Analysis of Task Management in Virtual Academic Teams

Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) aims at measuring collaboration in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). In this paper, we apply SCA to investigate the use of Task Management (TM) features in virtual academic teams on a collaboration platform. This paper contributes to theory by developing the TM Catalog describing the elements and characteristics of TM. Our literature review identified only three studies analyzing the use of TM features in ECS. These studies base their analyses on transactional data (event logs). We propose to analyze both the structure and characteristics of tasks, as well as how tasks are used. In our paper, we show how SCA can be applied to gain insights on the use of TM features. Based on data from an academic collaboration platform, we demonstrate the characteristics of tasks and how different types of virtual academic teams make use of TM features

Handling Conflicts in Autonomous Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities

International audienceCoordination between different organizations in dynamic situations, such as a disaster response, is challenging. Organizations are autonomous and coordinate the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organi- zations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, only e-mail, telephone or fax are used to exchange information. This makes detecting and handling of conflicting views on the situation very difficult. We propose an approach for inter-organizational pro- cess management for these kinds of dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them in the different workspaces of the organizations. State changes of shared activities are propagated optimistically. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementation and interviews to validate the concept

Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities for Disaster Management

International audienceIt is very challenging for different organizations to coordinate together in dynamic situations like a disaster response. Each organization is autonomous and considers the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organizations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, they only use e-mail, telephone or fax to exchange information. Thus, it is very difficult for them to detect and handle differences on their perception of the situation. We propose an approach for inter-organizational process management suited to these dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them optimistically in each other workspaces. The underlying system propagate the state changes to all workspace eventually. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementation and explain how we have derived a first evaluation of the syste

Understanding, Defining and Managing of Operational Personal Priorities. A Tool for Task Management Self-Prioritization

RÉSUMÉ : Plusieurs personnes se sentent bombardées par l'augmentation de la charge de travail et des engagements. Nous avons, souvent, le sentiment de manquer de temps. L'établissement des priorités devient un défi et émotionnel pour tout le monde. En effet, il est difficile de définir les tâches qui semblent plus le meilleur parmi plusieurs choix. Il existe des centaines d'outils numériques de gestion de temps personnel sur le marché. Cependant, il semble avoir une faible tentative de développer un outil qui s’aligne avec le comportement des gens et qui réponde à leurs besoins. Le temps est élastique et sa gestion est difficile par des gens. Par conséquent, chaque personne reste son meilleur planificateur. Cette recherche vise à répondre à l’objectif : « Comment pouvons-nous soutenir les gens dans la gestion, sélection et priorisation de leurs propres tâches connues / inconnues afin de donner le meilleur de soi-même ? ». Pour atteindre cet objectif, les besoins des gens ont été étudiés afin de comprendre comment ils gèrent leurs tâches. Les données ont servi à cerner leurs difficultés dans la gestion, puis à élaborer un cadre pour répondre à leurs besoins. L'étude empirique a été réalisée sur le personnel du département d'urgence d’un hôpital. Le choix du département d’urgence a été fait vu l’importance de la gestion du temps et des priorités. Sur la base des résultats de l'étude de cas, un nouvel outil a été proposé, appelé " House in Goal Hierarchy (HIGH) ", qui est un outil d'établissement des priorités et de prise de décision utilisant une approche ascendante de gestion. Le potentiel de ce nouvel outil a été testé auprès de quinze personnes de l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. Un sondage a été mené pour comprendre l'efficacité et les différences de comportement des participants avant et après l’utilisation de l’outil. Les données collectées ont été analysées qualitativement et quantitativement. Malgré cette recherche avait la limite de taille de l’échantillon, une amélioration de 50% a été mesurée auprès des utilisateurs dans leur priorisation de tâches et dans l’atteinte de leurs objectifs.----------ABSTRACT : Many of us feel bombarded by our increasing workload, commitments, and requests for more time. Prioritization is very emotional and challenging for everyone since it is difficult to prioritize, which is the best among more than one choice. There are hundreds of digital and paper versions of personal time management tools available on the market. It seems there is a feeble attempt to develop a tool that meets people' behavior and needs. Time is elastic and more or less manageable by people. Therefore, each person is his/her own best scheduler. Time-management more referred to the self and task management to make a balance between the activities. This research tried to work on the objective of “How can we help people to manage, select and prioritize their own known/unknown tasks to account to themselves in a respectful manner?” For this objective, people’s needs were studied to understand how people manage tasks. The data was used to identify their difficulties and then develop a framework to meet their needs. The empirical study was carried out on the personnel of the emergency department of the hospital since time and prioritizing is extremely valuable to them. Based on the results of the case study, a new tool was proposed called “House in Goal Hierarchy (HIGH)” that is a prioritizing and decision-making tool to create a bottom-up approach. The potential of this new tool was then tested with fifteen graduate students of the École Polytechnique of Montréal. A survey was applied to understand the effectiveness and differences in the behavior of the participants, before and after using the tool. The collected data analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Even though this research had a limitation in testing in a small group, but stillthe result of using HIGH tool showed that the approach has approximately a 50% improvement in prioritizing the user’s tasks and reaching his/her goals

Improving Tool Support for Personal Task Management (PTM)

Personal Task Management (PTM) describes the planning, prioritising and list-making of tasks employed by an individual user. There are hundreds of commercial electronic PTM tools available on the market which users can choose from. There appears to be little attempt to develop a framework for describing people’s task management behaviour, making it difficult to determine the extent to which these tools meet users’ needs. The aims of this thesis were therefore to understand how academics manage their tasks, to identify the conceptual gaps between them and the existing electronic tools, and to establish requirements for guiding the design and evaluation of PTM tools. The research adopts a user-centred design methodology. This includes both empirical and analytical approaches, conducted through four different studies. Firstly, a semi-structured interview study develops a PTM framework, describing the components of PTM (i.e. the underlying activities and contextual factors). Secondly, a member-checking study tests the accuracy of the framework. Thirdly, a video-diary study examines the inconsistencies discovered between the interview and member-checking studies. The findings extend the PTM framework to include other aspects of users (e.g. challenges, context awareness, etc.), broadening the understanding of the complexity of PTM behaviours. The data gathered in the user studies was analysed using a grounded theory (GT) approach, and the findings were then used to build personas of academics. Finally, an in-depth expert analytical evaluation of a set of existing tools using CASSM identifies the conceptual misfits between users and the existing tools. The contributions of this thesis are a development of the PTM framework, describing the key factors that influence academics in managing their tasks; a development of personas, explaining characteristics of different groups of academics and PTM strategies that they employ over time; and an evaluation of existing PTM tools, determining their strengths and limitations and providing recommendations