shared visual displays, awareness of team members' activities, and various signals to others about the importance of the work. Keywords. Computer supported ...
CHI 98 018-23
APRIL
ACM
1998
ISBN l-581
LATE-BRFAKING RESULTS
13-028-7
A Room of Your Own: What Would it Take to Help Remote Groups Work as Well as Collocated Groups? Judith S. Olson, Lisa Covi, Elena Rocco Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (c=w The School of Information The University of Michigan 701 Tappan Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1234 Ijsolson, covi, rakele]@umich.edu
William
J. Miller, Paul Allie Steelcase, Inc. P.O. Box 1967 Grand Rapids, MI 49501 [wmiller, pallie]@steelcase-researchxom
ABSTRACT
Remotely located teams have difficulty and today’s groupware is not totally successful in helping them. To inform our design of titure groupware, we investigated the work habits of teams that have nearly the ideal: they work in dedicated project rooms. We conducted field work that included interviews and observations of teams in 9 U.S. companies who had dedicated project rooms and a 6 week study of one site. We found that the team members reported clear advantages of being collocated: increased learning, motivation, and coordination. Future groupware for remote groups must at least support large, persistent, shared visual displays, awareness of team members’ activities, and various signals to others about the importance of the work. Keywords
Computer supported teamwork, space.
cooperative
work,
groupware,
INTRODUCTION
There is clearly a need for groupware: More and more companies are organizing their work into teams [2], more of these teams are not collocated [S]. However, research indicates that teams struggle to stay coordinated with they are not collocated [6]. What do teams actually need? Teams need to coordinate, communicate and share their work objects. We have desktop video conferencing, and chat boxes as well as
remote window or file sharing and glances into remote spaces to be aware of what someone is doing. The slow diffusion of these technologies, however, suggests that perhaps we don’t know the whole story yet. Research has focused more on what technology can do than on assessing primary needs of collocated teams. The goal of this study is to provide that an assessment of these needs.
METHOD
To investigate how dedicated project rooms are being used in real companies, we interviewed and observed work in project rooms in 9 Fortune 500 companies, and conducted an in-depth study of one site where 6 people resided in a project room for 6 weeks while they produced software code. RESULTS
Our analysis of the observations and interviews uncovered three main results, having to do with the kinds of cognitive artifacts in use in these rooms, how collocation supports teamwork, and the purpose of people being assigned to a dedicated project room What kinds of artifacts supported
and cognitive their work?
motivational
The literature on distributed cognition [4] focused our interest on the use of shared artifacts and the interactions with the other team members. Flip charts, whiteboards, tack boards, and walls often held important artifacts, displaying work in progress, current status of tasks, reference materials or past accomplishments. These artifacts helped the teams make intangible work visible. For example, in one room project, 41 flip chart sheets appeared on the walls at all times. They were co-authored by the group and were clustered, moved, and edited at various times in the production of the software. Individuals who were later coding parts of the so&are moved these near their workstation and referred to them often. And, in early analysis, use cases were displayed side by side so developers could see the similarities, in the hopes of finding useful abstractions. The point is that the displays were large, complex, and persistent. Besides making work visible and editable, cognitive artifacts also facilitated coordination. There were to-do lists with items assigned to individuals, tick marks indicating when things are done and what is to do next. Although there are software versions of this in project management
packages,the factthat it was persistentand large made it motivating.
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We were surprised at the number of other motivational artifacts that these rooms contained. Demming project planning principles, company logos and photographs extolling the power and speed of employees as well as products, and motivational posters reminded them of the value of their work. How
collocation
supports
teamwork.
In dedicated project rooms, team members are in constant contact with each other. This collocation afforded training, easy transitions, and awareness, implicit motivation. In a SWAT-team room, team members had desks about 15 feet apart. They reported that they were close enough to overhear other team members’ phone conversations zy they chose. When call volume was increased, team members could then appropriately cover for each other. Collocation also supports the implicit learning. People imitate each other when they are collocated. For example, team members reported that they learned “how things am done,” how to make requests on the phone, and how to chart progress by observing and replicating the behavior of proximate others. At some stages in teamwork, it is important for the team to collaborate, and at other times to work individually in parallel. Team members reported that being co-present during individual work provided opportunities for interruption at a moment’s notice for important interactions. They found this generally helpful, even though interruptions themselves create disruption. And, the co-presence of team members instilled hard work. Many times, when one person is visibly working hard, others will follow suit, a phenomenon called “social facilitation” [ 11. What project
is
the room?
perceived
value
of
a dedicated
Who gets these rooms? First, managers assign them believing they will produce efficient work. A number af rooms were given to teams who were behind on a critical development project. In the spirit of Skunk Works [7] the idea is that if people are put into a room, released from other bureaucratic impediments, they will be both creative and efficient. It was also a signal from management as to both the importance of the project and the desperation that management felt. Second, others gave project rooms as a signal. For example, a rapid response team for sales people needed to coordinate special pricing deals for major customers. Since sales volume was a major goal in this company, assigning a project room to this team signaled its importance. IMPLICATIONS
FOR
GROUPWARE
Collocation of cognitive artifacts and team members offers the broadest bandwidth for cooperative work. Team members developed shared documents together, making the work tangible. Artifacts helped coordination and motivation as well. The key feature was that they were persistent, allowing easy access (by a glance, not a file
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retrieval) and large enough to allow cross connections to be perceived. The presence of one’s co-workers helped with coordination, implicit learning, easy transitions from one phase of work to another, and social facilitation. Although computerized technologies such as Xerox’s SoftBoard, and Microfield Graphics LiveBoard, Smart2000’s board provide large editable displays, they arc still the size of one or two flip charts at most, not the room size, high resolution displays we saw in the project rooms. Although there are a number of technologies that support awareness in remote groups, such as MediaSpace [3], none of these have the ease and control afforded by physical space. There is nothing to dial to gain awareness of one’s collocated teammember nor to initiate a conversation or to One’s turn of the body signals simply overhear. availability without the effort of setting an iconic indicator in a remote application. Until the awareness technologies are as simple as movement in physical space, coordination, learning, and motivation will suffer. Third, teams get rooms with the belief that they will be The more efficient, and the rooms signal importance. inherent invisibility of much of today’s computing artifacts to the casual passers by defeats this second purpose. Until groupware is persistent, high resolution, providing easy awareness and visible, remote teams will suffer. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by a grant from Steelcase, Inc., and benefited from interview help from Stephanie Teasley and editing help from David O’Leary and a number of anonymous reviewers. REFERENCES
1. Allport, F. H.. (1920) The influence of the group upon association and thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3, l59- I82 2. Becker, R., Quinn, K., Tennesen, C. The ecology of collaborative work. Cornell University International Workplace Studies Program. Technical Report, 1995. 3. Harrison, S., Bly, S., Anderson, S., Minneman, S. (1997)
The Media Space. in K. Finn, A. Sellen,
and
S. Wilbur (Eds.) Video Mediated Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 225-244 4. Hutchins,
E. (1995) Cognition Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
in
the
Wild.
5. Kinney, S. T., and Panko, R.
(1996) Project teams: Profiles and member perceptions: Implications for support system research and products. group Proceedings of the 25th Hawaii international Conference on Systems Science. New York: ACM.. 6. Olson, J. S., and Teasley, S. (1996) Groupware in the wild: Lessons learned from a year of virtual collocation. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM. pp. 419-427. 7. Rich,
B. R., and Janos, L. (1994) Skunk Works. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company
