Links to more information and opinion

Here are some favorite pages on topics that inspired MetaTeam. Of course this page is not even close to complete. Please contact us with more pointers.

Organizational Development

• Organizational development on Wikipedia
• Saul Eisen's OD blog
• The Society for Organizational Learning
• The Chesapeake Bay Organization Development Network website has a good of OD resources

Team Performance Management

• The journal Team Performance Management and the International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, both from Emerald Group Publishing.
• Dr Walter Fernandez's Metateams in Major Information Technology Projects: A Grounded Theory on Conflict, Trust, Communication, and Cost.
• The Comparative Advantage of X-Teams. Similar to Metateams, X-Teams are cross company work groups.
• Team decision making models
• How does the FAA think about teams? Check this quick overview. Then have a look at their thoughts on metrics.
• This study report looks at the behaviors and strategies of high performing drug discovery teams. A quote:

  "Our research also supported the suggestion that the predominant reason for team performance problems is a lack of attention to people issues.... We anticipated we would find this lack of focus on people issues in the lower performing teams- and we did."
  

• A Haas School of Business presentation by Anton McBurnie: Team Acceleration & Team Roles. The first 8 or so slides are worth the price of admission.
• Getting groups to develop good strategies: Effects of reflexivity interventions on team process, team performance, and shared mental models is a mouthful. But the paper's focus on teams' reflection on their processes and performance is accessible and useful, especially when thinking about how to leverage MetaTeam's ability to make team structures and processes explicit.
• There are several interesting approaches to decision making in teams, one of which is the Stepladder Technique.
• Fred Nickols offers several interesting short articles including this one on goals grids.
• A presentation by Beth Kohsin giving an Air Force medical perspective, and the TeamSTEP program — including this pocket guide.
• Kevin McManus gives a hard look at teams from an industrial systems quality perspective. One of many possible starting points is this page on team myths.

And now for something completely different: a few of our competitors

We like to think MetaTeam is a unique team performance management platform. But actually, when we think about it more, we wouldn't want you to think we're so unique that we're all alone out here... So here are some of the folks that keep us company:

• http://cornerstoneteammanager.com/ a collaboration-oriented product billed as team performance management
• Kolbe's WAREwithal looks at how a manager can construct a performance pre-quantified team
• Lattice Partners (a Monitor Group company) have a range of tools to support team performance interventions
• http://www.virtualteams.com/ addresses cross-organizational virtual teams (i.e. meta teams)
• http://www.eteaming.com/solutions/gocollaborate.html pitches a customized solution that focuses on distance collaboration and learning
• TeamView 360 is an assessment and reporting tool that helps you evaluate your team members.
• Progress Planner is a team performance management application that shares some features with MetaTeam, though of course the differences are substantial.
• Four Groups offers a predictive team construction tool that is similar to the intent of WAREwithal (see above), but more visual.
• There are lots of collaboration tools out there, but TEAMCENTER puts a team productivity spin on things in a way that deserves a mention.

And, of course, there are others...

Learning Strategies and Technology

We like to think of MetaTeam as being a valuable tool for teaching strong team practices and as a reinforcement for team training programs. In that spirit, here are some links for people who think about workforce training and performance.

• Gary sent over a note about his firm's Innovations In Learning conference.
• Gene's paper New Skills, New Learning talks about teams and technology in the context of law school grads. Gene was also instrumental in helping us focus an earler version of the MetaTeam idea.
• This paper on reflexivity looks at "...the extent to which group members overtly reflect upon the group’s objectives, strategies, and processes and adapt them to current or anticipated endogenous or environmental circumstances" (A quote quoted in the paper—sorry, you have to read the paper for the citation). Getting groups to develop good strategies: Effects of reflexivity interventions on team process, team performance, and shared mental models

Virtual Teams

• Building Community in the Virtual Workplace, Jennifer Carpenter
• How does geographic configuration impact virtual teams? Warning, academic language, proceed at own risk!
• The International Journal of e-Collaboration
• The Leading Virtually blog offers several thinkers' views on practices and tools.
• This paper on social networks and collaboration is not focused solely on virtual teams, but what it considers is, if anything, more true in that case.
• Developing Growing Need for Soft-Skills in IT Professionals looks at the local requirements for a company embarking on an off-shored IT program.

Project Teams

• Searching for some hard numbers I came across Max Wideman's project managment site and this fascinating summary of a PwC paper on project-oriented organizations. Very worth a read.
• Staffing a project? First time logging into MetaTeam? You are faced with the task of creating collections of people (teams, projects, groups in MetaTeam terms). Here's one perspective on how to determine who should get a role in the group. "Group Social Capital and Group Effectiveness: the Role of Informal Socializing Ties".
• Why should you care enough to spend time cataloging and managing your team relationships? Here's one study that suggests that relationships have a strong role in perceptions of leadership and in success.
• Measuring projects is easy enough in terms of "hard skill" project management, but what do you do to measure organizational dynamics? Here is one answer to the measurement question in a software project context.

Human Capital Technology

• Systematic HR

Teams in general

• Team basics at Wikipedia
• Team basics at OPM
• MIT's HR has team guidelines worth reading.
• A range of information about teams at TeamTechnology.com
• Paul Ritchie's project and performance management blog
• The USN Human Performance Center has numerous references and URLs on teams.
• This page highlights teaching teamwork. Great question: what is the difference between group work and teamwork?
• An intriguing abstract on the relationship of perceptions of variances in team membership to team productivity. Basically, most teams have some uncertainty as to who is a team member; and that is not a productivity booster.

Other links

• eVisioner on AboutUs.com. Why link to a page about us? Because the categories at the foot of the page may help you find other sites with helpful organizational development content.
• MetaTeam on Wikipedia. Why you ask? Why not.