Integrated Operations Teamwork Handbook

2006

Collaboration technologies used in current military operations, such as email, instant messaging, and desktop conferencing, assist explicit communications between distributed team members. However, research in corporate environments has shown that explicit communication, while an important aspect of collaboration, is often used together with more subtle interactions to help teams communicate and coordinate their joint work. For example, monitoring other team members' ongoing task activities help teams integrate related task activities, identify appropriate interruption opportunities, and provide assistance when necessary. When physically distributed, as is often the case in command and control environments, it is difficult to engage in such subtle behaviors because team members' activities are not visibly accessible. Instead, people must resort to explicit methods, such as asking for a status update. These explicit methods require effort from both parties and can be disruptive. To address these issues in corporate work settings, collaboration technologies have been developed to help people remain apprised of remote colleagues' activities, while minimizing disruption. This paper examines the suitability of these corporate technologies for supporting military team interactions, with a focus on identifying aspects of military teamwork that are well supported by these approaches and aspects requiring new methods.

A model of team collaboration was developed that emphasizes cognitive aspects of the collaboration process and includes the major processes that underlie this type of communication: (1) individual knowledge building, (2) knowledge inter-operability, (3) team shared understanding, and (4) developing team consensus. This paper describes research conducted to validate this model and determine how these processes contribute to team performance by analyzing two collaborative decisionmaking tasks. Team communications that transpired during two complex problem solving situations were analyzed and coded. Data was analyzed for two teams that conducted a Maritime Interdiction Operation (MIO) and four teams that engaged in an air-warfare scenario. The MIO scenario involves a boarding team that boards a suspect ship to search for contraband cargo (e.g. explosives, machinery) and possible terrorist suspects. The air-warfare scenario involves identifying air contacts in the combat information cen...

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2019

How team cognition is conceptualized has evolved rapidly in the last decade with the emerging use of a systems approach, moving the focus from the cognition residing in the heads of individuals, to that distributed across the team. This is referred to as ‘distributed cognition’. Increasingly, network approaches are being explored in attempts to model team distributed cognition. The specific domain of interest in the present study is the sociotechnical system within a maritime control room. This comprises human, machine and software agents interacting to interpret sensor data in order to develop a timely and accurate picture of surrounding contacts at sea. To achieve the goal, information is shared or integrated across the maritime control room consoles. The aim of this study was to develop and apply a suite of workload, situation awareness and team performance measures, including network analysis techniques, to examine how the distributed cognition of a team might change as a functi...

2006

Collaboration technologies used in current military operations, such as email, instant messaging, and desktop conferencing, assist explicit communications between distributed team members. However, research in corporate environments has shown that explicit communication, while an important aspect of collaboration, is often used together with more subtle interactions to help teams communicate and coordinate their joint work. For example, monitoring other team members' ongoing task activities help teams integrate related task activities, identify appropriate interruption opportunities, and provide assistance when necessary. When physically distributed, as is often the case in command and control environments, it is difficult to engage in such subtle behaviors because team members' activities are not visibly accessible. Instead, people must resort to explicit methods, such as asking for a status update. These explicit methods require effort from both parties and can be disruptive. To address these issues in corporate work settings, collaboration technologies have been developed to help people remain apprised of remote colleagues' activities, while minimizing disruption. This paper examines the suitability of these corporate technologies for supporting military team interactions, with a focus on identifying aspects of military teamwork that are well supported by these approaches and aspects requiring new methods.

2014

This paper reports the results of a workshop studying the challenges of collaboration during emergency response in Norway. The findings from the workshop reveal three categories of challenges linked to collaboration both within and across emergency agencies: (1) communicating within and across emergency agencies, (2) establishing and maintaining shared situation awareness, and (3) inter-organizational understanding. Underlying barriers hindering efficient collaboration are identified for each of the three categories. Against this backdrop, the paper discuss opportunities for ambient intelligence technology that can help mitigate the identified challenges.

The construction industry is currently in a quite important phase of change and evolution towards better productivity and efficiency. The way project partners collaborate is being redefined. This is to a large extent due to an ever--increasing building project complexity. Projects need to be delivered faster, at the lowest possible cost and adhering to a rising set of performance criteria, such as energy consumption, structural stability, cost, accessibility, safety and many others. To be able to answer these demands, the different stakeholders in construction projects will work together in Building Teams from the very first stages of the project, at a moment where many design decisions still need to be made and thus can positively influence the project outcome. New evolutions such as "Integrated Project Delivery" (IPD) and the "Building Information Modeling" (BIM) methodology are being applied to manage these new processes, in addition to a wide variety of digital communication techniques, such as cloud computing, model servers and online audio-and videoconferencing technologies.

ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 2002

This paper covers some general observations regarding the relations between remote operation concepts and virtual organizations. In this paper we will show that remote operation concepts among other things involve developing systems supporting communication and collaboration in virtual organizations. In an effort to reduce the complexity we have categorized the different communication and collaboration requirements, with respect to the three lines of operation in the O&G industry. This categorization is then used as a platform for discussing the different needs and challenges that a remote operation concept presents.

Safety Science

The current paper reports the case study of a coaching process assisting an oil company in exploring how to establish a potential for resilient collaboration. When a new petroleum installation is being prepared for operation, a range of decisions is made that impacts the possibility for achieving resilient collaboration, i.e., collaboration that is sufficiently robust and flexible to work efficiently and safely across the various operational states that may arise, within the organization. It is, thus, of key importance that issues related to resilient collaboration -what collaboration should be like and how to achieve the desired way of collaborating -are addressed from an early point in the preparatory phase, to increase the likelihood that e.g., the work processes, tools and technologies, established jointly will come to promote the resilient collaboration. The purpose of the present study was to assess whether a coaching approach called, Coaching for Resilient Collaboration in IO (CORECIO), would be able to promote reflections about what resilient collaboration should imply in a planned organization, and help achieve alignment about this, in the early part of the preparatory process. Eight employees involved in preparing for operation of the new petroleum installation participated in the study, which involved the conduction of five workshops. The paper addresses strengths and limitations of CORECIO, and suggests how coaching might constitute a useful approach for assisting highly skilled professionals in preparing for resilient collaboration at a new petroleum installation in the early, conceptual, part of a design phase.

The goal of the FY04 Air Force Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation (MOIE), "Improving Time-Sensitive Team Decision Making," was to study teams of operators in realistic time-sensitive venues. We sought to understand the kinds of tasks and functions people perform in these collaborative environments, why the tasks are so challenging, how they are currently done, and how to better support team performance. This paper describes a framework, developed as part of this research effort, to guide observation and analysis of team performance data.

Collaborative Teamwork is regarded to be one of the most outstanding fields of teaching and research within the context of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning. This focal field is closely related to the research field of "Remote Teamwork", i.e. the substance-related cooperation of people over spatial distances in decision-situations aiming at the elaboration of suited remote-working structures for research, project transactions and teaching. The generation and manipulation of digital spatial models and their virtual transportation within large spatial distances represent the main research objectives. The Faculty of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning therefore is stressing information technologies within academic context. The following contribution is dedicated to the description of two teaching projects, namely ?BraGraLuWi" (collaborative teamwork between the universities of Technology Bratislava, Graz, Luton and Vienna) and carrying-out a VRML-workshop, ...