The Remote Project Manager
Posted by Brad EgelandI’m not necessarily a road warrior nor do I particularly aspire to be one, so I’ve enjoyed the challenges of managing projects and teams remotely. The primary thing I’ve learned about remote project management is that the most critical aspect is frequent, accurate, and detailed communication.
Communication, communication, communication!
To give an example of how critical communication is on a remote project, I would like to share some statistics with you concerning the remote project that I am currently working. This project only involves 5 core project team members and another 4-5 part-time members. It does, however, involve communication with and demos from potential software service providers. Over the course of the 16 weeks (80 days) of the project so far, here are the numbers:
- 1690 emails in my inbox (21 per day)
- 89 conference calls
- 19 webex meetings
- 9420 minutes spent in meetings/conference calls so far (157 hours total)
- Zero face-to-face (F2F) meetings
This has been a very successful project so far – all milestones and deliverables have been met, the primary customer is happy and we’re working very successfully together as a team and the communication has definitely been the key success factor. However, many project models will not work well with no F2F meetings. For a regular project, with phases that are more clearly separated, I believe that it is extremely important to try to bring most or all of the team together with the customer for a kickoff for each phase of the project as well as a separate kickoff meeting with the customer at the beginning of the engagement.
Challenges
Some of the obvious challenges involved with managing a project in a remote capacity are:
- creating a sense of community among team members
- communicating assumptions
- managing the ongoing activities of the project and team members
- communication barriers (time zones, etc. for global teams)
- boundaries for information sharing
As the project lead, you need to ensure that everything is communicated evenly across team members. Never assume everyone is on the same page, has all of the same information or understands specific assumptions unless you have communicated it to them. It will not happen by osmosis on a geographically dispersed team, and it won’t happen through any facial or body language. More calls, more emails, more webex’s will be required. In fact, when you are geographically dispersed, communication in those forms is likely to be 2 to 3 times the normal volume just to ensure everyone is on the same page. It can easily be the difference between a successful project and a happy customer and a project that goes in the toilet.
Overall, how you run a remote project as the Project Manager should be very similar to how you run a local project. Regular weekly status meetings still need to happen. Weekly status reports detailing up-to-date project status, issues, financials, etc. still need to be delivered prior to each status meeting and are the driving force for each status meeting. The key is that more communication needs to happen for your team to remain cohesive, focused, and moving forward. Out of site, out of mind can happen easily when you aren’t communicating with your team members. On nearly every remote project that I’ve lead each of my team members were also on other projects – sometimes another one of my projects. If you are not pushing them on the tasks for your project then they may be diverting their attention and focus to one of the other projects they are working on. We’ve all heard of the squeaky wheel concept…
I truly enjoy remote project management. I consider myself a good communicator and a very frequent communicator with my team – they’ve told me they get more emails from me than any other project manager they’ve worked with and I’ll consider that a good thing, but I’m not sure if they do. However, I do understand that remote project management is not for everyone and it’s up each individual Project Manager to decide if they can deal with managing a team of highly talented individuals with minds of their own without possibly ever meeting each of them in person.
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Aleksandar Trazoff says:
Brad, thanks for that example! I see 89 conf. calls in 80 days, seems a bit much to me… But only supports your point that communications is very important when you are running projects remotely…
Jim says:
Brad, thanks for sharing this, it mirrors my existence over the past year! I am not sure I quite enjoy as much as you but it has definitiely had it’s moments. One thing I wanted to ask was what tools did you find most effective in tracking the project progress?
Jim
Johann Granados says:
What software application tools do you use for remotely managing the projects?
Brad Egeland says:
I have always used MS Project for managing the project schedule and resources. I use the MS Office suite of products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio) for producing status reports, issues and risks lists, kickoff presentations, etc. I’m also reviewing ProjectOffice.net (www.ProjectOffice.net) as a very reasonably priced collaboration tool that allows you to import MS Project schedules or create new ones and collaborate across your organization without the large costs and implementation efforts necessary for MS Project 2007/MS Server 2007 implementations.
Ana says:
As Brad says, MS Project is a bit tricky for collaboration between remote teams if you do not use it in EPM environment. In that case the collaboration is actually just updating .mpp files sent by e-mail or stored on SharePoint. Therefore, real collaboration between remote teams will not really happen. I suggest using some web based project management application that besides pm offers also collaboration capabilities through wikis, issue tracking system and reporting time via time sheets instead of updating heavy plans. ProjectOffice.net previously mentioned by Brad is definitely a useful one.
Ajay says:
1500+ hours in 80 days averages to 18.75 hours a day on communication. Is the math okay here?
Also you mentioned about both project lead and project manager role on this initiative, could you elaborate more on this. What were were some tasks/deliverables for PL v/s. PM role? Any specific challenges in wearing two hats?
Brad Egeland says:
The communication total through 80 days was 9420 minutes, which is 157 hours. That amounts to 1.96 hours per day.
I was using Project Lead interchangeably for Project Manager on this article. I realize sometimes Project Lead means the lead developer or architect, however this project is not a development project – it is a market analysis project in a specific technology sector. So, for this article PL and PM are the same. I apologize for the confusion.
Johann Granados says:
Thanks Brad and Ana for just suggestions. However, MS Project (Server and Client) is too expensive and too complicated to configure properly. That’s the reason because I’m looking for an online project management solution. Do you have any suggestions?
Valentin Stan says:
Very coherent and concise opinion. Good shown example.
In time, with experience, the frequency of the web conferences and e-mails will decrease. Of course, not under a certain limit. And the efficiency will increase.
Congrats about your achievements.
Looking forward for a possible collaboration in the future with you.
georgiana says:
si ce sa vad?
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Arrington says:
How did you get your first job in remote PM work and what information do you have to offer to someone who is interested in working remotely or doing freelance PM work on the side?
Thanks!
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