Pillar 3: Real-Time Joint Editing and Review, Feb 28

(PDF, 9 pages, 147 KB)

"During the course of writing a new document or reviewing an existing one, team members often want input from others on the team. This ranges from the formal ("what do you think about the way I've written this line?") to the informal ("can we brainstorm on a response to this posting?"). Team members need a quick method of inviting someone else to view the same information on their screen, to jointly navigate through a document, and to permit the other person to directly change the text they’ve been writing."

Preparing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other forms of communication can be an intensely collaborative experience. People meet to brainstorm the contents of the document, assign portions to respective team members to prepare, and coordinate write up and final editing. In a face-to-face setting, team members routinely bounce half-formed ideas off each other, taking advantage of physical proximity to gain feedback on what they are writing or preparing as they do so. In a distributed setting, we have a problem: we are physically and intellectually isolated from others who can give us quick feedback on the topic we are working on. This is because we have to rely on individual productivity applications that were not designed for intensely collaborative work processes. A key requirement for such collaborative work processes is the ability to jointly edit and review documents while they are still on-screen with colleagues irrespective of location.

This paper discusses:

• The Situation Today ... how team members deal with getting feedback on in-progress documents today


• Negative Effects on Team Productivity ... associated with today's ways of doing things


• The Ideal Future Situation ... that enables joint review and editing of documents


• Positive Effects for Team Productivity ... if the ideal future situation was fully realized; and


• Technologies to Consider ... current product offerings that go some way toward meeting the set of ideal future requirements outlined

What's Next?
The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity provides a framework for thinking about how to design and deliver an environment for collaboration team work. Next time I will be discussing Pillar 4, coordinating schedules via team aware scheduling software. I’d love to discuss your reaction to Pillar 3, or anything to do with the 7 Pillars model in general. Please leave a comment below, or send email to michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com.

Comments

[Juan]

the URL of the document broken

[Michael Sampson]

See here http://resources.michaelsampson.net/2008/02/7pillars.html