Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects
On August 13, I successfully defended my dissertation. Today, I submitted my final, approved version to University of Michigan's institutional repository. That version won't be available until after I receive my degree in December, but you're welcome to read a nearly identical version of my complete dissertation.
Dissertation Abstract
In our efforts to understand how collaborative work can be accomplished, we often turn to discussions of “coordination” for help. However, the concept of coordination is inadequate for explaining the many interdependent processes at work within successful collaborations. In this dissertation, I examined a collaborative construction project – the Woods Avenue Bridge (WAB) Project – with many coordination demands. I used data from this project to develop the concept of adaptive capacity – the set of capabilities a team develops that enable them to adjust to internal and external stresses.
Through analyzing meeting minutes, interview transcripts, and documents the project team developed, I was able to identify behaviors and approaches the team took that may have enabled them to better respond to changes in their environment. I use a specific example of a time when the team successfully redesigned the structure they were building in the field to illustrate the kind of coordination work adaptive capacity enables.
From data about the WAB Project, I identified components of adaptive capacity including perspective taking, multimembership, affect, and social capital. Understanding these components and the adaptive capacity they can develop helps us understand what about a team enables them to accomplish coordination work. Without adaptive capacity, we lack an integrated explanation of the ways in which different components interact and how those components address coordination.
This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how collaborative teams accomplish coordination by refining the concept of adaptive capacity and integrating earlier literatures on coordination, collaboration, and adaptation. The concept of adaptive capacity helps us understand the resources collaborative teams develop that make it possible for them to find flexible and creative solutions to their coordination problems.
Current Research: Joining Virtual Organizations
People keep asking me what I'm working on now that I've defended my dissertation and moved to Arizona State. The answer is, "research!" More specifically, I'm working on a research project to understand and improve the experience of joining a virtual organization. My colleagues, Erik Johnston and Stephanie Teasley, and I are studying post doctoral researchers who joined (or are joining) virtual science research organizations. I've made a diagram of our research process to make this more clear (click the image for a larger version):
The red parts represent the inductive, qualitative portion of our study. I am primarily responsible for those stages of the project. I am currently collecting data, and that's why that piece looks different. Erik is primarily responsible for the deductive portions, those in blue. This diagram was inspired by process diagrams of grounded theory and deduction from
Gasson, S. (2003) Rigor in Grounded Theory Research: An Interpretive Perspective on Generating Theory from Qualitative Research. In Whitman, M.E. and Woszczynski, A.B., eds. The handbook of information systems research. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
Gill, J. and Johnson, P. (1997) Research Methods for Managers, 2nd Ed., London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
Storing, sharing, editing data
I'm starting a new research project on which I collaborate with two other people, one in Ann Arbor, MI and one in Phoenix, AZ. We use Macs and PCs. We have no budget for software. We're likely to have a bunch of qualitative data to keep track of and share.
My first task is to gather some information on potential participants for our study. I've spent enough time working with databases to prefer them to files and folder structures for these purposes. Databases have advantages in that they can store relational information, can sort data, are easy to search, can be viewed and edited by more than one person at a time, the list goes on. Bottom line, I want a database. I starting by building a Drupal site to keep track of the data about those potential participants - who they are, where they are, how to contact them, how they're related to each other, what my thoughts are about them. I ended up abandoning Drupal to build my own MySQL/PHP website that stores and displays the data; I also built insert and edit pages to ease those data functions.
This is my third try-and-abandon with Drupal. I can understand how Drupal might make maintenance easier for non-technical users, but as a quasi-technical user, Drupal gets in my way at every turn. My MySQL database has 9 tables with 2 - 10 fields. I would have to add all <90 of those fields by hand in Drupal. Then, I'd have to create views to see them and views to edit and views to add/insert. How is that better than just building a PHP site myself? If most of the work is during setup, how does Drupal save any time or frustration at all? It seems like Drupal has taken the command line, coding aspects of building my own database-driven site and replaced them with a convoluted web-based GUI. I'm not sure I see the point or the cost savings there.
The real problem here is not that I still haven't found Drupal useful or advantageous. The problem is that I still don't have a great, easy, usable way to enter, edit, store, and share data with my colleagues. Even after I build this mySQL/PHP site by hand, I'll still have to figure out a way to get the data back out so we can analyze it. That opens a whole host of problems whose current solutions such as NVivo and Atlas.ti are expensive ($240 and $119 for students, respectively). Opportunities abound for helping qualitative researchers capture, store, share, and analyze their data collaboratively. What price point would be appropriate here? If you're a researcher, how much would you be willing to pay for a personalized, secure, web-based data sharing solution? Would anyone else even want such a thing?
Comparing Collaboration Tools
Choosing a tool or set of tools to use when collaborating presents many challenges. Will my colleagues be willing to get yet another login? Will we use just email for communication, or should we make sure some IM or audio is available? How will we share documents?
All the systems included here allow you to store and share files of many types, including images, Stata files, video, etc. Here's a summary of a few of the off-the-shelf options available to people looking for a new online collaboration tool. I'll post more information about each system and how to tell which is right for you. Please feel free to email me if you'd like help planning for and setting up a new collaboration. I'm sure we can work something out.
| System | View/edit docs | White- board |
Chat | Video | Wiki | Platform | Login | Support | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTools | x (text) | X | Any | UMich | Email, phone | Free | |||
| Groove | X | X (text, audio) | PC | Groove | Online | part of Office 2007; $149.95 and up | |||
| Basecamp | X | X | Any | Basecamp or OpenID | $24/month and up | ||||
| Vyew | X | X (text) | X | Any | Vyew | Online | Free/ $6.95/ $13.95 and up per month | ||
| Google (combine Docs/Sites/Groups) | X | X (text) | X | Any | Online | Free | |||
| Zoho | X | X (text) | X | Any | Zoho | Email/online | Free/$50 | ||
| Adobe Connect | X | X (text, audio) | X | Any | Adobe | Email/online | $750/month |
Honorable mention: eXpresso lets you upload and edit an Excel document together. Support for other Office documents is coming but no timeline is set.
Becoming Manifesto-y, Telling Stories
A couple weeks ago, my advisor counseled me to make the research statement I was writing for a job application "more manifesto-y." A few days later, we elected Barack Obama President of the United States, spurring at least one manifesto [story from the Boston Globe]. This week I have watched an embarrassing number of episodes of The West Wing on DVD. The characters on The West Wing are constanting publicly declaring their intentions. Today, my brother sent me a Tom Peters manifesto from ChangeThis. Manifesto seems to be the theme of my life for November.
man⋅i⋅fes⋅to
[man-uh-fes-toh]
–noun, plural -toes. a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization. (from Dictionary.com)
This definition from Dictionary.com seems to be missing some of the "flair" I normally associate with a manifesto. For me, a manifesto is not just any public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, but an energetic, empassioned public declaration. Without passion, it's just a statement.
Why blog this? Well, I'm worked up. My guy won the White House. A close friend wrote something that was entered into the Congressional record and may find a public outlet for other important work. My brother sent me something from non-academic workplace literature that made me sit up and pay attention while I read. President-elect Obama. We millions who voted for him. My friend the policy researcher. Tom Peters. These people made public declarations of their opinions and objectives, and they did so with passion.
It seems silly to compare those actions to the kind of effort my advisor asked me to use in my research statement. I don't think I really understood when she told me to "be more manifesto-y." I definitely improved my statement after that advice, but it did not turn into a research manifesto. It's probably too early in my career for me to be writing research manifestos. After all, I need some political capital in order to get a job. I don't have the protection of tenure to shield me in the event that my manifesto is unpopular.
I don't think my manifesto would be unpopular though. My manifesto would be about doing research that helps us change the world by working together. Research that helps us solve problems like AIDS, bioterrorism, crumbling civil infrastructure, and the uncertainty and pain of starting new careers. Those are the problems the people I study are solving. My research will be useful to them. My research will help us work together better. My research will help us organize our projects so that we can accomplish more together than on our own. My research will help us feel better about our work, about what we can accomplish, about our relationships with our colleagues. My research will enable us to get more from ourselves.
That is the research statement I can make here, on my blog, after regaining hope in my country, after watching my friends do their best to change the world, after reading about how to succeed. I make it here because it's not appropriate for my job packet. I make it here because while reading #17: Work on Your Story in Tom Peters' manifesto, I was reminded of my frustrations about presenting and discussing academic work. Tom Peters claims that "he/she who has the best story wins!" He claims that telling stories is better than simply giving presentations. I am a great story teller. Ask my friends or the people who come to my parties. My friend Caroline, for sure, will vouch for me. I want so much to believe Tom Peters that being a storyteller will help me succeed. The trouble is, I'm not sure my audience can handle it. I'm not sure my conference presentations go over that well when I try to be a storyteller. I know reviewers get frustrated when I don't stick to intro, method, results, discussion and bullet points. I'm pretty sure a hiring committee would rather I send them the statement I did than something like the paragraph before this one.
Am I asking too little of my conference audiences, of those hiring committees? Would I be better off if I showed them the passion I have for the study of collaboration? I'm not sure. I do know I want to be more manifesto-y. The stories about the work I've done and seen could inspire. I don't know who would listen to them though. I don't know what audience would match my energy. The dry, monotonous style of academic publishing, both in print and at conferences, does not lend itself to manifesto. We academics are reserved; sometimes we are cynical. When I'm all worked up like this, that reservation, that cynicism is troubling. I see some value in a cold, passive, rational approach. I do. Just not tonight.
NSF Award
Stephanie Teasley, Erik Johnston, and I teamed up this spring to propose a study of post-docs joining virtual science teams. NSF awarded us funding at the full amount this week. Our project kicks off this September and runs through (at least) August 2010. I'm very excited about this project. To read more about it, visit NSF's site.
A Productive Summer
Andrew Begel and I had a very productive summer. We conducted 95 interviews with 26 people, and spent 7 days onsite observing new remote employees. We'll be presenting a poster titled, "How will you see my greatness if you can't see me?" at CSCW in November. The poster session is Monday night, Nov. 11. Come by to hear more about our study, especially our findings about how excellent work is and is not observable from a distance. Stay tuned; we're submitting longer papers to two other conferences, and I'll post here when they get accepted.
Related links:
Human Interactions in Programming Group at Microsoft Research
ACM's Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference (CSCW08)
A new vocabulary
I'm lucky to be the kind of researcher I am. I get to observe and interview people who do really cool work and to learn about what they do. A couple years ago I learned how vaccines for Black Plague get made. My dissertation lets me learn about how bridges (real ones, not just metaphorical ones) get built. Now, at Microsoft, I learn how software is built. Over the last couple of weeks I've been interviewing managers of developers and testers at Microsoft in an effort to recruit them for my study on remote onboarding and to learn about what they do.
Years ago, before I came back to grad school, I had the illustrious title "Developer" at a web start up in Chicago with about 100 employees. A "software team" there was a project manager, a developer, an architect, and a designer. We built websites. My job was to write ASP code that made the designers and project managers happy. Towards the end of my career, I wrote ASP.NET code. Somewhat more complicated, still produced a website. "Developer" at Microsoft means something a bit different. Developers at Microsoft build stuff that matters - Windows, for example. They do it in teams using tools such as Source Depot, Razzle, test harnesses, RSOPs, WTT, and TFS. They meet in scrums, war rooms, Live Meetings, Office Communicator, one-on-ones, and code reviews. Those 12 phrases and acronyms are new to me. Not one of them had I ever heard before. I now know what 5 of them mean. I'll leave you to guess which 5 I know.
Learning the vocabulary of my subjects is just one part of my research, but it's been a while since I had so much specialized vocabulary to learn. The phrases and acronyms the engineers I study use seem a bit more intuitive to me, things like "pancake test" and "aggregate" are nearly self-explanatory. Granted, "code review" means about what you think it does but "scrum"? No, developers are not playing rugby.
Being a new employee while studying new employees is so meta I can hardly handle it. Perhaps next week when I meet my first new employee subjects I'll start to feel like I have a better handle on the situation. For now, while I'm meeting with managers, I'll just keep typing as fast as I can and hope that I'll know when to ask for help.
Learning about visas
I'm just starting my third week as an intern at Microsoft Research, and I'm still figuring out how to blog this experience. I'm working in the Human Interactions in Programming group studying remote onboarding of new employees in the Microsoft Canada Development Centre (MCDC).
We originally defined remote onboarding as a process new hires who are geographically separated from their teams go through when joining a new company. After interviewing managers and HR professionals, it makes more sense to think of remote onboarding as a process the organization goes through to help new employees be productive. We use remote instead of distributed because only one person is physically separate from the rest (sometimes called a "one-off"). For me, distributed refers to a group whose members are in a number of different places, either together in groups or apart in one-offs or groups. Basically remote is a subcategory of distributed and a special enough category to get its own name. Microsoft uses a similar term, remote management, to refer to the kind of management leads and other managers must use to work with employees who are far from them, whether at MCDC or in India, Ireland, China, etc.
I'm conducting a comparative case study in order to understand how remote onboarding works and how various interventions impact onboarding experiences. Of course some part of my energy is directed at identifying areas for growth so that Microsoft can improve their onboarding, but it's too early in the study for me to talk about improvements. That said, I think I'm ready to say the U.S. has some serious room for improvement in its visa and immigration rules.
Many people are working from MCDC while they await an H1-B visa. Others are planning to stay in Canada for some time. A third group are waiting for L visas. As I understand it, both H1-B and L visas are work visas; people who hold them are able to work in the U.S. H1-B's are the visas awarded through lotteries that we hear and read about while Congress and the Presidential candidates debate immigration reform. Microsoft has been pretty open about its feelings about immigration laws. They want to hire more foreign workers because they are qualified, but the U.S. won't let them in the country. Enter MCDC. Canada apparently likes the idea of highly-skilled workers with good salaries living within its borders. L visas are internal transfer visas and are not part of a lottery system. Basically, if you work for Microsoft in another country for 365 days, you can then get an internal transfer and L visa to come live in the U.S. and work for Microsoft for 5 years. The H and L visas differ in their rules for getting them, the rights you and your family members have in the U.S., the length of stay, renewal, etc. I'll be learning all about visas in the next couple of months. I'm pretty sure I'll think we need some reform though. 65,000 H1-B's clearly aren't the right answer to the global competitiveness challenge.