Allen, Leo and I form our excellent team, UPSTAIRS, and each of us is irreplaceable during the semester study. Allen is the person with creativity and passion. 1 year working experience make him not only think theoretically but also emphasize the feasibility of the project. Leo is the guy with perfect logic and persuading oral presentation skills. Billions of ideas come out from his brain after he hears any kinds of assignments. My extracurricular experience and listen skills make me becoming the critic in our team to find out the leak of the project and presentation. We are in charge of different tasks but communicate with each other to make the collaboration smooth. As the logo of our team, our names’ capital letters consisted of a stairs which lead us to go the bright future. I love my team and team members and also believe our project can achieve a successful result.
Personally, virtual organizing is a creative concept and learning method for me during the master courses. Due to the globalization, people, companies and organizations have closely connections to each other. With the development of the Information Technology, Internet has become the best way for people to communicate, to commerce and to organize. Therefore, a new organizing method, virtual organizing, has be used increasingly. Reported by Michelle LaBrosse (2008), virtual team processes people with complementary skills and common purpose but has ability using technology to accomplish work across time and space.
The challenges of virtual organization could be lack of technology knowledge in managers, insufficient knowledge among employees, organizational environment fail to fit the virtual organizing and employees may not be suitable to work remotely. When we decide to do virtual organizing, we need to know the potential problems may occur and better to do the risk control during the process.
According to the assignment requirement, two teams can only communicate with each other through the virtual methods. Virtual organizing can be divided into two aspects, one is the virtual communication, and another one is the virtual executive. We are very lucky that both of the aspects we encountered challenges in the project accomplishment. Firstly, we accepted the suggestion from evening class to use the Google Hangout as the communication tool. Though the software, we knew the background and basic information of each other. Advanced technology plays an important role in the virtual communication. Google Hangout provides video chat and remote share, which we were not only able to see others’ faces but also read the materials prepared by others. When we discussed a problem that how to share the Internet to others, Garnet showed an equipment in front of the computer and we understood what he want to say. However, due to the time and space, one member of evening team did not attend the meeting. What we can do was to take notes of the meeting and send to her and asked her team members to transfer the information to her. The problem is that when information transferred from one person to another, parts of the information may be lost or misunderstand. At that time, we did not realize the problem until we wrote the report. We found out the idea and responsibility had changed during the cooperation. If it is the real business situation, what we loss is not just rewrite the report, it may be loss the control of the virtual organizing, profit, or the whole project.
After the course learnt and practice, I know that risk forecasting and management is necessary in the virtual organizing. Project assessment is important before the virtual organizing because it helps the cooperation parties to have a better understanding of each other and the project. If a A precise responsibility allocation is the priority step to identify the obligations to collaboration parties and the guarantee to ensure the project executive smooth.
Negotiation
The biggest challenge in the virtual organizing project is negotiation. Due to the requirements, we need to discuss a new product or service combined with two companies. At the beginning, Team GIVE gave the idea that their company is an e-book company and we determined to operate an online education company. At the first meeting, we discussed the new business the two companies can operate. The result is that online education plus digital materials provide. When the idea was criticized by the lecturer, we need to negotiate the project and come out another more creative and attractive idea. Team GIVE did not want to change their idea because they thought the idea can be executive. Therefore, we change the major business of our company to become an employment solution company. In the reality, if one side refuses to adjust, the collaboration is difficult to continue.
What I learnt about the negotiation is that transposition consideration. In order to achieve the win-win negotiation, we need to stand on the partner’s position to consider the problems and the project. When we know their wants and needs, we can know the advantages and disadvantages of their company so that we can use our advantages and disadvantages to complement the project. The objective of the collaboration is to achieve the win-win negotiation. Therefore, those actions can facilitator the cooperation process should be considered for both parties. In our project, when the partner refuse to adjust, we should communicate to them and find out the comprise method to make the project better. For instance, may be they can change or add some different service for their company so that we will have more cooperation areas.
If communicate with the partner team is external negotiation, I learnt another negotiation in the project is internal negotiation. I am proud of my team because I believe this team is effective and efficient. We have won three times in the voting and our team name, UPSTAIRS, is the most popular in the first time voting. I also appreciate that we have not quarreled in the discussion and we give enough room for each one to express his ideas and perspectives. Allen is a perfect coordinator because when he was persuaded, he gave support others though he had his own opinion. Through this collaboration, I can see the powerful leadership of Leo. This guy has tremendous ideas and religious logic analysis capability. When he faces a problem, he gives his ideas firstly and uses many theory and evidence to prove his ideas. I play a role as critic in the team. When Allen or Leo delivers their ideas, usually I criticize their ideas and point out the infeasibility of their ideas. Besides, I would like to summarize their ideas and offer a complete idea. However, during the discussion, different ideas sometimes make the argument occurred. The method we adopted is to give enough time for each one to clarify their ideas and answer the questions pointed by other team members. After that, all of us have a deep understanding of the project and a clear idea to accomplish the project. For the sake of achieving the win-win situation, our team use voting rather than selecting a leader to allocate the tasks for everyone. The benefit of the method is that members feel they are really involved in the project rather than work for the boss. Each of the member should consider others benefits and reasonability. Questions, such as whether Leo have too much works to do or whether Allen needs to have more creative ideas for the team discussion, are given to our members that remind members to allocate the tasks fairly. Therefore, the internal negotiation in the projects is smooth and we can make decisions that convinced and directly.
Knowledge management
In terms of the knowledge management, I think it will be used in companies and organizations widely. With purpose to practice managing knowledge, I took notes of each meeting especially for the knowledge relevant to the digital materials such as the e-book and APP. I knew that Amazon has its own e-book reading app and machine Kindle. In the future, revenue form e-book purchase may become one of the major items for Amazon. More and more customers will change their reading behavior, from paper reading to e-book reading, and affect their purchasing behaviors. The knowledge about business model of digital materials is the biggest gains for me in practice knowledge management. After I summarized the information and knowledge of digital material business, I shared to our team members and introduced the model and principle to them straightly. They can accept the concepts easily and give comments to my knowledge management. Within the discussion, I arranged the notes and transfer it into systemic and logical materials.
If communicate with the partner team is external negotiation, I learnt another negotiation in the project is internal negotiation. I am proud of my team because I believe this team is effective and efficient. We have won three times in the voting and our team name, UPSTAIRS, is the most popular in the first time voting. I also appreciate that we have not quarreled in the discussion and we give enough room for each one to express his ideas and perspectives. Allen is a perfect coordinator because when he was persuaded, he gave support others though he had his own opinion. Through this collaboration, I can see the powerful leadership of Leo. This guy has tremendous ideas and religious logic analysis capability. When he faces a problem, he gives his ideas firstly and uses many theory and evidence to prove his ideas. I play a role as critic in the team. When Allen or Leo delivers their ideas, usually I criticize their ideas and point out the infeasibility of their ideas. Besides, I would like to summarize their ideas and offer a complete idea. However, during the discussion, different ideas sometimes make the argument occurred. The method we adopted is to give enough time for each one to clarify their ideas and answer the questions pointed by other team members. After that, all of us have a deep understanding of the project and a clear idea to accomplish the project. For the sake of achieving the win-win situation, our team use voting rather than selecting a leader to allocate the tasks for everyone. The benefit of the method is that members feel they are really involved in the project rather than work for the boss. Each of the member should consider others benefits and reasonability. Questions, such as whether Leo have too much works to do or whether Allen needs to have more creative ideas for the team discussion, are given to our members that remind members to allocate the tasks fairly. Therefore, the internal negotiation in the projects is smooth and we can make decisions that convinced and directly.
Knowledge management
In terms of the knowledge management, I think it will be used in companies and organizations widely. With purpose to practice managing knowledge, I took notes of each meeting especially for the knowledge relevant to the digital materials such as the e-book and APP. I knew that Amazon has its own e-book reading app and machine Kindle. In the future, revenue form e-book purchase may become one of the major items for Amazon. More and more customers will change their reading behavior, from paper reading to e-book reading, and affect their purchasing behaviors. The knowledge about business model of digital materials is the biggest gains for me in practice knowledge management. After I summarized the information and knowledge of digital material business, I shared to our team members and introduced the model and principle to them straightly. They can accept the concepts easily and give comments to my knowledge management. Within the discussion, I arranged the notes and transfer it into systemic and logical materials.
From my own experience, I am sure that complete knowledge management is helpful in companies or organizations, especially for the fresh employees. Fresh employees can lessen the learning period through systemic learning materials so that they can become expertise in the particular industry. Additionally, knowledge management is benefit for companies and organizations’ sustainable development. Knowledge will update with the change of the industry environment and the needs of the customers. Companies and organizations with good knowledge management are more sensitive to the market change and seek out the new opportunities. However, one coin has two sides. I realize that there emerge the weaknesses in knowledge management. A good knowledge management is not just a document for the company but has become the asset of the company. Therefore, business spying is one of the potential problems for company with good knowledge management. Once the core documents released, companies loss parts of competence among the competitors. The suggestion for the company to deal with the knowledge management is to set up a team to in charge of the knowledge management. The team should divide the knowledge into basic knowledge and core knowledge. Basic knowledge is open to the employees but core knowledge should be resisted reading. Most of the core knowledge is from the research and development (R & D) department. This kind of knowledge stands for the advanced research for the company so that it should be protected severely. Another suggestion for the company is that when executive the inter-organizational collaboration, knowledge is crucial part to exchange and moreover, is the key to promote the collaboration process. In the information age, knowledge updates quickly especially in the virtual collaboration. Information and knowledge exchange between companies usually is the facilitator to make the collaboration more smooth and achieve the expected objectives.
Conclusion
Virtual organizing, negotiation and knowledge management are the most influenced topics for me in the High Performance Collaboration. Virtual organizing tells me that with the development of globalization, collaboration among companies and organizations have changed from face to face cooperation to virtual team work. People with different capability and skills but a common purpose can work cross the time and space via the Internet. Virtual team must be used in the future widely and become the carrier to make companies in relevant industries have a closely cooperation. Particular knowledge, as the company asset, has become the fundamental of the companies’ cooperation. In some cases, this kind of cooperation could be considered as the resource exchange and companies gain what they want and use them in to company research development.
Reference
Michelle LaBrosse, (2008), Managing virtual teams, Employment Relations Today, Volume 35, Issue 2, pages 81–86
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