Messaging News - December 2008 - (Page 17) One of the keys to Seamless Teamwork is that it outlines a way of using SharePoint to support both the work tasks of the team and the social well-being of the team. Key Elements One of the keys to Seamless Teamwork is that it outlines a way of using SharePoint to support both the work tasks of the team and the social well-being of the team. An example of this is advice about how to use the wiki capabilities of SharePoint to support team brainstorming during the process of the project, as well as how to use the blog to support the people at a social level when the project is underway. Using the blog for this purpose provides a strategy for interpreting silence in virtual teams, which is a huge issue. Once you take away the ability for people to directly see the others they are working with, those people become invisible and inaudible. Thus when you use technology to bridge the gap between people, you need to provide cues as to why some people may be silent at a particular point in time. Keeping a project blog about upcoming movements is one way of overcoming this silence. Another key to Seamless Teamwork is the way the sites are set up. In any business project, there are three broad groups involved in what happens: the people working on the project team, the sponsors and stakeholders of the project, and everyone else in the organization. The set up of a project site needs to recognize these three groups, and their differing requirements. The way Seamless Teamwork handles this is akin to the design of a building: anyone can walk into the foyer or lobby of a building and read the mission statement on the wall, look at the pictures of the CEOs, and view the brochures and magazines placed for review. However to get further into the building, you need special access privileges. This idea can be brought to life in SharePoint by creating an overall site for the project that anyone in the organization can access, and which gives details about the project and the people involved. If the visitor is a member of the project team, or a sponsor of the initiative, they can get to one of the sub-sites that forms that group’s working place. If you’re on the project team, you can get to the Inner Team site. If you’re a sponsor or stakeholder, you can get to the Sponsors and Stakeholders site. Both of these sub-sites are set up with specific lists and libraries to support project execution and communication. Seamless Teamwork is a very pragmatic book. You will wonder if the same person who wrote the SharePoint 7 Pillars critique earlier in 2008 could also write Seamless Teamwork. Yes, I wrote both. If you are not familiar with SharePoint 7 Pillars, it is a research report that concludes that SharePoint fails in its ability to support team collaboration, according to the requirements of the 7 Pillars framework for enterprise collaboration. Yet, here’s Seamless Teamwork, a book that talks about how to use SharePoint for collaboration. How does one square the advice of both? The simple answer is the audience for SharePoint 7 Pillars and Seamless Teamwork is different, and each care about different things. The audience for SharePoint 7 Pillars is the IT Department, charged with building an IT environment to support collaboration. The SharePoint 7 Pillars research sounds a warning about how far you can go with SharePoint, as well as some of the areas where you will require technical and human practice mitigations. Seamless Teamwork is directed to people in business teams who use SharePoint. While Seamless Teamwork is not a complex IT book, IT people will benefit from a better understanding of how people use SharePoint. My hope is that the book will be of great help to all who read it. MS/TMP EDITOR’S NOTE Messaging News readers can learn more about Seamless Teamwork at www.seamlessteamwork.com. It is published by Microsoft Press, and is available online from Amazon.com and at better bookstores everywhere. Michael Sampson also offers a one-day workshop for business teams to explore how they can use the main ideas of Seamless Teamwork in their work, as well as a a longer workshop for IT folks, to set a strategic direction for how business teams across the organization can use SharePoint more effectively for collaboration. FOR YOUR REFERENCE Messaging News writer Michael Sampson helps organizations improve the capability of teams that can’t be together, to work together. He writes at www.michaelsampson.net and can be reached at michael@ michaelsampson.net messagingnews.com messagingnews.com 17 17 http://www.seamlessteamwork.com http://www.seamlessteamwork.com http://www.Amazon.com http://www.michaelsampson.net http://www.messagingnews.com
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