The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

In his formal evaluation of the process after the project, the customer particularly expresses appreciation
of the „continuous communication‟ with the team during the period when he was in another city.
In both of the above cases the customer took a strong personal interest in the development process and
appreciated being involved with technical issues and have them resolved quickly. Formal meetings were
however not conducted over IM.
A team in the 2006 cohort did use IM for formal meetings with their remote customer. While this is not
typical of our projects, we will go into some detail on the case because it demonstrates a communication
breakdown which might in part be due to the inadequacy of IM in the particular coollaboration setting.
The project group in question had taken on the task of making a game for a collaborative virtual
environment. The customer role was held by a team of two researchers, one at the students‟ university and
one in an academic institution on the other side of the globe. The team never met the remote customer
face-to-face. Meetings between him and the group were conducted via IM. Being the one proposing the
use of IM for meetings, the customer was willing to have meetings at late hours to cope with the time
difference. As the project process was being subject to formal evaluation, the project group wanted to
document their communication with the customer. They therefore chose, with their customer‟s consent, to
log the meetings conducted via IM. Some weeks into the project, the group was frustrated because of
what they conceived to be misunderstandings and vagueness related to needs, requirements,
responsibilities and expectations in the project. Deadline was steadily approaching without the necessary
progress of work. Example 3 shows an excerpt from a meeting over IM conducted at this rather critical
point in the project. We have called the remote customer Johnatan/Johnny, and his Norwegian partner
Anja. Frode and Per are two of the four students in the project group. During the meeting, the students are
collocated in the PC lab. Anja is on another location in the students‟ city whereas Johnny is on the other
side of the globe. The communication is taking place in English, Johnny‟s mother tongue. We lack
timestamps for the comments in the log, but the conversation shown in the excerpt should be understood
as continuous and without major pauses.
From Example 3 it can be noted that highly critical questions in the project are at stake: what are the
requirements, who is doing the planning and resource allocation (the group feels it is their job and that the
customer is interfering), and access to important resources for the work (a particular server). In the heat of
the conversation, Frode, who was in practice the project manager, starts commanding the remote
customer in a mix of anger and desperation: “Read the storyline document! Get us access to the server”.
Not surprisingly, the remote customer simply leaves the conversation at that point, and communication
breaks down. The team expresses uneasiness with the situation. The local customer, Anja, stays in the
conversation and tries to moderate and explain the situation. Frode goes on to explain what he sees as the
major problems.
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