Meeting notes from "Virtual Teams in the Real World"

Virtual Collaboration – What are the Issues

• Lack of media fluency
• Driven by consolidation forced by cost issues
• Cultural & TZ Issues
• How to manage virtual teams
• How do you get VC teams to take responsibility?
• Technology and flexible video, multiple tools

Introductions within the room and from the remote participants: there were quite a few people attending remotely from all over the world. The eLearning Forum creates its own virtual team today!

Speakers

• Professor Terri Griffith of Santa Clara Leavey School of Business discussed the benefits, barriers and best practices for transferring knowledge in virtual teams. Terry is also working with Cisco on an empirical analysis of its virtual team collaboration processes.
• Megan Gailey, Manager of Technical Programs with Cisco's Worldwide Sales Force Development talked about the structure and organizational benefits of Cisco’s virtual team program for sales engineers (SE).
• Ted Cocheu, CLO of Altus Learning Systems -- who works closely with Megan and her team at Cisco -- discussed and demonstrated how Altus has transformed video-on-demand content into what has become a huge, searchable, video "brain bank" that plays a key part in knowledge transfer in Cisco's SE virtual teams.
• Sameer Bhatia, serial entrepreneur and founder of Octane Technologies, talked about Virtual Team Collaboration in the Context of Outsourcing to India —an increasing common option here in the Bay Area. This topic is interesting not only for its economic/business and political ramifications but also because cultural challenges often arise in cross-border virtual team collaboration. This discussion brought some very interesting lessons and “best practices” for how to deal with these challenges.
• Sandeep Sood, President of DeepSun and eLearning Forum Board member shared his experience and also talked about Virtual Team Collaboration Technologies, based on recent work he has done.

Distributed Work and Knowledge Transfer

Terri Griffith
Professor of Management
Santa Clara University

What is distributed work? Work done by teams that are not necessarily face to face all the time.

Is there really a traditional team that works face to face all the time? We’ve found that not to be so. There are more teams that work face to face for some of the time and some of the time working alone but together to complete a task virtually. Those are hybrids. More often than not the teams are in different locations working on virtual teams.

13% of the time is face to face with the rest being virtual work on tasks and projects.

How do virtual teams differ from face to face teams? We did an analysis on types of conflict (task, relationship, procedural). The procedural conflicts were the highest percentage because there are things that need to be done and if they’re not things can go seriously wrong or the meeting or task will not come to fruition.

Distributed work and types of knowledge that are distributed.

• Traditional explicit, tacit, over time the percentage is the same
• Hybrid explicit and tacit, over time the explicit and tacit stay the same. Virtual teams learn less tacit knowledge from their team members than in a hybrid or a traditional

Q Is 13% enough or should people be spending more time together?
A Good question, it’ll be addressed at the breakout session.

Types of Distribution

• Face to face - the best - they know the most about the others
• Fully distributed – they get the short end of stick
• Nodes – end up knowing a lot of what the other team members know because they have more access to team members. There are 3/1 nodes and 2/2 nodes. The 3/1 does better than the 2/2 nodes because most of the team spends time face to face with one person alone. The 2/2 node is more difficult because each node has trouble accessing the others.
• Token and nodes – also end up knowing a lot of what the other team members know because they have more access.

The 2/2 nodes and the fully distributed are the two groups that get the shortest end of the stick in terms of getting all the information they need.

Until we learn how to communicate in a virtual way face to face meetings are more effective.

SE Virtual Team Program

Megan Gailey
Cisco
Worldwide Sales Force Development

Developmental Alternatives and communities of interest

• Facilitate and maintain development of system engineers
• Internal and external system engineers
• Deliver development alternatives targeted at maintaining and expanding the technical knowledge and competency

Need for communities of interest: collaboration of the Cisco technical specialist

World wide sales force org – sys engineers
Tech groups and business units
Prod and tech marketing
Customer advocacy
Engineering

A VT member is the focal point to facilitate the timely info dissemination to the field op they represent

Q What motivates an employee to be a VT?
A It’s part of their job, it’s a privilege, the contacts they make are key to their career advancement.

Other VT members

Core set of leaders – program manager, tech leads specific to each VT.
Corporate advisors - help with marketing, etc.
Management sponsors - motivators that collaborate with the VT leaders to provide strategic direction. Commits resources, provides filed management perspective.

Deliverables

Dedicated team leader critical (program leader and logistics team that’s part time – web maintenance, equipment)

2 physical meetings per month face 2 face and world wide love broadcast of face 2 face
1 monthly conference call
Dedicated lab and equipment
Communication vehicles – websites, newsletters, team aliases

The face to face and the lab are two of the most important

Q Do you have remote labs?
A yes, it’s very important that remote employees can access a remote lab to work on configurations together with people on site

Q The size sounds impressive can you tell us more about that?
A The teams are very large, there can be 35 in a room watching a lab configuration or one person in Singapore watching it over very low bandwidth.

The conference calls are generally done on web event software like Placeware and chat is used a lot.

Q What is your budget?
A Can’t talk about budget but if you use your infrastructure tools its cheaper, the most money goes to the program managers, it’s a low cost solution.

Q what are your tips to keeping momentum in the community?
A You have to keep the team alive, the team leader has to keep the team motivated. The core group of leaders have to work together to motivate the team. The key to keeping the team alive is listening to what the field is saying. Reviewing surveys and improving the team as much as they can. The motivation to the leaders is their bonus, promotions, etc.

Websites – lists all the activity of the virtual teams. It also has a curriculum that the team members have to take to stay certified. All the latest and greatest info is on the site. There is reference material and helpful information, such as business unit info, etc. Tools such as videos, previous meetings and presentations are also linked there. This can be used for sales people that need to be out in the field that can go through and pick and choose what they need from their “brain bank” or data repository. They can capture it in a lot of different modes, such as transcripts, video, audio there are a lot of different ways they can get the information. The portal can be used by anyone in the company.

Q Do you find that the VT use this as a tool as well?
A There’s a transfer of information that is condensed in to a smaller package.

Team aliases – the group is a team that is on one email address.

Q Is there a problem with consistency?
A With any communication there is some but there are checks and balances that keep the information and content 100% accurate. The program managers and others leads are responsible for that.

From the mouths of experts to a corporate “brain bank”

Ted Cocheu
Altus Learning Systems

All presentations like todays are put right into the brain bank for use by anyone in the company.

We have a virtual format that uses video, audio and text files.

Performance support is a very important part of what Altus tries to accomplish with their virtual teams and supporting them.

Keeping things simple is what Altus does the most in the following areas:

Complexity issues
Knowledge architecture
Taxonomy creation
Metadata design
Controlled vocabularies
Ontology driven KM etc.

Simplicity

Knowledge capture and access
Apply internet success to learning
Make it easy to contribute and access knowledge
Disintermediate!
Shortest path from experts’ learners
Content based search

The more you try to complicate things the more time they take and the more money it takes to make it happen.

Q If you don’t use the robust search methods how does that affect the results?
A It gives people more information and more opportunity to share knowledge. Yes it’s frustrating for some, but most are very happy to get it.

Capturing the knowledge is the first step in virtual team meeting. There can be about 100 people listening to a presentation. It’s being video taped by a team called the Onsite Service Center. Altus employees work within Cisco to support their virtual meetings.

Production consists of IPTV broadcast which syncs the sound with the video, low bit rate web cast for dial ups, internal video on demand that can be delivered by video stream audio stream mp3 download, audio download, PowerPoint download and CD ROM. These can all be tracked to see what’s used the most. Sales can download the MP3s and modify them and use them for their own purposes.

Q Can you unbundle the assets?
A They have been unbundled for you in each component

Q How many people does it take to run a VT?
A About three people for the onsite, then six hours to process and then it’s ready to go the next day, so less than 24 hours.

Transforming Knowledge

There are a variety of ways to use the assets. They can be used for training, on the portal, as presentations, an EPSS. Each is published once and then used in many different ways.

Q Any good systems/software that can transcribe voice?
b Some do voice to text and then try to extract out key words. The accuracy rate is not great. A person does need to transcribe some things because of acronyms and jargon that needs to be translated. Because VTs are global the transcript is very important because the audio is not always usable for speakers and listeners of different languages.

Q What’s the turnaround time for the transcriptions?
A It takes eight days for the transcription before it’s put into the video on demand.

The return on investment on this is enormous.

VT content

10 mil spoken words
text from 54, 000 slides
1900 presents
1100 cisco experts
330 vt meeting days
1600 hours

NPI content

2000 presentations
1000 engineers
300 new products/updates
last 3 years
1300 hours

Q Do you track how many average steps it takes to find something in the data bank?
A No we don’t know how many times it takes for them to find what they want. They can track the most common search, etc.

Q Do you search through the transcript or the audio?
A All the spoken or written words are added to the database and that is what is used for searching.

Q Can you move things in and out of the library?
A Cisco set a standard format for publishing, if you don’t publish it that way it is not necessarily part of the brain bank, but there is a way to link the ones out of format.

Q Can you share the bookmarks to other people outside Cisco?
A Yes you can, you can send people pages.

Q How is the transcript built?
A It’s all done manually for accuracy and translating.

Q Are the downloaded presentations in PPT or Flash?
A They are simple HTML files in a zip packet. You can save the PPT or preview it as well.

Q What’s the average time that people use this?
A It’s very quick system as seen in the demo

Input from Terri

Santa Clara u VT study being done at Cisco – ROI, tools, knowledge development, performance

VT attendance – communities of practice and absorptive capacity.

Study process

Create tacit knowledge survey – using Sternberg’s practical intelligence in everyday life.

Survey of employees
Analysis via model

Q Are there any other social networking tools that empowers the sales engineers?
A They are deemed as the specialist which makes them the obvious expert to go to. They can be chatted with, phone calls, IMs.

Technology helps give and get knowledge transfers but you need to know who or what to look for. There’s an integration and interconnection that makes it successful. That means the people’s face to face reinforces the technology.

Perspectives on Indian Outsourcing

Sameer Bhatia
Sandeep Sood

Managing Across Oceans

Outsourcing is here to stay

HR is the biggest and fastest growing section

Why? It is a cheaper source of code, normalized cost structure, and percentage of costs are a quarter in India of what they are in the United States.

Not always rosy

Communication isn’t always the best. Not always good quality.
Processes – are not well defined between in-house and outsourced teams
Performance metrics – are not clear
Knowledge capture

Is it really worth the pain? It doesn’t have to be painful.

Six keys to success with virtual offshore teams
1. Have CIO-level oversight and sponsorship; assign fulltime resources to manage the offshore relationship. Create a team to ensure the metrics are reached. Don’t neglect the project. Senior management should be involved so that things can’t slip through the cracks.
2. Ensure that key knowledge and learning is captured in house. Don’t be completely dependent on your outsourcing partner.
3. Manage projects aggressively, proactively, and based on metrics. Any metrics used? Milestones mostly.
4. Establish tight software development processes to work with your vendor.
5. Ensure that proper communications tools are put in place to support processes web conferencing, instant messaging, chats.
6. Consider working with a US-based firm that can help mange it.

Critical tools

1. instant messaging
2. collaborative workspaces
3. web conferencing
4. blogs/wikis/discussions boards
5. expertise management
6. social networking
7. PowerPoint conversion

Knowledge management tools

Objectives

Maintain a central document repository that facilitates seamless collaboration from anywhere at anytime.

Allow for multiple parties to work on a document without stepping on each other’s toes by controlling versioning and managing modification/review cycles.

Eliminate the need to send documents via email.

Example: cowork – accessible via a browser. It’s a data repository.

Questions for the panel

Q thoughts on how important processes are disseminated so that people know what they are supposed to do?

A Terri Griffith – gives contact information of all the people on the team. Megan – a core team owns the processes that manages, leads, and is passionate about it. Everyone learns differently so you have to help them through their way of learning. Give a lot of options. Ted – from a vendor point of view, you must be very explicit and less informal and friendly. This has been a mistake we’ve make before. Sandeep – if you introduce new technology tools that incorporate process you have to allow for training of everyone. Sameer – be a drill sergeant

Q Megan Gailey or Ted Cohue – for the knowledge services you give Cisco employees have you found a problem with people forwarding proprietary information to outside people?
A Megan Gailey - the content is for public viewing only so that there isn’t a problem with that all that often. It does happen at times but not all the time. Ted – you can’t download or forward anything as a third party. Most info is sanitized that needs to be kept confidential.

Q For the panel - do you have problems with IM security? Is there any fatigue with it as well?
A Security issues are huge at the enterprise levels. Outside with smaller companies it’s not as much of an issue. The fatigue isn’t usually a problem because they are fairly targeted to issues. Some times IM works well but sometimes the phone is the right tool. Misinterpretations can happen easily on IM.

Terri – if we continue to use and increase the use of tools that don’t document they’ll be problems about who said what when.

Q For the group - what are the barriers that you’re finding?
A Finding affordable tools. Taking advantage of the free tools out there are a good way to go but you must have someone that manages it really well.