WMBA 6010 Week 6 Cross-Site Collaboration Design Example

Three Sites, Thirteen Hours Apart, One Manual: A Working Arrangement for Minneapolis Project Managers, Lisbon Linguists and Manila Layout Staff, With Decision Rights for the Hours When Minneapolis Is Asleep

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6010: Managing People and Promoting Collaboration

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Sites, Thirteen Hours Apart, One Manual: A Working Arrangement for Minneapolis Project Managers, Lisbon Linguists and Manila Layout Staff, With Decision Rights for the Hours When Minneapolis Is Asleep

The Work and Why It Breaks

At Larkspur, the localization agency built for this course's case, a typical manual project passes through three sites. Project managers in Minneapolis receive the client's source files and set up the project. Linguists in Lisbon, six hours ahead, translate and review. The desktop publishing team in Manila, thirteen hours ahead of Minneapolis in summer, places the translated text into the layout and returns proofs. Every manual crosses each boundary at least twice, because layout problems send text back to Lisbon and client questions come in through Minneapolis.

The current arrangement relies on goodwill and email. Its failures are predictable. A question raised in Manila at 4 p.m. reaches a Minneapolis project manager at 3 a.m. her time and waits until morning, costing Manila a full working day. Lisbon changes a glossary term after layout has started, and Manila redoes pages. No one knows who may approve a small layout fix that changes the meaning of a line. The farm equipment manual team discussed in Week 3 lost about four working days to these delays in its first five weeks.

The research explains why. Olson and Olson (2000) argued that distance makes tightly coupled work, in which each step depends on frequent clarification, especially hard to coordinate, and that groups need shared context and clear structure to compensate. Cummings et al. (2009) found that coordination delays in globally distributed projects grew with the number of time zones between team members and were smaller when members shared overlapping working hours. Hinds and Bailey (2003) traced much of the friction in distributed teams to missing context: people at one site cannot see the pressures behind decisions made at another.

Design Principles

Three principles shape the arrangement. First, decouple wherever possible: reduce the number of points at which one site must wait for another. Second, put decisions where the information is, with limits set in advance. Third, use the short overlaps for decisions and the long gaps for work.

Who Holds Which Decision

Table 1

Decision Rights by Site

The table covers recurring decisions; anything not listed goes to the project manager.

The table moves two frequent decisions out of Minneapolis entirely. Manila can shorten overflowing text without waiting, as long as meaning does not change, and logs what it did. Lisbon can change terms freely until the freeze date, after which the cost of change falls on Manila and the decision moves to the project manager, who can weigh it against the schedule.

What Moves Between Sites, and When

Four items cross site boundaries: source files, the glossary, translated files and layout proofs, plus a fifth that the current arrangement lacks, a shared query log. Every question from any site goes into the log with the language, page and a proposed answer if the person asking has one. Each site reviews the log at the start of its day.

Handoffs are fixed. Lisbon delivers translated files to Manila by 4 p.m. Lisbon time, which is 11 p.m. in Manila and gives Manila the full next morning. Manila returns proofs by 5 p.m. Manila time, which reaches Lisbon at 10 a.m. the same day. Minneapolis reviews the query log at 7 a.m. Central time, when Lisbon is in early afternoon and can still answer.

Overlap Windows

Table 2

Daily Overlap Windows and Their Use

Times assume northern summer; Manila keeps no daylight saving time, so its windows move by an hour when Europe and the United States change their clocks.

The Minneapolis and Manila overlap is short and falls outside normal hours for one side, so it is reserved for escalations. Everything else between those two sites goes through the log or through Lisbon.

When a Decision Is Needed at Three in the Morning

The hardest case is a decision that cannot wait and falls outside the table, such as a client calling Manila directly with a change to a page already in layout. The arrangement handles it in two steps. First, the Manila lead may make a provisional decision, record it in the log as provisional and keep working, as long as the decision can be reversed in under two hours of rework. Second, if the decision cannot be reversed cheaply, Manila calls the on-duty project manager, a rotation among the seven project managers that changes weekly, who has agreed to take one urgent call per night if needed. The rotation spreads the burden and keeps any single person from being the default overnight contact.

Making It Work

The arrangement asks people to give up some habits. Project managers lose control over small layout decisions. Lisbon loses the freedom to change terms late. Manila gains authority but also accountability for logging what it decides. Each site will be asked to review the arrangement after the first two projects, and the project manager on each project will keep a count of hours lost to waiting, the measure the design is meant to improve.

The design does not solve every problem. It will not make a rushed client reasonable or stop a reviewer from missing an error. What it does is reduce the number of times one site sits idle because another is asleep, and that is the delay the current arrangement creates most often.

References

Cummings, J. N., Espinosa, J. A., & Pickering, C. K. (2009). Crossing spatial and temporal boundaries in globally distributed projects: A relational model of coordination delay. Information Systems Research, 20(3), 420-439. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1090.0239

Hinds, P. J., & Bailey, D. E. (2003). Out of sight, out of sync: Understanding conflict in distributed teams. Organization Science, 14(6), 615-632. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.14.6.615.24872

Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2000). Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3), 139-178. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4