BUS603: Managing People

People work together, and groups make most of the complex decisions in organizations. Managers and staff continuously make decisions, design and manufacture products, develop policies and strategies, design software and so on. Even in hierarchical organizations, decision making is usually a shared process. A group may be involved in a decision or in a decision related task. However, work groups may have both potential benefits (process gains) and potential drawbacks (process losses). When people work in teams, especially when members are in different locations and may be working at different times, they need to communicate and collaborate and access a diverse set of information sources in multiple formats. Thus, supporting work groups emphasizes the important aspects of communication, computer technologies and work methodologies. Other reasons for support are cost savings, expedited decision speed, the need to support virtual teams, the need for external experts, and improving the decision making process. Almost all organizations, small and large, are using some computer-based communication and collaboration methods and tools to support people working in teams or groups). Moreover, the importance for businesses has been increased to such level that collaboration technology (CT) has been hailed as the hallmark of an empowering organization, as it goes beyond the scope of traditional e-mail systems to allow people to collaborate electronically, fostering creativity, and teamwork in the process.

Working with teams and groups is a complicated process, even for the clear advantages that can be obtained, there is a great chance for process losses. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach is usually required for the multiple and diverse aspects that have to be considered for a successful implantation of the appropriate technologies, where some of these aspects are related to personal behaviour and work styles, group's functionality and dynamics, organizational culture and learning, knowledge sharing and conversion, technical skills and expertise. Since CT belongs and represents a paradigm shift for computer science, one in which human-human rather than human-machine communication, coordination, and problem solving are emphasized. Then, it is important to realize how this technology can enable and improve the group work performance through a successful selection and implementation of the right infrastructure, allowing an effective technology appropriation and user acceptance. In this context, virtual teams require the use of information technology (IT) to exist, little is known about how the technology can be configured to optimize work group performance.

Although some of these aspects and concerns have been discussed before, in previous research works, more and diverse cases are need to support, design and establish a framework for best practices and lessons learned, that if the case, serve as a baseline to look for models, explore and develop standards based in a common standard-based foundation, that in consequence will address common efforts of researches, developers, and practitioners dedicated to all different and diverse aspects of collaboration.

In this chapter, discussion and topics of virtual work group collaboration are explored within a real and practical case of a selection and implementation of an integrated web-based IT infrastructure for a manufacturing process.

Source: Jorge Luis Gonzalez-Trujillo, https://www.intechopen.com/books/process-management/virtual-work-group-collaboration-in-a-manufacturing-process
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.