Last Wednesday the Scooby team decided to test out the collaboration spreadsheet tool that's still in beta by Google (Labs).
I'm sending this e-mail to document and to hear from those who participated, feedback on how this particular collaboration tool worked, what didn't work and what we can learn from this tool.
Since this was a bit of an experiment in learning and seeking out new tools in working collaboratively, there was a bit of confusion on the original invitation list and who was to participate. My intention was not to leave people in the dark, but to just try something out with a small group of people and if it worked, the team could decide if it would be worthwhile to incorporate this tool for part of project planning.
Just to update, we continued working on the planning for Scooby 0.3 (without the spreadsheet tool) in place of the status meeting last Thursday. Please see attached for the latest version of the feature ranking matrix. The Scooby 0.3 FRM will also be documented and updated on the wiki. For more details see:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ScoobyZeroDotThree
What is a this 'feature ranking matrix' (FRM)?
This is a spreadsheet that helps Product/Program/Design (PPD) team decide on priorities based on target user's needs and Engineering to estimate (SWAG) how long it will take to implement the features. Once both teams have entered in their data, it helps determine the priorities for that particular release. See attached for FRM example.
In regards to the spreadsheet, here is some feedback I captured:
Negatives:
+ Only two people sent me their Gmail address as requested from the original invite and with the confusion of people who wanted to participate in the meeting, it took an additional 15 mins to have everyone in the same chat room viewing the spreadsheet and to get over the chaos/excitement (because this was a new) and move forward with the task at hand.
+ In addition to the chaos, I rushed in adding everyone with read/write access and that was a big mistake on my part. People were making changes to the spreadsheet, mainly because it was 'new' and 'cool' to see changes made on the fly and everyone else could see as well. So in some ways this point is a positive because people were really excited to be able collaborate in this way.
+ The tool is clearly still in beta. There were bugs in the tool and some of the guests had refresh problems on different browsers etc, and then there were limits to how many people could participate. It was clear to all of us who participated that this tool is still in beta.
+ Adding an extra tool to the process means making sure everyone also has an account and it is yet another hurdle for everyone who need an account just to follow along. When working with a small group ie. the Scooby team it was not as difficult, though if it were for the Chandler team, it might have been more difficult to have everyone on board.
Positives:
+ The real-time interactivity was very 'cool' and people were really excited to be able collaborate in this way.
+ The chat feature is great. We chatted on IRC mainly so we could archive our chat in case we needed to refer back to what decisions were made. Perhaps if there was a file to 'download' your conversation, that would be ideal for our purposes.
+ Everyone was on the same page when going through the document. Made it really easy for people to follow along, and to stop off-topic conversations (the cross town bus analogy.)
What I learned:
+ To give certain people read/write and other people read only access. When I originally thought of how things could work, everyone could put in their SWAG for the line item, we'd still follow the same methodology to go through each line item one by one.
Perhaps if the users are used to understanding of what the task is, could there be a way where I would just hand over the spreadsheet and ask everyone to enter in the SWAGs? This way I could work on other things, keep the window open and if they had questions or finish they could just ping me. This collaboration tool could introduce new ways to work, perhaps more efficiently or does one really need to go through each feature line item by line item? Would it cause more confusion in the end? I don't know. This is just a thought after using this tool.
I leave the decision to the team to see if we should use this tool again for planning Scooby 0.4 in a couple of months from now. I would also love to hear feedback from everyone who took part to add their thoughts about the tool if I left out anything, etc.
Thanks, -Priscilla
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