Exercises at the end of the chapter are designed to strengthen your understanding and retention of the information recently acquired in the chapter.
Essay Questions
Write several paragraphs to provide more in-depth analysis and consideration when answering the following questions.
- Assume that you are the leader of a virtual team that includes members who are in New York, Bogotá, Honolulu, and Tokyo. You would like to choose a day and time for a weekly conference call to keep the project on track. Choose a day and time and explain your choice and the compromises and problems it might cause for each member. Use the term “synchronous” correctly and identify the specific time zone for each participant.
- From the list of available templates in your word processing or spreadsheet software, choose a template and describe it. Fill it out and then describe how it could be modified to meet the needs of a particular situation or organization.
Discussion
The exercises in this section are designed to promote exchange of information among students in the classroom or in an online discussion. The exercises are more open ended, which means that what you find might be completely different from what your classmates find, and you can all benefit by sharing what you have learned.
- Consider the newer synchronous and asynchronous communications technologies with which you are familiar. Describe how they might be used on projects in new and innovative ways. Relate these ideas to what you learned about project cultures—specifically about innovation on projects—and describe how the new communications technologies could be used to innovate.
- Describe your experience using Excel to manage data such as lists of purchases. Discuss how the features of sorting, filtering, and subtotaling could help answer questions about that list.
