Project Management Forum - Virtual Teams

Virtual Teams

Forum Discussion Notes for February 18, 2010

Communication

• Face-to-face communication is inherently more efficient than voice-only, text, etc. (by research)
• Different countries’ have different cultural differences in communication.  Face-to-face communication can be more confusing with Korean and Western cultures (e.g. Nodding in Korea is not “yes”)
• Project Managers have an obligation to learn the cultural significance of their project team members.
• Research online.
• Check with all companies’ HR Departments.
• Get to know someone and their cultural differences through an informal chat (sometimes this will work in some cultures)
• Travel book sections about the cultural differences

Trust

• Building relationships with your team members is easier in person.
• Tip: Increase face-to-face meetings with all team members as much as is possible given cost and time constraints.
• Tip: Use the tools listed in Technology (below) to increase meeting virtually face-to-face, if not in-person.
  

Time-zones

• Tip: Find overlap times.
• Tip: Rotate meeting times to accommodate the different groups equally.

Task coordination

• Tip: The trick is to get everybody on the same page using the same method. This should go back to your project management plan.
• Tip: Use some sort of baton to hand-off tasks, one to another. E-mail is a good tip. Extra tip: Ask for acknowledgment that the recipient has read, received, and understood the e-mail..
• Tip: Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone! Benefit here is truly a two-way communication.
• Tip: Periodic check-in meetings (e.g. weekly check-in). Keep the check-in meetings short (segment / spawn off if needed). Spawn off meetings with more specific meetings so a lot of people aren’t bored.

Resource collaboration

• Operational support of resulting product can be left hanging and become a political issue, especially turning into an “us” vs. “them” with virtual teams.
• Tip: Bring the support staff into the project early by including a project deliverable of "training support staff".
  
• Team members from functional organizations who report to their functional managers have conflicts of interest, with their supervisor's needs often winning over the project's needs.  Virtual teams exacerbate the issue, as the team member usually works face-to-face with their supervisor and virtually with their project manager.
  
• Tip: Have HR incorporate feedback from the team member’s project work into the team member's performance review.
• Tip: Have HR incorporate feedback from how the team member’s supervisor supports the project into the supervisor's performance review.
• Sharing documentation, project content, documents, and even tasks among virtual team members can be problematic.  For instance, the project manager cannot just review the current documentation sitting beside the virtual team member or answer questions easily with a quick face-to-face meeting.
  
• Tip: Use a content management system (CMS. See also Technology, below). A CMS can provide secure content.  It can also be problematic if all major companies’ use their own content management resulting in documentation needing to be updated in multiple locations.
  
• Management of the massive amount of data can be a problem. Who’s managing it? Who’s fact checking?
• Setting up the security and security levels can be tricky, depending both on how the system can be used and the politics, procedures, and laws needing to be followed (e.g. HIPA, PCI, etc.) by the company hosting the tool.
• Supportability can be a problem, especially later, after the project has been completed.
  

Culture across town

• Hallway / Water cooler conversations are missing interactions from people in one group to another.

Technology

• Tip: Use online video conferencing and computer desktop sharing services / software.  Some examples are: Skype, WebEx, Conference call + Netmeeting tool.
• Tip: Use a Content Management System (CMS) to manage documentation.  A CMS, project Wiki, and Document Management System are different flavors of the technology that does the same thing: provide a storage area for project documentation during the project's lifespan.
  
• Technology Policies can restrict what you can use; security settings.  Security vs. functionality is a big issue.  IP or confidential information is risked being exposed by using these tools.
• Technologies can be different and differently accepted across companies working together on the same project.

Sometimes, the Virtual Team Members cannot see the Resulting Product

• Tip: Hold a Lunch-and-Learn with the stakeholders, including virtual team members.

Identifying and gathering the correct stakeholders is more of a problem with Virtual Teams

• Tip: Understand that it is going to take more time to do the stakeholder analysis correctly for virtual teams.
• Tip: Travel is very important for virtual teams.  Otherwise, the project risk increases and needs to be shared with the project stakeholders.
• Project-to-project continuity problems contribute to the problem of being able to identify correct stakeholders, especially with projects being managed with virtual teams with changing members.

Lessons Learned

• Often, virtual teams do not have access to previous projects' documentation, including lessons learned.
  
• Tip: Require reference of lessons learned from previous projects as a part of all aspects of the project.
• Tip: Have previous lessons learned stored somewhere other than just “organizational memory” (aka people who’ve been there forever).