On Tuesday May 18, Clear Point invited Charlotte Robidoux, content strategy manager for the HP Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Network documentation group, and Judy Kessler, senior staff technical writer for Sybase, to discuss this timely topic. Charlotte is the editor and Judy one of the contributing authors of the forthcoming book
Virtual Collaborative Writing in the Workplace: Computer Mediated Communication Technologies and Processes.
There is a lot of interest in virtual collaborative writing in our field, since many documentation managers currently wrestle with how to make global teams work. Our meeting space at Panera was packed.
Judy described the DITA conversion project at Sybase and outlined her struggles to get all the writers to see the big picture and follow the same process. Once the technology was in place, she needed a lot of patience nudging her staff to move from their individual ways of doing things to a common practice. She implemented ongoing training and issued frequent reminders to help manage the change.
Charlotte explained that the idea for the book grew out of her efforts to better her own virtual team at HP. She said surmounting technical challenges is of course Job One in all virtual collaborations. But the more difficult work lies with the human component: bringing people from very different cultures together and creating a cohesive and collegial organization. As we all know from experience, culture clashes can be sticky even within corporations on the same continent! And national traditions compound the differences in how people in a global economy relate to each other and get things done.
So Charlotte’s work at HP and Judy’s at Sybase provided the real-world foundation for the process they sought to define and understand: What does it take to make virtual teams work?
The short answer? It’s the culture, the leadership, and the mindset – rather than the technical tools – that determine the success of virtual collaborations. Here are some of the key points of the presentation:
Culture changes only through leadership, so leaders must be empowered at every level of the organization, starting with the very smallest groups.
- Team members must trust each other, and this trust is established most effectively through voice contact over the phone rather than email.
- Structure and process must be in place and visible to all, in order to keep the ground rules clear.
- Job descriptions must include clear accountabilities, so that performance can be measured.
At the end of her talk, Charlotte was asked what she would do differently, based on her experience. She answered unequivocally: test the tools and pair people in smaller teams.
To order Virtual Collaborative Writing in the Workplace: Computer Mediated Communication Technologies and Processes, go to IGI Global:
http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=40273
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