Collaboration

Everybody involved with the decision discovery project at AIC needs to collaborate. They need to be able to review each other's work, provide feedback related to that work, make suggestions for how to describe, and document the decisions, make updates directly to the decision documentation, and sometime even change each other's work. Blueworks Live provides a number of features that support this kind of collaboration, including:

򐂰 Activity Stream

򐂰 Chat

򐂰 Comments

The activity stream

The activity stream in Blueworks Live provides a dynamic view into the work taking place on a decision discovery project. The decision discovery team members at AIC can see the details of changes made to the decisions in the AIC Online space, who made these changes and when they made them. They can view this information by date or by user, and they can expand and collapse the changes to show more or less detail. They can also post messages to the activity stream, which enables them to broadcast important project-related information to the whole team. The activity stream has quickly become an information hub for the decision discovery project team at AIC.

You can see some of the information available through the Blueworks Live activity stream in the left pane of the screen capture, as shown in Figure 4-57.

Figure 4-57 The activity stream

Chat

Ideally, your decision discovery team is co-located in the same general area to facilitate efficient communication and collaboration. However, in this day and age that is often not possible. Blueworks Live provides an online chat capability that can help distributed teams with informal communication and ad hoc collaboration. The AIC team is co-located on the AIC campus, but they work in different buildings. When Sue is working in Blueworks Live, she frequently uses the online chat when she needs to ask a teammate a quick question, find a good time to meet or let a co-worker know that she would like for them to informally review some of her work. And she often finds herself responding to similar chats from her

teammates. The Chat function can be unwieldy for comprehensive, in-depth communications and the history of a communication thread is not retained so Chat is best used for quick, informal interactions. Quick questions, straightforward coordination and notification, and checking in with teammates are all great uses of the Blueworks Live Chat function.

To initiate a chat, the person you want to communicate with has to be logged in to Blueworks Live. You can see the names of people that are online at the lower right corner of your Blueworks Live screen. If you click one of those names, you get a pop-up window, which shows you what they are currently viewing in Blueworks Live, as shown in Figure 4-58 on page 97.

Figure 4-58 Opening a chat window

When you start a chat, the chat window opens, as shown in Figure 4-59.

Figure 4-59 The chat window

In addition to being able to type a text message into the chat window, you can send a link to the page that you are viewing as depicted in Figure 4-60 on page 98. If Ginny clicks the link that Sue sent her in the chat window, she will automatically navigate to that same page. In the example below, Sue is making some changes to the Pricing decision diagram that she would like some informal feedback from Ginny on. When Ginny clicks the link and navigates to the decision diagram, she will see the changes that Sue is making to the decision diagram in real

time. And, of course, if Ginny makes any changes, Sue will see those in real time. Chat can be a very effective tool for collaborating dynamically and “getting on the same page”.

Figure 4-60 Getting on the same page – sending a link via online chat

However, for more significant interactions, you will need a permanent, threaded,

context-sensitive way to communicate around decisions that are being documented and reviewed. Comments, in Blueworks Live, work well for this purpose.

Comments

We have already seen comments in action in Blueworks Live. The advantage of comments is that they are context-sensitive, that is, the comment is made and attached directly to the decision, activity, or process being documented or reviewed. Sue can use comments as a way of leaving notes for herself to help with her work. For example, she may want to remind herself of some additional tasks she needs to perform or some additional documentation she needs to obtain before she can finish documenting a particular decision or process activity. But comments can also be tremendously useful for collaborating with others when reviewing and validating decisions.

As we saw in the last section, Sue started a chat with Ginny to request some preliminary feedback on an early draft of the Pricing decision that Sue was beginning work on. When Ginny reviewed this Pricing decision, she was happy to see that it considered whether or not the driver had been at fault for accidents that could have an impact on the premium price. When Ginny reviewed the Validate Driver decision, it did not appear to her that this was being considered when evaluating the driver’s accident history for eligibility purposes.

Thinking that she may have discovered yet another area within AIC where this determination of fault was not being properly taken into consideration, Ginny immediately brought it to the team’s attention by adding a comment. She navigated to the Evaluate Accident History sub-decision of Validate Driver, and pressed the “Add Comment” button in the pane on the lower right side of the window bringing up the “Add Comment” dialog, as shown in

Figure 4-61 on page 99.

Figure 4-61 Adding a comment on the decision diagram

Comments can also be captured on the Comments tab of the Decision Details panel.

Comments are displayed, in context, when a sub-decision is selected in the decision diagram in View mode, as illustrated in Figure 4-62. They are also displayed in the Activity Stream for the entire space. And team members can reply directly to a comment wherever they appear.

Figure 4-62 Comments show up in context, when navigating a decision diagram in View mode