Supporting Inexperienced Teams

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Supporting Inexperienced Teams
Roger Tagg (DSTC Visitor) Senior Lecturer School
of Computer and Information Science
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Anyone want to leave now?

• Ill be talking about asynchronous, distributed
  cooperation
• Different time, different place
• NOT military-style command and control rooms
• I wont be proposing an all-singing, all-dancing
  software solution
• I may make comments relevant to DSTC3
• I carry with me the prejudices of 40 years in
  computing

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Motivation

• My background in database, workflow and
  inter-enterprise computing
• My experiences when joining a new university in
  July 2000
• Collaboration with a BPR enthusiast
• Exposure to agent-based thinking
• The commercial Groupware hiatus
• Exposure to FlowMake/Chameleon and a brief look
  at Skelta
• The LiveNet work at UTS(Igor Hawryszkiewycz,
  Alan Lin, Ingrid Slembek)

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My user experiences

• I joined the School at UniSA in July 2000
• They were short staffed, so I immediately had to
  take on 2 courses I hadnt seen before
• I had no knowledge of procedures and no-one had
  anything I could read
• I had an Assistant Lecturer who had helped once
  previously
• Emails hit me demanding this and that
• Few colleagues had any time to answer my
  questions
• Discussion rooms were started up, but few
  colleagues ever visited them

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Case Study Academic Teaching Management

• The calendar is fixed
• Many staff come and go
• Cannot afford more staff

• Processes not written down
• Rules vary for each campus
• Campuses are autonomous

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Case Study Asset Management

• Large organisations operate expensive collections
  of assets, which may need maintenance, and all
  have a life (not known in advance)
• Much of the maintenance work is subcontracted,
  not necessarily to a single contractor

• Actual job times vary
• Work can get stuck
• Need early warnings

• Unavailability costs
• Multiple contractors are difficult to
  coordinate

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Case Study Grid Computing for e-Science

• Research institutions, universities etc co-
  operate by doing complementary tasks
• Examples astronomy, epidemics, human genome
• Vast collections of data representing daily
  observations
• There is no formal subcontracting structure,
  everything is peer-to-peer

• Funding is competitive
• Sponsors expect results
• Headcounts are squeezed

• No one organization can tell another what to
  do
• But depend on good workflow

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What are the main problemsfor Inexperienced
Teams?

• Not knowing the procedure for doing something (or
  if one exists)
• Not knowing who to ask
• Cant find the relevant data
• Different tools and applications that dont
  integrate
• Team members who dont participate in the
  information sharing

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The Prattle syndrome

• The team leader sets up a shared workspace
  (bulletin board, discussion forum etc)
• Team members are pressed just to answer their
  email, phone and F2F emergencies
• So they rarely or never get to log on to the
  discussion forum
• Pull is inappropriate for over-busy teams
• Need a Push approach
• Alerters, Sticker
• Generate urgent email messages
• Unified Task List

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What Paradigms for Supporting Inexperienced Teams?

• Process Help
• Guided process execution (hand holding)
• Flexible workflow enabling
• Intelligent Agents
• Process Knowledge Management
• Tacit knowledge exchange facilitation
• Universal data filing system
• Team and individual
• Integrated Computer Workspaces
• Team and individual

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Process Help

• Answering the question how the XXXX do I do
  this?
• Hypertext procedure manuals (XML)
• Big backlog of existing manuals to re-encode
• Diagrams with you are here arrows
• E.g. FlowMake with searchable activity
  descriptions and superimposed arrows
• Reference to a file of who to ask experts (see
  Tacit Knowledge later)

XXXX
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Process Help Diagram Example
You are here
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Guided process execution

• Answering the request take me through this step
  by step
• Is less than general application of a workflow
  process template
• Single process instance only, from one
  performers viewpoint
• Needs comments in addition to the activity
  description
• Extracts from the full procedure manual
• Guidelines on how to do it, quality expected,
  related policies
• Needs to include the activities this performer
  ISNT doing as well as those he/she IS doing
• Ideal would be a variable Wizard, whose steps
  were generated from the process template
• Context (primary key) should ideally be deduced
  from the users previous actions

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Flexible workflow enabling

• A teams (or individuals) use of Workflow can be
  looked at in 3 quite different ways
• As a driver of a mission-critical business
  process that must be performed in correct
  sequence ? Big workflow
• As an integrator of software components in an
  customer-assembled mega-system ? Enabling
  workflow
• As a set of rules applied to defined events in a
  cooperative system ? Small workflow

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Problems with Workflow as a solution for
inexperienced teams

• Processes are often too volatile
• The team may start without any!
• There are too many exceptions
• Most team members wont have skill in modelling
  processes
• It is difficult to enforce processes beyond one
  organizations boundaries

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Can workflow be optional?

• A possible spectrum is
• Fully prompted all work is done in response to
  a worklist item
• Opt out user decides not to follow the prompts
• Opt in user chooses to be prompted by the Wf
  engine
• Email prompted, but no compulsion
• Fully ad hoc user totally decides what work to
  do next
• Problem is, mix and match may not be an option
• Next performer cant rely on the process state
  having being updated
• Cant monitor, audit or analyse performance

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Groupware Market Mismatch (adapted from Sheth)
BigWorkflow
Process-free Groupware
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Intelligent Agents

• User Agent (beyond the MS Office paperclip)
• Aware of and learns - one particular team
  members needs and preferences
• Filing Assistant (Agent)
• Suggests a place to file everything based on
  content, team goals, individual goals
• Drop boxes (see later)
• Categorization
• Puts any object into categories based on its
  content
• Filing is one application, drop boxes another

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Process Knowledge Management

• The team may start with few, or only very broad,
  processes
• If activities are recorded,
• Process Mining detecting possible patterns in
  events
• Learning interacting with team members to
  establish patterns as approved processes
• Ref Biuk-Aghai, Simoff Slembek,
  Knowledge-Assisted Reverse Engineering of
  Virtual Work Processes

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Tacit knowledge exchange facilitation

• LiveNet (see later) has
• About this workspace (a user can join many)
• GoalsNewsSurprisesMilestonesTerminologyFAQ
• About your role
• Folders Chat Room(n) 
• Communication Send email
• Who to ask list

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Universal data filing

• All types of data should be filed by what they
  relate to, not by what software they were created
  in (current Groupware folders problem)
• All types of data should be relatable by their
  content (e.g. emails with database rows with word
  documents with web pages)
• If a piece of data is relevant to multiple
  categories, it should be accessible (either by
  replica or alias) in all those categories

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The Data Perspective

• Data may exist in many topic types, e.g.
• Status of the entities being worked on
• Decision support data, statistics etc
• Metadata what types of data are there
• Negotiating positions
• Data exists in a lot of different software forms
• Application databases
• Office tool file types
• Web pages and XML
• A lot of the data is still unstructured and
  unsuitable for linking to more structured data
• Terminology is an issue ( hence Ontologies)
• Whether data is shared or transmitted depends on
  the trust between the team members

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Integrated computer workspaces

• Dashboards
• UI containers that assemble a users total work
• Unified UI objects
• e.g. Single task list (inbox workflow tasks
  )
• Integration between standard team support
  components work management
• Mainstream groupware (email calendar tasks),
  workflow enabling, project management, contract
  management, time tracking, common office tools
• Integration with domain-specific applications
• e.g. accounts receivable, production planning, HR

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Dashboard Example
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Dashboard - Implications

• Need to provide a tailoring facility for creating
  and pasting in compact controls
• If a control gets dropped in, the system should
  take some responsibility for managing things
• Need to capture knowledge about the tool(s)
  underlying that control
• Need to designate shared and individual elements
• Screen space may be a limitation
• Multiple displays
• Mobile-friendly versions?

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Drop Boxes

• Are dashboard icons (or sub controls) that act
  as specialized administrative assistants
• Are supported by rule based components (agents?)
  that work out what to do when something is
  dropped
• Invoke a categorization agent to deduce, from
  text in messages or files, the data values that
  drive the rules
• Support many types of droppable things, e.g.
  messages index lines, selected text / graphs,
  file icons (including attachments)

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Drop Box Functionalities
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Drop Box Architecture in Mainstream Groupware
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A prototype system LiveNet from UTS

• Specifically supports team working
• Aims to support Tacit Knowledge Exchange
• Includes some small workflow
• Includes some Process Knowledge Management
• Tested in a cooperative business proposal
  preparation and review example (Ingrid Slembek)
• Agents are subject of current research (Alan Lin)
• Doesnt seamlessly integrate with ordinary email
• Doesnt have a component customization system for
  integrating with external applications
• Isnt dashboard-friendly or mobile-friendly

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LiveNet An example screenshot
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A persistent problem Autonomy of Team members

• In none of my 3 case studies can one organization
  control how team members in other organizations
  do things
• In formal B2B situations, the process to be
  followed may itself form part of the contract
• In University CS departments, even internal
  control doesnt stand much chance
• Riempp (1998) proposed 3 inter-enterprise models
• Hierarchy the requesting org can set the
  process to be followed
• Market requesting orgs have to accept the
  processes of the service suppliers
• Equal partnership peer-to-peer
• Some individuals may not participate
• Wont use some tools, or even a prescribed common
  environment

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Why we should expect a New Generation of Groupware

• There has been no real dent so far in information
  overload
• Depth of use of Groupware tools is very low not
  much apart from email
• Functionality has been pretty static for some
  years
• Virus attacks have been a big problem
• Clients have inconsistent features (3 types of MS
  Outlook)
• Users arent managing to integrate Groupware data
  with application data
• Vendors have been researching into agents and
  categorization for some years

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What Implications for DSTC3?

• If all the hard research problems have been
  solved, why isnt it happening yet?
• The current research shortfall is probably more
  in ergonomics and social science, not in computer
  science
• Team Builder could the concept be extended to
  take aboard some of these ideas in this talk?
• selection how often is there that much choice?
• event monitoring needs to cover all tools and
  applications
• event monitoring should include mining of
  processes
• How much edge in this field has DSTC got?
• Some risk of being wiped out by the big wave
  that must come soon

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Is there any IP in all this?

• Possibly in the successful application of agents
  to support knowledge management in agile team
  collaboration
• If it doesnt happen in next generation
  groupware, then EASY-TO-CONFIGURE component-based
  integration of complementary tools for Work
  Management
• .NET and WS Chameleon expertise
• Could include Dashboard tailoring
• But is it marketable by DSTC Ltd?

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Conclusion

• Er .
• Thats it
• Any questions?