Goal

After reading this article you'll:

  • Understand the best practices for collaboration 

Summary


Gain an understanding on the various ways you can optimise collaboration with your team and other colleagues 




Organising Your Team



Organise your shared folders

Create folders for each exercise/library:


  • Library files
  • Change Control



tip: save the old files in a separate folder within the folder




Communication is Key


Organising your workflow 

  • Talk to your colleagues to avoid:
  •  Interfering with another colleague while testing
  • Erasing the content from an exercise while it’s being run by the team
  • Downloading the wrong version of the scenario
  • Things that can help you are:
  • An Exercise calendar, so everyone knows when are exercise running
  • Limiting the number of collaborators. Not everyone needs access to a paid licence, especially if that person is only building and testing

Image Placeholder

tip: to avoid any mistakes, it’s very important to talk to your team colleagues




Free Licences Vs Paid Licences 

Space is where you publish your scenario to be able to run or to test your exercise.


Differences between spaces?

Paid Spaces: 

  • No watermark
  • Customised URL
  • Used to build, test and run real exercises
Free Spaces: 

  • Watermark in Virtual Desktop 
  • No customised URL
  • Used to build and test. Never to run a real exercise
tip: It’s a good idea for your colleagues to get their own free spaces to work on their own while the paid space is not available.




Dividing The Work


Each person from the team can work in different aspects of the exercise:

MEL:

  • The MEL can be created in a spreadsheet and imported. The person in charge of it can leave some placeholders for personas and also media files.
Personas:

  • Sharing personas’ libraries is easy and quick. Once is ready, share the library with the person creating the MEL to replace them.
Media files:

  • Same as the personas, the files for the media library can be added independently. After being created, the file is shared with the MEL author.
Teams:

  • Teams are easier to share as they can be created in a CSV file.
Pattern of Life:

  • Pattern of life can be created independently from the exercise and be imported and paired with it when needed.

tip: think of your exercise like a puzzle where all the pieces come together to create your scenario





Collaborating 


Allows colleagues to share your cloud space so that you can divide labour between different people.


Adding a Collaborator & Selecting Permissions

When you add someone as a collaborator you can decide which permissions to give this author: 

  • Modify active scenario. This means the collaborator can upload teams and scenarios to this space 
  • Download response report. This means the collaborator can download data from this space




Adding a Space


The collaborator needs to add the new space to his/her own spaces


Your list of spaces

Once you add the new space, you’ll be able to use it. It is recommended to:

  • Add an image to be able to locate it quickly.
  • Add a name for it.
Image Placeholder

Image Placeholder

tip: your list of spaces can easily grow and get messy if you don’t have an organize list of spaces.




Navigating Through Spaces


Make sure that the space selected is the one you want to use



Changing Spaces

To change the space, select the one you want to use. Depending on the section of the Editor, you have different ways of checking the space you are publishing to: 


  • When publishing your scenario 
  • When publishing your personas 
  • When publishing your teams
tip: make sure that the space selected is the one you want to use











Downloading from Space


Being a collaborator gives you permission to download the latest version published of a scenario


To download from space, these are the steps to be taken:

  • The author needs to publish the scenario to the space and inform the team
  • Someone who collaborates in that space needs to download from space
  • Depending on his/her permissions, this person can make changes and re-upload the scenario once it’s finished so the rest of the team as access to it.

Image Placeholder

tip: this is a good way of collaborating and using latest versions of the scenario. However, we always  recommend to have a SharePoint (e.g. Drive or Dropbox) to keep a record of all the different versions of an exercise.