The Micro-Agreements™ Platform

The Micro-Agreements™ Platform provides underlying functionality upon which Web applications can be built that manage access security with user accounts and security groups. It supports the following robust features for superior team collaboration:

• User Authentication and Authorization – Before a user can participate, they're authenticated through their e-mail address, and the person accepts an agreement about the terms of user for the system. The process requires the user to establish a secure password. (Passwords are immediately encrypted and stored in the database in a form that can not be detected by system administrators.)
• Shared Task List – All users with sufficient security clearance can view and interact with the task list. A task can be associated with a project or stand alone. Registered members can add tasks and assign them to themselves or to other members. The task's description is a rich-text field that can contain text, a Web page, one or more documents used in the task -- in fact, the content one can associate with a task is practically unlimited. The task list easily enables quick sorting by priority, person responsible, target date, etc. It provides e-mail notifications when the person responsible is changed. A commitment is requested from the new assignee, and the system records their acceptance or rejection of the task assignment and notifies the person who assigned the task.
• Project List
– A project is a collection of tasks.
• Program List – A program is a collection of projects.
• Organization List – This can be used to manage customer organizations or internal organizations.
• Individual Wiki Pages – A wiki page has content that can be edited using a Web browser. The levels of user security needed to view the page and edit the page are specified by the author.
• Secure Collaboration Forum – A hierarchical collection of wiki pages (referred to as Topics) contained in Forums, organized by Categories.  We use it to manage organizational documents like roles and responsibilities, standard processes, etc. 
• List of Members – This displays each member account, their security group, and their e-mail address.
• New Member Invitations – This is how you authorize new user accounts.
• My Account Settings – This enables users to change their password, etc.
• Team Calendar – I don’t recommend you use this feature unless you have a widely scattered virtual team with no standards for scheduling meetings and events.  It’s a little buggy.
• Administrative Functions – This is where administrators configure the application, view the activity log, etc.
• Security Groups – Each member (user account) is assigned to one and only one security group.  Each page specifies the minimum security group needed to access the page.  There are a few features that show more data to people with a higher security group. 
• Activity Log – Every page in the application posts a row in the activity log showing who the member was, what page they visited, what IP address they had, what page they came from to get to that page, and what browser they were using.  This is one of the most powerful features of the Micro-Agreements Platform.  It’s invaluable in diagnosing programming problems as well as tracking how people use the site, how they move from page to page, and what they try to do that they’re not authorized to do. 
• Randomly Selected Quotation – Any page can display a quotation selected randomly from a database of motivational and thought-provoking quotations.

Micro-Agreements™

Team Analytics's platform for Micro-Agreements™ provides a secure, Web-based tool for recording clear commitments and tracking performance against those commitments as well as participants' responsiveness to communications between stakeholders about their delivery commitments. Micro-Agreements™ also include secure, persistent, threaded online discussions as well a shared task list.

By virtually eliminating the effort wasted on nagging colleagues to report progress and deliver on commitments, Micro-Agreements™ enable project managers and stakeholders to focus on driving the project forward with sufficient support from the team to insure success.

Do any of these problems sound familiar?

• Your resources say "Yeah, I can do that." to a task assignment, but it's a prediction -- not a commitment they take very seriously.
• During the course of a project or a business deal, you often find yourself diverting your attention from driving the project in order to “nag” colleagues to complete a commitment or provide information you've asked for.
• You waste a lot of cycles following up to be sure progress is being made.
• Your organization experiences difficulty operating with virtual teams composed of remote participants, especially in offshore teams where language and culture may interfere with clear communication.
• It's difficult to orient new team members to bring them up to speed on the most relevant conversations and decisions that have taken place up to that point in a project.
• Have you noticed how e-mail, which is inherently formless, has fragmented business communications over the past decade?
• There's an "energy leak" that continually drains focus and motivation from team members but is never adequately addressed.
• Your team members spend most of their time in meetings discussing the things they agree on while avoiding making difficult decisions.
• Instead of dealing with a sequence of unique problems, your team is dealing with the same damned problem over and over.
• How much time do you waste in a day dealing with spam -- i.e., e-mail from people butting into your business?
• Your organization continues to reward a vendor with more work even though its people are not responsive to your requests simply because nobody's keeping track of the vendor's response history.
• Your company has missed opportunities to avoid costs related to critical-path information that arrives late or falls between the cracks.
• You've felt the disappointment of missed schedules and frustrations due to communication problems and/or inadequate collaboration processes within your workgroup.
• Your company has continued to pursue an approach that's costly and inefficient because the real costs and the real impact of the inefficiencies are too squishy or too complex to measure.

You’ll appreciate the sensibility of Micro-Agreements™ from Team Analytics LLC.  It's a standards-based system that improves productivity and collaboration within a workgroup.  It eliminates the ambiguity inherent in e-mail communications, establishing appropriate structure and security to support purpose-driven, interactive, business transactions between colleagues on all your important projects.

Micro-Agreements™ are Web-based transaction services that supplement freeform e-mail communications. 

Micro-Agreements™ engage the following participants in managed communications:

• In-house staff members in multiple locations with Internet access
• Field staff members capable of receiving e-mail and accessing the Web
• External vendors you specify

These transactions are currently in beta test and development:

• Shared Task List -- Registered members can add tasks and assign them to themselves or other members. A task can be associated with a project or stand alone. The task's description is a rich-text field that can contain text, a Web page, one or more documents used in the task -- in fact, the content one can associate with a task is practically unlimited.
• Secure Message Thread™ -- Some "virtual conversations" are important enough and sensitive enough that e-mail just doesn't work. A Secure Message Thread™ enables members to start an online, managed conversation with a specified group of people that are notified by the system whenever a participant posts another message in the thread. Only members specified as participants in the Secure Message Thread™ can access the thread or even discover that it exists. This makes it possible for the conversation to persist over time without risking intrusion from unauthorized participants.
• Request for Commitment™ (Action Item) -- For work items requiring a more formal process of specifying the work and assigning responsibility, a member (the petitioner) can send another member (the respondent) a Request for Commitment to perform an Action Item. The person being asked for a response (the respondent) can make a counterproposal indicating what support or payment they want for accepting responsibility for the Action Item and delivering as agreed. Once the petitioner and respondent execute an agreement, the system sends reminder notifications to help each party fulfill their responsibilities and keeps track of their performance according to the agreement.
• Request for Commitment™ (Project Task) -- A Project Task is similar to an Action Item with the distinction that it's associated with a project.
• Request for Product Change (Change Request)
• Request for Service (Problem Report)
• Sense-Us™ -- real-time feedback in meetings indicating the degree of alignment among team members

The heart of Micro-Agreements™ is a platform for structured interaction designed to facilitate specific requests for commitment, clarification, support and other services or information during the course of a project and to account for completions according to a schedule.  Workgroup members receive timely reminders as well as actionable feedback on their response times and success ratings in servicing accountable requests.  Over time, these metrics become reliable predictors of collaboration behavior by internal and external participants. 

You’ll never go back to unstructured e-mail for your most important project communications.

For more information on Micro-Agreements™, please contact us!

More about the features and benefits of the Micro-Agreements Platform™