Social-GTD for Collaborative Activity Support in Organizations
Filipe Alexandre da Silva Mariano and Joaquim Belo Lopes Filipe
Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal
Keywords: Planning, Activities Management, Collaborative Systems.
Abstract: Activities management in organizations is of utmost importance for optimizing the effectiveness of business
processes. Time is one of the important factors in this context, so time management becomes an important
aspect that needs appropriate theoretical support. Our research work is based on work done in personal
management but we propose an adaptation of a particular methodology to the organizational context. This
work-in-progress includes the development of an information system for collaborative activity support in
organizations based on a matrix structure, which can collect and manage available actions, providing each
organizational unit the capability of sharing and managing information/resources.
1 INTRODUCTION
Business is constantly changing and it’s important
for the organizations to stay competitive. However,
competitiveness is more challenging than ever and
due to the fast changes in technology, organizations
are being overwhelmed by information and under-
resourced to support all the information they have
available.
It’s important to decide what to focus on, how
and when, and what to do for an organization to
maintain its high-performance levels and avoid some
failures in time/activities management, due to
constant changes in the daily schedule and
interruptions that increase the difficulty of planning
and priority management. An inefficient
management of individual and collaborative agendas
can create resistance to the timely and appropriate
performance of organizational tasks. Therefore,
organizations need new tools to access and organize
all internal information available, generated through
multiple channels, somehow related to activities
management. One of the most well known time
management methods was proposed by Allen
(2001), under the designation of GTD (Getting
Things Done). Despite being an approach that aims
at personal management, more and more
organizations, groups and/or work teams try to
incorporate it in their culture. With the introduction
of a Social-GTD variant, as proposed in this paper, it
is possible to adapt those ideas to an organizational
context, where activities are enacted in a multi-agent
collaborative setting.
When all workers sense they control their work
and that their goals/commitments are clearly
defined, the organization should benefit from it.
However, it’s not easy to introduce a GTD culture in
traditional hierarchical organizations due to the fact
that this methodology leads naturally to distributed
leadership, and may face some resistance from
traditional managers. This seems to be another
challenge for organizations in applying GTD
principles for organizing their collaborative
activities.
2 BACKGROUND
GTD it’s a personal productive approach that allows
people to have things done, eliminating the stress
that comes from all the goals, commitments and
tasks that they have in hands. According to Allen
(2001), GTD “doesn’t involve new skills, (…) but
most people will have some major work habits that
must be modified before they can implement this
system”. This methodology presented by Allen, is
based on two key objectives: “capturing all the
things that need to get done (now, later, someday)
into a logical and trusted system outside of your
head and off our mind; and disciplining yourself to
make front-end decision (…) so that you will always
have a plan for next actions that can be implemented
or renegotiated at any moment”. Having a clear head
will allow you to focus on actions that are necessary
341
da Silva Mariano F. and Belo Lopes Filipe J..
Social-GTD for Collaborative Activity Support in Organizations.
DOI: 10.5220/0004193103410345
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (RDBPM-2012), pages 341-345
ISBN: 978-989-8565-31-0
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
to do at the moment, and not in actions on which
you can’t do anything. For these actions it’s required
to organize reminders in a system reviewed
regularly.
Several professionals think that the lack of time
is their biggest problem, but, in many cases, the
problem is the lack of clarity and definition about
the projects, plans and next actions. Frequently, they
can’t perform their actions not for lack of time, but
due to the execution not been previously properly
defined. In this context GTD plays an important
role.
The GTD process is composed by five stages:
collect, process, organize, review and do it. In the
collect stage is where we capture all the things that
might represent something to do, i.e., every
incomplete action must be saved into a reliable
system. Process stage is about identifying each item
previously collected and deciding what to do with it,
organizing them in actionable or non actionable
items. To help to illustrate those stages (process and
organize), the next diagram shows the “categories of
reminders and materials that will result from process
all stuff” (Allen, 2001).
Figure 1: Workflow diagram – process and organize.
Adapted from Allen (GTDfiling).
Daily and weekly reviews are required to check
the plans, projects and actions state, and to decide
what are the next actions. In the last stage (do it) is
where we finally choose what to execute at any point
in time.
Allen (2001) defines stuff as “anything you have
allowed into your psychological or physical world
that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you
haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the
next action step. (...) As long as it’s still stuff, it’s
not controllable”. Therefore, it is important to
transform stuff in an actionable way that stimulates a
person to act.
In contrast to traditional management methods,
GTD adopts a bottom-up approach, dealing first
with specific issues rather than high-level goals.
There are no “explicitly defined priorities,
milestones, or deadlines, i.e. formalized planning
schemes and objectives” (Heylighen & Vidal, 2008).
Those systems are tools that allow to specify who
does what and when. In these systems it is the
manager that has the key role and other co-workers
don’t interact or contribute much to plan
improvement, unlike in traditional GTD which aims
at personal empowerment.
3 COLLABORATIVE GTD
APPROACH
In the previous section, it was made clear that one of
the key objectives of GTD is to collect things that
need to get done into a logical and trusted system.
Although we acknowledge the elegance and
effectiveness of GTD, this is mainly targeted at
individuals and something more is needed in order
to optimize collaborative activities in an
organization. Some basic concepts must be defined
before we proposed an extension to this method. The
first one is task, and this is the work unit for all
workers; tasks refer to the things that need to get
done, which Allen calls actions. To avoid the
problem of repetitively creating recurrent tasks, with
the same features in different time periods, we
consider essential to define an abstraction of task -
named task template - that can be used to
instantiate those tasks that are performed frequently.
Allen (2001) defines a project as “any desired result
that requires more than one action step”, but in an
organizational approach if we assume this, we will
have a large number of projects and, because of that,
our approach requires the existence of a conceptual
level between task and project, named activity,
which can be represented by a directed graph of
related tasks in a specific context. Analogously, the
concept of project can be represented by a directed
graph of activities.
3.1 Organizational Structure
At the moment, our approach has been tested only in
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organizations that have a matrix structure. This type
of organizational structure combines the best of
functional and divisional structures. According to
Mintzberg (1979), with a matrix structure “the
organization sets up a dual authority structure (...)
sacrificing the principle of unity of command”, this
can result in conflicts that should be solved by this
system.
The people that are involved in collaborative
projects, activities and tasks in an organization
belong to one or more organizational units, which
may be related to each other by functional
dependencies and/or line dependencies, and which
may vary in time. This means that the organization
can be seen as a superposition of two or more
orthogonal hierarchical structures whose
organizational units and individual members have a
particular dynamic. We tried to capture this
complexity by decomposing the problem into
subproblems, as usual, and by defining a number of
useful building blocks, starting with the concept of
group as a basic organizational unit. We then devise
a general relation between groups that can be used to
represent hierarchical structures or matrix structures,
based on a particular ontology of group relations,
which we designate as AVIS – Adopt, make Visible,
Inherit, Share – due to the structure of these relations
(see section 3.1.2.)
3.1.1 Groups
Figure 2: Matrix structure and groups representation.
To support multiple units that exist in a matrix
organizational structure, the system has a concept of
group that can represent either a department, a
section on a traditional hierarchical structure or a
project or functional unit. In either case, the group
has a set of members (persons) that belong to it in a
particular time frame.
∈
P – Person; G – Group; i – Group index; t – Time frame
Each group member has a role which identifies what
functions this member can have in the group. Those
functions determine what the member can or can’t
do inside the group.
The system also supports working/ad-hoc
groups, which can have a life span as short or as
long as necessary.
3.1.2 AVIS
The matrix structure defines channels where
information may flow from one group to another.
Additionally, it is also possible to conceptualize
activities and control structures to flow along these
channels, but these can be reduced to information
structures, assuming autonomy of organizational
agents/actors. In accordance to the agency theory
formalized by Belnap and Perloff (1989), it is not
possible to see if an agent does what another agent
orders. All that is possible is to create in the first
agent an obligation that he can fullfil or not, as
explained in Filipe (2000), and such commitments
can be formalized, in deontic action logic as
information structures, and communicated. They can
then be enacted and controlled.
Organizations will benefit from these channels
because the shared information will create an
ontology accessible to each and every group in the
channel. With AVIS, groups can share all elements
previously described, namely: task templates,
activities, concrete tasks and goals, including status
information and available resources that can help
groups get their own work done in a collaborative
context, i.e. sharing information and tasks with each
other if and when necessary and taking advantage of
available resources in a better way.
Figure 3: Groups channel, with AVIS actions/enablers,
where information flows.
There are two enablers and two actions to make
information flows possible. The enablers can be seen
in two ways: in a top-down approach, a parent group
can share (S) information with child groups; and on
the other hand (bottom-up) child groups can make
information visible (V) for the parent group. The
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343
actions are the decisions to adopt (A) or inherit (I)
the information that has been made visible or shared.
Table 1: AVIS representation between groups.
A V I S
Owner
0 * 0 *
Parent Group
0 * 1 *
Child Group
1 * 0 *
Impossible
1 * 1 *
The representation with Boolean values in the
AVIS table means which group can adopt or inherit
resources from other group. The enablers (*) can
have Boolean values too, which represents if a group
can share or make visible some resources.
3.2 GTD Workflow Stages
The social-GTD system collects information about
tasks in three different ways: creating tasks via
simple forms, e-mail or importing group plans.
Group plans have some features that are unique for
all, and others that depend on each group, which
means the templates to import always have some
static fields for all groups. To process and organize
the actions collected previously, there are some
containers like next actions list, waiting for list, task
pools and calendar, for actionable items. Task pools
are related to each group and it has tasks which
group leaders don’t need to assign to their members.
In this case, after a member finishes a task, the pool
can be consulted to select a task that best matches
their skills. According to Heylighen and Vidal
(2008), “this is a flexible approach suggested by job
ticketing systems (...) that rather than immediately
delegate the task to a specific individual, the system
creates a job ticket (...) and add it to a shared pool of
tasks to be performed”. However, some tasks have
to be assigned to a set of members by the leader, and
these won’t be shared in the task pool.
The system also supports delegation, however
it’s necessary to verify the member’s agenda that
will receive the delegated task. If the agenda is full
for the period of execution of the task, then it is
cancelled. Otherwise this process would create two
tasks: to the member that receives the task, and a
verification task to the member that has delegated.
For the reviewing stage each group leader has to
review and coordinate their group. On the other
hand, members have to review the agenda, tasks lists
and regard that it’s all in the right place to ensure the
system is organized and updated. The last stage of
GTD workflow (do it), is where group members can
execute tasks, which the system allows to report a
planned or unplanned task. For those that were
reported but weren’t planned, it’s only necessary to
register the hours and description. Unexpected
things to do appear almost every day, so it’s
recommended to not have a full daily agenda,
because you will require some attention and time to
those unexpected tasks (ad-hoc). However, when the
same task is created regularly in an ad-hoc mode, it
needs to be introduced in some plans to avoid the
unexpected occurrence, and make them more
realistic.
3.3 Pattern Recognition Helps
Organizational Learning
Currently we are trying to improve the system
performance by applying pattern recognition to
discover which ad-hoc tasks could be used to infer
plans that may be reused in the future. This takes
into account the number of tasks created ad-hoc with
the same specifications per group. Therefore, when a
new plan is going to be imported, the system can
suggest, for that group, to introduce new tasks in that
plan, by using the pattern recognition module thus
helping avoiding the proliferation of ad-hoc tasks.
Reducing the number of ad-hoc tasks will help the
organization to learn and become more and more
organized.
3.4 Solving Group Conflicts
Conflicts occur because of the multiple authority
structure presented in matrix organizational
structures. First of all, each group leader must know
about the conflict that is affecting their groups and
the system must maintain them informed about more
specific details, like members and tasks involved.
However, to solve group conflicts, each group
member has autonomy to accept or deny tasks
assigned to them, which means they can decide
about what to do when they’re in the middle of a
group conflict. When a group member denies a task,
he/she has three possible actions: delegate the task to
another member in group, call for group leader’s
help or put the task on the group shared pool of
tasks. Otherwise, if it’s accepted but it fails, the
member has the two last actions, enumerated before,
to opt.
3.5 Social BPM
Social BPM combines social tools with BPM to
support communication and collaboration in
organization’s business processes improvement.
According to Schmidt and Nurcan (2009) this
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combination “enhances business processes by
improving the exchange of knowledge and
information, to speed up decisions, etc”.
This social-GTD approach provides runtime
process guidance using social analysis to determine
the next actions to do. Also supplies social process
discovery by extending it to all organization
members through bi-directional communication,
provided by internal social wikis and forums
between group members. Those wikis and forums
should be associated to a group, which facilitates the
communication and the processes feedback/know-
how between group members. The AVIS is a social
way to share resources between groups. Each group
only adopt, make visible, inherit or share what they
want, which can be a social decision discussed in
group’s forum. During a task execution some social
features can be used - ask group members for help,
delegation and task shared notes - to allow group
members to interact, collaborate and help others in
organizational time/activities management. Thus,
this approach allows organizations to observe
patterns and behaviors in their members’
interactions in order to improve plans, processes and
performance.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
According to Heylighen and Vidal (2008),
“traditional methods for task and time management
only provide superficial relief, because they fail to
address the central problem: new information
typically requires reconsideration of priorities,
objectives and resources”. In this case, GTD seems
to be an effective way to meet new challenges and
opportunities for an organization, because it allows
all stakeholders to take responsibility for what they
do, to focus on their work and adapt themselves to
changes. Therefore, organizations need to maintain
their competitiveness to ensure their survival in a
constant changing business world.
The GTD methodology presented by Allen
(2001), can be extended to support collaborative
work, however organizations need tools that they
can trust to bring them to high-performance levels.
This paper describes an information system that is
being developed (work-in-progress), which
organizations can trust, based on GTD ideas, to
achieve those levels. Some of the future work that
needs to be done to this system is: bring pattern
recognition to other levels, like finding patterns in
ad-hoc tasks that are frequently created and
associated to other tasks, suggesting a new plan to
be created for a group; and make a skills matrix (real
time updated) based on the effectiveness and
efficiency of group members in tasks and activities.
When this information system is finished, it will
be provided to an organization, with a matrix
structure, so it can be tested and validated. The
organization users should be from various
departments and with different levels of
responsibility. These users will be observed and will
answer surveys to find out how this approach is
improving the effectiveness of the organization.
After three months of usage, the created ad-hoc tasks
will be analysed to discover how they could be
implemented in the organization’s plans, so they can
improve their coverage and also be able to refine the
estimates of time spent in activities that are already
planned.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the Polytechnic Institute of
Setúbal, School of Technology of Setúbal, for
supporting the research work reflected in this paper,
presented at KMIS 2012 in the scope of the RETE
project.
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