Master your Online Project
Channel: Scatterwork
Date: 24/03/2016

Deasún Ó Conchúir from Scatterwork to talk about "Mastering your Online Project".

The scenario is that you or one of your subordinates has been given a significant, real-world, challenging, once-off assignment - let's call that a project.

And your team are in different places and we'll call it an Online or a Virtual Project. In reality, most projects are like that nowadays. It's very unusual to have everybody sitting in the one place. 

And of course the risks in a project always include poor communication. In a virtual or an online project, the risk of poor communication is even higher, particularly if people speak different languages, they are in different time zones, they have different cultural interactions and so forth.

So what we do is we have a project simulator and alongside it there is a project plan which we have to complete. We put your people into teams of 3 or 4 people and each team has a copy of the project.

They have to plan the project, put the right people against the work so that the project will be carried out on time. Then the clock starts and every now and then they get a message - maybe somebody walks into the office or it comes in through the computer - and the message says:

"something has happened" - maybe somebody is ill or equipment has broken down - and they have to change the plan.

We run that for a while and then we stop. When we stop, we ask ourselves or each team asks themselves "what did we learn from the interaction?"

This is called experiential learning. It means that they learned from what they did themselves. 

"Did we have bad Communication?"
"Did we understand each other?"
"Why did we make a wrong decision?" and so forth.

What do we get out of it?

What happens is that when we start off, particularly if the people are in different places and don't know each other, they can be very reserved and they find it quite difficult to plan the project.

But the further they go, the more they get involved - it it's very game-like. The result is that they get to know each other very genuinely at a personal level.

It's obviously much, much quicker and cheaper to run a simulator like this for a project team to get them going than it is to do it on the real project.

And it has the additional advantage, of course, that people have different types of project experience but each person gets a feel of where the other person's experience is, so it combines all their experience. 

So who is it for?

It's particularly for teams where not everybody is in the same place, but as I said, this is actually most projects these days, but particularly if people work across time zones, the project needs to start quickly, we don't want to move people around the globe and the work must take place. 

If we just have a telephone conference, you can be sure most people will be doing emails during the conference and the team as a team will not work. 

So the format of the workshops is simple: we run typically three 3 hour sessions on 3 consecutive days. We have to explain the
assignment, people have to get to know each other and then they have to have these debriefing sessions and so forth.

At the end of that, we find that the typical team have increased their level of communication with each other in quite unexpected and positive ways.

So that's the way that wokshop product works: if you have a team that is distributed, you want to get going quickly, you don't want to
travel either to save time or money or both.

This is the product for you.