M253 Team Work in Distributed Environments Week (3) By Dr. Dina Tbaishat

Resource sheet (10) Producing a team response A team response: is an agreed position on an issue or question that the team has been asked to address or research There are two major stages to producing a team response: first, the team has to reach agreement on the issue, through discussion in electronic forums or face-to-face meetings. Second, the team has to document this team response, usually in the form of a report.

Steps for producing a team response document 1) Discussion in order to generate ideas and ways of approaching the task 2) Armed with this set of ideas and possibilities, team members may have gone away and individually researched these ideas in order to identify the most promising approach or to provide background information for the team response document 3) Discuss the outcomes of your research in order to agree upon your team’s position, and hence what you will record in your team’s agreed response document 4) Your team needs to draft an outline for the document and decide who is going to write which sections of the document

5) Writing the document comes next, followed by cycles of editing and reviewing, until a final, agreed draft of the document emerges. 6) The agreed response document has now been completed by the team. The model chosen for collaborating writing depends on a number of factors: The size of the response document: Short documents are usually written by one person and reviewed by the rest of the team. In contrast, long documents can often be written faster if different people write different sections of the document. While it does take time to compile a document if different sections are written by different people, there are advantages to be obtained through sharing the task of writing a response document.

The skills of different team members: While some people have good writing skills, others may have skills in proofreading or graphic design. It is a good idea to make the most of the skills that team members possess in order to expedite production of the response document. The independence of different parts of the document: If discrete sections can be identified then these could be written by different people. Alternatively, if there is a lack of independence to different sections of the response document then it is possible for the draft to contain overlaps or contradictory statements that must be resolved. Resolution of these issues is best carried out by one person who can ensure that the report is coherent, consistent and reads with one voice.

Which document format to use You should try to standardize on the same set of software programs, ensuring that everyone in the team can open, edit and save documents created in that format, in order to avoid the problem of incompatibility between different word processors Concentrate on agreeing upon the structure and content of the report and then writing it Move to its presentation, styles consistently applied, grammar is improved and spelling errors are corrected

Document management Two approaches: In the centralized approach to document management, one person maintains a master version of the document against which everyone else suggests changes. This person is in overall editorial control of the document, in that they make all the requested changes, and they have to resolve any conflicts in the suggestions for changes that have been requested by other members of the team. One disadvantage of the centralized approach is that team members are unaware of changes that other team members have suggested until a new version of the document is issued for discussion.

In the round-robin approach, team members take it in turns to make changes to the document, passing it on to the next person in the team once they have revised the document to their satisfaction. This overcomes the disadvantage of the centralized approach in that team members are able to see each other’s revisions, but it can slow down the process of editing the document considerably (sequentially rather than simultaneously) We recommend adopting the centralized approach  done by the report coordinator

The role of the report coordinator Take responsibility for planning and coordinating the production of the team response document Could write it themselves or solicit contributions from other team members Then the report coordinator circulates the draft for comment and revision by the rest of the team Finally, manage versions of the report as these pass through the stages of editing before final document is produced

Version control Changes that you make to a document implicitly create another version of it Some changes such as grammatical and spelling changes represent improvement upon the previous version Other changes may alter the content or sense of the document  Keep the old versions and number each

Track changes Most word processors have a facility to automatically record changes that are made to a document while you are editing it. This facility (called Track Changes in Microsoft Word, or its equivalent in other word processors) In collaborative projects where many people review each draft of the document, conflicting changes may result. The report coordinator then would have to reconcile these changes and choose the best one that reflect the agreed viewpoint of the team The table in the resource sheet shows an example schedule for how track changes can be used by a team to support collaborative reviewing of a document

Who is going to coordinate the production of the team response? Who is going to write which parts of the team response? What is the common software environment that you are going to use for document preparation and production? How is the final version of the response document going to be approved by the team? Who is going to proofread and add the final polish to the document? The keys to collaboratively writing an agreed response document are coordination, and choosing someone who has the organizational and writing skills to produce a report on time, according to the specification that you have been given