Group Project

Our group project was to facilitate a synchronous meeting with other students and discuss a topic related to technology use in global projects teams. As part of this project our group needed to have a Planning meeting, prepare a meeting invitation for people to join our discussion, and facilitate the discussion. Our group chose "Using social media in project management". In this paper I would like to discuss my experiences in the group, using the technology, the challenges that I believe we ran into and give some guidelines that I believe will be beneficial for others when participating in a global/virtual project.

We held our planning meeting on Friday October 12th at 7:00pm. The technology that was used for this meeting was Google Chat. Overall, I believe we choose a good medium for this type of meeting. The meeting flowed well and everyone was able to keep up with what was happening. Introductions went well and by using a text based medium we had documentation of the meeting easily available. During this meeting our topic was decided upon and assignments were made for people to follow up on. Additionally it was tentatively agreed to meet the week of 10/15/2012.

Prior to this meeting and in subsequent discussion after this meeting we used the group bulletin board to keep in touch and updated. This medium worked and was nice in that we could give updates and statuses asynchronously. In my opinion that asynchronous facility was also a problem as we were not able to get updates as soon as needed/wanted and in the event of out 10/15 meeting it never did happen because people schedules did not work out. I felt I was doing a lot of waiting for people to respond to my posts and I am sure my team members felt the same way.

For out technology discussion we used Skype. This was a new technology to all in the group and we had some trouble at the beginning of the meeting getting all participants on. This set us behind schedule approximately 8 minutes. Skype allows video, voice and a text chat. For a free technology this worked pretty well. We did have some distortion a dropped call or two and some people talking over the top of others. Overall the discussion was very good and there were a lot of good topics brought up. I feel we should have had a more defined goal for the meeting. While there was good discussion I am net sure we got anywhere or there was any real major gains made in our thought on "Social Media in project management". For the voice side of things I would like the capability to get in queue to talk or have the concept of a "talking stick". This is the idea of if you have the talking stick you and the only one that can talk and once you relinquish the "stick" the next person in line can take it up and talk. I think this type of tool would help eleviate the problem of people talking over the others.

As in most projects I think we were all on