Editorial

In other words, we allow (trick?) ourselves to believe (or to be boxed into a corner and forced to accept the fact) that 24/7 is literally 24/7 when we work on virtual global teams. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Especially when we participate on more than one of these “24/7 virtual teams.” In our May web site poll this year, we asked the question …

65% participated on three or more virtual teams

One-quarter of the respondents answered that they were members of more than five virtual teams. The same percentage quarter participated on one to three teams, while yet another quarter didn’t participate on any. Approximately 10% participated on one team and around 15% are members of between three and five teams.

News Flash! Need to Upgrade Your Globalization Skills or Find Out How Others Are Defining Their Globalization Strategies? You and your staff have 3 chances to upgrade your skills for automating the globalization process during LISA’s always popular workshops from the best instructors in the industry before the end of 2007. Whether you’re an implementer, a business manager or a globalization strategist, one of our 14 workshops will meet your needs. Group pricing is available. For more information, click Berlin, Boston or Antwerp. During the Globalization Executive RoundTable in Berlin on October 22, senior managers from Adobe, HP, IBM and the EU’s Directorate General for Translation will be sharing how they define globalization requirements and where they currently stand vis-à-vis their globalization initiatives. In addition, attendees will focus on setting up a Special Interest Group for the creation of a global business data repository. Click here for more information.

In other words, 65% of respondents participate on anywhere from three to more than five virtual teams. That represents a lot of communication and many, many emails everyday – that’s before we ever turn our attention to coming up with a creative solution to a customer challenge, reflecting on what needs to be accomplished six months from now or implementing an improvement to enable our teams to run more smoothly.

Furthermore, we do ourselves, our colleagues, our customers, our partners and our management a great disservice when we behave in ways to perpetuate this myth. It leads us to the wrong metrics for measuring success/failure and to an unstable basis for partnerships.

What exactly is the “24/7 myth?”

And what exactly is the myth?

That just because team members are located around the globe and that one or more will be awake and working at any given time during a 24-hour period, it doesn’t mean that the productivity of the team should be measured in this way.

Why not?

Because working under this model has its own requirements for nurturing maintenance that cannot be ignored, if the team is to function as productively as possible. In our everyday work lives, these include, but are not limited to …

• All of the time (each and every day) that is required to communicate, re-communicate and then over-communicate to ensure that everyone is staying on-course, especially as the course changes.
• The meetings, web conferences, calls, etc. that must often be rescheduled due to time zone differences, workshift variations, holiday downtimes, etc.
• The virtual world of Skype, IM (instant messaging), web conferencing and email that many of us live in is not the most conducive to cross-cultural communication – as we all know, but don’t always fully take into account when it comes to measuring productivity. The quality of phone lines, the issue of the fluency in the dominant meeting language and whether or not lower-ranking members feel free to speak up are just some of the factors that affect team productivity – regardless of whether a “virtual someone” is available to code or test 24 hours a day.

And just when you are sure that you have taken everyone else’s needs into account, one of your key team members will do the unthinkable – take off time to be sick or to take pick up their child early from school or daycare.

There are also issues that affect the longer-term health of a team and the organization that sponsors it. When all of us are on-call so many hours of the day, this usually means that there is no opportunity for required downtime for creative thinking or doodling. There’s a reason that Google’s team comes up with the ideas and products/services they do, and it’s not only because they seek out and hire the “best and the brightest … they go that very crucial next step to nurture these people and to encourage the IP that can grow in their heads to produce truly innovative products/services by mandating that every employee spend this time.

How many emails are required every day to keep your global virtual team going?

When busily answering the 45th email of the day (I’m not exaggerating!), where can you find the time to document or to pass on all of the wonderful expertise and IP developed by your team to the next generation and future members of a team who will face the same/similar challenges (the goal being to turn this IP into reusable assets)? You don’t.

So what’s the best way to keep the myth of 24/7 from eating you alive? Until there are more studies on the actual productivity of global virtual teams, here are two suggestions:

• Establish metrics for team performance up-front that take this myth into account.
• Expose the myth to the light of day by committing to goals and objectives that are realistic. Yes, you can really do it! Hmmm, that reminds me, I need to readjust some of my goals and objectives with my own boss

In preparation for How To Audit Your Business Processes for Globalization Readiness, a workshop that I will be giving in Berlin during the LISA Forum Europe on October 25, several of our Members agreed to be interviewed and to share the latest trends for how they are building and nurturing their global teams locally. Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents from eleven global virtual teams at Alcatel-Lucent, Business Objects, EMC, HP, PerkinElmer, Rockwell Automation, SAS Institute, Schlumberger, Sun, TIBCO and Xerox share how they measure their success/failure in Global Outsourcing Metrics (premium).

If you would like to receive a copy of the Ask the Experts Guide that will include all of the data and analysis (along with background information on the teams) gathered from the 17 Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents who responded to other questions about how they manage successful global teams, just click rebecca@lisa.org to send me an email.

Oracle and T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom are taking global virtual teamwork to the next level by providing a framework for communities to be built in order to share and leverage the knowledge and expertise that reside within each employee. To do this, both organizations are making a conscious choice to manage culture and language as a business process. In Paradigm Shift: Managing Language and Culture as a Business Process, (premium) Karen Eden (Oracle) and Philo Holland (T-Systems) describe how their organizations are leveraging communities to integrate the thousands of employees who have become colleagues over the past few years (through 35 acquisitions in the case of Oracle and the fusion of 208 very independent organizations in the case of T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom).

On October 23, during the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin, you will be able to meet Eden and Holland when they interact with the audience to present Scaling for Growth and Organizational Diversity.

In “Keeping Up With the Joneses” (public), Joe Lapierre (Web Site Manager for CIGNA International) shares how he and his global web team serve users in more than 180 countries, while maintaining effective global web processes at the same time.

You can meet Joe Lapierre in person when he participates in a panel discussion, Maintaining Effective Web Processes in the Wake of Increasing Technological and Global Business Demands, on October 23 during the 14th Web Site Globalization Conference in San Diego, California.

With the vast amounts of content awaiting translation/localization by all of these teams, it’s high time that more organizations take a serious look at how to apply business management and workflow to managing language and culture. In We Would All Like a Tighter Ship – But How Do We Sail It? (public), Tobias Rinsche (Vice President of The Language Technology Centre) lays out the various solutions.

You can meet Dr. Adriane Rinsche, Managing Director of Language Technology Centre, during the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin when she presents LTC Worx – No More Compromises on Tuesday, October 23.

And, of course, underlying all of these activities are standards – if we choose to leverage them to simplify our working lives. Arle Lommel provides an update on what’s happening in the world of language standards in Focus on Standards (public).

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Join us for the LISA Forum Europe in Berlin from October 22-26. Our theme will be Building Global Teams Locally: Outsourcing, European Integration and Globalization. For information on special packages, please click here.

From December 10-12, LISA and the Lessius Hogeschool in Antwerp will host a unique Forum, Teaching Localisation for Global Business Readiness. The Forum will bring together localization professionals from academia and industry seeking to improve career development and training in today's localization industry. Click here for more information.

There are two conferences this fall for those of you who focus on UNICODE, web globalization or DITA. The 31st Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) is the premier technical conference for both software and web internationalization. Unicode experts, implementers, clients and vendors are invited to attend this unique conference from October 15-17. Click here for more information.

During IQPC’s 14th Web Site Globalization Conference (October 22-24 in San Diego), you will have access to candid insights and case studies from your web site globalization peers from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Motorola, Research in Motion, Philips Medical Systems, PayPal, Seagate Technology, Textron, Cigna International, Xilinx, VeriSign and The Nielsen Company. Click here for more information.

Join CIDM and OASIS for the 3rd Annual 2007 DITA Europe Conference in Brussels, Belgium on November 13 and 14. This conference is for anyone interested in implementing XML DITA or learning more about this new standard for topic-based authoring. Meet publications professionals who have implemented DITA in their organizations and hear from representatives of key tools vendors who are actively supporting the DITA community. For more information, click here.

Hope to see you in Berlin, Boston or Antwerp before the end of the year!