Bionic eTeamwork; KM Links and Documents; Problems in Threaded Discussions

24–Apr-06 Archive of Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Books

Bionic eTeamwork: How to Build Collaborative Virtual Teams at HyperSpeed by Jaclyn Kostner

The age of co-located teams is dead. Instead of working with the people down the hall, we now work with people whose locations span the globe. To achieve real success, companies can’t just plug into the new technology. They must learn how to collaborate effectively when people are not in one place. They must create fast, cohesive, Bionic eTeamwork from afar-the next wave of virtual teamwork. Armed with new technology and new methods, eTeams allow companies to break the speed of light.

One of the world’s leading experts on virtual teamwork, Jaclyn Kostner, takes readers step-by-step through the process of creating fast, effective, Bionic eTeams that use technology’s power to extend their human capability and touch. Kostner notes: “Being on the same e-mail system doesn’t make a team. People make a team.

Communication makes a team. Trust makes a team.” In BIONIC eTeamwork, Kostner includes best practices from SAS Airlines, Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and more.

BIONIC eTeamwork teaches: the three-step evolution to bionic eteamwork; four key ways to transition your team quickly to bionic eteamwork; best practices for creating trust in teams that communicate virtually; moments of truth to enhance a leader’s power to guide behavior from afar; three kinds of emotion that build a sense of team, even from across the globe.

KM Links

Knowledge Management Links and Documents

I created a group in MSN to share documents, articles, links, and communities. Here was the content of this site as of the date of the original blog post:

Documents

1. KM and Personal Growth (Part 1) — 26 maxims
2. KM Communities
3. KManager wanted
4. Subscribing to KM Blogs and News

Links

1. Midwest KM Professionals Community
2. Community of Consulting and Systems Integration KM Leaders
3. Increasing Profits and Customer Focused Quality through KM
4. Sharing Knowledge by Design — Building Intellectual Capital in a Virtual World
5. Part 2 of the maxims for KM and personal growth — 10 more maxims
6. Setting up a Knowledge Management Program
7. Knowledge Street Reports
8. Choosing Connection v. Collection, Open v. Closed, Practical v. Theoretical
9. Line56 KM Blog
10. Top Tips: Creating a knowledge-sharing system
11. HP KM Presentation to KM Chicago

KM Questions

Q: What are some typical problems in how people post to threaded discussion forums?

A: Here are three problems along with recommended solutions:

1. Replying to posts or digests and not deleting the original text. When replying to a post, include just the text you wish to quote in response, and delete the rest. This will prevent large amounts of the forum from being cluttered with redundant text, and will make it easy to distinguish between new and old posts.
2. Sending messages intended for one person to the whole list, or sending messages to a few people which should be sent to the whole list. If you are replying to one member of the forum with a message intended just for them, do it in a separate email directed to that person only. Conversely, if you have a question or comment of general applicability, don’t send it to a small subset of the members. Post it to the forum so that all can learn from it and respond to it.
3. Including long URLs which wrap across lines and thus may not work when the recipient attempts to click on the link. If the URL you wish to include is long, convert it to a short one using a service such as TinyURL. If you are including a link to a book on Amazon.com, strip off the trailing text following the product number. For example, “http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0793148340/002-4836761-5172858?v=glance&n=283155" can be reduced to “http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0793148340/" — everything after the slash following the product number can be deleted.