Modifiers for Quality Assurance in Group Facilitation

A key task of a professional facilitator is to assure the quality of the knowledge products created through collaborative effort. To manage the quality of the knowledge a group generates, facilitators attend to, judge, and question the quality of the contributions a group makes, the decisions it makes and the commitments its members make toward achieving the group’s goals. When facilitators or group members detect deficiencies in ideas, decisions, agreements, or artifacts, facilitators may need to intervene to support the group in improving the quality of their output, without disrupting the flow of the group process. In this paper we present a framework for quality assessment and a toolbox with flexible interventions that can be added to a collaborative process on the fly as soon as quality deficiencies are detected. The toolbox is a set of conditional adjustment interventions that a facilitator can add to other facilitation techniques so as to guard the quality of the group’s intellectual products. The toolbox can also be used as a starting point for designing intelligent agents that support the automatic detection of quality deficiencies.

[1]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Animation control for real-time virtual humans , 1999, CACM.

[2]  Alan R. Dennis,et al.  A conceptual framework of anonymity in Group Support Systems , 1992 .

[3]  M. Higgs,et al.  Influence of team composition and task complexity on team performance , 2005 .

[4]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Causal Relationships in Creative Problem Solving: Comparing Facilitation Interventions for Ideation , 2004, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[5]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) , 2018 .

[6]  Starr Roxanne Hiltz,et al.  Group Support Systems: A Descriptive Evaluation of Case and Field Studies , 2000, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[7]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  On the Measurement of Ideation Quality , 2007, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[8]  Robert P. Bostrom,et al.  Making knowledge work in virtual teams , 2007, CACM.

[9]  Marius Leibold,et al.  Strategic Management in the Knowledge Economy: New Approaches and Business Applications , 2002 .

[10]  Bruce A. Reinig,et al.  Toward an Understanding of Satisfaction with the Process and Outcomes of Teamwork , 2003, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[11]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  Invoking Social Comparison to Improve Electronic Brainstorming: Beyond Anonymity , 1995, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[12]  Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten,et al.  Reconceptualizing Generate thinkLets: the Role of the Modifier , 2007, 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07).

[13]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Satisfaction attainment theory as a model for value creation , 2004, 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the.

[14]  Jiajie Zhang,et al.  The Nature of External Representations in Problem Solving , 1997, Cogn. Sci..

[15]  Richard Y. Wang,et al.  Anchoring data quality dimensions in ontological foundations , 1996, CACM.

[16]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  A conceptual foundation of the thinkLet concept for Collaboration Engineering , 2006, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[17]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  ThinkLets: a collaboration engineering pattern language , 2006, Int. J. Comput. Appl. Technol..

[18]  Gert-Jan de Vreede,et al.  Creative approaches to measuring creativity: comparing the effectiveness of four divergence thinkLets , 2004, 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the.

[19]  H. Merisalo-Rantanen,et al.  Gathering innovative end-user feedback for continuous development of information systems: a repeatable and transferable e-collaboration process , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[20]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Theory-W Software Project Management: Principles and Examples , 1989, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[21]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  ThinkLets: achieving predictable, repeatable patterns of group interaction with group support systems (GSS) , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[22]  Veda C. Storey,et al.  A Framework for Analysis of Data Quality Research , 1995, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[23]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Developing Groupware for Requirements Negotiation: Lessons Learned , 2001, IEEE Softw..

[24]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  Collaboration Engineering with ThinkLets to Pursue Sustained Success with Group Support Systems , 2003, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[25]  Allen Newell,et al.  Human Problem Solving. , 1973 .

[26]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  User interface directions for the Web , 1999, CACM.

[27]  Lisa C . Troy,et al.  Cross-Functional Integration and New Product Success: An Empirical Investigation of the Findings , 2008 .

[28]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Collaboration Engineering: Foundations and Opportunities: Editorial to the Special Issue on the Journal of the Association of Information Systems , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[29]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Recurring patterns of facilitation interventions in GSS sessions , 2004 .

[30]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Collaboration Engineering: Designing Repeatable Processes for High-Value Collaborative Tasks , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[31]  Robert O. Briggs,et al.  Making Every Student a Winner: The WinWin Approach in Software Engineering Education , 2006, 19th Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training (CSEET'06).

[32]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Integrating Collaborative Processes and Quality Assurance Techniques: Experiences from Requirements Negotiation , 2004, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[33]  Gert-Jan de Vreede,et al.  A Collaborative Software Code Inspection: the Design and Evaluation of a Repeatable Collaboration Process in the Field , 2006, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..