What Maggie learned from Outsourcing Project?

This oursourcing project has been started for a month. Honestly, it's not easy to do this project with team mates at another side of the earth.

The first and the main reason I think is that no one exactly knew how to do it and how it should look like. But good thing was that all teams put their works online. So we sometimes went to visit other teams' website, combined all their ideas and then added ours to finish the homework.

Another reason is that the time difference. We had only one discussions with French members on GTalk. Neither did we, they didn't clearly understand the whold structure and the frame of the project.

I heard from other teams that they finished all work by themselves, without French members' any help. Luckily, we had three French members who contributed a lot to this project at the fianl two weeks. But another two members.....we, and even those three French members, just didn't know where they were. It's a problem for international project to successfully move on if we can't find the right access to commnicate with each other. Though we all have internet, it's still hard to get them and make they work together.

But just like Dr. Pence said, we need to find out the reason French memebrs were not interested in this project. Perhaps we didn't let them know what their roles were, and how they could help. After Cathy send out the survey to all of us, we were more clearly understand the roles of each other. Nelly, the leader of French team, made the time schedule on wetpaint so that everyone could know what should be done at what time. Thus, we knew what we could expect to see every week. What I learned is to make all messages visible and understandable to all. Get things transparent so others could come in to help.

One more thing just came thought my mind. All homework in this class are demaned to finish online. The process of discussion, the decision making, and the result should all be put online and shared with others. Though it's comfortable to stay in warm and cozy bedroom and discussed homework on MSN, I may still prefer to meet face-to-face :( Primarily because it easier to express some ideas with hand gestures or by drawing the frames on paper/whiteboard. On MSN, sometimes conversation splited into different topics and hard to focus on any of them and connect all pieces of message together.


Over all, we finished the Outsourcing project!!!!! This experience is a good lesson for me to work with others in the virtual/digital world. Now I know what problems I may confront and what could I do to make the process better. I also know that I still have lots to learn and to figure out the better alternatives of those problems.