using various collaboration technologies that you are learning like Blogs and Social networks. While learning this important topic, you will also get some idea of how this chapter can be structured as well as how other similar chapters can be developed.

Fourth Lab: Finalize your Chapter Outline.

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:48:00 +0000

Dear team ? class? students?
hmmm.. I suggested all your teams to find some good name for your team (like Dare Devils for Delhi Cricket). I think we need to find some name for our entire group of 240 + 10TA + me and Eugene. I dont want to refer you as just students or class. Any name suggestions for our full group of 240 ?

Well, dears ..
You have spent last 3 Lab sessions, trying to get some basics done. You got all your team members at a reasonable level of understanding of Google Apps collaboration platform, you have formed the teams, assigned roles, created mailing lists, calendars, identified the team project - the chapter topic. You have also learned how to research on the web and have already identified about 50 articles on the subject that your team can use as the raw material for developing your product - the chapter of the book. Some of you may feel, we are going so slow. But when we are working as a team, specially in the initial stages of formation and learning new processes, the things can not be done faster.

Now you have started actual Product Development work. From now, for every task you perform you must follow Quality Standards. Quality standards for work to be performed are already published for your use on the shared folder.

In the forth lab each team member will read 2 articles assigned to him/her by the team. You will read and carefully make notes. Use Onenotes if possible for taking notes. Share your notes with the full team. Prepare a short presentation on what have you learned by reading those 2 articles about the Chapter topic. Then you need to have a brainstorming meeting among all team members. This brainstorming meeting you will have to organize outside the class some time during this week. The end product of your this week's efforts should be a Chapter Outline devided into multiple sections and each section assigned to a team member.

Next week each team member will finish writing minimum 2 pages of content for the section allotted to him/her.

You have done very well so far. Keep it up.

Quality Management System Initiated

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:07:00 +0000

First 3 weeks we spent essentially to get the team together, learn/teach Collaboration technologies, define roles responsibilities etc.

Now we are getting started with actual Product Development activities. This is where we need to ensure that the required level of product quality is being built. Especially when the work is performed by multiple people together, there is a greater need to control quality. We have therefore formed a QA Team and all project teams will strictly follow the quality standards being established by the QA Team.

The first set of quality standards are being released for the following:
(1) Team infrastructure: All project teams have to follow some basic guidelines of how each team will operate.
(2) Project Charter: This deliverable is always created before start of the project. Please get this completed before 11th.
(3) Research: This standard provide guidelines on how the team should conduct research.
(4) Brainstorming: After the research, all team members sit together and perform systematics brain storming.

Please perform all tasks starting from this week strictly following the standards.

Collaboration Technology in Action for the First year students of BIMTECH

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:15:00 +0000

You will find the use of collaboration technologies in your day to day activities.
Recently, students approached me about the problems they are facing with internet connection. When Prof Rueben inquired about it to IT department, he realized that students had never logged their problem with IT. So, we thought the solution will be maintain a log of all issues that have been raised by the first year students and then periodically review the open issues with the concerned departments of the institute.
Last week after my meeting with QA team, I had sent out a task list of open technical issues to all team leaders to share it with all their technical team members.

I am pleased to announce that Umang Gupta has already created an online form with spreadsheet for logging all open issues. He will soon prepare a document in consultation with QA team and release this application for use of all first year students. This is the way, you will find collaboration technology can help us simplify so many day to day tasks for more effective management.

Congratulations to Umang Gupta and today he deserves the "Candy of the day".

Seventh Class: Getting ready for Brain storimg

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:13:00 +0000

Project Status Review
This week you will complete research over the internet for the topic of your book chapter. You have already identified which chapter you are going to write in a collaborative manner all together as a team. Then you searched and found several articles already published on the internet which directly talk exactly about what you want to write or something very relevant to your topic. For all these articles you have added the bookmarks to your Delicious account. Your network bookmarks for your chapter are now in the range of about 20 to 40. You are requested to gather atleast 50 unique bookmarks between all the members of your team network. Many of you have already started browsing through these articles. Many teams have also tried to think how they will structure (Outline) their chapter. Congratulations! you all have done very well!

Now you need to do some serious study and get prepared for next big thing - brainstorming.

Assignment # 15.1
Start browsing all these 50 articles. Dont spend more than 5 minutes per article. Decide is this article really of interest to you? Are you going to find some useful information to add to your chapter from this source? Start making notes on whatever is coming to mind. A tool that can use for this type of quick notes is "Onenotes" from Microsoft and it is part of your Microsoft Office. Identify 2 most important articles that you must read end to end. Inform your team that you have selected these 2 articles for full reading, so your team members will try to choose some other article reading to avoid duplication of efforts. Read these 2 articles completely and keep making notes on your Onenotes. On your Onnotes, you can copy text, images, links, tables almost anything that you may like to note down for inclusion in your chapter.

Assignment # 15.2
These notes is your first deliverable created for the project. You need to store it safe and easily accessable by all your team members. For this purpose your team needs to create a separate shared folder on Google Docs. This shared folder will have read access all team members. You can save your notes into this shared folder. All team members will be able to view your notes and will not be able to make any changes. If you would like any specific team members to also make changes to your notes then only that specific team members you can provide extra previledges of editing it.

Assignment # 15.3
Now you need to prepare to present to the team what have you learned, what do you think will be good content to add to your chapters etc. For this presentation you will prepare slides using Microsoft Powerpoint. You can prepare some simple presenattion slides using Google Docs as well. But for preparing professional quality presentation slides, I will recommend you use Microsoft Powerpoint.

Assignment # 15.4
You will now get together as a team and listen to presentations of each team member. Remember, presenting your thoughts to a group of people is a great art, science technique. This process of presenting and listening to presentations is with the objectives of (1) learn the topic to it's depth and (2) start thinking what will be the chapter outline

Assignment # 15.5
After you have heard of all presentations, next step is debate among the group and create a Chapter Outline. Initially, debate and white board the outline. when you have concluded, then you can use the Word Outline template to document your conclusions. Then assign the sections of teh chapter to individual team membersfor th enext step of drafting out the section.

Candy for the Day
Today, I would like to give a candy to some one who can find a sponsor for the page "Candy of the Day" on this blog. We have large number of kids of rich parents and who are going to become some the richest parents in the coutry. The Candy vendors should be lining up to sponsor this page. Come on, go get me some sponsor very fast!

Sixth Class - Lab Overview - Project Preparation Phase

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:06:00 +0000

Before we look at our Lab tasks for Project Preparation phase, we need to revisit what we were supposed to have finished in our previous phase - "Team Organization".

Assignment #10
You created calendars, added Bimtech calendar, but it is still of no use in actually planning team events in a collaborative manner. Unless every team member will add all the events he/she is attending, your shared calendars are of no use to your team members. To make this easy, this week all section representatives will create section calendars and invite all students in the section to all calendar events as appropriate. Each team leader will create team calendar, plan some team events and invite all team members. Each team member then needs to add his/her personal events to ensure that any other person interested in inviting for a meeting has full picture of your free time slots.

Assignment #11
From time to time, all of you will need to send messages to entire groups. For this purpose, you need to have the email groups which you can use while creating email messages. Each team therefore is requeted to create a contact group of their own team members with the name in the format 'Gr99' where 99 stands for your group number like 01 to 24. Then export this contact group to a .csv file. Send this file as attachement to your TA. TAs will compile these files and provide them to all students. Each student then can import these files and create groups in their own system.

The last step in "Team Organization" is Quality Assuarance. You have done team assessment last week. You must have noticed there is wide variation in how each team has done their assessment. In many teams, almost everyone has scored full marks, although it is quite clear many students are still struggling with basics. This is the result of lack of Quality Assuarance procedures. We are now forming the QA team, which will lay down quality standards and measure the quality delivered by each team.

Assignment #12
QA team will lay down quality standards for all the above mentioned 11 assignments and then create the assessment spreadsheets (similar to what you have already used) and get the measures of quality of work completed by each team. Those teams which meet the quality requirements, will proceed for the next stage of the course.

Now we are ready with teams which are properly organized to undertake the project.

Project Preparation activities were described in Fifth Class. This week you are going to start working to create your product, a Chapter of the Book.

Assignment #13
The first step is to identify which chapter of the book you are going to write. Select a topic that all your team members would really enjoy studying it together. Some teams will be inclined to take a topic that is more Management Discipline oriented while other teams will be more inclined to choose a topic that is Technology oriented. You should be choosing a topic that is from Part 2 and Part 3 of the book. Part 1 will be written after all other chapters are completed and Part 4 will be created from all that I am writing in this blog. Work with your TAs and finalize your topic.

Assignment #14
Now you all need to research this topic. Allocate each team member to research from different sources of knowledge. Check out my bookmarks with tag "research". You will find out where you can go to research information on the web. Each team member will do the research and create bookmarks on Delicious. All bookmarks created should have tags "bim520" and your group number "Gr99". In addition depending upon the topic you may add more tags. Now each member is expected to have learned enough about the topic to move on to next step.

Assignment # 15
Have a brain storming session among your team members and prepare an outline for the chapter using Microsoft word template. Once outline is ready transfer it to Google shared word document.

Assignment #16
Each team member will create content for the section of the chapter that is allocated to him/her. Upto about 2 pages of content by each team member is quite adequate.

Assignment #17
Now the control of the shared document is transfered to the "Author" in the team. The Author will have the rights to edit the document, all other team members will only have "view" previledges. The authors will thoroughly edit the full chapter. Now you have a basic backbone of your product.

Assignment #18
Now you clothe and add ornaments to your backbone. Create sections like "Learning Objectives", "References", "Diagrams", "Figures", "Illustrations", "Review Questions", "Bibliography" etc. etc.

Pass on your work to QA team and congratulate your team for successfully completing one of the most important steps of your project. Go ahead and Celebrate!

Fifth Class: Writing a Chapter on Communication Technologies for Managers

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:59:00 +0000

Today we will review how we could write one of the chapters of the book. As an example, I have taken a topic, which everyone is familiar with - Communication Technologies. The objective is not to teach you Communication technologies but to understand "how a team will write the chapter in a collaborative environment - the methodology that they need to follow"

We will first start by checking out what knowledge is already available about the subject in the world. Let's start from the Encyclopedia created by collaborative efforts of hundreds of thousands of experts worldwide. Search for "Communication Technologies" for an existing Wikipedia article. You get directed to "Information and Communication Technologies" When you start reading this article, you will notice that several technologies that are relevant to your chapter are already listed in this article. Bookmark this article on Delicious. Tag it with your course "BIM520". Also tag it with your group "Gr99" (substitute 99 with your 2 digit group code). Also tag with subjects "Communications" and "Technologies". I suppose, by this time, you must have already created network of team members on Delicious. The way you have identified relevant knowledge available from Wikipedia similarly your other team members will research information from other sources of knowledge and share bookmarks with you.

The sources for knowledge are books. Amazon is good place to start searching for books. When you find a book, read through the few pages of the book that are available for reading for free. These pages give an excellent overview of what knowledge it contains. Either you can create Delicious bookmarks or create a wish list and share it with your team members.

Similarly you will find many other sources of knowledge. Libraries, Software vendor sites, Professional organizations websites etc. etc. Divide the search amongst all your team members and generate a large pool of bookmarks.

You now need to do some brain storming and "outline" the chapter. Use Microsoft Word template and create an outline of your Chapter. Here is one example that you can down load from this link.

Next you divide the subtopics that each team member will write. Transfer the outline you have created to Google shared Docs and let each team member start writing their part of about 2 to 4 pages each. When all team members have finished writing the complete chapter will be about 20 to 40 pages long.

All team members should now work upon some other areas of the chapter like Learning Objectives, Review Questions, Exercises, References, Learning Objectives, Images, lists of figures and tables etc. etc.

Now the authors from your team should take control of your chapter. Carefully edit all the contents. Bring in some level of consistency, make it readable, avoid duplication, improve formatting, check that there are no copy right violations. The rest of the team members should continue reviewing the product and advice the editors of any suggestions.

When your product is ready give it to the Quality Assuarance Team who will further have some testers to identify and correct defects.

Fourth Class: Lab Review - Team Organization Phase

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 05:22:00 +0000

You all have already completed one Lab session. Each one of you was expected to complete 4 assignments and then collaboaratively assess the performance of each team member, which automatically roles up to Team performance.

While doing the assignments, many students had problem in looking up my Delicious bookmarks and adding my Bimtech calendar. To view my Delicious bookmarks you need to add me into your network. My Bimtech calendar was another domain and hence to make it easier, now Eugene has created another "BIMTEH ERPLabs" calendar, which you should be able to add to your calenmdar. This will be demnstrated in the class.

The assessment spreadsheets are evaluation of each individual team member. The summary sheet is role up of all team members. Many students had missinterpreted the procedure. We will see in the class the correct method.

The second Lab session that will follow after this class will include assignments 5 through 9.
Assignment 5 is to create 10 prospects who will be interested in buying your product, the book chapter that you are going to write. To collect this information from all team members in a consistant manner, each team will create an online form. This online form will be sent to each team member who will fill in the required details and submit. The result will be a spreadsheet containing all the information about the prospect. I will demonstrate in the class how this online form is created.
Assignment 6 is to create a draft message that you would like to email to your prospect. You will create a shared word document and write your message in that document. all your team members will read this document and advice you if any improvement can be made.
Assignment 7 is about Collaborative assessment. You have already learned about this in the previous Lab session.
Assignment 8 was determine the role of each team member. You have already completed this task.
Assignment 9 is to create a Project Charter. I have stored 2 URLs on my Delicious bookmarks which will provide you information on what should be the contents of yoru Project Charter.

Section C will have the second Lab session thiw week on Thursday, while all other sections will do their Lab next week Monday and Tuesday.

Hope you are having fun with your new knowledge of collaboration,

AR.

Third Class: Project Overview

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:54:00 +0000

Last week, we formed the teams. 10 persons, who have never known each other in the past, have been asked to collaborate and do a project. It is going to take a while to find out who is good at what, what are their behaviourial patterns etc.

This week, you are being given more information about your collaborative team project.

We, as a complete group of 240 students, are going to write a book in next 8 weeks. Your team of 10 students is going to write a chapter from that book. You will use all the collaboration technologies that you are learning in developing and marketing of this product.
Please access this shared spreadsheet.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/bimtech.ac.in/ccc?key=0AleNZxzmU_FldDB0QTJ4V3E4by01ZVJSSUJUMVpVbUE&hl=en&authkey=CMibvzY
The sheet titled "Plan" lists down the weekly project phases and the activities that you are expected to do week by week. Various Book chapters are proposed in the sheet titled "Book Chapters" as a starting point for debate before we finalize the list of chapters for the book and assignment thereof to each team.

We also reviewed the process of Team Development. The stages of "Form", "Storm", "Norm" and "Perform". You will pass through all these stages. Try to identify these phases and quickly try to move into "Perform" stage.

You were also explained about the next exercises. Identifying 10 prospects per team member and drafting out an email campaign message. Preparation of a Project Charter and defining standards for the final product.

In our next class, we will do a demo of all these exercises to prepare you for doing these exercises in the following Lab session.

Regarding a few issues that you had identified with other assignments, here are few explanations:

Many of you, had problems in getting to the bookmarked websites using Delicious. At this link you will find screen shots of how to do this task.
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1H_V0tX0Q73HLjX11Kfba-3fyQZ6nElSypVIDKgzR_iE&hl=en&authkey=CNP__OIC
You can also call/email Megha, your Teaching Assistant, at 99713 14418. She will be able to explain you the solution.
You were also not able to add Bimtech calendar. Eugene is creating a new calendar and that will shared with you very soon.

rest we will deal in next class.
wish you all the best,
AR

Looking Back - The First week

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:41:00 +0000

I am very pleased with our work in the first week.
There was almost 100% attendance. All students have very quickly adjusted to the method of online forms and shared documents. Finally most students seem to have adopted to reading the blog regularly and following the assignments and instructions from the blog. The Teachning Assistants are very involved and have shown excellent initiative. I am sure, very soon we all will get adjusted to this style of working and collaborating.

I started out with a questionnairre because I wanted to find out what you already know and avoid wasting time on teaching something that you already know. You overwhelmingly voted that you already know Gmail and Voice communication.
Following graph shows what you told us,

Almost every one is very good user of GMail as well as Chat and VoIP solutions. This was expected but I was not expecting such overwhelming confidence. More than 50 students said they are not just good users, they are experts. So, we decided we will just show some advanced features of GMail and start introducing you LinkdIn and Delicious which many of you had indicated you dont know.

To decide which advanced features in GMail we should cover, we got another poll to pin point the your weak areas. We got following results.

While Communications as overall, the students had indicated their knowledge index at about 4 out of 5, the knowledge index for advanced features dropped to 2.3. Again we find some features are already well known by students, so we eliminated even those and then the Knowledge index drops to only 1.9. I have therefore explained you and given exercises for only those very few features that are not known by most of you.

In the following week, our assessment will reveal how much you have learned.

We could not start Lab sessions because we can not have Lab sessions unless classroom sessions are complete and on Thursday we had this problem of lack of communication. Many of you thought we have Lab sessions on Saturday. I hope now all of you are quite clear about the schedule. All Lab sessions are on Monday (11AM-IB, 3:30PM-Sec A),Tuesday (3:30 Sec-B) and Thursday(3:30 Sec C)

Unfortunately, in Seminar hall, we do not get proper WiFi, and we will have to live with it. Labs will be in Computer Lab with wired desktops. So, in Lab sessions I am hopeful of not having any internet access issues.

Look forward for a good week ahead,

AR

First Lab: Forming a Team

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:10:00 +0000

Today we will start with our actual project. Each team consists of 10 students. In this first week, we need to ensure that each team member is fully prepared to become an effective team member.

Assignment # 7
The first question we need to ask, "Is every team member properly set up in using the collaboration technologies that team has decided to use for the project?". To answer this question,
(1) each team member will demonstrate his/her readiness to all the team members,
(2) collaboratively all team members will decide whether each team member is ready,
(3) if any team member is not ready then how can we help this team member to get ready.
(4) Before you start the project, also study about the process of Team development. You can aget a copy of the ebook from the library or purchase it from
http://www.zeislerassociates.com/virtualteamhandbook_team.html
(5) You should prepare a checklist of what are the minimum requirements that each team member must fulfill and then
(6) collaboratively evaluate if everyone meets those requirements or not. One TA will also be part of your team and you will be told who has been assigned to your team.

Assignment # 8
Now you need to determine who is going to do what. Each one of you comes with some special skills. The team requires people of all types. If you can leverage each person's special skills in a collaborative manner, that will provide you the synergy required. Your project is to write a book chapter. So you need in your team experts who can research and understand the topic, experts who are very good at writing in English or other languages of communication, Word Processing expert, powerpoint expert, website developer, marketing/PR expert, graphic artist, a team leader/co-ordinator. Feel free to decide the roles of your team member and any other roles that you may feel is important. Finally provide this information in the shared document or on the online form to TA.
Team Roles at Work

Assignment # 9
Next, you need to clearly document the complete plan of action. Generally such a document is prepared at the beginning of the project and it is called "Project Charter". This document details out what you are going to do, who will do what, when, what are project goals, how will you measure the success of your project etc. etc. Prepare a shared word document and collaboratively complete this document in consultation with your TA.

Second Classroom Session (Getting ready for collaboration)

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:52:00 +0000

Assignmenmt # 2
Sign into Delicious.com.
Search for Benchmarks on the tag "BIM520"
Narrow search for the tag "Collaboration"
Study the training material available at this tag.

Assignmenmt # 3 (Optional)

Create a personal email ID on Gmail.
Set mail forwarding from your Bimtech mail ID to your personal Gmail.

Assignmenmt # 4
Log into your Bimtech Gmail.
Create Labels
Add Bimtech calendar to your calendars
Create all your personal events on your personal calendar.
Copy Bimtech calendar events to your personal calendar that applies to you.
Create a group of all your team members in the contacts
Create tasks for each assignments given to you so far.
Send the list of all your pending tasks to your TA
Read the shared document "CoLab Tech students List"
Create a folder for all CoLab Tech related documents and assign relevant documents to that folder.
Create a signature
Add your photo to the profile
Invite all your team members for Google Chat
Create filter to add all messages coming from TAs and your Team members to folder "CoLab"
Enable offline mail
Add gadget for sending SMS from your chat

Assignment # 5
Identify 10 of your contacts who you think will be interested in purchasing your product (The book chapter or article) when it is ready at the end of the course. Prepare a word document that provides details of the persons whom you have selected and why do you think these ae very good potential prospects to purchase your article. Share this document with all your team members and your TA

Assignment # 6
Prepare a draft letter to your prospects, telling them about your joining BIMTECH PGDM course. What do you like about he institute? Tell them about the CoLab Tech course that you are attending. What do you find is so importanmt to learn in CoLab Tech. Why you think your prospect will be very much interested in knowing about CoLab Tech. Provide them the link to go to BIMTECH website and CoLab Tech webpage.

The first session on Collaboration Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:09:00 +0000

All first year PGDM and IB students have now attended my first lecture. In my online form, I had asked you about 17 different technologies and how much do you know. Generally most students have indicated that they already know a lot about these technologies. We will therefore not get into teaching some of the very basic things in these technologies. Rather, we will try to concentrate on providing you the context, discuss advanced features and help you spend more time on a live project.
Following is the summary of what did you tell us about your knowledge of these technologies at the start of the course.

To help us concentrate on more advanced features, another questionnaire is sent to you asking you about your familioarity with specific GMail advanced features. On Wednesday/Thursday we will see live demo of using these features and provide you guidelines on how should you set up your personal collaboration environment to become an effective team member.

Today you have also seen live demonstration of how LinkedIn profiles are created and how can these be of great use in professional career development.

Assignment # 1
Your first assignment of this week is to create your personal LinkedIn profile. Once you have created your profile, join the "BIMTECH ERPLab" LinkedIn Group.

See you tomorrow,

AR

Getting started

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:18:00 +0000

Today is the first day of our class for Section C and IB from 3:30PM to 5:00PM at Seminar Hall, First Floor. What I discuss today with Section C and IB will be repeated for Sections A and B tomorrow from 11:00AM to 12:30PM at the same location - Seminar Hall, First Floor.

Please come prepared: bring your laptop, make sure that you have Bimtech mail installed.

I will be primarily taking the classroom sessions. You can all me at Extn.392.
Prof Eugene Rueben will primarily coordinate your Lab practical sessions. Extn.407.
Many 2nd year senior students have offered to help in teaching this class. Following seniors will be your first point of help if you have any difficulties in doing your practical assignments.

Phone No.    E Mail ID    Technology
0 96545 51855 abhisek.datta11@bimtech.ac.in    Communication (Gmail, VoIP etc.)
0 97176 29673 preeti.chaudhary11@bimtech.ac.in   Communication
0 99994 19467 sandeep.sinha11@bimtech.ac.in   Development (Blogs, Wikis etc.)
0 99713 14418 megha.sangwan11@bimtech.ac.in   Shared Docs (Spreadsheets, Word, Pres)
0 96548 12312 amar.prabhakar11@bimtech.ac.in   Shared Docs (Spreadsheets, Word, Pres)
0 97175 92009 priyanka.raina11@bimtech.ac.in   Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.)
0 96501 18587 ms.gokulnath11@bimtech.ac.in    Team Management (Tasks, Calendar, MSProj)
0 99719 11997 deepak.thomas11@bimtech.ac.in   Promote/Publish (WebSites, Tags, Adsense)
Some more may join this group of Teaching Assistants.

When you come to class, first you will need to identify one of these Teaching Assistants from amongst your seniors and provide them some more information, to help us group you in one of the teams for doing practical sessions.

Hope you enjoy this class to explore collaboration.

The Peter's Principle

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 23:49:00 +0000

PGDM A,B,C,IB

Majority of you have responded to my questionnaire. 202 out of about 240, to be precise. Thank you all. Following graph how many sent in their online forms and when

You will notice, within first 2 days I got almost 25% responses but then it required a strong warning from the Prof. Ashok Malhotra and Prof Verma to make the remaining act in time.

We all act only when there is a deadline. People tend to wait right until the last day. There is a famous book, titled The Peter's Principle. The basic theme is that all employees get promoted to their highest level of incompetence. But the extensions of this principle are that "All projects get completed only on or after the specified target date", "Expenses are incurred to the maximum level of budget sanctioned", "Every product is used for more challenging applications until it fails" etc. etc.

Two thirds of our students did not bother to respond right until the last minute. If the warnings were not issued by Prof Malhotra and Prof Verma, then I am sure probably half the students would have come to first class with the request that they be given another day to submit the form. This is just human nature.

Your first lesson in this course on collaboration technologies. When you are working in teams, collaboration is critical. Everyone is dependent on someone else's efforts. Therefore we need targets and deadlines for every task. The culture of "clearing up the desk" (of all pending tasks at the end of every day) has to be evolved among the team members.

No more responses

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:42:00 +0000

In first 2 days of my mail to all of you, I got 65 responses and I was quite encouraged. But thereafter the responses have dried off. There are about 240 students who should respond to my questionnaire and till date I have only 75 responses. Only about one third have responded and twice as many have as yet to send me the response.

What is the problem? You are not reading your email messages, or just lazy to respond or dont know how to do it? Please remember, if you want to attend my course then you must send your response before the first lecture of the course. First lecture for Section C and IB will be on Monday at 3:30PM in Seminar Hall, First floor. First lecture for Section A and B will be from 11:00AM to 12:30PM also in Seminar Hall on First Floor.

If you need any assistance in completing the questionnaire, then plase call me at extn. 392 during office hours.

Please hurry up your responses,

28 done. more than 10% have responded on the very first day! Keep it up.

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:31:00 +0000

PGDM A,B,C,D and IB:

Well done, my friends!

28 have already submitted their online forms.

You can see the results of this survey at

https://docs.google.com/a/bimtech.ac.in/Doc?docid=0AVeNZxzmU_FlZGRiZm52a3BfMGM1YnBta2Rj&hl=en

Half the respondents are engineers, most students are already quite comfortable using Word and Powerpoint but many are not using spreadsheets quite often. Most students are already quite familiar with facebook etc. but familiarity of Webex type meetings is low. Most students are quite excited to attend the course.

Thanks you for those who have already submitted their forms. All others do it quickly. Also please go to my blog at http://colabatbimtech.blogspot.com/2010/06/welcome-to-collaboration-laboratory-at.html and register yourself as a "follower"

Welcome to Collaboration Laboratory at BIMTECH

noreply@blogger.com (ERPLabs) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:22:00 +0000

Dear PGDM and IB 2010-12 students,

Welcome to my class to learn Collaboration Technologies. This would be a great experience. I have enjoyed every bit of my exposure to these new technologies and I hope you will have as much fun and I did.

At BIMTECH, while 'Rethinking the MBA', it is well established that we need to provide increased training in practical hands on skills in use of technologies that make modern managers efficient at their jobs. Check out this book by Narendra Datar of Harvard Business School : Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads. The 'technologies of management' that we would like to teach at BIMTECH are - Collaboration, ERP and Business Intelligence. There are many more technologies that are part of the modern manager's tool kit, but I have identified these as the most important of them all.

Learning these technologies of management is not just a matter of attending classroom theory sessions. It requires doing some practical hands-on work. You will be performing several tasks every day as Manager, after graduating from BIMTECH. Therefore, completion of practical Laboratory exercises is absolutely important. Your grades in this class will be primarily on the basis of your project work.

The technologies that you are going to learn, are actually being used in teaching this class. For instance, you are going to learn about blogs and what you are reading right now is from my blog You will continue to get a daily (well almost!) post to give you the regular updates.

Now, before you come for the first class, you need to fill in an online form and tell me about yourself. Are you ready to take this class? You must have a laptop of your own, the BIMTECH email and other Google Apps should be installed and you should be familiar how to use them. I also want to know about your education and work experience background. Your familiarity with various Collaboration tools etc. This information will help me to decide what to teach, at what level of depth etc.

Only those students who have submitted this online form will be eligible to attend the course.