Trouble Shared is Trouble Halved

Organizations must design collaborative technologies to provide coordination across geographically distributed teams and work

Organizations must design collaborative technologies to provide coordination across geographically distributed teams and work

Collaborative technologies provide a powerful support to promote collaboration and coordination across geographically distributed teams in such distributed work environments. It has also been shown that satisfying coordination results in significant improvements on productivity as well as a significant reduction in the failure proneness of work

Organizations in general and IT organizations in particular are distributed globally. This creates a need for collaboration and sharing between individuals and groups spread across sites for managing organization tasks, enterprise transactions, and projects. ERP systems and other network applications enable enterprise transactions to be done anywhere, anytime using common databases for synchronization and also facilitate generation of up-to-date reports. However there are still a wide variety of activities that are done in organizations that need collaboration and sharing. These include gathering information such as project status/views/reports, collaboratively developing content, participating and sharing in discussion forums and knowledge repositories, etc.

Coordination: The Call of the Day

A globally distributed project work requires substantial amount of coordination, since the work is carried out simultaneously by many individuals and teams across geographically distributed locations and then integrated. Work schedules need to be synchronized, creating dependencies across tasks and people. A global project work is also a social process involving stakeholders from multiple organizational units. It’s widely recognized that collaborative technologies provide a powerful support to promote collaboration and coordination across geographically distributed teams in such distributed work environments. It has also been shown that satisfying coordination needs results in significant improvements on productivity as well as a significant reduction in the failure proneness of the work products. This is particularly true of software projects and development. Globally distributed organizations do have their senior management teams (viz., heads of sales, heads of delivery sites) distributed across different locations; and there is a similar

collaboration need for these teams to collaborate within themselves and with the rest of the organization. Also, as there is a lot of knowledge and information with people who may join and leave organizations/ project teams, the same is to be captured and shared for the benefit of other existing and new members.

Enabling Collaboration through Interworking

A variety of choices exist to enable the need for collaboration and sharing in such organizations. As organizations grow a variety of collaboration tools, which are project-specific, or function-specific, or site-specific, come into existence. This requires special efforts to make them interoperable and in some cases impose constraints for collaboration and sharing. The solution for the organization should be interworking with the organization’s ERP system, the various off-the-shelf and in-house MIS applications, commonly and widely used email platforms, and other productivity applications.

A unified collaboration and sharing system across any globally distributed organization encompassing various functions, projects, geographical sites, and specific work groups is the need of the hour. This article specifies the experience of architecting and implementing such a Unified Collaboration & Sharing Platform (UCSP) and the organizational impact of the same.

Unified Collaboration and Sharing Platform

In architecting UCSP, the functional requirements to cover various groups, types of contents, and the access management were important considerations. In choosing a platform, factors such as global accessibility, web- enabled, easy to learn and use, and ability to interface with the existing systems and tools were considered important.

UCSP was structured as shown below:

Depending on the needs of the users, contents of UCSP varied from files and reports to wikis, blogs, discussion forums, and task lists.

Interwork with Existing System

The interactions of UCSP with other systems in the organization are given below:

A collaboration platform, which was off-the-shelf and configurable at the user level, was chosen to enable this interworking. The collaboration platform chosen enabled bi-directional interworking with documents in widely used formats (viz., Excel files). As indicated, the UCSP is integrated with the enterprise email and calendaring systems, the ERP system, as well as select MIS applications. It enabled easier adoption by the users, as they could do most of their transactions from their often used applications such as email client. The tasks assigned in UCSP could be accessed and status updated through an email client.

Implementation and Impact

The Information Systems (IS) team devised the implementation strategy for gradual adoption of the systems and tools in UCSP while the other systems were still operational, so that there will be a total ‘ buy-in’ from the users. Thus while the system was well thought of in the beginning of the journey, it was allowed to grow and get used rather than a top-down push in one go. As an example, one of the sites which had a dedicated platform for policies and processes was linked from within the UCSP to provide seamless access. Flexibility was provided to the owners of the respective collaboration sites for individual projects/function groups to organize their sites in the manner best suited for their activities.

The best practices and learning from each of the groups were reused in the creation of other sub-sites within UCSP. The access restrictions and access policies were carefully set up by the IS team, so that there was no chance of any breach of confidentiality, integrity, and privacy. To enable distributed maintenance of the access controls, the permissions to configure these controls were distributed at different levels in UCSP structure. This reduced the dependency on the IS/IT teams, typically located at the headquarters, for routine maintenance and upkeeping.

Project Management Portal

The project teams use Excel spreadsheets and word documents for documenting various project artifacts such as details of meetings, action items assigned to different project members, statement of work documents, financial evaluations of the projects, technology component sheets, and project risk details. These are stored in a variety of configuration man-

agement tools or in an individual’s laptop/pc, and then circulated within the team using an email. Tracing of an event and resolution of it was cumbersome. The unified platform provided a web based interface and a server based repository for storing all the above project artifacts. The team members could be given shared access with access rights ranging from read, write, and modify access as appropriate to different documents, folders, issue lists, in the project site. The system was chosen for its ease of use and flexibility of online access. Even the icons in the system were familiar to the users. Hence only a quick introduction to the platform was sufficient to enable users to get started and explore further as they use. Users could continue to use Excel templates and word documents for storing their project artifacts. However they are shared through UCSP rather than through emails.

The project managers used the platform to assign and track tasks. The members could post the progress on each of their activities. Hence the collaboration platform provided a one-stop solution for storing and sharing the project artifacts during the entire life cycle, starting from the first stage till the last stages. This gave a complete visibility of the project to all in the project team, thus enhancing the effectiveness of the team as well empowering the team members. Since most of the R&D projects that Sasken does come with its own related Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAS), the access and security control is meticulously configured and monitored for each project site to prevent any possible involuntary errors and omissions.

Management Review Portal

This portal allowed functional heads to share their reviews and progress reports with their managers and Sasken leadership team. The data for some of these reports are derived from the granular data present in the various projects and collaboration sites. For example, the engineering delivery flash reports indicate the overall project status within one click. It minimizes the coordination required across hundreds of project managers, eliminating data redundancy and improving data integrity. The head of delivery function is able to present a comprehensive picture to the top management about metrics such as project utilization levels and project schedule adherence. Currently, all functions in Sasken, including corporate functions such as human resources and facilities management, use this portal to submit and review management reports. Different functional teams and cross-functional teams have adopted a similar portal for their collaborative activities. The quick search and configurable views enable an easy access to the specified reports from the thousands of stored artifacts.

Knowledge Sharing Portal

This portal hosts a variety of forums for collaboration and knowledge sharing. It includes discussion forums, knowledge base for sharing articles, blog sites for each individual, a common company glossary, and a platform for sharing organization policies and processes. An innovation promotion initiative was easily implemented on this platform with minimal support from IT teams. Globally, technical and project management trainings are being done on this platform. Also, sharing course content and conducting online assessments.

Impact of the UCSP

Since the introduction to span across geographies, functions, and work groups, the number of users accessing the platform has grown substantially. Being easily configurable, this platform is enabling the set up of collaboration project sites quickly, solely by the user groups themselves with minimal support from IS teams. UCSP also enables the quicker conceptualization and piloting of new systems and processes in the organization, without the need for creating specific implementation tools that have long gestation periods. It also gives the flexibility to relevant user groups to do changes to the system and processes during the pilot exercise with ease, thus enabling them to attain maturity before implementing them organization wide.

In a fast changing technical and business environment, collaboration and sharing are keys to promote innovation, dexterous planning, and execution excellence. Thus, a carefully chosen and implemented UCSP will provide the required network externality effects much similar to some of the successful social networking platforms to bring tremendous value to the organization.