TeamSupport, Creating Together

Google putting an end to Wave

Mike Zhu — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 03:57:11 +0000

As Google has decided to stop Wave as a seperate product and will incorporate some of the functions in their other products, we decided not to continue our development of a brainstorm module using Google Wave.

It has been one of the brainstorm modules alongside email and twitter that was in the pipeline of being worked out and implemented for use in our GSS. With this decision we like to say that we found the Wave project very interesting and were glad to see Google working on a collaborative software. There are definately some things that we can learn from this and will continue to improve our software using the latest technologies.

TeamSupport moving into new office!

Mike Zhu — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:16:58 +0000

Today TeamSupport has moved into the new office provided by the Yes!Delft incubation program. The building is not quite finished yet, there are still painters working in the hallways and the lunch and dining area is still being built, but the outlook is nice. Only thing for us is to buy some new cabinets for our things, IKEA here we come! (also for the lunch)

TeamSupport in Tilburg, NL

Mike Zhu — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:19:56 +0000

On July 1st TeamSupport facilitated a session at the Tilburg University Library in the Netherlands. It has been a session organized by ReflecT: Research Institute for Flexicurity, Labour Market Dynamics and Social Cohesion at Tilburg University. The session was a 4 hour brainstorm session as part of a research by request of the municipality of Tilburg.

The session itself was led by Rene Voogt, researcher at the ReflecT institute while I provided the technical support onsite. The brainstorm led to a great number of data and it became a 4 hour non-stop session (no breaks) with water, coffee and tea kept flowing on this hot summer’s day. The participants were quite happy with the use of TeamSupport and were especially fond of the fact that so many things were mentioned in the 4 hours they had.

A new session is now planned on September 1st for the continuation of the first TeamSupport session!

(Missing pictures… unfortunately the SD card was corrupted and the photos were lost)

TeamSupport at the GDN 2010

Mike Zhu — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:11:51 +0000

The Group Decision and Negotiation conference 2010 was held at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of the Delft University of Technology. It was a three day conference about different aspects of group decision and negotiations.

Of course tracks about collaboration engineering and tools in group decision making was of special interest to me. There has been a study in using a GSS-tool in the process of supplier selection that was quite intriguing and got me thinking of using TeamSupport for similar a tasks. Luckily I met the creator and developer of this tool and had a great talk with him, further exploration might be needed and he was nice enough to help us in doing so, thanks Onur!

Besides the tracks about technologies and tools being used, but also tracks on tactics in a negotiation process and research findings these were really interesting. For example the fact that culture and background plays a very significant role and gives away a lot of information about how you will enter a negotiation process was really fascinating.

Prof. Paul Meerts of the Clingendael institute provided the keynote on day 3; the story telling fashion of his talk was intriguing, I wished our history teacher was more like that All in all it has been a great conference where I again met interesting new people that can help us on our road.

Congratulations: Graduation of Gijs Duivenvoorde

Mike Zhu — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:42:24 +0000

TeamSupport congratulates Gijs Duivenvoorde on his graduation at the University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands.

Gijs has been working extensively on his thesis in the field of Collaboration Engineering for the last couple of months and has finally presented his findings. His goal was to create improvements on how to reduce the brainstormed items in a effective way without losing the commitment of the group while still creating the common understanding in this group.

In his thesis he was able to create 2 ThinkLets that helps the group converge items that are brainstormed in such ways that cognitive load is reduced ( Less thinking is need ) and more effectively.

TeamSupport has been helping Gijs in creating a custom version of the Group Support System to evaluate his ideas. We have created the new modules following Gijs’ design and also with help of Arjen van Kol, who was helpful in providing access to his database of Dutch synonyms. Several sessions has been held at the University and the results were very satisfactory to both the students and teachers who attended the sessions for their course and to Gijs for use in his thesis work.

TeamSupport @ SURFnet

andrewgo — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:26:01 +0000

Last week TeamSupport was used in a creative way @ SurfNet. SurfNet wanted to explore the possibilities of a creative Lab; a room which stimulates innovation, collaboration and creativity. The challenge was to find out, what this creative lab should be, and how it should work.

The preparation for the TeamSupport session was unlike other sessions.We had no fixed process! The facilitator wanted to see how the session would progress so we could change the TeamSupport session on the fly. The pace was very high, but we were still able to create clarity.

It was great to see the group dynamic and its influence on the process. We ended up with excellent results: a satisfied group and a lot of good ideas that can help move the project forward.

Dev team at the driving range

Mike Zhu — Fri, 21 May 2010 04:54:53 +0000

These photos were made on Good Friday where the dev team spent some time at the driving range in Delft.

Custom Scrum board

Mike Zhu — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:22:12 +0000

Right now in our office we have made a part of the wall directly into a big scrum. This is working very well as you can see on the picture below, this session is closed!

In the meantime new stories and new task are hung.

Getting things done using TeamSupport

Mike Zhu — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:02:50 +0000

A popular “lifehack” these days is the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology developed by David Allen. In his methodology lists play a big role and it centers itself around organizing these lists. The workflow (Collect, Process, Organize, Review Do) look like it can be supported by the basic TeamSupport session of Brainstorm, Organize and Discuss. So it seemed a good idea to explore the possibility of using TeamSupport for GTD.

TeamSupport is of course targeted at teams that work together. But as I have seen before we can apply TeamSupport in many single person situations, such as a tool for test reporting or personal brainstorms, because its ability to organize these items. And again it is this so important feature that links TeamSupport to GTD.

I will look into this over several posts. First I take a look at how GTD can be applied using TS and then see if GTD can be applied to a team, probably a management team with several projects using TeamSupport.

TeamSupport session in class

Mike Zhu — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:32:24 +0000

Today students of the faculty “Technology, Policy and Management” of the Delft University of Technology attended a TeamSupport session during a 4hr class. The students brainstormed goals and instruments for the government on the topic of Energy Transition, which are made into strategies suggestion for the government. The goals were based on articles that these students have studied in advance.

During this session TeamSupport tested a new intelligent way of polling (which still is nameless at the time) designed by a MSc student of the Delft University of Technology. Using this method it becomes much easier for the participants to determine the useful items from the data set.

Looking at the faces of both students and the professor, we can conclude that the class and session was a great success. Congratulations to the all the participants and everyone who made it possible!