I’m currently working with a kind of organisation that is probably most responsible for enabling global trade, a large logistics company. We are helping them to make savings at their smallest offices by removing, wherever possible, the local server infrastructure.
We have 16 members in the team from 10 countries which are: India, Malaysia, Denmark, Kuwait, Brazil, China, Australia, Sweden, England and, last but not least, myself from Wales. Weekly project meetings will be a challenge with the time zones included so we looked at solutions to assist us working more comfortably.
Below, on the graphic, is my idea to show how the different methods (remote access to Telepresence, Sharepoint to Twitter), showing how close to reality and how secure the communication methods are. Those at the top, I consider to be less secure, more public or open. The further to the right, I consider to be more like meeting people face to face.
The thing is... there’s no substitute for meeting. These tools assist us to work outside of our normal office hours or on the move to extend our face-to-face meetings.
We held a kick-off meeting face to face over a few days, one of the reason to get together was so as we knew each other outside of work, to build an effective multi-dimensional team.
Three questions:
- where would you place different collaboration offers in the grid?
- how to maintain the team spirit once the kick-off meeting has finished...that non-project based relationship?
- are there any additional tools you would suggest? Should LinkedIn be there? Facebook? BBM?
Simon
Credit: © Victoria - Fotolia.com
I've been a consultant with Orange Business (and its predecessor Equant) for more than 15 years. My specialties are Messaging, Active Directory, hosting, application traffic management and global networking.