EnviroNet

ENVIRONET is the result of the collaboration between the five members of the team ADHOCIA. The project took place in a ‘team culture’. A good ‘team culture’ is defined by England and Finney in their book Managing Multimedia as a collaborative environment where all members are pulling together to achieve well defined tasks, respect each other’s skills, share success and failures and where there is mutual support when needed.

ADHOCIA was characterised by a good team culture since it enclosed all the elements mentioned above. Each team member had well defined individual tasks that led to the implementation of the project. Because of the nature of the project the management of the team was not hierarchical, each member had individual tasks that performed with the freedom and the responsibility of her/his own decision-making. For that reason, respect for each other’s skills had been achieved. However, the team members had the chance to suggest ideas and comment on each other’s work during the meetings, allowing this way the team to discuss and develop the project collaboratively. Consistent group meetings were essential for maintaining a successful communication between all team members and consequently achieving a shared responsibility for success and failures in the project.

Focusing five individuals to work collaboratively is not an easy task. Each member has individual values, objectives, visions, different personalities, cultural backgrounds, different defense mechanisms and her/his own ways of interacting in a team. In order to focus the team to develop the project successfully we used the Fishbone exercise. The Fishbone exercise enabled us to focus our unstructured collection of our individual characteristics in a form of different steps that lead to the completion of our project.

The management style followed in this project was a combination of the Collaborative and the Delegation style. The Collaborative style occurred after recognizing that as a project manager I did not have the right experience, knowledge and skills to take decisions for the different specialized aspects of the project so I asked for the team to express their opinions to bring together the experience required before reaching certain decisions.

The Delegation style was followed by breaking down the tasks of each member directing her/him in a way to the right track for the completion of the project but at the same time transferring her/him the power of decision-making within her/his role. However, the delegation allowed by the individual members was controlled by the power of the collaborative decisions the team made as a whole during the meetings.

The team-meetings took place every Wednesday. These meetings’ purpose was mainly to evaluate the progress of the project and outline the next steps.

Methodology: A day before each meeting the main points to be discussed during the meeting were publish in the group’s Blogger (also emailed to the members) in order to keep the meeting focused.

Objectives: During the first few meetings I realised that it was very hard to keep the meetings focused resulting to miss discussing important issues. The method of publishing the main points the day before overcame the problem and kept the meetings focused to the main points. Also, the members had the chance to think and prepare for the discussion points before the meeting or to suggest any other issues they would like to discuss.

In the last month we had group meetings more often (at least twice a week) since it was the most productive period of the project and more meetings were required to make sure that all team members were pleased with the development of the project.

Methodology: The main points of what was discussed and all decisions made during the meetings were published in the team’s Seedwiki making it available to the team for future reference.

Some members of the team also met to work together when they had to carry out tasks collaboratively. It is also worth mentioning that many members met ‘virtually’ using online messenger services to test and evaluate each other’s first developed tasks.

Methodology: Each member was given a schedule with her/his own individual timetabled tasks. The members presented to the team the development of their tasks during every meeting.

Objectives: This method allowed the team to see and evaluate the development of the project as a whole (not just from the scope of their own role) and work collaboratively to overcome any difficulties appeared.

Seedwiki is a web tool that allows you to organize and publish your content for a wide audience by using your browser. In this project Seedwiki was used to organize and publish the content at the time the team was producing it. This way the team had access to the process of the project at all times. The development of the project was saved and organized in the team’s Seedwiki. This allowed the team to see the journey of the project, track its progress and access information discussed in meetings.

The project’s Seedwiki can also be used as a reference for the team in their future projects.

Click here to view the Team's Seedwiki

Assets Registration

Methodology: All assets produced for the final product (mobile site version, promotional website and projector file) have been registered using Excel and published as a web page. Each asset was organized by its name, size, format, date created, resolution, location and description. The assets have been arranged alphabetically.

Objectives: Registering the assets is essential in multimedia projects because it helps members locate a file, reproduce or change it easily avoiding time consuming searches. Also, colour coding the different file formats and locations makes the essential information eye catching.