What occurs when the collaboration tool limits and sometimes even directs user activity?

Q2-1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics of Collaboration?

• Cooperation – a group of people working together, all doing essentially the same type of work, to accomplish a job. Usually the quality is the same as one person doing the work alone.
• Collaboration – a group of people working together to achieve a common goal via a process of feedback and iteration.
• Different ideas are brought together to receive the maximum output.
• Feedback and revisions are important in improving ideas or products.

Importance of Effective Critical Feedback

• In order for collaboration to be successful, members must provide and recieve feed back
• Groupthink should be avoided, because their would be no critical feedback as everyone shares the same ideas and agrees with one another.
• Feedback should be constructive and not to destroy one another
• Group work is meant to invite different ideas and views; otherwise, there is no need to work with a group.

Guidelines for Giving and Receiving Critical Feedback

• Discuss the guideline with your group in the beginning so everybody has an understanding of how to receive feedback without causing any conflicts in the group.
• The guideline includes be specific, offer suggestions, avoid personal comments, strive for balance, question your emotions, do no dominate, and demonstrate a commitment to the group.

Warning!

• Working in a group of people with different backgrounds is important because they were educated differently will most likely have different views of the situation.
• You never know whom you’ll have to team with in the future, so iteration and feedback skills are important.

Q2-2 What Are Three Criteria for Successful Collaboration?

• Three criteria for judging a team’s success include successful outcome, growth in team capability, and meaningful and satisfying experience.

Successful Outcome

• Students biggest concern is to accomplish the goal set out by the professor.
• Timeliness and staying within budget is two of many criteria that is not as transparent as getting the task done when looking at whether or not the outcome is successful.

Growth in Team Capability

• Team growth is important for the group’s longevity.
• Teammates learn from one another, and as they achieve unity and cohesion, the task completed at a faster and more efficient pace.

Meaningful and Satisfying Experience

• Work that is importance and receive compliments/recognition can be perceived as satisfying work.
• Creating unity and cohesion among the team is also viewed as a meaningful and satisfying experience.

Q2-3 What Are the Four Primary Purposes of Collaboration?

Becoming Informed

• Data can come off as ambiguous so the team must make sure everybody is on the same page and share the same information as much as possible.

Making Decisions

• Decisions are made at three levels.
  • Operation Decisions are those that support operational, day-to-day activities.
  • Managerial Decisions are decisions about the allocation and utilization of resources.
  • Strategic Decisions are those that support broad-scope, organizational issues.
  • The Decision Process includes structured decision and unstructured decision.
    • A structured decision process is one for which there is an understood and accepted method for making the decision. Seldom require collaboration.
    • An unstructured decision process is one for which there is no agreed-on decision-making method. Often includes collaboration.
  • The Relationship Between Decision Type and Decision Process are loosely related.
  • Decision at the operational level tends to be structured, and decisions at the strategic level tend to be unstructured.

Solving Problems

• A problem is a perceived difference between what is and what ought to be.
• The outcome is subjective so people can have different views.

Managing Projects

• Projects are formed to create or produce something
  • The starting phase is to set the ground rules for project and the team. Assigning jobs to your teammates. (Roles, goals, methods, etc…)
  • The planning phase is to determine “who will do what and by when.”
  • Project tasks are accomplished during the doing phase.
  • The finalizing phase is when the team either comes up with new task to expedite the process or document.

Q2-4 What Are the Requirements for a Collaboration Information System?

• Collaboration information system or collaboration system is an information system that supports collaboration.

The Five Components of an IS for Collaboration

• Hardware, software, data, procedures, and people.
• Project data is data that is part of the collaboration’s work project.
• Project metadata is data used to manage the project.

Primary Functions: Communication and Content Sharing

• The three criteria to a teams success includes completing the work, on time and on budget, growth in team capability, and meaningful and satisfying experience.

Q2-5 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Improve Team Communication?

• Synchronous communication occurs when all team members meet at the same time, such as with conference calls or face-to-face meetings.
• Asynchronous communication occurs when team members do not meet at the same time.
• Meeting face to face is very difficult due to conflicting schedules, but there are many applications that can be used to meet online, such as virtual meetings, screen-sharing applications, webinar, videoconferencing, email, and discussion forums.

Q2-6 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Manage Shared Content?

• Both project data and work-product data as well as project metadata has to be shared amongst the group; therefore, everybody must utilize the applications that is being used for ease of transferring.

Shared Content with No Control

• Emails are primitive and have a high chance of causing difficulty.
• File server is a computer that stores files just like the disk in your computer, which is better than email because it is stored in a single location.
• A careful method of dealing with the data on a server should be discussed in the beginning to avoid data overwrites.

Shared Content with Version Management on Google Drive

• Version management track changes to documents and provide features and functions to accommodate concurrent work.
• Google Drive is a free service that provides virtual drive tin the cloud into which you can create folders and store files.

Shared Content with Version Control

• Version control is the process that occurs when the collaboration tool limits, and sometimes even directs, user activity.
• Version control applications can be set up so that users are required to check out documents before they are able to modify them.
• While checked out, no other users can edit it, which will reduce data overwrite.
• Workflow control manages activities in a predefined process.

Q2-7 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Manage Tasks?

• Good project managers make sure that every team meeting ends with an updated list of tasks.
• Specify the task explicitly so everybody understands.
• Team leader has to make sure the others are given due dates and follow up on their task.

Sharing a Task List on Google Drive

• Setting is very simple and easy to access and edit. The only thing is that each member has to have a Google account.

Q2-8 Which Collaboration IS is Right for Your Team?

Three Sets of Collaboration Tools

• The minimal collaboration tool set does not have audio or video but still able to collaborate with your team with little support from the software. For example emails and text.
• The good collaboration tool set has the ability to conduct multiparty audio and video virtual meetings and has support for concurrent access to document, spreadsheet, and presentation files.
• The comprehensive collaboration tool set includes content management and control, workflow control, and online meetings with sharing.

Choosing the Set for Your Team

• Using the power curve to show the relationship of power/capability to time can help decide which collaboration tool your group will need.

Don’t Forget Procedures and People!

• You should not worry about hardware as much because the most important thing is the data component that is created by people.
• Ground rules about iteration and feedback, which tools to use, and job roles are important in order for a collaboration to be successful.

Q2-9 2026?

• Collaboration systems will become cheaper and cheaper, which will allow for face-to-face meetings to be much easier to manage.
• Face-to-face meetings may be more costly than meeting in person, because you will be losing actual human interaction.
• More and more businesses will allow their employees to work from home and they will be able to cut their traveling expenses as there will be no need for business travels.