Paper: Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace
Written by: Jan H. Pieper, Julia Grace, and Stephen Dill
Summary:
Team Analytics is a web-based application that allows users to know more about the people they are teamed up with. Different applications were combined into one in order to better server ad-hoc teams in getting to know one another, and allowing them to find the best meeting times for each member of the group. There are several widgets associated with this application and an example of the site is shown below.
The very top widget is known as the Picture Gallery and has every member of the team listed with a picture. These link to the Bizcard section shown below with a slightly bigger picture and much more information about the person next to it. The second widget is the Organization Chart that shows how each member of the team is related within the company they work for. They are color coded as well to show ranks in the business and which department they work for. Another widget shown is the Attribute Pie Chart which allows for more information to be shown. This will help with the understanding of the team composition so that team members will know how much background information they will need to provide in order to start working on a project. The last widget is the Timezone Pain Chart which shows the teams members in each time zone, and which time is less "painful" to schedule a meeting to accommodate everyone on the team. This should allow team members to find a meeting time with ease, and they won't have to go through the hassle of remembering what times will work for each person since it is visually represented on a graph. Team Analytics has server over 300,000 group lookup requests and averages about 5,000 requests per week.
The way Team Analytics works: it is a set of Perl CGI scripts and is hosted on the Apache 2 web server with the information being rendered via LDAP or web service API's. The makers of this application sent out a survey amongst its users in order to figure out what they all liked best or found most useful. Out of all the users, about 290 decided to actually take the survey. The graph below shows the percentages for each widget and whether or not people thought it was useful or not very useful.
Out of their findings they found the Timezone Pain to be the weakest one when they were expecting it to be a higher percentage. Most users found it to be confusing so they didn't rate it very high. They also asked people what they would like to see added to the application and many people wanted a geographic map to show where everyone on the team is, and allow them to use their company instant messaging system with it.
Discussion:
I thought this application would be useful in not only a work setting, but possibly for groups in a class working on a project together. I think that it could be implemented for students in an educational environment, and possibly have less widgets or different widgets that would benefit them on their projects. I think the major thing that would be future and ongoing work would be adding more widgets, possibly having business specific widgets, and incorporating schools into the use of this application.
I didn't think about the schools application. Especially useful would be in doing graduate thesis and PhD papers and projects with classmates at other schools. There are lots of foreign graduate students in the CS department here, and maybe they could work on their thesis with group members at their old school.
ReplyDeleteAn application like this would be very useful in putting together strong, diversified teams for corporate or academic projects. It seems very scalable, which could see it implemented on a wide range of platforms.
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