Team Performance Measurement in Distributed Environments: The TARGETs Methodology

In today’s workforce, many teams-particularly military teams —are distributed (i.e., separated by space). These teams are often large in size and composed of members with different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Teaching team members to maximize coordination and synchronization skills necessary to function successfully in distributed environments poses a tremendous modern day training challenge. Fortunately, technologies for distributed training are emerging. Advances in hardware, software, and network development will eventually make distributed training more commonplace. However, along with these advancements, one of the most critical training components that must also be developed for effective distributed training is team performance measurement. This chapter describes an extension of a measurement technique from conventional team training settings to a distributed training environment and discusses the lessons learned resulting from this application.