Excerpt from Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning

Looking through some old files, I found this interesting excerpt from “Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning.”

Managing Team Members Across the World

SAP—an inter-enterprise software development and implementation company—needed to provide their project managers with a learning experience to address a specific challenge—managing teams whose members were scattered across the globe. With team members in Germany, Japan, America, and India, a SAP project manager must contend with issues such as cultural differences, time zones, disparate expectations, communication styles, and other issues a local team may not encounter.

SAP partnered with an e-learning design company, Enspire Learning, located in Austin, Texas to craft six, hour-long modules tackling six major difficulties with distributed, or “virtual,” teams the training including a 20-minute capstone simulation for each of the six modules.

The capstone simulation allows the learners to experience virtual team management as a team leader. The learner makes key strategic decisions about a simulated project and assigns work packets to three distributed segments of the team, based on their skills, cultural differences, and the work in question. After making strategic decisions, the project is executed and the learner experiences the effects of their actions, mitigating any issues that arise.

Enspire and SAP recognized the significant design challenge of meaningfully discussing cultural differences while remaining sensitive to the cultures of learners world-wide. This challenge was addressed by using a trick from the gamer’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play (MMORPG) games. The team created a fictional world called Orth with its own fictional cultures. The team from the Orthian region of Sampo considered timeliness as paramount, while the culture from Shananees viewed time very loosely. Understanding and deciphering these differences influence how the learner makes decisions.

So how does the learner measure progress? To coincide with SAP’s standard processes, the simulation fixes the timeline and resources, leaving three measures of a successful project: Quality, Feature set, and Morale of your team—your “QFM” score. Choices the learner makes directly or indirectly affect her ability to deliver a finished project of high quality, with a maximal feature set, and high team morale.

As with many problems faced by actual executives and managers in a business setting, there is no one way to win the virtual team management simulation. You simply develop the most appropriate balance. Each course of action comes with different costs and benefits, in terms of QFM scores and the time available on the timeline. If you choose to hold an in-person meeting for all three teams, you may increase team morale, but you lose one week of production time. Canceling in-person meetings provides more production time, but may result in miscommunications between the teams later in the project.

The simulation also tackles the common problem of resource allocation. The learner must allocate work packages that makeup the project. However, just as in real life, there are restrictions. Certain work packages require certain skills to complete. Others must be addressed sequentially. Experiencing the difficulty of complex work allocation puts pressure on learner’s other decision points, such as whether to give a team time off to celebrate a local holiday, and helps drive home the points of the simulation.
The simulation provides the learner feedback throughout the execution stage.

A team lead may complain of being assigned work his team finds boring, or he may thank you for providing them with new communication technologies. At the close of the module, the learner’s virtual mentor, Linda, provides the final QFM score, general feedback on performance and feedback on specific learner decisions that significantly impacted the learner’s scores.

While the learners operate in a fictional world with fictional teams, the issues they face are the same issues they face with actual teams and actual work flow processes. The use of a fictional world, to avoid offending any specific culture, may seem abstract from reality but the carefully crafted, fictional world is based on the patterns of the real world so the learning transfers. The simulation in this case has more in common with how our brain visualizes patterns and relationships than it does with the details of reality such as having a real project or using real cultures. But the rules learned in the simulation—the underlying relationships and patterns —get processed exactly the same way as we process real things like “working on a holiday causes low morale” and “allocating resources requires trade-offs.” The lessons of the simulation are learned even though the events take place in a fictionalized world.

In fact, the simulation won an award.

Want to read more interesting stories about simulations, gadget, games and gizmos for learning? Check out the book!