Purpose of this page: To document information about how OIT is currently facilitating remote work, telecommuting and collaboration between teams and staff who are in different physical locations, and to evaluate technologies and methods to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity of staff working in different locations.
Executive sponsor and lead of this effort: Brian Buckler
Scope and goals:
- Facilitate more effective methods, technologies and best practices for full or part-time remote workers/telecommuters, and also to facilitate improved communication and collaboration between OIT coworkers who are in different physical locations or even where teams are spread out in private offices within the same building.
- Facilitate open and continuous communication between team members who may otherwise be isolated or excluded from relevant conversations.
- Leverage technologies and methods that allow coworkers in different locations to interact in ways that emulate face-to-face interactions.
- Assess what OIT teams and individual staff are using today and identify what is working well, what are the challenges, and how are the challenges being addressed.
- Pilot/evaluate new technologies and experiment with new approaches.
Notes and relevant information and resources:
Remote Work Best Practices from Trello
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QJUIzMx6-zSy5oLXtNAA4OMYiC2yON-b
Overview of how UC Recruit, and Chancellor and Provost IT teams are using technology and innovative methods to enhance their team collaboration and their collaboration with remote team members:
UC Recruit, and Chancellor and Provost IT
Notes from interview with Valerie Jones about her experience with remote work in her teams:
Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse
Zoom whiteboarding how-to documentation:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205677665-How-Do-I-Use-Whiteboard-
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004797286-Using-the-Whiteboard-with-Zoom-Rooms-for-Touch
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004773103-Getting-Started-with-Zoom-Rooms-for-Touch
Recorded webinar: Telecommuting - Work is what we do, not where we are
YouTube recording of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amsiQHbE71M
Slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1awhbezQT1wPdlwF97r2qGOYPmQfYTAuBwzr3YnwnE8o/edit?usp=sharing
The "Double" telepresence robot
- https://www.doublerobotics.com/
- Double robot setup, user instructions, and support:
- How to drive the Double:
- Anyone can test-drive a demo robot on the vendor's website.
- Live test drive of a Double robot provided by the vendor (from a PC or Mac using Chrome or Firefox):
- iOS apps (for driving the robot from an iOS device)
- The Double is a remote control robot that allows someone to virtually move around an office environment as though they were present in the office. It is a lightweight robot on wheels that uses an iPad as a virtual video talking head. From a supported web browser, the person controlling the Double can control the movement, hear and see the robot's surroundings, and can talk via a speaker. The person controlling the Double has a wide angle forward view and a picture-in picture view of what they look like to others in the iPad screen, and can also look down to view what is surrounding the foot of the robot.
- Having your own Double in the office means you can be free to roam around anywhere without having to schedule a meeting. Double takes everything you love about video calls on an iPad and puts that on a mobile base that puts the remote worker in control. Your Double is always on, ready to take you anywhere you need to go. Most offices have quite a bit of ad-hoc verbal communication throughout the day. How many of those little conversations do the remote workers miss? Typically, the remote worker is only contacted for higher priority items. This makes them second-class citizens, since they're not in the loop on many day-to-day activities. Double gives each remote worker a physical presence in the office all day, every day. They're there for the hallway conversations. You no longer need to say "can someone call Mary and let her know what we talked about?" (from the Double website).
- Computer Science Professor Judy Olson, and her PHD student Veronica Ahumada Newhart, have agreed to allow OIT to borrow a Double to evaluate for a couple of months because they are interested in how we find it to be useful to inform their research.
- Judy's book: Working Together Apart: Collaboration over the Internet (Synthesis Lectures on Human-centered Informatics) 1st edition by Judith S. Olson (Author), Gary M. Olson (Author)
- Available hear on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Together-Apart-Collaboration-Human-centered/dp/1608450503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512763213&sr=8-1&keywords=working+together+apart
- Abstract: Increasingly, teams are working together when they are not in the same location, even though there are many challenges to doing so successfully. Here we review the latest insights into these matters, guided by a framework that we have developed during two decades of research on this topic.
This framework organizes a series of factors that we have found to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful distributed collaborations. We then review the kinds of technology options that are available today, focusing more on types of technologies rather than specific instances. We describe a database of geographically distributed projects we have studied and introduce the Collaboration Success Wizard, an online tool for assessing past, present, or planned distributed collaborations. We close with a set of recommendations for individuals, managers, and those higher in the organizations who wish to support distance work.
- We will be setting up a pilot test program in OIT to evaluate how we might use the Double to enhance the effectiveness and collaboration of remote co-workers.
- Tips for effective use of the Double for remote work/telecommuting: https://www.doublerobotics.com/business/Double-Guide-to-Telecommuting.pdf