X-Culture: Geographical Barriers Overcome by Technology

Guest Blogger: Rawan Afandi, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

When you describe to someone a team which consist of six people who are geographically spread across the continents and are assigned one shareable task, the first reaction you will hear “Good luck getting this task done”. People will expect team members to fall victims to the difference of time zones, of cultures, of age, of backgrounds, and of field of study. In addition, people would expect the geographical barrier to play the biggest role in making a small easy task very complicated. In our X-Culture team, Team12, we faced many of these obstacles but we were able to work them out and put together a fabulous final draft of our project.

First obstacles we faced were a technical problem with Turnitin.com. After submitting the first draft , to turninin.com which helped us in identifying the parts of our document that are not cited properly, it showed that we only have small parts that are needs to be revised. To my surprise, one of the team member has turned most of his work were copied from the internet without proper citation. I sent him his part to be revised and to be fixed within a couple days and send it back to me so I can integrate it in the final document. A couple days past and I got his part back which was not revised and only changed couple words with improper citation. We were tight on time and I knew that this person will not revised his part properly so I took the easy road and scrape his part and re-wrote the whole segment a few days before the due date of the final version of the document.

Another issue we faced was the issue of the loss of communication with 3 team members a couple days prior the due date. I was sending out reminders for the dates and the updated Gantt chart so everyone on the team would know exactly when his part is due to be sent to me. two of these team members got back to me a few days late and one I heard from two days after the submission of the final document. Luckily, I and all three members had already submitted their final revised part prior to the incident of the loss of communication issue.

I want to take this opportunity to thanks all the X-culture team members for their fabulous contribution to the project through the past couple months. I was honored to be a part of such experience where I learned that geographical barrier can be overcome using the technology available to us at no cost such as emails, Facebook, Google Doc, and dropbox. I also want to applaud Sabestina and Aleja for their work, cooperation, and the sense of selfless devotion toward the project in general.