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Impact of Collaboration Technologies on a Large Academic Research Collaboration

Presenter: John McGee, USC, Information Sciences Institute

Collaborative academic research projects provide unique challenges for project managers charged with leading people and managing resources. The GRIDS Center is an NSF funded partnership among five leading computer scientists and their respective organizations: University of Chicago, University of Southern California, University of Wisconsin, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

A key element of Grid computing is the notion of a virtual organization, a group of people and resources working together towards common goals, yet distributed across administrative domains. The research focus of GRIDS is for distributed computing systems, however we experience the virtual organization reality in the social and political landscape of the project on a daily basis.

This facilitated discussion will present the top six challenges experienced during the first three years of the project, and explore the various off the shelf collaboration technologies that have been employed with varying degrees of success within the GRIDS Center.

Managing people that you technically have no right to manage; Aligning goals and objectives from five principle investigators; Project memory; Decision making processes; Handling significant changes in project strategy; Handling ELA, Extremely Low Availability due to broad time zone coverage and incredibly active travel schedules.