The Road Not Taken

Jonathan Grudin

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Microsoft Corp.
Redmond, Washington

In an effort to reduce employees' time on the road, more and more companies are conducting more and more of their training sessions remotely and putting an increasing number of courses and lectures online. Soon, the number of people who listen to a lecture remotely or take a course on the Web will exceed the size of the audience that hears it in person. That's already true for presentations at Microsoft. So, if you are someone who gives presentations or conducts training sessions at your company, you should start thinking about designing your talks with both live and remote audiences in mind. So what kinds of things should you do differently?

First, your live audience members are no longer your primary audience. Think of them as a studio audience, whose purpose is to give you feedback. Second, structure your talk around your slides, and carefully consider how you label them. By doing so, you can use your slides as a table of contents for your presentation, which will help your audience navigate through your lecture. Also, state all of your key ideas up front. A live audience usually sticks around for the whole explanation, but remote listeners may not.

If you monitor how many people watch a given portion of a talk, you'll see that the number is high each time a new slide is displayed, but it falls off the longer a slide stays on the screen. People tend to skip from slide to slide. If you're designing a talk for people to access at a later time, get your key ideas in at the beginning of each slide; don't save them for your punch line.

Jonathan Grudin (jgrudin@microsoft.com) has been studying access patterns to learn about how people use distributed learning and on-demand video. Grudin researches human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Microsoft frequently has outside presenters speak in-house for developers, testers, marketers, and others. The archived videos of those talks have been accessed by tens of thousands of viewers.

Jim Herbsleb

Leader of the Collaboratory Research Project at Bell Laboratories
Lucent Technologies
Naperville, Illinois

We use two organizational models at Lucent to minimize travel. The first is to distribute the work so that sites operate as independently as possible. The second is to establish employees as official go-betweens. We call them "liaison engineers."

One of our first liaison engineers worked between our offices in Nuremberg, Germany and Bangalore, India. The Bangalore site was a relatively new one, whereas the one in Nuremberg had been operating for a number of years. Naturally, the engineers in Bangalore had lots of questions for the Nuremberg staff, so a liaison engineer from Bangalore was sent to Nuremberg to learn how that office was run. That temporary position turned into a permanent one, with a new engineer rotating in every three months to satisfy visa restrictions. Whenever an Indian engineer had a question, a liaison was around to find the answer.

Whenever we plan a site, we urge that someone who's gregarious and technical become the liaison engineer. The person most familiar with the style of an area learns to communicate and to supply information to colleagues at home.

Jim Herbsleb (jherbsleb@lucent.com) is a member of the technical staff in the software-production research department at Lucent Technologies's Bell Labs facility. He is currently leading a research project to address the problems of globally distributed software engineering.

Danamichele Brennen O'Brien

Vice President and Chief Travel Scientist
Rosenbluth International
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Regardless of your company's size, T&E -- travel and entertainment -- is your third largest expense. If you want to reduce travel, restructure your relationship with your travel agent -- by giving that person incentives to reduce costs, not to book flights.

For a long time, Rosenbluth has been in the business of not providing tickets. We work for a flat fee: Our job is to minimize travel expenditures by negotiating deals with airlines, hotels, and car-rental companies. We also help companies analyze data about their travel habits, and we suggest ways for them to get the most out of their money.

Another way to reduce travel is to rethink how you budget for communications technology. People don't use videoconferencing because it's not managed as part of a business process. Usually, equipment is owned, set up, and run by IT departments. If you want to reduce travel, manage and account for your communications technology as part of your travel department.