5.0 Virtual Company

Students participating in WIMMA Lab will be divided into their own project groups, ie virtual companies, based on different assignments and their skillsets an interests. In the summer of 2018, the largest team was Iotitude, which included 10 people. The smallest virtual company, Mysticons, had 5 people. Virtual companies behave like real companies and have their own name, structure, homepage and information system. However, they are not real companies.

Virtual companies operate independently according to their own practices, which the members of the company agree with at the beginning of WIMMA Lab. However, virtual companies' own practices must not conflict with WIMMA Lab's common practices.

Pengwin Media member creates graphics for Iotitude.

5.1 Company Job Description

The assignment of the virtual company should correspond to the job description of the company, which is already defined at the start-up phase. If no existing virtual company has the correct job description, a new company can be set up as needed.

A new virtual company can also be made, a so-called subsidiary or a sister company that focuses more specifically on a particular area of business expertise.

5.2 Mission, Vision and Slogan

It would be good for every virtual company to define its own mission, vision and slogan. These help to understand the role of the company and create a common purpose.

Mission: Why does your virtual company exist?
The mission tells about the role and mission of the company. The mission answers the question of what the company wants to achieve during WIMMA Lab.

As an example Overflow's mission:

As an overflow, we want to be an evolving team where everyone brings new and innovative thinking to their own efforts, creating new solutions.

Vision: What are you trying to do? Where are you going?
Vision is a company dream that helps create a virtual enterprise for employees with a vision of the future. Vision is meant to inspire and create meaning for work.

For example, Overflow's vision:

Overflow wants to provide an evolving and high quality service for tracking technology, utilizing the latest applications and technologies.

Slogan: The slogan of the company.
Slogan encapsulates the basic idea of the company in one sentence.

For example, Overflow's slogan:

Don't Just Flow, Overflow!

5.3 Staff

The company's staff includes the people who work to accomplish the company's assignments.

A virtual company has a team leader who is responsible for the progressing the project and steers the group in the right direction. He is also responsible for informing internally and scheduling for the team. It would be good to determine the team leader on the basis of interviews, so that the team will have a capable and a willing leader from the beginning. The task of the team leader is to participate in possible meetings of the management team and daily scrum of team leaders.

The staff should also, together with the coach, choose among themselves a substitute team leader who will take on the team leaders responsibilities when the team leader can't make it for some reason. The substitue should stay on the map for team matters so that he can quickly take the lead. This prevents unnecessary waste of time when a problem situation occurs.

The other team members are the normal staff of the virtual company, whose tasks are determined by the team leader together with the team members.

5.4 Roles and Responsibilities

The employees of the virtual company should determine the roles and responsibilities of the team members themselves. At least the following should be identified as responsible:

• Who is responsible for internal communication (usually team leader). This mainly means communication between the team and the instructors.
• Who is responsible for external communication, ie informing the team about the situation to the sponsor, and the person who asks the sponsor if necessary. The purpose is to select only one person to do this job, so that all team members do not ask questions that have alreade been asked from the client. It is recommended that this is also the team leader.
• Who is responsible for official communication on various social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Other responsibilities can be assigned to different people if they are needed.

Determining those responsible is important because someone will do the job and not leave them to a mysterious "Someone else" to do (and the job will be left uncompleted). Getting your own responsibility also makes the group's work more committed and encourages them to do their job in high quality.

Iotitude's members at work.

5.5 Information Systems

WIMMA Lab's organizing staff should find out the operating systems in advance and make the necessary IDs for the participants.

In the summer of 2018, all documentation of WIMMA Lab and virtual companies as well as task management and sharing were handled through a network service called GitLab. GitLab offers eg version control, wiki, and task management functions. GitLab also provides homepages to the web in a uniform manner.

File sharing practices must also be agreed at the outset so that all virtual companies use the same platform. For sharing WIMMA Lab files, Dropbox has been used to create shared accounts for everyone to use. Here you should consider whether it would be good for each team, for example, to create their own Dropbox account, as the common folder fills up quickly and there may not be more room.

You should agree on data protection right from the start. Is there something that has to be kept secret and how is this treated? Does a virtual companies assignment need a confidentiality agreements and should these kinds of assignments even be taken?