Virtual War Rooms

Author: Marcus Randrup

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Abstract

This article aims at providing insights into what a war room is in a project management related context, the types of war rooms that currently are in use, and an introduction to how Virtual War Rooms can be implemented and utilized. Virtual War Rooms refer to the digitlization of war rooms. The details and information presented are greatly based on the works of C.W. Getz, Mika P. Nieminen, Mari Tyllinen, Mikael Runonen, Willem Standaert, Steve Muyelle, and Amit Basu. The specific journals and papers issued from these authors can be found in the Appendix at the end of this article. This article is produced as a part of the course 42433 – Advanced Engineering Project, Program and Portfolio Management E22 at the Danish Technical University (DTU). Introduction: A war room is typically a well-equipped and well-designed meeting room to help the company plan their strategy, share information between all project teams and departments, and provide a specific space for collaboration.

• Physical Meetings: Physical Meetings generally lead to increased motivation, higher efficiency in completing tasks, and better team coordination; however, they require all relevant members to be physically present and there is no flexibility in scheduling
• Virtual and Digital Meetings: Virtual Meetings provide benefits such as increasing the amount of participating members and allowing for a quick and effective sharing of information, although the meetings tend to be more tiring and do not incite the same level of collaboration and focus.
• Hybrid Meetings: Hybrid Meetings are completely avoided as they are less effective across all the meeting objectives.
• Virtual War Rooms: These war rooms implement the concepts, tools, and methods used for online meetings and make effective adaptations to better serve the purposes of the war rooms.

Introduction to Managerial War Rooms

some random info i guess regarding the topic.

Annotated Bibliography

For the detailed description of all of the different aspects and building blocks of a good war room, read the following exert from the authors book. It goes through the 7 basic elements in great detail, as well as providing examples of how war rooms were used in some of the major projects around the world. This excerpt specifically defines how a virtual war room should look. they talk about the specific requirements for Collocated Group Work Spaces, such as project war rooms. It is from a book that three authors have collaborated on, and it gives really good insights and pointers to how an effective digital working space should look and be structured. This is becoming evermore relevant as we are in a more digitalized world, and we need to make use of the technology around us in a meaningful and beneficial way.

A few of the other documents can be used to further read up on what exactly project war rooms are, as well as a few documents describing how online and physical meetings can be used for different objectives. Although it might not be too relevant for this article, it was interesting to see if online war rooms could be useful, but there are still a lot of drawbacks to these and currently it seems to be impractical. War Rooms jsut function best in person, using up-to-date technology and software.