Collaboration Improvement
As part of a needs assessment project for one of my IST graduate classes I worked as a part of a team of consultants to determine what collaboration tools or improvements could be made for a mid-sized pharmaceutical company. For public reporting purposes, the organization has asked that we not use their name. The organization has employees working in remote locations on projects often in teams. Thus, they have a need to be able to communicate and share globally online. The consultant team conducted interviews, surveys, and SWOT and PEST analysis to determine what improvements could be made to their existing collaboration software, what training gaps might exist for their existing software, and what cultural aspects of the organization might be restraining collaboration.
All team members had some input of the work of others during the project, but one of my main roles was to analyze the data when it was collected from our interviews and surveys and tease out trends both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. From these data, we were able to conclude that the organization has many different software for collaborating online and that the organization could benefit from standardizing their software to one or two that can be deployed on a global scale and training could be improved as well. The employees of the organization tended to have their own preferences for the tools they like to use, however, since everyone used a different technology for online collaboration, the teams tended to default to using conference calling and email since it was the technology they were all comfortable with. We were able to explain this need to the organization as well as offer suggestions for improving online collaboration based upon the data we collected about the organization and the existing literature on the topic.
Michael Gough
mbgough@gmail.com