Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, and High Performance

bGraphic tools and visual solutions for team building and development/bpiVisual Teams/i uses visual tools and methods to help teams—both face-to-face and virtual—reach high performance in today's work environment. As teams become more and more global and distributed, visualization provides an important channel of communication—one that opens up the group's mind to improving work systems and processes by understanding relationships, interconnections, and big picture contexts.piVisual Teams/i shares best practices and uses visualization as a power tool for process improvement by providing teams with a common language for high performance. The book:ulliExplores how any kind of team can draw on the principles and practices of creative design teams in the software, architectural, engineering, and information design professions/liliIntroduces the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model and related tools—a system used throughout companies such as Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron, and others/li/ulpiVisual Teams/i presents a comprehensive framework, best practices, and unique visual tools for becoming an innovative, high-performance team.

br/hr class="bucketDivider" noshade="noshade" size="1" / br/ span class="h3color" strong From the Book: Visual Teams in Meeting Settings/strong /spanbr/br/table align="right" bgcolor="#fffff" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" tbodytr td align="center"img src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/wiley/Visual-Teams-in-Meeting-Settings.jpg" align="center" border="0"/td /tr /tbody/table bSame Time/Same Place—Face-to-Face Meetings/bbr/ The traditional, and historically most familiar way to work as a team, is face-to-face at the same time and in the same place. Many kinds of work groups are still located in the same geographic area or building and can meet together this way. The tools explored in iVisual Teams/i for this team mode are: br/br/ • Graphic recording on large paperbr/ • Static and interactive whiteboards and multi-touch screens (and walls) br/ • Computer projection of idea mapping, flow charting, and other softwarebr/ • Predesigned presentation murals and chartsbr/ • Wall and tabletop graphic templatesbr/ • Workbooks, worksheets, and handoutsbr/ • Sticky-note displaysbr/ • Decision-support software for electronic brainstorming, voting, and rankingbr/ • Tablet computers for active graphic recording that is projectedbr/br/ bSame Time/Different Place —Virtual Meetings/bbr/ Increasingly, teams are distributed in different locations, many times all over the world. But they still want to meet at the same time, hearing each other’s voices and perhaps seeing themselves on video and looking at shared drawings. Many face-to-face meeting involve a virtual component with several people calling in. Its tools are: br/br/ • Teleconferences with target documentsbr/ • Web conferences with shared whiteboards and interactive presentationsbr/ • Web conferences with active recording on tabletsbr/ • Video conferences with telepresence and interactive whiteboards integratedbr/ • Interactive whiteboards and telephonesbr/ • Live chat with or without videobr/ • Browser-based decision-support softwarebr/br/ bDifferent Time—Same Place Meetings/bbr/ This brings us back to a physical office or workspace. When teams are collocated they can communicate visually through the physical environment in ways that allow coworkers to see what is going on at different times. These tools include: br/br/ • Physical bulletin boards and project-management wallsbr/ • Postersbr/ • Posted action plans and road mapsbr/ • Team rooms with displaysbr/ • Kiosks—physical and electronicbr/br/ bAnytime/Anyplace—Social Media and Cloud Computing/bbr/ With cameras on smart phones and tablets, wifi and other Internet connects becoming universal, and data access from the cloud expanding exponentially, the “anytime/anyplace” possibility is becoming reality. Some of the tools that specifically make this possible are: br/br/ • Textingbr/ • Video and photo sharingbr/ • Teleconferencing on smart phonesbr/ • All the above plus drawings on smart tabletsbr/ • Coordinating through cloud computing servicesbr/ • Mobile appliances of increasing varietybr/hr class="bucketDivider" noshade="noshade" size="1" /br/