For teams to work together effectively, a series of boundary conditions have to be met. Based on our own experience and combining a few existing models, we have in Future Workspaces come up with a model for team effectiveness. We use this model to analyze how well a team works together and to advize where process improvements or innovative technologies can help a team to be more effective.

Central in the model is individual readiness: the individuals in the team have to be willing and able to work together. Between the different individuals there have to be positive relationships. Other key aspects are having clear goals, clear roles & responsibilities, a common way of working, organisational embedding and strong leadership. Click on the image above to see a more detailed description of these aspects.

We are currently validating checklists for each of these individual aspects – such checklists can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the situation or to compare the situation before and after an intervention.

I am curious to hear which models you use around team effectiveness!

At the Dutch National Architecture congress (LAC2009) we have given a talk on the organizational and architectural aspects of introducing Web2.0 tools. One of the main issues we discussed was how to support your employees to make responsible use of social media and how to deal with negative responses, complaints or online discussions about your brand that are getting out of hand. One of the interesting approaches companies such as ING and UPC are experimenting with is a webcare team.

A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!
(Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces teamblog)

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

The bias storm is a method we apply at the start of collaboration, when the people who have to collaborate come from different backgrounds, cultures or organizations. The method aims to get prejudices they might have about the other in the open. Talking about these prejudices helps to understand the other and clears the road for fruitful future collaboration.

How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti
Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces teamblog.

Today I have handed in my resignation! After 11 interesting and stimulating years at the Telematica Instituut (now also known as Novay) I have decided to move to GriDD Consultancy. And not only because it reduces my travel time with about 20 seconds. More importantly, this move allows me to grow professionally in new directions, deepen my consulting skills and be in even more close contact with customers. I’m very excited about this step and looking forward to working with my new colleagues.

Still, telling the news at work was difficult: in 11 years these colleagues have become like family (one very literally) and I really enjoy working in the Future Workspaces team. Therefore, I would like to thank all colleagues for the many inspiring conversations we had over the years and the institute, for offering me a chance to combine my PhD with project work. Fortunately, I will still be able to wave to you from the TriMM/GriDD building.

I will be around until the end of December to properly finish my Future Workspaces activities and tie up the loose ends.

After days of anticipation and checking my e-mail, the Google Wave invite finally arrived. Hurray! Of course I watched the video’s before and read Robert Scoble’s comment that Wave is overhyped, but I wanted to testdrive it myself… My first impression is actually not that good: I have recently compared a series of tools for online collaboration, and Google Wave does not seem to be best-of-class.

A few remarks:

• Sure, I used a tool of the devil, but Wave seems to have a problem with .docx files.
• Can I define groups of contacts? It would be nice to be able to start a Wave with my team, without having to select all individual members.
• No standard support for action points: this is something I use a lot in online collaboration.
• Wave has folders again… You can actually assign tags to waves (check the tiny button on the bottom), but these tags are not shown in the navigation pane.
• Sure, the auto translation is cool! Goodbye babelfish…

I have to give it to Google that the way they organized the Wave invites helps to build a hype: are you one of the lucky few? Did you get no invite yet? Could you please invite me too? And then after you activated Google Wave, you notice that your Google profile is outdated, so you also visit your profile page to update your picture and personal information.

What are your first impressions of Wave?

–UPDATE–
I gave a presentation at work on my first experiences with Wave:

Since one of our customers would like to experiment with close collaboration across organizational boundaries (discussing information), I am currently comparing a series of tools. The table below represents my findings from testing the different alternatives. The information in the row “User friendliness” is subjective: it indicates how easy I could find my way around the tool. If you see information in the table that you consider to be not correct, please let me know or post a comment. (more…)

Last night, my domain was transferred to my new local hosting provider. And even though the “install Wordpress with one click” CGI script of the new provider did not work properly (I sure hope this is not a sign of things to come…), I managed to have my Wordpress up-and-running pretty fast. The import of my old posts went smooth. And after I remembered I backup up my uploads direcory, the images in posts were also showing. Still, I am checking all kinds of settings, fixing the widgets and all kind of small things, but all in all I’m not unhappy.

Since Wordpess is not very cooperative on a temporary hosting account, it is pretty difficult to run the old version and the new version in parallel. So, the new version needs to be set up while the old version is no longer reachable. That does not leave much space for error…

My lessons learned:
Before the transfer of the domain to the new provider takes place:

• Export your wordpress MySQL databases to your local machine (just in case). Tricky process.
• Use the “Tools -> Export” function in Wordpress to get an XML file with all your posts and sore this file locally.
• FTP your website and copy your theme, plugins and uploads directory to your local machine

After the transfer:

• Set up a clean version of Wordpress
• Create the appropriate user accounts
• FTP your theme, plug-ins and uploads back to the new Wordpress install
• Activate your plug-ins
• Import your posts from the local export file
• Check and double-check everything

Espresso did it again!
Funny and informative slides I like to use to explain marketing and business development people that social software is not a novel way to broadcast your message – it is about engaging in conversations and actually listening.

My hosting provider is trying to get me out of my current cheap plan, which is a continuation of a plan by one of the companies they acquired. Since they now even do not keep my PHP version up-to-date anymore, it gets pretty inconvenient. So I decided to take my business somewhere else and even found a local hosting provider.

The coming time, after our holidays, I will be moving my website to the new provider, so please bear with me if at some point in the process things break. I know I have a master’s degree in these things, but that does not guarantee I actually master the process

Based on our experiences with doing workshops to discuss the social media landscape and facilitating experiments to gain hands-on experience with these tools inside organizations, we are now developing three concrete FWS products around social media:
(more…)