Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Noticing the past to manage the future 125
adopted in which participant observation was combined with the in- depth study
of a core activity, resulting in ethnographic data, video- recordings and a collection
of work documentations used in the activity. The general insights gained through
the observations were used to select “hot spot” activities (Jordan & Henderson,
1995). In our case, the shift- change meetings were seen as such a core activity in
the internal work of achieving continuity and collective knowing. In the following
section, the ethnographic observations (field notes) have been used to make a
description of the organizing aspects of work continuity. The video data and the
documentation collected (covering the morning and day shift changes from one
week) are used to give a concrete description of the actual work of shift changes.
Each change of shifts consists of two meetings; one between incoming and outgoing
shift leaders, and one shortly after between the starting shift leader and the
engineers starting their shift. This arrangement resulted in 27 recordings, varying
in length between a few minutes up to the twelve- minute time limit, which totals
160 minutes of video. Interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) was used
when analyzing the video along verbatim transcriptions. The shift reports used by
the participants in the activity were also used as a resource for the researchers in the
analytical process. To ensure the anonymity of the participants and the company,
fictive names of individuals and technological systems are used.
The helpdesk and the organizing of activities
The helpdesk team studied consists of 15 persons who operate around- the- clock at a
Swedish site of a large multinational manufacturing company. The responsibilities of
the team include surveillance, running and maintenance of global systems including
expert support of user problems. Problem- solving at all hours requires the team to
work in shifts. Job sharing of this sort implies that the support engineers are highly
dependent on each other; they take over each other’s tasks, and have to be familiar
with the total range of activities the team is responsible for. Conditions like these
stress the need for continuous access to the collective knowing of the team.
The helpdesk resides in one corner of a large open- plan office. On the wall there
are clocks showing current time in countries around the world. Below, monitors
show server statuses. There are sets of four desks where the support engineers work.
Desks and computers are shared in ways that enable the shifts to sit together and
not dispersed in the office area. This is an informal mechanism of significance for
sharing knowing between support engineers circulating between shifts. Securing
redundancy and overlap of both people and information is characteristic of this
setting and achieved by means of several strategies; resources, and thus potentials,
for work continuity are features built into the everyday practice.
Documentation and the doing of case work
Documentation is a vital aspect of support work. All troubleshooting tasks the team
deals with are documented as cases in a web- based case- management software.