Mr. Adam B. K.'s Blog

Working on a team that is spread across the country is fun but has its challenges.  Obviously, we don't see each other on a regular basis, so we have to make do with conference calls and lots of e-mails. I don't know how teams have collaborated in the past.  In order to share our documents we have a used a creative combination of free (or borrowed) tools to gather information and share our working documents.  Here's a little rundown of what we are using.

• In MySMPS.org  we created a community and use that to store web links and articles that we may use as part of our secondary research.  The library here is great for storage.  We tried the Wiki for a working document, but it lacked some needed functionality.
• Google Docs provides the functionality we need for our working documents.  We use this for the outline and draft of our paper, as well as, a spreadsheet for a to-do list.  One team member sets up the document and sets the share permissions for the other team members.
• Zoomerang was used to conduct our survey. SMPS National allowed us to use their account, which isn't free to them.  So this is our borrowed tool.
• LinkedIn is our secondary distribution method, e-mail was the primary.  In order to get our survey out to as many relevant people as possible, we incorporated LinkedIn Groups for distribution. By joining groups relative to the demographics we wanted in our survey (AEC industry related owners and consultants), we were able to post a link to the survey in new discussions.  Direct communication with other organizations provided little assistance with our survey distribution, so we pushed through on our own through LinkedIn.