Happy Ending

We have finished this course, and we enjoyed every class. We would like to thank our teacher Frank, thank my partner team Battery, thank all my classmates. Thanks for your help, we have a perfect memory in CityU.

Best wishes to you!!

Sincerely 

Fiona and Rita

 

High performance collaboration individual report 1

WANG Lu

52789305

This semester, I took a MGT course – High performance collaboration. I am a student from Engineering, so I just have one chance to learn the knowledge about management, and I treasure this opportunity. My teacher Frank is Taiwanese, who is very nice, wearing a glasses and looks very gentleman. I remember that he is very good at singing. One day, Frank sang an English song in our class, when listening to his voice and watching his looks I almost immersed in the world of music, I thought he must be a singer. My partner is a beautiful girl, her name is Rita. We are good friends and we have a lot of common topics. Other teams all have 3 members, and we think that we two can do better. Frank said we should write our assignment in our own blog, which will promote the communication between each other, I think this is very fresh and interesting. Compared with my boring engineering class, I full of expectation in this course.

Frank told us that our final project need collaborate with the team in the morning class, and each team represents a company from a different industry, then we need build a virtual organization through building VirtualXXX.com. At first, I am confused about the virtual, about what we should do in the virtual team. When Frank gave some examples for us and I discussed with my partner, I understood some about our final project and I thought it’s an interesting assignment.

After discussing with my partner, we determined that before contacting with the team in the morning class, we should think out our own case, and then we can have the preparation to discuss the collaboration issues with them. What's more, our common opinion is our case should be creative rather than some e-business companies operating the Shopping sites, which became the powder of the next conflict.

The communication

When we have a primary thinking, we began to contact our partner in the morning class by E-mail. They have a nice name-- Battery. I found that one of their members is my old friend in the last semester, this surprise made me very happy. I sent the message to her by Wechat (a chat tool), then we two became the communicators of two teams. The main network chat tool in mainland China is QQ, and all of our members are the students in mainland, so we rapidly build a QQ group-- Collaboration final project, which is the main discussion platform of our virtual collaboration team.

We also communicate by calling, I think speak directly is more efficient. Sometimes I called Yakee and Sun Bin to discuss our thoughts and asked the work schedule. The results proved that, calling is the best way to communicate expect for face to face.

We almost had a meeting in our chat group one time a week. During the discussion about which case is better and how we can improve our virtual collaboration, we had a high meeting frequency.

The content we discussed mainly includes 9 aspects: 1. Respectively presented own thoughts and case. 2, Proposed the questions and suggestions on the other's point of view. 3, Did the analysis about our discussion. 4, Discussed the details about our virtual collaboration. 5, Divided the work according to our own will. 6, Follow the work schedule. 7, Discussed the problems we met in the working. 8, Sharing the resources. 9, Updated our own works.

The follow picture ( we did not use English, because we think we can clearly present our opinions in Chinese, and this is what I think we did not do well in our virtual communication) is something about our virtual discussion:

The conflicts

Before meeting with the other group, we had thought out our own case. In order to design a creative topic, we choose an animation industry and a hotel to collaborate to build a theme hotel. The other group also had their own idea, they wanted to create a website to sale a battery manufacturer’s production, which will take some virtual sales methods.

Our first meeting was exchanging our respective idea, but we had not reach consensus. We thought that their idea is not creative and they thought that we did not take a virtual form in the collaboration. In the whole process, we just presented which point in our case belongs to the virtual field, and they only tried their best to persuade us their methods are important and creative. At last we determined we present the two ideas together in the next presentation and ask Frank to give us a suggestion.

After the first presentation, Frank gave us the comment as expected, the two ideas all were not a proper case, then we faced the second conflict. My partner did not believe what we said that the comment about their case from Frank is true. They still thought their idea is perfect, but we did not think so, even though we had admitted our own case was also have something wrong.

Our third conflict was we all insisted our own idea, and it was difficult to have a common view.

How to solve our problem?

We clearly learnt that there would not be a result through arguing, if we want to do well in the project, we need a better idea and enough evidences to persuade our partner. Based on Frank’s suggestion, Rita and I thought out another two ideas, and asked Frank whether we catched the point in these two cases by E-mail. Frank replied us rapidly and helped us learn more about virtual collaboration. Taking these evidences, we had another discussion to determine the main topic of the final project. At beginning, it was an intense argument. When we clearly presented our new cases, they seriously listened to our presentation and choose one of them to do the final topic, which surprised us, because we did not think that it is so easy that they accept our idea. In the following discussion, we soon determined the details about this topic, divided our respective work, and confirmed the deadline. This was an efficient and important meeting for our collaboration. We felt very happy. If the previous conflicts like raining, we were feeling like a sunny day in that time. I believed we can have a successful collaboration.

The method to solve the third conflict is that presenting our own idea, the others gave the suggestion and do the analysis. We will choose the one the most person support.

The results and analysis about our virtual collaboration

After we completed our final presentation, we successfully finished this virtual collaboration. Even though we have not met each other in real life, we do a good work together. Nowadays the high-tech communication tools actually improve our work efficiency. This virtual communication makes the common communication and resources sharing become easy, which improve the convenience, flexibility and efficiency of work. I don’t find the drawbacks of virtual communication, if so, it is the lack of emotional connection. Even though we have some conflicts and different views, we don’t let thing happen, and we try our best to solve the problems. We do the decisions according to all the members’ will, which is peaceful and efficient, and we all do our work well before deadline. In this collaboration, most things works well, but I think if we can actively present our own opinions is better, actually we seems not a whole team.

We all have a same goal—to do the project well, and we believe that doing our own work for team is every member’s responsibility, so we did not promise anything in our team. Even so, we all tried our best to collect the data and analyzed the case study to design a good topic, even though we finally choose a best one, it does not mean that the others do nothing for team. I think everyone has already done the best for our team, and we also get the good result.

In this collaboration, I provided the primary case for our team, because I mainly focused on the creativity and innovation and ignored the virtual form, it was not a good idea, but we accepted the creativity of the animation company, and thought out a new idea that animation industry collaborate with the early childhood education. Because of our members’ responsibility and their good ability to understanding, I believe our group will work very well and we will complete a high quality project.

My thoughts about virtual team

As the development of technology, virtual collaboration and virtual communication become more and more important. It not only overcomes the obstacle of time and space, but also let the work run up. What’s more, this virtual collaboration will save a lot of cost. All of these will improve the efficiency of work. Besides, more important is that we should build a good trust and rules in the virtual collaboration, which are the essential factors for virtual team.

In the business battleground, there is no forever enemies and also have no forever friends. Virtual Enterprise collects the core competencies and resources from different enterprises, and has unique competitive advantages in management, technology, resources. In order to achieve the win-win goal, we share our customers and market. Virtual Enterprise is a continuation of the collaborative production of the globalization of the industrial economy, innovative forms of business organization of the information age.

What did this course bring to me?

The whole semester course has finished, I got more from this course. Compared with the theory and knowledge we learnt in class, I think the more important for me is improving my communication ability. First of all, we had a discussion and a brief presentation in every class, which is a challenge for me, because I need clearly present my views in public. After the experience, I think I got a great progress on the presentation skill. Besides, learning the virtual communication with other teams, which make me know that how to persuade others, how to face the conflict and how to solve the problems. What's more, teaching me the importance of team-work. Two heads are better than one. We cannot ignore the power of team-work. All in all, thanks to this course, I got more spiritual wealth. Thank you, Frank, thank you, my partners. 

High performance collaboration individual report 2

CHEN Sixian 

52910724

Collaboration process

Since we are not allowed to meet face-to-face, our two groups do collaboration through virtual ways. We connected each other through E-mail and then decided to set up a group using chatting software in order to exchange our opinion and data in time. So we can upload our own information and download others’ data and messages from the common database.

It took us some time to know each other and build trust among the team members. Trust is an important component of many interpersonal relationships and interactions. Team members who are responsive to communications, follow through, and take responsibility for results help build task-based trust, which helps enhance the team’s performance. Since task-based trust, or the belief that team members will do their jobs, is key to the success of a virtual team. Since we come from different department and are major in different courses, the way we think about questions are different. This leaded to a lot of problems during our collaboration as I will explain below, but this also complemented the shortage of each group.

We discussed the main idea of the organization, the value of this organization to each company, the way of operation of the organization and decided which industry we should stand for. After finished our own part, we consolidated them together to complete the general frame of the blog and then we modified it according to our own industry’s perspective. Meanwhile, we also consider the reliability and some operation problems of this virtual organization. We tried to make it more authentic.

Once the task was defined clearly, we altogether tried to be combined to create the right blend of technical and interpersonal skills to complete the task successfully. All in all, this was a smoothly process. Although we caught in trouble during the procedure, we did our job and finished the project eventually.

Conflict & Solution

Collaboration with other group

The working and learning experiences have a great effect on one’s thinking and the way of doing things. This mainly reflected on the understanding of the final project. We two group both propose our own idea at first. We had a conflict about the choice of the idea.

The morning group put more emphasis on the form of the virtual organization. They want to ensure the organization is accorded with professor’s request, and the collaboration form and process is practicable. But my partner and I want to do the organization in a more creativity and innovation way. Our initial idea didn’t fit the request very well, and then we tried to figure out a new one. We changed one of our collaboration companies and improve our scheme in order to make it both creativity and fit to the request. Then we express our idea to the morning group. After listening to our opinion, they changed their mind and decided to do our idea together. After reached an agreement, we quickly discussed the brief idea of the virtual organization and how it worked.

During the follow-up cooperation, physical distance and time distance brought with it other issues. Team dispersed affected quality of our collaboration. I found that collaboration across distance is more difficult than in a collocated environment. We have problems including difficulties in communication and coordination, reduced trust, and an increased inability to establish a common ground.

For example, we just connected with each other using E-mail and chatting software. This escalated conflict to some extent. When we using e-mail to resolve conflicts, this carries a major risk: that disputes will escalate late to irresolvable levels and even damage senders’ and receivers’ relationship. When I was confused with other group member’s idea and we discussed through the Internet, we couldn’t see each other’s face and the words couldn’t express ones emotion. What’s more, when a sender bundles multiple arguments in a lengthy e-mail message, the recipient may forget to respond to one or more arguments in the reply. When a sender believes that the recipient has ignored parts of the message, the sender may suspect a violation of interaction norms. Sometimes I can’t get others’ feedback in time and this could lead to a lot of misunderstandings. It made me think that the attitude of some group members’ was not so friendly and some of them were so self-opinionated. This wasn’t a good sign.

Connecting through E-mail in some ways slowed down our rate of process and destroyed our relationships. So this made me think that face-to-face video conversation or phone calls were necessary to discuss disputes. And fact proved that even we couldn’t avoid using e-mail to handle contentious issues in most cases, occasionally face-to-face conversations were helpful. We can get each other’s feedback more directly and timely through this way and this had a good effect.

Also, social-emotional processes are important too, especially in terms with physically dispersed members, interpersonal differences are a greater threat to the team’s social stability because of the greater difficulty in resolving conflicts across geographic boundaries. So a virtual team like us must ensure that team members commit to the overall group goals, identify with the team and actively support a team spirit. It was very lucky that all of the team members are very responsible for this project and this responsibility increased our team cohesion and helped to establish and maintain interpersonal bonds that enable our group to better cope with conflicts.

Collaboration with my partner

We just have two people in our group, so actually it’s hard to say who the group leader is. We worked more like partner for most of the time. Fiona and I are classmates; we are both major in Electronic Information Engineering. So it’s easy for us to discuss the project and exchange opinion all the time. As engineering students, our way of thinking are sometimes familiar. So it was easier for us to come to an agreement in some issues.

It was unavoidable that we may have some different opinions about the project and the previous exercises. The way we fixed this problem was that we both focused on the part we in charge of and then exchange opinion about another one’s idea. Then we modified our own work according to our own understanding and the partner’s suggestion.

Effect on me

This was the first time I cooperate with others in a virtual form. It was really a special experience and had a lot of positive effect on me. Not like most of the classmates, I don’t have any working experience and I have learned engineering for so many years. So this course itself is a big challenge to me.

Firstly I was shocked by the efficiency of part-time students. They have to deal with their own work in the daytime. So in order to finish the project, they put a stronger focus during their spare time. This requires them to fix the problems perfectly at first time. I think it’s the essential ability I should be equipped with in my future career. So I appreciate them for being such good models for me and I have learnt a lot during the collaboration with them and during the time we study together.

Secondly, the lectures and projects gave me a chance to train my writing and presentation skill. They made me thinking and trying to present my own opinion to others. What’s more, the exercises in the class and the projects developed my thinking and made me become more creatively. I have learnt more skills about how to search information, how to negotiate with other people and so on.

Thirdly, I learnt more about how to negotiate among diverse individuals to arrive at win-win outcomes. I changed a lot during the learning process and learned how to control my own emotion. I was a person who always wanted to prove that I am right while arguing with others. After learning the courses, I noticed that competing is not always the best way to deal with conflict and the experience of working with other group members made me realized the importance of collaboration. I learned how to consider both integrative and distributive aspects of negotiation, and build good relationships in order to get the problem solved. I have practiced all these knowledge and skills during the collaboration with the morning group and had a good effect.

Finally, the best harvest I think is the experience of dealing with conflict. As most of the virtual teams, we met a lot of problems when this team was first set up. We overcame the difficulties, such as dispersion, misunderstanding from electronic communication, etc. and then built trust. Each of us contributed a lot to the collaboration and eventually got a happy ending. This project made me get the key point for a virtual team to be success as: high level of trust, open and clear communication, strong leadership, clear goals and purpose and the use of appropriate levels of technology.