Team Kickoff


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How to start the HydroEurope team collaboration?

This is a description of a possible 'kick-off' in your team collaboration. All the topics are just proposals, please feel free to use your own way to start the collaboration. But take care to agree with ALL of your team colleagues, otherwise you might be start competition and not collaboration.

Important Steps

  1. Team Composition

    2. The team composition is published on the HydroEurope course platform. Please have a look on your team and your team colleagues.

  2. Team Address Book

    3. In the Communication section, you will find the list of all participants and supervisors. Each participant has received a username and a password to use the platform WorkSpace. You have to update your individual details on the Communication page. This information will be useful for your colleagues.

  3. Team Interaction/Communication Agreement

    4. The HydroEurope teams are composed by members from different locations, with different background and with different types of Internet connection. So do not expect that your team colleagues will have the same habits and skills in Internet communication. It might be very helpful to set up an interaction agreement which describes how to communicate in the Internet in a way, on which all team members agree. This includes obligations such as:

    • obligation to send information (e.g. send an email)
    • obligation to read information (e.g. have a look in mailboxes)
    • obligation to accept information (e.g. email conformation of receipt)
    • obligation to deliver information (e.g. upload a file)
    • obligation to pick up information (e.g. download a file)

    as well as internal rules to work on SHARED team work space.

  4. Team Work Plan

    5. When you start your team collaboration it might be helpful to agree on a work plan. An easy approach is to define responsibilities and related tasks inside your teams based on the different competence of the team members. The teams can use the Work Plan deadlines in their team work spaces to organize their working tasks. You can plan meetings and prepare small reports on the team work space to ensure that all team members have the same information about the activities done by others. It might be also helpful to put minutes of the NetMeetings or Live or Yahoo messenger (e.g. to save the chat protocol in a file) on the team work space to inform all those team members, who were not in the meeting.

  5. Team Online Presence Time Table

    6. Most important at the begin of your team work is to find out the suitable time windows for communication and project performances. As all locations have their own 'boundary conditions' your should early agree on the time for collaboration. Please use the OnlinePresence time table in your team work space to mark your personal availability.
    Please do not forget: Team work in HydroEurope means to share work and responsibility in a virtual organization to overcome the local constraints and to integrate the local competences towards the common team success.

  6. Work Space / Web Page Management

    7. The team work space is a shared web space and login on the HydroEurope platform. All team members have the same access and the same rights on this work space. The directory structure and the internal rules for uploading and editing of files is free of choice. It might be helpful to define some internal rules to prevent overwriting of files.

  7. Reporting

    8. Reporting is an important task in engineering projects to present the ideas and performed work to the non team members. All teams are pleased to report their progress during the course in reports. These reports are short summaries of the work done at the different locations and the existing problems. The reports are important for the team members themselves to ensure the same level of information at all location and to the supervisors to observe the team work. Based on the reports the supervisors may write assessments with comments, remarks and if needed direct support to the teams to overcome problems.

    The results of your team work has to be reported in a final report. This report should have two parts. Part one should describe your engineering solution. Please comment your suggestion of river management and maybe also discuss alternatives and not solved problems in the river. The second part should be the collaboration report which describes the way of Web-based collaboration performed in your team.

    Please feel free to use your own team layout and structure for reporting to present your team work to the public. The reports are published in the Web with open access, so in principle everybody can have a look in your work. This is an interesting challenge.

Human Aspects

Last but nor least: Team collaboration has a lot of technological and organizational aspects which has to be considered by corresponding tools, methods and structures. But all this will not automatically lead to a successful co-operation: You have to consider the human aspects !

The human interaction is reduced by the Internet, but both sides of the 'line' have human behaviour and habits. Most of the participants have limited English language skills and different practice of Web technology, ArcGIS, MIKE11 or MIKESHE. They will have different educational background and are coming from countries with different cultural background. So do not have the expectation, that your way of collaboration will be followed by your colleagues. It is better to start on a simple level and to increase the level collaboration step by step the by finding compromises. Disappointment will appear - please do discuss this in the teams looking for agreements.

Anyway this is maybe one of the most interesting aspect of HydroEurope: You have the chance to collaborate with people from the whole world!

Enjoy the game as a challenge to meet new friends!