Cross Atlantic Communication

Hi all,

At this point most of our module seems to be completed, it certainly looks very good, so it is a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the processes we've been through.

For me personally, this project has been enjoyable. I was prepared for major struggle with timing, confusing messages and tasks and lack of communication, but our team has really done an effort to try our best to minimize the possible weaknesses of this long distance between us.

The project was a little difficult to comprehend in the beginning, what were we really to do? But I believe our Professors intentionally gave us much room for us to scope out our own project and goals, so that we would feel and face the struggle of making some big decisions between us internationally.

For being 9 team members I must say that we managed to have a pretty good communication between most of us. Imagine doing this just 10 years ago! Just phones, and faxes. I believe our team made the communication and decision making as easy as it could be because all of our member truly are knowledgeable of all the virtual communication technologies today. Skype helped a lot as always.

Via Skype we were able to have a few but very effective meetings. Most of the decisions, except for our democratic vote on which countries to analyze, were done over Skype. And that helped to make our decisions process very short. Imaging doing all our discussions over email with 9 people!

After figuring out what we were to do in our first meeting, we spent a week reading up on Malaysia and the UK. Articles, websites and blogs helped us with getting a picture of how doing business in this country would be like. The second meeting served as a Division of Labour-meeting, where we separated work load among ourselves and set some deadlines. With some tangles goals and deadlines - our tasks did no longer seem so diffuse. Communication also are much better and easier when clear goals and deadlines are set. It seems to me that the first part of all projects, the brainstorming, the searching is the most crucial and difficult communication-wise because we are all a little confused and worried.

Looking back, getting communication off ground a little earlier is an obvious thing we could have done better. And if we had managed to do that, we would also have been in a position to set our deadlines earlier, which in turn would have made it possible for all of us to spend more time going through each other's parts and make things look more united and not so broken into pieces. But I must say looks pretty good today as it is.

It was a pleasure to work with the French team, communication on Skype was really good. I can imaging that if we were not so similar in age or in knowledge of these internet technologies, our communication and project results would not have turned out so great.

We'll keep in touch!

Audun