Working In A Virtual
World
Using Digital Project Management Software Keeps Virtual
Teams Connected
"California, here I come" might well have been the
rallying cry for thousands of individuals looking for a
booming economy, great weather and a bright future. But
the rallying cry soon became a nightmarish scream for
local governments as they tried to meet the demands of a
burgeoning citizenry. In particular, they struggled to
balance the needs for housing and associated services
with the need to keep the area scenic and
attractive.
Riverside County faced just such a problem. As the
fourth largest county in the state, it stretches nearly
200 miles across and comprises over 7,200 square miles of
fertile river valleys, low deserts, mountains, foothills
and rolling plains. Riverside County shares borders with
densely populated Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and San
Bernardino counties...extending from within 14 miles of
the Pacific Ocean to the Colorado River. Recent years
have brought dramatic population growth to Riverside
County. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of residents
grew by over 76 percent, making Riverside the
fastest-growing county in California. By 1992, the county
was "home" to over 1.3 million residents, more than the
entire population of 13 states, among them Maine, Nevada,
Hawaii and New Hampshire.
The population boom in Riverside County created
conflicts between land use and conservation. All too
often these tensions resulted in adversarial battles
between real estate developers and
conservationists-usually on a project-by-project basis.
To ease the tension, Riverside County instituted an
integrated planning program to provide a framework
effecting future decisions for land use habitat
conservation and transportation in coming decades. Using
a team to deal with such a project is not, by any stretch
of the imagination a new concept, but using a virtual
team in a digital workplace most certainly is.
Virtual Teams in Real Time
Working with Sverdrup Corporation, a
privately held firm headquartered in St. Louis and a
subsidiary of Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., one of the
world's largest providers of professional technical
services offering full-spectrum support to industrial,
commercial and government clients in diverse markets,
Riverside County wanted to create a team of professionals
and consultants to support the planning program.
Creating such a team presented several challenges to
Sverdrup, including the need to:
• Bring together
professionals from geographically disparate consulting
firms and universities without relocating
them to a single site in Riverside County;
• Integrate the
varied infrastructures of the organizations involved in
the project without mandating any standards;
and
•
Leverage resources (i.e., bring the work to the
people and get them up to speed quickly on
the project) to reduce overhead costs and to create a
permanent record of the work produced on
behalf of the client.
Sverdrup and Riverside County dealt with
these hurdles by implementing a digital workplace. In
essence, they established a "virtual construction
trailer" for integrating the project team and
coordinating their activities using a virtual project
management software called eRoom. eRoom is a secure,
Web-based workplace and complete set of business
collaboration tools that are quickly tailored for
specific business initiatives. The virtual project
management software allowed people from across a company
and from customer, supplier and partner companies to come
together to innovate, negotiate, resolve issues, make
decisions and get work done.
The implementation of the digital workplace
allowed Riverside County to have:
• Greater user
adoption due to reduced information technology overhead
and burden. The dozen organizations involved
in the project needed only a browser to participate. This
allowed quick access to project documents
without the information technology staffs
from the various organizations negotiating
protocols and standards.
•
A
single version of documents eliminated confusion and
saved time. This approach ensured that all
professionals were working on the right
document.
•
Real-time project monitoring for senior management
without team interruption. Senior managers
could look through the eRoom(s) for updates, allowing
project staff to spend less time reporting
and more time producing.
The Year 2020: Everyone Home for Dinner
Sounds great, but what about the future of the
digital workplace? How prevalent will it become? We have
all heard how today's hierarchical and fixed
organizational structures will give way to more fluid
partnerships, created to complete a specific project and
then dissolved at its completion. The employee will give
way to the expert. Work and education will no longer be
discrete phases of life, but rather ongoing and
interwoven. Resumes will reflect projects accomplished,
not offices occupied. The boundaries between work and
life will begin to dissolve because the choices made for
one will no longer exclude the other. We will live where
we feel most comfortable, not within "reasonable"
commuting distance. We will be home for dinner.
"Creating the future workplace is not just about
delivering another piece of software," says Francois
Gossieaux, chief marketing officer, eRoom Technology,
Inc., Cambridge, Mass. "It is about developing an
environment that is conducive to innovation, learning,
community building and collaboration. The success of the
digital workplace will be determined as much by
individual psychology, culture and sociology as by
technical functionality."
Picture this: The proposal you've been
working on all week is due tomorrow. You're at home with
the kids, but you're still connected through a digital
workplace containing all of the project information. You
make a few changes to the most recent draft and send an
alert notifying your teammates to check out the latest
version. One of the associates calls with a question
about a number in the budget. You open up the archive of
client correspondence to refresh your memory and then
explain the situation. Then you go back to the
Legos®.
Or, you're sitting on an international flight
and your phone vibrates, notifying you that a shipment of
materials coming from overseas will be delayed one week.
Your digital workplace opens, displaying all of the
production schedules for your new product. You are joined
in the digital workplace by the key team members involved
with the product line. You are debriefed on the nature of
the problem and the possible solutions. In minutes the
team is able to come to a consensus. The digital
workplace updates your backbone ERP and SCM systems
automatically. You go back to watching the
movie.
Digital Workplaces: Today's Success
Stories
For some of us, these visions of the new way of
working are still two to four years in the future. For
some, it's already happening. The printer division at
Hewlett-Packard has implemented a program to work more
closely with its suppliers. Using the digital workplace
as the collaborative platform, in conjunction with other
eBusiness applications, this division was able to reduce
production shutdowns and cut inventory levels in
half.
Haworth, the second largest manufacturer of custom
furniture, uses the digital workplace as a part of a
customer relationship management system. In their digital
workplace, the Haworth sales force is able to collaborate
on multi-national accounts. And key customers are able to
participate in the design of their own furniture in
private workplaces created by the sales
representatives.
But what about the need for human contact? "The
digital workplace, at least in our generation, is not
going to replace the need for face-to-face meetings. But
the younger generation, where their best friend is just a
screen name on America Online, might be a different
story," chuckles Gossieaux.
Like any change, moving to digital workplaces has
its obstacles. "The behavior of virtual teams has a
different set of rules for teamwork that everyone needs
to agree on. But sometimes, it is the same set of rules
as a regular team. For example, who is going to clean up
the meeting room? If we forget that in a regular team,
the room becomes cluttered and a mess. The same rule
applies with the virtual team."
In virtual environments, Gossieaux also warns to
set up rules for dealing with conflict ahead of time.
"You must describe what the rules of engagement are if
there is conflict. In a digital workplace you have the
chance to reduce conflicts since everyone does not have
the same history with the problem. When conflicts arise
in a digital workplace, they tend to get out of control
much faster, partly due to the lack of additional
nonverbal clues. But when conflicts do arise, that might
be an appropriate time for a face-to-face meeting."
From California to Cairo, the workplace is
changing. The widely popular team concept must now change
as well to incorporate the digital world. Doing so
presents some obstacles, but once they are overcome teams
become more effective, efficient and in the end result
just as happy. And they will all be home for
dinner.
January
2001Homepage
I Will
Survive
