CommuteZero

Update on Whiteboards for Virtual Teams

2010-12-07T22:03:13Z

The design goal of many collaboration tools is to reproduce as closely as possible some aspect of the face-to-face meeting experience so that virtual project teams can be as productive as co-located teams. What I have found is that some tools developed for virtual teams actualy work better than the process they were built to replace. A great example of this is the whiteboard. Online whiteboards available today for free make many common whiteboarding tasks easier than the old fashioned flip-charts or dry-erase markers. You can use electronic whiteboards to brainstorm, problem solve, describe complex concepts, create flow-charts, or even vote on issues as a team. All it takes to be successful is a tool that has a minimum of features that are well-implemented and intuitive.

Just like desktop sharing tools (see my last blog), online whiteboards have come a long way in the past few years. There are now many free tools that have some excellent features and would be a great addition to any virtual teams’ tool box. I will mention a few here and comment on their pros/cons. Note: this is just a sample of current offersings and not intended to be an exhaustive list nor an endorsement of, nor recommendation for, any particular tool.

Let me start with a list of the Must and Want features of the perfect whiteboard tool:

Must

Multiple users (at least 10) can make changes and see those made by others nearly instantly during a collaborative session
Editing a text object is done in-place (no pop-ups or special right clicking)
It is easy to move text objects around using a simple click-and-drag mouse movement
The free-hand sketching tool creates a smooth line (no jagged line segments)
Line width for lines and boxes is adjustable
You can save a whiteboard and send it to others to open up in another session with all objects editable to continue working
You can edit all objects to resize, move, delete, and change colors and other attributes
You can add pages and move back and forth between them
It is very fast to get into a session and easy to invite others to join

Want

The canvas area can grow as the drawing grows
Different people can work on different pages at the same time
Works on all platforms (PC, Mac and Linux)
All data exchanged is secure (SSL)
Users can paste objects (text and images) from their local clipboard onto any page
Templates are available to get teams started with common tasks such as voting, fishbone diagramming, affinity diagramming (KJ), flow-charting, RACI charts, etc.

Here are a few tools I’ve tried recently:

Vyew

A very complete collaboration tool set with built-in desktop sharing, snapshot, audio and conferencing bridge services. Build on a Flash platform.

Pros

one of the best implementations of a whiteboard I’ve found to date. Very easy to draw smoothly, create and move text and edit objects.
you can add sticky note-like comments into a drawing and position them where they apply
the desktop sharing feature includes some of the whiteboard tools for markup.

Cons

It is free, but you have to deal with ads.

Dabbleboard

Has a good compliment of tools (all the required ones). Has an interesting method of selecting and modifying objects on the drawing surface.

Pros

includes a list of participants and a chat window to give people a back-channel

Cons

it is not easy to move text around as it requires several clicks to grab an object

ImaginationCubed

A product from GE (I’m not sure why they got into this business). Although an interesting tool to play with, it is way too combersome to be useful in a collaborative meeting.

Pros

Slick animation and implementation

Cons

this tool falls into the category of whiteboards that implement a traditional whiteboard too closely. You can’t edit things that are placed on the board. You can only undo and erase them. This completely defeats the most powerful aspect of an electronic whiteboard, editability, and makes brainstorming extremely difficult.

Scribblar

Very nice and clean design with all the required element including a participant list and chat widget.

Pros

includes built-in audio broadcasting from one to many (I’ve not tried it to check the quality)
can take snapshots of work in progress. Maintains a list of these ‘assets’ for download or recovery to the whiteboard.

Cons

drawing with the free-form too creates badly jagged lines

Twiddla

Twiddla’s Mac-like user interface makes for a pleasant visual experience. It implements an interesting paradigm for erasing that is sort of whiteboard like. You can erase parts of an object as if the object is a scribble on a real whiteboard. But, when you move the object you can see the original object unerased appear. Very disconcerting.

Pros

includes audio channel, chat window and an easy invitation process
nice facilities for adding and managing uploaded objects
includes a tool for creating mathematical formulas and embedded code fragments (why?)

Cons

really poor jagged lines when drawing with the pencil

Thinkature

This tool has a very different paradigm where you create ‘cards’ that contain text that are easily moved and connected using dynamic lines and arrows. Should be great for flow-charting or creating other types of associative diagrams.

Pros

very smooth free-hand drawing tool

Cons

lacks most of the drawing objects you would expect
text object always has a box around it, making brainstorming messy

As you can see, there are a number of really decent solutions out there for you to try with your teams. If you have had any experience with these or any others, please comment on this post as I’d love to hear what you have found that works for your team.

{image by jm3 (flickr.com)}

Update on Desktop Sharing for Virtual Teams

2010-12-07T21:57:42Z

A well-performing virtual team makes effective use of a wide range of collaboration tools. After the various forms of communication discussed in my last post, any self-respecting virtual project team must have access to a decent desktop sharing tool. In the past few years, the options and quality available here have grown significantly. To work well for a virtual team, your desktop sharing tool should have most (ideally, all) of these key features:

Must Have

Fast and simple process to get connected to a session (< 5-10 secs)
Share with up to 10 people with no performance impact
Connect people across firewalls
Integrated whiteboard for brainstorming and note-taking
Snapshots and mark-up the resulting image
Save mark-ups in a standard file format for distribution to others
Lightweight client-side component that installs quickly and simply
Fast and simple switch between desktops being shared

Want

Integrates with a mainstream IM client (or at least has its own built-in)
Has a list of who is in the session
Has a hands-up queue for managing questions in larger groups
Is secure (encrypted stream)
Can share more then one person’s desktop at the same time

Of course, none of the tools available today have all of these features, so you must make tradeoffs for your particular situation.

For this post I will not talk about the large providers of desktop sharing that charge for their service, such as Microsoft Live Meeting, WebEx, and GoToMeeting. I will instead discuss some recent experience I’ve had with a few of the free desktop sharing applications I have found. If you have had some experience with a tool you like, please comment on this post. I’d very much like to hear what you have found useful.

Note: I have included a comment about Linux compatibility, as this is a platform used by many of my colleagues and thus important for my particular collaboration needs. Since Microsoft Windows is the primary desktop used by most, this probably will not be an issue for you. However, I’ve found that although most of my colleagues do have access to a Windows PC, all it takes is one ‘purist’ on Linux who can’t contribute during a meeting to have the effectiveness of the session drop dramatically.

Microsoft SharedView

This is Microsoft’s answer to NetMeeting-through-firewalls, but without the voice or instant messaging. It is relatively easy to connect to another Windows user (but not perfect as I’ve had problems connecting with some people);

Pros: Has the usual Microsoft polish, so it is easy to use and attractive; up to 15 people can share;

Cons: No whiteboard; Does not work with Linux (no surprise here)

Vyew

This is a very nicely done tool that integrates a free phone conferencing service and whiteboard along with a desktop sharing engine. The service provides persistent storage of session data so that your team can come back and update the contents. Unfortunately, it does not work on the Linux platform (at least not natively).

Pros: Excellent whiteboard for multi-user collaboration (one of the better ones I’ve used); Persistent content

Cons: Does not work with Linux.

Skype

Yes, Skype includes a very simple desktop sharing feature to compliment its rather impressive voice and video sharing. The feature appears to be implemented as a compressed video stream and is sent in place of a video channel.

Pros: Very easy to start a desktop sharing session once you find with switch (call > “share your screen” > “share full screen”); Fast to share, once you have the Skype connection established;

Cons: Works only between two people; Does not work with Linux (yet?); You cannot take control of a shared desktop, so remote support is not as easy; The compressed video stream has poor resolution, making it difficult for someone on a small screen to read text on another PC.

Mikogo

Although somewhat complex in its installation and usage, this is a very nice tool for small team collaboration. I really like the on-screen mark-up (they call it a whiteboard, but it isn’t really) where you can draw over anything on your screen. It handles up to 10 participants.

Pros: Attractive; interesting features; excellent fidelity of desktop image.

Cons: Does not work on Linux (Windows and Mac only); screen sharing starts immediately unless you configure it otherwise; there is no obvious indication you are sharing your screen.

These are not necessarily the best nor the only desktop sharing solutions available…just the ones I’ve come across lately or have had some experience with. In fact, desktop sharing appears to be quite a hot area now with products popping up all over the place. Some other names to check out: yugma.com, teamviewer.com, and yuuguu.com. I’ve not had a chance to play with these, but they look interesting.

If your virtual team does not make use of the desktop sharing tool, I would love to hear from you why not. Being able to share desktops in a virtual meeting is a must-have for all project teams.

In my next post I will talk about my recent experiences with a few of the popular virtual whiteboard tools.

[image by Steven Parker (flickr.com)]

Update on Key Communications Technologies for Virtual Teams

2010-12-07T22:05:48Z

As someone with a great deal of personal experience working in virtual teams and having managed a collaboration technologies research team for several years, I am very familiar with the obvious as well as subtle problems with the collaboration tools available today. As I am sure you know, there are just way too many tools from which to choose. For this post, I’ll touch on my recent experience with just a few examples of those that provide communications (auditory, visual and data).

Let me start by sharing with you a mental model I have for helping me understand how the many communications technologies available today can be used to optimize project team dynamics:

This model shows the various classes of technologies in decreasing order of the richness of the connection between people. By “richness” I mean the relative amount of information conveyed in the form of auditory, visual, data, and body language cues.

The gold standard for communications is, of course, face-to-face. This is the form we should all use when we must exchange information in the richest and most efficient way possible. While we are face-to-face, we can all easily and intuitively collaborate on documents, draw on a whiteboard or paper, share photos, and use our hands, face and voice to describe and emphasize our ideas. This is also the mode most desirable when sensitive subjects are being discussed (e.g., performance reviews).

Moving down the table, I list technologies that provide facsimiles of the face-to-face visual and auditory experience to a decreasing degree until we reach the bottom with instant and text messaging where no audio or video is used and where the data (text) exchanged is greatly limited. To achieve optimal team performance, everyone on the team must be careful in the selection of the technology used for a given information exchange. For example, it would be insensitive to send a text message to lay someone off. Likewise, you should not call a face-to-face meeting to answer a simple question like, “Did you send that invoice?” A very fast “Yes” sent in an instant message is much better for that.

There is one interesting aspect of these technologies that deserves more discussion: the time element. All of the technologies listed in the table that are marked as “Y” in the real-time column require everyones’ full-time attention for the duration of the connection. Those marked “N” allow each party to respond at a time more convenient to them. One of the biggest killers of team productivity is unnecessary interruptions. Studies have shown that it can take 15-30 minutes for a programmer to get his mind wrapped around his work after an interruption, so limiting them is important. It is at least partially due to the inherent interruption control afforded by the non- “real-time” technologies that make them so useful.

So, now, let’s pick a technology from the table that I’ve been quite pleased with the progress made so far: PC-to-PC voice over IP (VOIP). In particular, Skype. I have recently been helping a colleague on a Web service he is building. We have met a few times face-to-face to whiteboard some ideas, but for the most part, we have used Skype to chat. After a quick check over instant messaging to be sure we are both ready to commit to a real-time connection, we open a voice channel nearly instantly. Then, using the built-in array microphone in my laptop display (a recent addition in laptops). I enjoy a very nearly “being-there” audio experience. No headset, very low delay, and pretty close to full-duplex exchange. I can finally say the audio quality has finally exceeded the old POTS telephone and is way better than a cell phone connection. But, what really impresses me most is that we can have a three-way (or more) conference call with another of our contributors without paying a cent for a conference bridge! In addition, we don’t have to waste time setting up the bridge, dialing a phone, and going through a mess of menu selections to get connected. Fantastic! The only problem we have had with it so far is that my colleague is unable to run Skype on his Linux laptop, because his version of Linux does not support the audio hardware in his computer. So he must chat with me from his backup Windows system. (As an aside, Linux compatibility for most collaborative technologies has been an ongoing issue for as long as I can remember. Most new desktop technologies are developed for Windows first — a much larger market –and much later, if ever, will show up on Linux with a greatly reduced feature set.)

Next time: my latest experiences with desktop sharing.

(Disclaimer: I don’t own any stock nor do I work for Skype. I used this tool as an example of the state-of-the art. It is possible that other manufacturers have similar capabilities).

[image by FadderUri (flickr.com)]

Announcing New Beta 2 of FreeBusySharing.com

2010-01-02T01:45:04Z

We are proud to announce the Beta 2 release of our free/busy calendar sharing service at http://freebusysharing.com. This release adds these features:

* Support for Google, Apple iCal, and Microsoft Office.com calendars;

* Ability to link more than one calendar (e.g., work and personal) and share any of them with others;

* A simple-to-use, on-line scheduling tool that allows you view all of your team members’ availability on one screen and easily find times to meet.

We will continue to add new features to the service in the months ahead. Check it out and give us feedback!

A Great Time to Practice Telecommuting

2009-06-24T19:45:18Z

photo by gak

We are a week away to a possible BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) strike in the San Francisco area…again. If your people can’t get to work, what will you do? Your competition elsewhere in the world is not encumbered by your particular transportation woes! They will take this opportunity to move ahead of you while you are shutdown because your people struggle to get to the office to man (people?) the phones or work on that critical project.

So, what better time than right now, this week, to practice your emergency plans for business continuity for natural disasters and the like. Surely you have such plans already in place just waiting to be triggered! Well, okay, if you don’t, at least ask as many of those affected by the pending strike to work from home one day this week. See how things go. Fine tune your processes and telecommuting technologies. It is better to be ready to activate your plans or at least be aware of your potential problems than to scramble to keep things together when disaster strikes.

For tips on how to run teams virtually, or how to better work remotely as a telecommuter, check out the rest of this site.

Communicate Effectively with Technology

2009-06-23T22:19:41Z

The number of technologies we have at our fingertips today to communicate with our virtual project team members is nothing short of daunting. In addition to the most natural and effective method we all know as ” face-to-face,” we have phone (wired and wireless), voicemail, email, instant messaging, blogs, RSS, SMS and Twitter, to name just the big ones. Unfortunately, none of us are taught how to best use these techologies to get our ideas across to each other and to minimize the impact on our colleagues. It is no wonder, then, that we all struggle with them.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out which technology to use when or how to use it properly–it just takes a moment or two of thought and some common sense before you hit the ‘send’ button. What follows is a brief list of the major communications technologies we have available to us today along with some of the best practices and common sense guidelines to maximize effectiveness and minimize the impact on all of our daily lives. Note: modern communication tools are the life-blood of virtual teams and therefore must be used well or things can really breakdown when face-to-face communications is not frequent.

e-mail

Use mostly for detailed explanations and for sending work products to colleagues;
Keep messages as brief as possible. Take time to edit your prose down to the essential points. Put the purpose and expected actions up front. Keep in mind: the longer the message, the less likely someone will read all or any of it;
Never say anything in anger, you will regret it later;
List questions on separate lines to make it easier for people to see and respond;
Unless you are sending an advertisement to potential customers where presentation is important, DO NOT use stationary! Colored and patterend backgrounds are distracting, take up needless email storage space and transmittion bandwidth, and make it difficult for people to reply to your message;
Don’t use slang when communicating internationally;
Check and reply to your email at least once a day;
Be extremely careful with Reply-All. Before you use it, be sure EVERYONE needs to see your response. Otherwise, only reply to the sender and CC those with a strong need to know.

Phone or Voicemail

Use only if your message is urgent or if you really want the other party to hear your voice inflections to better understand your intent (typically for sensitive topics).
Get right to the point and don’t ramble on and on. be sensitive to the other person’s time;
For voicemail, leave a concise message about what you need by when;
Try to keep voicemail to less than 60 seconds if at all possible;
Don’t perpetuate voicemail tag by leaving messages like, “Call me. I need to talk to you about the xyz project budget”. Instead, tell them exactly what you need and ask that they call you back only if they need more data. Or, answer their question if they left you one on your voicemail;
Don’t use voicemail if an email or instant message is more appropriate;
Don’t use a cell phone if your connection is weak;
Answer messages prompty, but at least once a day.

Conference calls

Be on time. This should be easy for a conference call;
Use a good quality headset;
Don’t use a wireless headset unless you have a fully-charged battery and a good connection;
Mute when not speaking unless you are in a quiet room, have a noise-canceling headset, and are sure you have positioned your microphone so that you don’t make heavy breathing noises when you are not talking;
Be concise in your comments and don’t dominate the call; let others get their thoughts out too;
Speak slowly and clearly if the call includes international participants;
Don’t use a cell phone if your connection is weak. In fact, don’t use a cell phone at all if you can avoid it as the short delays inherent in modern digital cell transmissions make back-and-forth discussions very difficult.

Instant messaging

Best for short questions that don’t require a lengthy answer;
Use sparingly as it is a technology that can interrupt people in mid-thought (like the phone, another rude device);
Some good uses are: to ask if someone is ready for a scheduled phone call; to bring people into a conference call who are late, forgot, or are new to the call; when the conference bridge fails and you need to move to another conference number; and for a back-channel to clarify discussions in a conference call;
Don’t carry on lengthly IM conversations when a phone call is more efficient.

Twitter, RSS, Blogs:

Consider using one or more these technologies in place of project update mass-emailings. This way, people can control when and if they receive them.

Again, none of these are anything but obvious. We just all need a reminder once in a while.

Happy Communicating!

It's Times Like These…

2009-05-03T15:33:33Z

It is times like these that I wonder why it is that virtual teams and telecommuting are not a standard part of every company’s business continuity plans or, better still, part of the core of the way of doing business. Think about it…if the concerns over the current flu pandemic come true and millions of people get infected or even die, what will you do with your business? Will you send all your people home for a long vacation? Think of your revenue stream. Think of all the phones ringing with nobody to answer them and orders going unfilled. Or, how about those unhappy customers taking their business elsewhere because there was nobody in Product Support to help them fix a problem with your product

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for many businesses: telecommuting. If you don’t already have one, you owe it to your shareholders to setup a telecommuting infractructure and encourage eveyone who can work from home to do so periodically as part of your business continuity strategy. If you have a culture and infrastructure that supports a work-anywhere workforce, you will be able to shut down your company facilities for a short time and your customers may not even notice the change.

It just makes good business sense to be prepared for disaster. The disaster that shuts you down might not be a virus, it might be particularly bad weather, terrorist attack, or a global conflict. Whatever the cause, being able to operate your business with a distributed workforce is prudent.

You can read elsewhere on this site how to get started with telecommuting. Why put it off any longer?

Photo attribution: samantha celera

Announcing a new Free/Busy service

2009-04-09T15:43:25Z

We have just finished our first production version of a free-busy sharing service for Outlook users. You can check it out at FreeBusySharing.com. Using this service, you can share your free/busy calendar data with any Outlook user in the world, and they can share their’s with you. You can then use Outlook’s built-in free/busy time viewer to check for times to meet.

If you work for a company running Exchange, you probably use Outlook’s free/busy viewer every day to schedule meetings. This great tool allows you to easily see when your colleagues are free for a meeting. Unfortunately, without great effort, you cannot use this scheduling tool to see free/busy information for people outside your business. With our service, you can easily solve this problem. All you both need is a supported version of Microsoft® Outlook (i.e., 2002, 2003 or 2007).

Once you have completed the setup, you can easily schedule meetings from within your Outlook meeting scheduler. The free and busy times for each invitee should appear in your planning window and look similiar to this (Outlook 2007):

Check it out!

Resolving Disagreements in Virtual Teams

2009-03-24T20:34:58Z

One of the more difficult team dynamics project managers must face from time-to-time is conflict. The ‘conflict’ can be project-related or interpersonal, but either way, strong feelings are often involved, making rational resolutions difficult. For virtual teams where face-to-face time is rare or non-existent, conflict resolution can be especially challenging, even for the highly skilled virtual team manager.

Whether you are managing a virtual team or a traditional one, I have learned from many years of team experience that even the most emotionally charged of disagreements can be resolved when people bring hard data to the table to support their positions and engage in an open, honest, respectful dialog around the data. If your team is not on speaking terms, then you must deal with that first. You may have to calm people down remind them of their adult status before constructive discussions can commence. For this blog, I will assume that things are not that bad with your team.

I have led or participated in countless meetings where issues went round and round, with no convergence on a solution until someone (often yours truly) went up to the board and drew a diagram or listed the pros and cons of the current issue. Having something visual on which everyone can focus their attention removes a great deal of the ambiguity and misunderstanding nearly always present in a disagreement. The very act of putting ‘pen to paper’ requires that ideas be articulated, enumerated and quantified. Once the initial capture of the issues and supporting data is complete, the team leader can then facilitate discussion and debate around the ideas and build and refine a conceptual model until everyone agrees their issues have been covered. Once all sides have had enough time to make their cases, the leader can either try for unanimous agreement on a decision, call for a vote if 100% agreement is not possible, or she can just make the decision herself, given that all the pertinent data has been presented. In this last case, all participants should at least leave with a feeling that at least their ideas were heard and understood by all.

As it turns out, this process can actually run better with a virtual team than face-to-face provided everyone has access to a decent real-time PC desktop sharing tool. I personally believe this is true because people are unable to see eye-rolling and other body language cues from others that tend to escalate emotions. Instead, everyone is forced to vocalize their feelings and ideas, making intentions clearer to everyone.

The best real-time collaboration tools to use in discussions is either a desktop sharing tool such as NetMeeting, WebEx or Microsoft Shared View, or an on-line, multi-user whiteboard tool such as that in NetMeeting or Vyew.com’s Web-based application. It is best, especially if the leader needs to break the meeting into working subgroups, to use a whiteboard, but this is not always possible for inexperienced virtual teams. However, and I must emphasize this, it is CRITICAL that there be some form of visual tool to capture the issues and focus everyones’ attention on the discussion. Otherwise, words and ideas stay ethereal, making it difficult to reach conclusions everyone can buy into. You can get more information on some of the more popular whiteboarding and desktop sharing tools at CommuteZero.com, my virtual team information site.

In summary, resolving disagreements in virtual teams can be greatly expedited by capturing everyones’ ideas on ‘virtual paper’. This snapshot of the issue(s) is then used to facilitate real-time discussion, where the ideas discussed are captured in real-time. This process works just as well for face-to-face teams, but is essential for virtual teams where there are no visual cues to help discussion (the pros and cons of video is a topic for another blog).

The Best Thing About Virtual Teams

2009-02-04T04:21:35Z

I was just reading an article offering tips to telecommuters. One suggestion was to stay on your boss’s and coworkers’ good sides. It’s easy to write something that someone takes the wrong way, the article said, and because you don’t see them you don’t know them very well.

It’s certainly easy to write something in haste that doesn’t come across the way it’s meant. I’ve learned the hard way to let an angry email sit overnight and to think twice about whether my written humor is clearly humorous.

But why would I not know my remote coworkers? That seems like a strange idea. I’ve shared lunch hours with remote coworkers via telephone and remote meeting. On breaks we talk and play games, brainstorm ideas and trade vacation photos like coworkers anywhere do. We share cheerful hellos in the morning through instant messages like office workers greet one another at the coffee station. We yak and sketch back and forth on a remote meeting whiteboard while everyone’s getting settled for staff meeting just like office team mates chat as they assemble in a conference room. Perhaps it’s because remote teams are more conscious of the need to “bond” that the remote teams I’ve enjoyed have been as closer than many teams I’ve known in the office.

The best thing about a virtual team, though, is that they tend to be from all over. Sometimes a coworker is calling in from across campus or across town, but often it’s from across the country or the world. What a great opportunity it is to get a perspective on the latest news from half a world away, or to hear how someone’s family will celebrate a local holiday, or to hear about everyday things that point out how much a culture is different or how much we’re just the same. It’s a treat to work side by side – in a virtual sense – with interesting people I’d never meet in the office.

It seems strange to think of telecommuters as isolated. To me one of the special benefits of remote work is getting to know great people.