Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace

By Jan H. Pieper, Julia Grace, Stephen Dill

Summary:
This paper described the web application Team Analytics and a user study done for the program. The Team Analytics application is designed to help users who work in groups to find important information about the members without having to see each one's individual profile. It is composed of several widgets that help relay information to the user that otherwise might be painstakingly hard to gather and analyze by oneself. Below is a screenshot showing the program:


Figure 1. Screenshot of the Team Analytics application showing information
about ten people.

As can be seen in the picture the program utilizes several widgets to display the information. Of these include a photo gallery at the top, an organization chart that shows the hierarchy of the people and other information such as their location or company, there is a 'timezone pain' chart that helps display optimal times for organizing meetings or conversations, the pie chart shows the distribution of people across the group so that the user can see how many belong to one department or one company, and the last widget is the 'bizcard section' which displays small information boxes for individual people which is linked to the person's full profile.

The Team Analytics program was deployed in February 2007 and has since been well received. A user study was conducted by a third party in which the original authors were invited to contribute some questions which were used to test the satisfaction and use of the program. A large number of participants reported using the application weekly and a good number even daily. The overall satisfaction of the program was around 90%. Some of the more detailed parts of the study reported on the individual widgets themselves.

The most popular widgets were the organization chart, bizcard section and email plugin followed by the picture gallery, timezone pain, and attribute pie chart. The widget that had the least satisfactory rating was the timezone pain, which came to the surprise of the authors. Based off of the comments given they reasoned that even though people found the widget very useful it was confusing. Some of the future work for this would be modifying some of the requested changes such as making the timezone pain less confusing and perhaps a better scheme than using colors as an identifying property. Another thing they are looking into is integration with Sametime, their corporate instant messaging system.

Discussion:
I liked this paper and I like that the technology discussed is not just research but is actually already out in the real world being used. I found the relative simplicity of the application but that it was overwhelmingly liked intriguing. I also greatly appreciate that the program was designed for convenience to the user and that some of the work they did on it after original deployment was to integrate it into email to make it even easier to access. I would like to think that this is something similar to what I could be working on in the future.