Virtually Impossible?
Bill Haeck, Vice President of Program Management | One to One Interactive
September 30, 2003
Virtual teams can succeed, but only if project managers can
make the leap to "virtual" reality
The advent of the global economy, projectized organizations, and
advancements in technology have all contributed to a rise in the
use of virtual teams to accomplish company and project objectives.
Opinions regarding the efficacy of these teams is slowly evolving.
Over the past 2 1/2 years I've had the opportunity to formulate my
own opinions and observations firsthand while co-leading a large
virtual team, PMI's Organizational Project Management Maturity
Model Standard team. This team, in existence for a span of over 5
years, utilized over 800 volunteers and included resources from
over 35 countries. During my time as the deputy of the program, I
had ample opportunity to observe a truly virtual team at work. In
the end, any skepticism I may have had about the effectiveness of
virtual teams has been eradicated. What I have concluded, however,
is that there are a number of guidelines and rules, some of which I
had to learn the hard way, which can greatly benefit project
managers trying to form and lead successful virtual projects. The
following tips and guidelines represent my observations for how to
best manage virtual teams. Where possible, I've cited evidence or
research I found to back up my anecdotal conclusions.
1. Getting to know you
Although traditional projects usually start with a kickoff, the
focus of these events is normally 95% percent dedicated to the
details of the projects and 5% dedicated to the introductions. It's
generally correctly assumed that there will be time for team
members to get to know each other and develop relationships as the
project progresses. While this practice normally works for
collocated teams, it's a very poor practice for virtual teams. As a
virtual project manager, you need to schedule what might appear to
be an inordinate amount of time for activities at the beginning of
the project which proactively encourage team members to establish
relationships which have a context outside of specific project
tasks and responsibilities. Ideally, these should occur in face to
face kickoffs where up to 75% of the agenda is dedicated to getting
the team to know each other and bond. This approach is incredibly
counter intuitive and is generally contrary to the strong desire
PMs and the team will have to get started on work as soon as
possible. Studies have shown, however, and my observations would
concur, that the establishment of this initial personal groundwork
pays immeasurable dividends as the project team begins to encounter
their initial obstacles. In layman's terms, these initial
interactions begin to lay the foundation for trust that is
necessary to allow teams to move out of the storming phase of team
building. If collocation can't be arranged early in the project,
find other more inventive ways to make sure that team members get
to know each other outside of the project context early and often.
Spend the first minutes of your first team meetings conducting
introductions where members are asked to reveal more than just who
they are and what they do in the project. Perhaps each team member
can create a funny or humorous bio with a picture that can be
distributed to the team. Regardless, avoid the traditional approach
to push initial relationship building to the back of the bus, as is
so often done in traditional projects. If you don't, you'll quickly
come to appreciate, in a negative way, how much relationships
factor into the efficiency, consensus building, and problem solving
abilities of a team.
2. Virtual teams do need different people
Although project managers are not often given the ability to
handpick their teams, work in a virtual environment requires a
unique set of skills above and beyond the normal requirements for
working in a team environment. Regardless of whether you have the
power to select your team, you should develop a specific list of
skill criteria, beyond the baseline technical skills required for
the project, which you view as necessary for your virtual team
members to possess. If you're fortunate enough to be able to select
your team, you can use this list to select team members who you can
have some confidence will operate well in the virtual environment.
Even if you are not able to select your own team, however, you can
still employ this list: 1) to educate the stakeholders who are in
charge of selecting your team, and 2) to highlight to the eventual
team the characteristics you expect them display. The body of
research on this topic is quite wide, but I've listed a few of my
own characteristics based on my work with a number of virtual
teams.
In my experience, successful virtual team members:
- Are able to communicate in the written medium, succinctly and
accurately
- Are generally more outgoing and extroverted than their
peers
- Enjoy collaboration, but are willing to question ideas
- Are strongly self motivated
- Are able to hold themselves accountable to quality standards
and time constraints
- Are solution and task focused, rather than process
focused
3. Face the facts
Although virtual teams possess a number of common characteristics,
one which almost unanimously separates them from traditional
projects is the increased amount of asynchronous communication.
Even in the virtual team where there is a team chat room or
frequent meetings, virtual teams simply don't have the frequency of
synchronous real time communication that collocated teams do. This
is especially amplified on larger teams. As a project manager of a
virtual team, you need to account for this in a number of ways if
you are to be successful. First, recognize this limitation when you
develop your project plans and schedule accordingly. In your
project plans, look for those project activities which are
communication intensive or which require consensus building, and
either plan and budget for collocated activities or adjust your
schedule accordingly to accept what experience and research have
demonstrated; asynchronous communication is simply not as efficient
or time effective as real time communication. All the technology in
the world doesn't facilitate communication the same as face to
face. Additionally, if your team leadership style or your client's
expectations rely on consensus, consider the tradeoffs up front and
discuss other possible governance structures which will allow you
to operate in a more effective manner.
4. Fight for and use your silver bullet wisely
Without question, my single biggest lesson over years of working on
virtual teams, and in particular on my latest team, is that your
effectiveness in successfully budgeting, scheduling, and timing the
few collocation events you have in your virtual project will
potentially have more impact on your project's ultimate success
than almost any other factor. Ironically, there is frequently
tremendous pressure from stakeholders to trim these highly visible
budget line items or to justify these meetings with detailed
agendas, necessary decisions, etc far in advance of their need. In
fact, sizable research suggests that this investment may be the
most important money you'll spend. Researchers have pointed time
and again to the need for collocation to reinforce social
similarity, shared values, and expectations. Perhaps more
important, face to face encounters not only establish trust, but
also increase the immediacy and reality of threats, internal and
external, for failing to meet team expectations. Inevitably, before
and after collocated events, I repeatedly saw examples of increased
accountability, increased willingness to engage in real problem
solving, and most notably, abilities to overcome obstacles which
had been for weeks considered insurmountable. In short, your
meetings together as a team, even if just a gathering of team
leads, are silver bullets. Fight vigorously for them in your
budget, plan them to coincide with critical deliverables, milestone
dates, or phase transitions, and always keep one or two available
in your back pocket as a contingency.
5. Talk about talking
In traditional co-located teams, there is typically a fair amount
of effort dedicated to developing a communication plan with
clients, but rarely is a great deal of effort set aside to develop
detailed communication plans within the teams. More often than not,
the extent of internal communication planning consists of
scheduling a weekly team meeting. Within virtual teams, this
approach will quickly lead to chaos and frustration. Right at the
outset, virtual team leaders need to work with their team to
establish very strict guidelines regarding not only what and when
to communicate, but also how. Specifically, virtual project
managers are urged to develop and promulgate guidelines regarding:
what are the primary mediums for communication (IM, emails,
telecons) and when should they be used; what are the guidelines and
etiquette within each of these mediums and how will they be
enforced; what are team preferences regarding expected response
times, and how will you accommodate the desire multiple
communication preferences? As an example, email is a great medium
for arranging logistics and getting answers to one on one
questions, but it is a particularly poor medium for developing
consensus or resolving complex issues requiring multiple party
input. Left to their own devices, I've watched project team members
engage in week long email threads which were eventually resolved by
simply forcing a change in the communication medium and arranging a
10 minute phone call. The impetus for working quickly with a team
to develop the guidelines and expectations which will ensure
consistent and fruitful communication falls squarely on the
shoulders of the virtual project manager. In addition to setting
forth these guidelines, virtual project managers will also need to
very purposefully monitor and manage the use of these channels.
Virtual project managers need to take immediate action to suspend
flame mails and other forms of communication more quickly than they
would in traditional teams. In short, while collocated project
managers frequently focus on gathering and analyzing information,
virtual project managers have the additional burden of facilitating
and monitoring the overall communication within the team at a
fairly detailed level. This role as a communication coordinator,
facilitator, and referee is fairly unique to virtual project
managers and can be frustrating as well as time consuming, but it
is, none the less, essential to the success of the team.
6. Cyber management
In traditional projects, many PMs use a dashboard approach to
gather critical information like budget, schedule or scope
problems, and supplement these pieces of information through the
time tested management principle of "management by walking around".
One of the lessons I learned the hard way is that while the
traditional control information (i.e. budget, schedule, etc.) can
be gathered in much the same way on virtual projects, you need to
double or triple the intensity applied to "walking around" in the
virtual space. Items that would normally come to your attention by
the water cooler or over casual conversations at lunch only come to
light on virtual projects if you actively extend conversational
opportunities to large populations of the team. When relationships
begin to go bad in virtual projects, it often happens in emails or
IMs you never see. Ferreting out issues on virtual project can take
twice the time and effort and you should plan accordingly. As a
virtual PM, schedule more time in your day to make the calls,
emails, and visits to make sure you're getting a good "virtual walk
around" of your entire team. Step out side the urge to simply check
in on the status of tasks or deliverables. You may be surprised by
what you discover.
7. Spend more time making sure you paint a bigger picture
Finally, time and again when I surveyed members of the virtual
teams I worked on, one common theme that appeared was a consistent
feeling that team members felt detached from the overall objective
of the projects. I eventually adopted two strategies which seemed
to help eliminate these concerns and build team cohesiveness.
First, I began to schedule and conduct conference calls or visits
with the sub teams with the objective of 1) recapping the overall
status of the project and connecting sub team roles to the final
objective, and 2) opening myself up to questions on the project.
These proved effective in combating team feelings of separation in
spite of geographic divisions. Second, I worked with the sponsors
to develop and disseminate information from them which carefully
noted the contributions of the various parts of the team while
continuing to stress the importance of the overall project.
Stakeholders generally prefer to deal and work through their
management teams to interact on projects. On virtual teams,
however, you need to help convince them that they can be your
greatest ally in building a cohesive team. Where I've been
successful in engaging stakeholders with the various components of
the virtual teams, feedback on this approach has confirmed that
this has helped overcome feelings of isolation.
In conclusion, I've come to be a believer in the potential
effectiveness of virtual teams. Getting laudable results from
virtual teams is not impossible, but it is more challenging. One of
the primary keys as a project manager on a virtual team is not to
treat virtual projects like regular projects with higher phone
bills. They present unique challenges, require different, well
thought out approaches, and need to be treated as the unique
entities they are if one expects to achieve success. Hopefully, the
items noted above will be helpful in providing some insight into
how virtual team leaders can facilitate and spearhead virtual
projects.
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