Managing collaborative activities in project management

ABSTRACT

People working with current ad-hoc collaboration tools suffer from information overload and information scattered. Our five-month study of project managers found their work was comprised of fragmented activities implicitly organized by activity threads. Most of these activities were communicative to track and report project status, which introduced frequent interruptions and low efficiency. Accordingly, we explored an activity centered approach to help them manage work information. In our Activity Centric Project Management prototype, solutions like integrating activity with project task, providing timely activity awareness based on RSS, utilizing activity data to generate status report, and allowing third-party easily to update task status were introduced.

REFERENCES

• 1: Liam Bannon , Allen Cypher , Steven Greenspan , Melissa L. Monty, Evaluation and analysis of users' activity organization, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p.54-57, December 12-15, 1983, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/800045.801580]
• 2: Victor M. González , Gloria Mark, "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": managing multiple working spheres, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.113-120, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985707]
• 3: David R. Millen , Michael J. Muller , Werner Geyer , Eric Wilcox , Beth Brownholtz, Patterns of media use in an activity-centric collaborative environment, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1055096]
• 4: Sridhar Seshadri , Zur Shapira, Managerial Allocation of Time and Effort: The Effects of Interruptions, Management Science, v.47 n.5, p.647-662, May 2001 [doi>10.1287/mnsc.47.5.647.10481]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Management

Keywords:
activity centric computing, project management, prototype