Lets take a drive around how teams are operating in a distributed environment. I am sure a lot of us would have been meeting people remotely. This challenge is to take collaboration a step further.
Roopa, a seasoned manager has got started on a small but interesting project. Her team is rolling out a health monitoring mobile app to districts in eastern and southern India. Her team is co-ordinating with NGO representing the states, district health officers, volunteers and her own team that visit these folks on the ground.
Their team needs to showcase the mobile application to the NGO every week and to some selected volunteers. Roopa, the team’s analyst and couple of senior developers discuss with the NGO on an almost daily basis about the app; take feedback and generate ideas for subsequent milestones. This is a true distributed team – with everyone having views.
If they were co-located, Roopa would have hit a sixer with her facilitation skills, stickies and white board. But, that is not what it is – and, Telephone and video calls are proving to be not sufficient at all.
After a bit of haggling – her company has told it will support budget and consider specific security reviews if she can recommend some tools for simulating the workshop process online.
Can you help her find those tools, she is using her home computer to research tools giving these features
- Collaborate on ideas and do facilitation online
- Showcase her mobile app without having to do the installation in every phone every week
Network availability (3G or wired), power situation is good at NGO and Government offices – almost on par with her offices.
Suggested solution:
Roopa has several options to review and select from the below categories
Collaboration tools for Team Meeting: These are tools that distributed teams can consider – this category of tools is more well known too
GoTo Meeting
Zoom
Webex
Skype
Google’s Hangout
And
Slack – Just awesome for the amount of integrations. Now they have opened voice calls too. You may want to look at their site if you will need to look at
Collaboration for discussing generating ideas (Facilitation tools): These tools can be used to actually change the tone of meetings, especially if all people must participate and contribute to ideas
XMind – Primarily an offline mind mapping tool; but very effective if you use it with team meeting tools and in some cases let the other person take remote control.
BlankCanvas: Another tool that is just awesome for the way it allows us to consolidate and group ideas and get people to contribute. Worth taking more than a look.
MindMeister: Have used it very little personally, but avoids X-Mind’s offline challenges.
Team Tasks & Dashboards: What is a team if we can not point who is to do what and see how the team is progressing; the following tools help people become what they could be – “effective team”
Trello: Easy to setup, share and create lists, tasks and integrate with other collaboration tools. This should be your first choice if you are looking for something light weight and effective. Pulling metrics is slightly difficult (IMO), but you could export and get things done in a jiffy.
Mingle – I like this tool for the amount of reports and insights that you can pull up and consider it truly enabling for teams in organisations.
Also consider BaseCamp, I have heard good things – but never used it.
User Experience sharing tools
If you use mac, go first for Sketch. Balsamiq is good for doing mock ups. Check out Creately too. If nothing else, use powerpoint (or) KeyNote (or) LibreOffice itself to create new visuals – those are very very effective. All these tools can be used from a very light-weight sharing visual ideas to a proper end user ready prototype.
Mobile Application Showcase & Sharing tools
Consider HockeyApp, TestFlight (for iOS). These tools give more options to understand crash reports, actual user behaviour (especially links that users do not even bother to look -which ideally you must get an idea during early prototyping).
But, if the idea is just to demo – then a screen recorder will be good too
4 Responses
Hi Shiv, I can relate to this, it is a real different world.
I was invited a few times to address students appearing for CET exams as an industry person and found it challenging to connect with them. I was able to connect somewhat as one of their concern was what if they do not get into a good college, which I was able to address by sharing real life examples.
Thanks Vasu. College “brand” no doubt helps early on in work life – corporate doors open more easily. But down the line, it is people’s motivation and track record that helps build careers. I am sure we have all seen examples affirming this. I have stressed with the mentees that I work with. An aside, the mentorship program I am involved in spans 4-5 months and so, I have had time to work on the “connect”! Yes – takes time and effort.
Hi Shiv – very well written – thanks for the write-up.
Many years ago I was a volunteer mentor for a couple of youth as part of Dream A Dream’s life skills mentoring program. This was in person mentoring where the mentee and I would meet periodically (usually on a weekend) and discuss general topics. There was no prescribed structure though all mentors did go thru a few hours of in person training. Based on that experience I can corroborate that it takes time for the mentee to open up, especially in that case given their lack of confidence in expressing in English which was the recommended language for communication. Switching to Tamil (in one case where the mentee was from Tamil Nadu) helped.
Can also relate well to your point on swings in mood and engagement level of the mentee and the need for mentor to shift gears accordingly.
I am sure the mentees are benefiting a lot from your vast and varied experience – hope you will come back to mentor more such students after you complete the current mentorships and possibly take a break!
Thank you, Bhasker!