24/7
An online productivity and planning solution for distributed project teams
The Brief: In today’s working world, people are often required to work together on a project team where they are physically separated by time and space.
How can we improve the productivity and working experience this arrangement?
Research
With the brief, my partner and I originally decided to research distributed project teams and their problems with time zone differences. It became clear early on in our research that time zone differences are not the biggest pain point for distributed project teams. In fact, when asked about coping with time zone differences across work teams, a few interview subjects even said things like, “We just know how to work around it.” and, “It is just a given.”
We decided to broaden our research scope and interviewed members of distributed project teams to find pain points other than time zone issues. These are key quotes from our interviews:
“You miss so much that is otherwise communicated just from desk to desk”
“Important to build team relationship at the beginning of a project”
“Make sure all members of the team are properly trained and supported before project starts…”
“It is hard to get a read on a virtual colleague without context”
“There were various different stakeholders and not everyone was in touch.”
“We need a standardized process”
“There is no personal investment in the relationship with a person across the pond you’ve never met”
“It is easy to feel isolated when you’re working in dispersed teams.”
Analysis
So, after restructuring our interview questions and refocusing our scope, we gained these insights about working in distributed project teams:
- Inability to connect on a personal level with teammates dehumanizes the experience for everyone, which is critical for feedback and constructive collaboration.
- Virtual team management requires new skills and awareness that most people are lacking.
- Physical distance between team members can lead to project disconnect.
- Without the right tools, colleagues are sometimes unaware of project status.
Most interestingly, we found that these insights are supported throughout studies and articles written about this topic. One of the most satisfying parts about working on this project was learning how common these distributed project teams are becoming in the age of globalization. Most large companies today are implementing global teams because it can be cost-effective and teams can essentially work 24–7.
A huge part of our research was to look at the competition. Productivity and scheduling tools are in a saturated market, so this helped us to determine where we fit in:
What we found is that each of these tools is used for a different purpose, and part of the confusion for distributed teams is figuring out who is using what tools.
Synthesis
When synthesizing our research, this is the design direction we settled on:
“The solution should cultivate an environment where virtual team members are aligned in their understanding of the project goals, scope and roles, facilitating a productive and collaborative working environment.”
Part of understanding our research was in developing personas. We developed 3 personas who work together in a distributed project team:
Testing and Iteration
We tested our very rough sketches with some of our interview subjects. What we learned from them was that we needed to reorganize our feature prioritization. What we had on the homepage was not what users wanted to see, and most of our design changes had to do with IA.
Final Product
Because of the 2-week time frame of this project and the breadth of our topic, our final project is more like an iteration. However, we feel like our iteration spoke to some important research themes and accomplishes what many other team tools do not.