Discipline

Discipline is regarded as the basis of success in any industry. The authors of The Discilpine of Teams states that “the most important characteristics of teams is discipline; not bonding, togetherness or empowerment” and goes on further to say that team discipline works the best in any industry. Teams in the industry are much favoured over single efforts, with many industries optioning and building their businesses on teams. With a team you are given variety of solutions to a problem because you have a variety of people. But team work can only work, in my opinion, with the presence of discipline.

Discipline is a process of adhering to orders given by an authority head. Every team should have a leader and exercise their authority. The success of a team is the result on how well the team is disciplined. Receiving orders is much harder than giving them in majority of cases. It is safe to say that project teams “directly create or affect a significant portion of a country’s gross domestic product.[1]” It is considered that project teams are automatically bringing together many disciplines because of the many backgrounds, organisations and business ethics, therefore making project decision making multi-disciplinary.

But how can teams collaborate ideas and essential information with discipline involved? Some answers from Focused Sharing of Information for Multidisciplinary Decision Making by Project Teams states:
· The current information exchange mechanisms need to be complemented with an approach that responds to the needs of project teams.
· Interactive multi-user, multi-application, and multi-device user interfaces need to be designed.
· Project teams’ effectiveness in making decisions needs to be measured to assess the power and generality of the information exchange mechanisms and the user interfaces.
In effect this will need discipline from the team to execute.

The example discuses different ways of collaboration in a disciplinary environment, communication is the common theme used for collaboration. Motivation is then discussed in tools for working in a team environment. These include

· Traditional meetings
· Meetings with 4D models
· Meetings with product model support

Information exchange and interaction approaches require further discipline demanded from the team. “In the absence of well-tested...software, focused sharing of information can be set up more quickly than the exchange of product models. It will enable project participants to bring their expertise to bear on a set of related project documents and support multi-disciplinary decision-making. Finally, the separation of information interaction and view control from software services and data will lead to more intuitive and standard ways of interacting with and consuming project information. It will also create demand for the integration of product and other models and for the further development and use of visualizations for the multi-format information found on all [team] projects.”

[1] Liston K, Fischer M and Winograd T (2001) Focused Sharing of Information for Multidisciplinary Decision Making by Project Teams, ITcon Vol. 6, pg. 69-82, http://www.itcon.org/2001/6 (http://www.itcon.org/2001/6/paper.pdf) accessed on 05/04/08