Increasing numbers of us must work in teams. Teams of people who we have never, and may never, meet. We have the phone, email, Messenger and Net Meeting for our gatherings. We may be in wildly different time zones. It’s difficult to build a cohesive team, aligned with the project goals and full of motivated, cheerful people. Maybe online gaming, familiar to many of us, can make a positive contribution to the working day by addressing these pain points.

Recently there has been much publicity about Second Life. For many years there has been online gaming. For several years, too, many of us have had to work in widely dispersed teams. Given some thought, these things have something in common: people striving to achieve a shared objective without any physical interaction. Apply some more consideration and see a productivity tool for industries where handheld computers are used, or for field sales.

There has been no real crossover between online games and work though. With the costs involved in building a successful online game it’s not surprising that enterprises have shied away in droves. Open Source has entered into the fray. Sun has introduced Project Darkstar - a massively multiplayer online game server framework. Now the expense has been diminished. They have also dared to produce an advanced client, Project Wonderland, to portray a virtual building at their campus, although this is not yet stable.

Surely there is something simpler than Wonderlands rich environment. A thing that combines the commitment of “World of Warcraft” with the rapid onboarding of “Counter Strike”. An interface that will include IP telephony and enhance Netmeeting. Online activities that take the compulsion of First Person Shooters and integrate the development of quality Enterprise software.

Taking influence from the real world might bring us to a place where projects are handed down from a higher organizational tier and resources are then applied. Resources may be staff, and these staff may delegate their tasks to lower hierarchical levels. Money and status are always flowing around this matrix, motivating performance.

Rapid onboarding occurs in games like Counter Strike since there are short rounds and everyone is familiar with the objective, if not the map. This could be translated to farming out smaller tasks whose completion would be rewarded with money and status.

AFK (Away From Keyboard) is an online game issue so common that it has its own acronym. Since a project may operate on a different time zone this cannot be avoided. For those project team members in the same time zone it is a serious problem. Projects should be able to define punishments for late or nonexistent responses, unanswered phone calls and such like. Easily available measures include loss of money and status, or change of avatar. An avatar image could be tarred and feathered for the virtual equivalent of a medieval European punishment!

Openness of projects may help avoid the building of “development islands” by having the project available for all to see it, or even to participate in it. This free access could be provided by something analogous to a coffee area. In a coffee area visitors or idle project members could read status reports, help wanted ads or even enjoy a hot beverage.

It would be a shame not to use corporate processes, especially if they are available in software. Workflow could be used to enforce some rules and ordering the execution of the project. Resources recently introduced, like phone book applications that control the desktop phone should be integrated. Avatars that can be clicked to start a conference call should be implemented.

Money and status are movable things – when a staff member moves to another project these attributes move with them. Staff that are mobile between projects and retain their attributes must be stored outside of the application on some sort of database.

This discourse has brought us naturally to a diagram of the landscape.

Some basic objects like Tasks, Staff, Resources, and Money have been discussed and attributes like avatars, skills and Status were applied to Staff.  

So have resources to for the objects to use and places to set the objects, like meeting rooms and coffee areas.

In the next installment I’ll try and include inputs received to develop a detailed Software Requirement Specification. Suggestions on client structure would be more than welcome, too. Then I’ll write about designing, coding and testing