Virtual Team Project – Week 1
So, here’s the deal. My fellow Limerick students and I have to participate in a virtual collaboration project with students in Orlando and Paris. Together, we need to write instructions for an online tool and then translate these instructions into French. That does seem in my wheelhouse… This past week was all about getting to know each other, assigning roles, and deciding the basics of our communication and management processes. Simple, right? Not so much when you have ten people spread over three countries and as many universities.
We saw quickly that we would not have a live online team meeting this week and we would have to rely on emails until everyone joined our Whatsapp group. Long email threads are not ideal, though they were the norm where I was a project manager so I might be more comfortable with them than my teammates.
I am a bit anxious at the thought of Whatsapp being our main means of communication. May I remind you that there are TEN of us? Have you ever tried to organise anything online with more than two people? Don’t get me wrong, a group chat is great: because it is informal, people may share their thoughts more freely. But is it adapted for structured communication and for making decisions? In my opinion, email or any other structured form of communication is still required to keep the focus on set objectives. One option: I may recap the chat daily (or as needed) to summarise what came of it.
Yes, I am the team’s project manager. That was not my intention as I thought the role could provide a useful experience for someone else. I had my eye on a localisation consultant/editor role. Eventually, I did take over planning this week and though I offered to step back, my teammates agreed to leave me this role. In my previous experience, the rules were more clear-cut – I made the decisions based on data from all the project stakeholders (internal client stakeholders, translators, proofreaders, post-localisation designers, reviewers, etc.). In this project, I think we will all benefit from having everyone participate in the decision-making process. So, the main challenge for me will be to foster structured individual engagement – in Whatsapp. Let’s see how this goes.
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