After finishing the ILF session in Canberra, I jumped in a taxi and headed for the airport for a flight to Melbourne. After a few delays, both in getting out of Canberra and in landing at Melbourne, a 30-minute taxi ride took me to the location of my next presentation. It was a very different audience to who I am used to: teachers of IT to Year 12 students in Melbourne. Last year apparently, the decision was made to have a focus on virtual team collaboration and what it means within Year 12, thus aiming to help students prepare for their careers and to think through the changes taking place in business, government and industry. The event was run and organized by VITTA.

It was amazing. About 11 teachers came, some who had taken the afternoon off school so they could drive for 2 or 2.5 hours to be in the City to attend my session. The event started at 4.30pm and we were finishing at about 8pm, and then they drive home again. Now that’s dedication in action!

There were two parts to the proceedings. I was asked to start with a 45-minute lecture on the ideas behind virtual teams and how to support their performance — and so I focused my comments on the human aspects. The second was a two-hour workshop intended to demonstrate some of the ways that virtual team technology can support and assist virtual teams with information sharing and collaborative decision making. Although the students actually have to build a web site to perform many of these actions, I took the easy way out and used a number of commercial Internet services to show the concepts that I wanted to get across. For example, when I wanted to show the concept of “pulling people back into the virtual team space”, I showed how Basecamp offers both RSS notifications and email alerts. To show the concept of “addressing the needs of the three constituencies of virtual team work”, I used hosted SharePoint. To show the concept of “wrap up discussions to show what was decided”, I used Central Desktop.

Some of the comments that I received on the session were:

“The session was good because you linked concepts with tools were clearly; it was worth 5 hours of driving!“

“Great application of the theory concepts to real-life situations.“

“I can definitely use information in the classroom and out of it. I understand what it’s all about!“

“I could really see this being very productive in any size organization. I really want to investigate further.“

So … a great evening. Many thanks to those who attended, for the great questions, and for the stimulating discussion. And many thanks to Renne, Lisa and Antonia for inviting me.