Individual Reflection—Ivy Chow

Our team adopted Google Hangouts (www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/‎) for team meeting to facilitate collaboration during these two months of team work.  The advantage of using Google Hangouts is that it is capable of supporting up to nine persons simultaneous video conferencing.  Productivity tools like Google Drive are also helping in teamwork sharing and collaborating.  As such, our teammates who are geographically separated can meet and work together by virtual means.  With these technologies, we could arrange meetings more easily.

Moreover, with the help of Google Slide and Screen Share, we can share the latest version of the presentation materials among teammates, and each team members could give feedback real-time.  Most importantly, when the most updated version is always put online and being kept in a centralized location, the chance of updating incorrect versions in collaboration is slim.

Google Calendar also plays an important role in collaboration.  Not only teammates can check the team’s schedule, but also individual schedule.  Google Calendar has notification capability which acts like alarm clock for notifying teammates on important deadlines and milestones.

Team members are being able to work with these tools with efficiency.  They are also keeping up with schedule and update information without confusion under minimal supervision and guidance.  For example, when the document are being kept in Google Doc, team members could contribute to the same document for updating a specific part assigned to them, without having to worry about overwriting each other’s updates.   Also, we would have been using email attachment when we have not used Google Drive, as such we don’t have to waste effort on handling manual version keeping and merging of multiple copies from different individual.

Brainstorming is the major method of consolidating collective thinking during virtual meeting.  In order to ensure effective outcomes, each team members must prepare before meeting the materials which were in their expertise. Through proper division of labor, effective assignment based on members’ expertise, and brainstorming, an interim decision was made.

Each interim decision was then discussed before finalization.  Different group of virtual team would discuss the interim decisions and hopefully they could arrive with consensus on the issues.  After few round of negotiations among different groups, a finalized decision would emerge.

The first conflict was the disagreement on adopting team work technologies. This conflict was resolved by sparing extra session on demonstrating and discussing the use of these technologies and fortunately we have come up with consensus by performing workshop on them.

The second conflict was during the brainstorming process.  Brainstorming could help creating ideas, but the process would be easily side-tracked.  The conflict was resolved by requiring members to support their ideas with facts when the brainstorming was leading to chaos.

The third conflict was the disagreement on final decision after meeting. This was where we introduced iterative negotiation processes where interim decisions were refined through iteration of discussion with different combination of virtual team.  This was a timely process but we are grateful that this always led to common consensus in the end.

As mentioned before, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Google Doc and Google Side, etc. facilitated team collaboration.  However, sometime these technologies did not work as expect, for example some team members claimed that those services are sometime inaccessible when they were in China, some even didn’t understand the operation of those technologies.  As a result they would resort to use more primitive and ineffective technologies like email, which would eventually hamper our performance.

I committed to the team with my knowledge in collaborating technologies, and my experience on management which is also helping in resolving conflicts.

I have successfully organized meeting and led the team to its full potent, and resolved couple of conflicts arise.

My major concern in sharing with the group was our cultural differences might lead to conflict in believes which would eventually end up with unnecessary argument or side-tracking on topics.

Regardless, I have not shared with the group that I think we have taken too much time on iterative negotiations during disagreement on decision.  Sometime I think I would have been more effective to resolve these disagreements when we have chance to meet in person, because there would have been changed in attitude when people are met in person.

Nevertheless, I believe the group is working very well, given that the outcome of our work is quite satisfactory.  I think outcome is all that matters.

In conclusion, I believe our group is completing a high quality project because, first we have successfully made use of technology to surmount our geographically barrier; second we resolved conflicts with our pre-determined processes and eventually come up with ideas that was a result of our fully committed efforts.