Communication is key!

Upon reading the Virtual Team assignment specification, I noted the importance of establishing contact in the early stages with other team members. Due to time differences and varying break times throughout the semester, I understood the need to establish contact early in the week. Using Sulis, I created a post introducing myself, however, the only other post was from my University of Limerick classmate Fionnuala. In order for the project to gather momentum and to gather input from other team members, I created two new topics in Sulis. Firstly, I asked for team member’s preferred choice of topic and secondly, I was keen to establish an agreed collaboration day and tool. I was hoping that by being proactive it may encourage responses from our international team mates.

I suggested Slack as a potential collaboration tool for our team. Slack is a free tool that enables public or private visibility of conversations within your team. It enables communication amongst team members via direct messages, exchange of files and making individual or group calls. Fionnuala agreed to test it out, therefore I created a new team in Slack called “team8-global.slack.com”. In the meantime, Li Guan (based in Paris) posted in Sulis and also agreed to evaluate Slack as a potential tool. I sent invites to both Fionnuala and Li so that they could provide feedback.

This week highlighted some issues that arise when working in an international team. Typically a team face-to-face meeting is not possible hence technology is heavily relied upon for communication.  In my opinion, the lack of communication issues highlighted the need to establish a project manager who will be proactive in the initial stages, ensuring everyone participates. According to Brett Harned, “if you’re not making a strong effort to communicate with your team, you will likely fail”.

I understand that I will need to persist with contacting other team members as it is impacting any decision making thus may impact assignment milestones. A lesson learned this week is that communication is key!.