Self Reflection Liam

Self-reflection

Review on this virtual collaboration project

I think all of my teammates have learned something from the process of working out this project because it is quite challenging and puts some of our basic collaboration skills to test, one of these challenges is that it is not a collaboration among some of the people we are quite familiar with like what we did in other courses, our working partners are from the evening class, their working style and thinking pattern is totally unknown to our team, in limited time we have to build a collaboration relationship with them and adopt to the pace of the new group, these all demand some communication skills and negotiation skills, to unify the ideas of 6 people in 2 teams will never be an easy task, the content of this project is also quite interesting and challenging, we need to choose 2 companies from different industry and try to find out the linkage of them and discuss the possibility of collaboration between these two companies, we even need to be able to simulate the collaboration process to find out the possible problems in their cooperation and the future vision of this virtual collaboration, to all of us, the creativity thinking will be tested and developed, so it is worthy to summarize this project and have a review on the problems we encountered and the lessons we learned.

The inter-team communication

It is quite tricky to unify the schedule of the 6 members in the two teams especially the part time team have to spend their major time on their daily work, sitting down to have a face-to-face discussion seemed to be imposable, so we finally turn to the web based communicating tools for help.

E-mail

Primordial but effective, e-mail is helpful for us to exchange documents and website links, not like some other popular instant message exchange tools, e-mail is good at delivering long passages and attachments, also it is available on phones, makes it an ideal choice for us, but the shortcoming of E-mail is sometimes you can’t perform instant chat with it, there will always be delay in receiving and replying the mail, maybe checking the mailbox itself is a time consuming thing especially you have to deal with a large number of inbox mails, so although it can serve as an information exchange channel, we can’t share the idea that suddenly appear in our heads. In this collaboration we usually use it to transfer documents like ppt and report.

Skype

The abundant function of Skype makes it a perfect choice when we need to hold a teleconference, we found out that although we can communicate with messages and mails but sometimes a face to face discussion is irreplaceable because people tend to be more focused when facing the others, also the facial expression and body gesture sometimes can convey more information than words, but it also have shortcoming: if you want to have a teleconference, you need to find a space that is silent as well as bright, you don’t want to be interrupted or influenced by the background noise, that means this communication method requires a proper environment, but unfortunately it is hard for us to find a place like this whenever we need to have a discussion, so for us Skype is a choice to have regular meeting every week to report the progress and to cross contract our data.

Whats app and QQ

went through a lot of discussion, we made Whats app the communication tool in our team, these two software are all instant messaging app that can meet our need, but the problem is that our team are more familiar with QQ because in mainland most of our friends are using it, but the HK local team prefer Whats app and many of them don’t have a QQ in their computer, we had a discussion on this because we all want to use the tool that we are familiar with, at last our team made compromise and agreed on Whats app because it is more stable and has more functions that can serve our inter group discussions. Whenever we have good idea we will use this to share with the whole team and collect feedback from the other team.

Choosing the message exchange is the first step of collaboration since the cooperation is based on communication, the unified communication tool assists us to have a high efficient collaboration.

Evaluation on coordinating the work

For my part, we did a good job on coordinating the work, from the very beginning we made a frame of our report together and assign the work to every team member, the key to make it workable is that we never make vague assignment, everyone have to choose a part that he is interested in and he had to work out a rough timetable about how long time he could finish it, every individual know the progress of the hole team, it is easy for us to compose modification on the structure of the project

The attitude within the group

Another crucial reason for our success in this collaboration is the attitude, with the communication instrument I mentioned above, we all actively take part in the discussion process, the common goal is the spirit of a team, I think the right thing we did is that we illustrated the expected outcome before we set out doing this work and that helped, we discussed the collaboration in our project we expected and the resource we needed to refer to letting the team members to know the specific objective of this project can provide them a very clear view, and motivate them to engage in the creative thinking, the positive attitude and the willingness of sharing information and looking for better solution is a key factor that guarantee the quality of the outcome.

Conflict within the team

Although we all tried to replace thinking and building channels to exchange and discuss ideas, still there were conflict we encountered, but we properly handled these conflicts to avoid any further influence on our work here are some cases:

Case 1

The virtual collaboration project involve a lot of creative thinking, but many of the idea from our brain storm can’t be accepted by the other team, different culture and major background made it hard to get agreement on certain points, for example the initial proposal from our team is about a collaboration between fast food restaurant and a heath consulting center, we believed it will perfectly work because from our perspective as a consumer, we will accept the product provide by these companies, we put forward our proposal and give suggestion on the structure of the report but they strongly disagree. They evaluated our plan based on their understanding of the consumer behavior and reached a conclusion that the consumers will not accept this kind of service and this collaboration will damage the interest of the stakeholders, you see we get our conclusion based on our own understanding and experience, but the different cultural background leaded to different criteria, we negotiated with them and evaluated our plan again and finally compromised because the target market is in HK and we should set plans base on the consumer behavior of these region, in this case we can see a cultural crush, that is to say, the people of different background is likely to have different perspective on a certain topic, we properly dealt with this problem for we believe that rather than quarreling over different perspective it is more efficient to find out which one is more suitable to be applied in the current situation and that avoided internal friction in our collaboration group.

Case B

The team members in the part time team are all equipped with rich working experience and through the whole process they played a leading role, they did a really good job and their proposal is complete and in detail, but this forced us to work out the project base on their perspective, so to some extent, we wanted to add some origin thinking from us, this conflict was solved by communicating, through chat apps Skype and E-mail we try to provide our suggestion, the other team was also willing to accept our advice and begun to pay more attention to our feedback about the plan, we avoided this conflict by utilizing communicating channels and actively providing feedbacks to let our peers know what we are thinking about.

These two cases show that there are many inevitable factors in the team that may cause conflict, the obstacle in the information sharing or information transparency will result in conflict and divergence in the team, to cope with this, we need to be active to express our idea and perspective, we have to accept the difference in the concept of our team members and willing to discuss them to avoid conflict.

Team promises and commitments

There is not a real ‘commitment’ that we made according to me because we succeeded in building trust among the team members, from the very beginning we clarified the role of every team member plays in this process, so we worked in a frame and shared the common interest, the first thing we did is to make sure that everyone knows their due work and how their part will contribute to the whole project, we are all motivated by this objective and the trust in this group is more effect than commitment, surely we will have a evaluation process about the outcome of the peers, but we didn’t want to use commitment to force them to take part in this procedure.

My concerns

About this project one of my biggest concerns is how will we use the digital platform to serve the existing customers and to attract the potential customers? Actually on of our main topic is how communicating channels can link two different companies that seems not to have chance to cooperate I shared this concern with the team members and luckily this is in accordance with their opinion, so we emphasis a lot on this question and that made our plan convincing and informative, but some of the concern I didn’t share with my peers for it is not strongly related to the main content of our plan, for example I wanted to emphasis the pressure from the potential substitutes of HK styled café but it turned out to be in lack associate with the main idea of our project so I didn’t share this one within the team.

Conclusion and evaluation

Due to my criteria of a high efficient collaboration, the teamwork of our group is a successful one, we encountered many conflicts but finally found the way to solve them there are some tips for the further collaboration practice:

Sharing ideas and giving feedback

The lesson I learned is that some of the conflict is inevitable but with expedite channel of communication, we can reduce the effect of these conflicts and increase the coherence of the team, only by making sure that everyone has the access to express his own opinion can we reach a win-win collaboration and expect high performance

Technology is power

The new communication technology really can change the form of collaboration; it brings in great convenience and benefits to the working teams, but be careful when choosing them, only the most suitable one works

Be creative!

In our collaboration relative thinking helps a lot, sometimes the best way to solve problems is to think out of the box, we didn’t suppressed by our experience and knowledge, that is the key to a successful collaboration.