Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 3

As we identified in Part 2 – seven key success factors for virtual teams are:

• Human resource policies
• Training and on-the-job education and development
• Standard organizational and team processes
• Use of electronic collaboration and communication technology
• Organizational culture
• Leadership support of virtual teams
• Team-leader and team-member competencies

In this Part 3, let’s look deeper at the final three of these: organizational culture, leadership support, and team competencies.

Organizational Culture

Organizational culture includes norms regarding the free flow of information, shared leadership, and cross-boundary collaboration. It helps to create organizational norms and values that focus on collaboration, respecting, and working with people from all cultures, keeping criticism constructive, and sharing information. The organization’s culture sets the standard for how virtual team members work together. An adaptive, technologically advanced, and nonhierarchical organization is more likely to succeed with virtual teams than is a highly structured, control-oriented organization.

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Technology as a Change Agent

A major feature of information technology is the changes that IT brings. Those who speak of a revolution from technology are really talking about change. Business and economic conditions change all the time; a revolution is a discontinuity, an abrupt and dramatic series of changes in the natural evolution of economies. In the early days of technology, change was gradual and often not particularly significant. The advent of personal computers accelerated the pace of change, and when the Internet became available for profit-making activities around 1992, change became exponential and revolutionary…eventually bringing us to where we are today. To a great extent, any study of information technology is a study of change.

In what way can and does technology change the world around us? The impact of IT is broad and diverse; some of the changes it brings are profound. Information technology has demonstrated an ability to change or create the following:

Project management – Online collaborative tools bring diverse and virtual teams close together for productive and team-focused activities. Electronic communication, videoconferencing, web-based meetings, etc. of eliminated distance as a factor bring teams and the customer together on a moment’s notice.

Within organizations – Creating new procedures, workflows, workgroups, the knowledge base, products and services, and communications.

Organizational structure – Facilitating new reporting relationships, increased spans of control, local decision rights, supervision, the formation of divisions, geographic scope, and “virtual” organizations.

Interorganizational relations – Creating new customer-supplier relations, partnerships, and alliances.

The economy – Altering the nature of markets through electronic commerce, disintermediation, new forms of marketing and advertising, partnerships and alliances, the cost of transactions, and modes of governance in customer-supplier relationships.

Education – Enhancing “on campus” education through videoconferencing, e-mail, electronic meetings, groupware, and electronic guest lectures. Facilitating distance learning through online courses, e-mail, groupware, and videoconferencing. Providing access to vast amounts of reference material; facilitating collaborative projects independent of time zones and distance.

National development – Providing small companies with international presence and facilitating commerce.

Technology has been changing the way we live and do business our entire lives and the change pace has stepped up significantly in the last 15-20 years. As project managers, we try to not only use this technology to our customer’s advantage on new engagements but also to our own advantage as we bring our teams and customers closer together in terms of communication, collaboration and overall project strategizing.

We all use web meetings, video conferencing, teleconferencing, and collaborative tools. If there’s anything truly unique that you’ve done or utilized as a project manager in moving your projects forward or bringing your team together, please share it here by commenting.

Strategies for Managing a Mobile Team

I ran across a great document put together by Terrence Gargiulo for Makingstories.net. Mr. Gargiulo discusses what he feels are the top ten strategies for managing mobile workers. His full document is a very good read because he also discusses things such as risks and issues to consider when managing mobile workers.  You can access his full document here.

I’m sharing this here because so many times as project managers we are overseeing the work of a very geographically dispersed team. In the past three years I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Here are Mr. Gargiulo’s Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers as described in his document.

Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

1.    Focus on building relationships

You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can learn from them. Avoid finger pointing and hold up the mirror to reflect on your own opportunities for improvement. Extreme cases of under-performance do not warrant time or effort. These however are few and far between.

2.    Streamline communications

Consolidate and prioritize communications. Use email and IM (instant message), texting, blogging, threaded discussions, etc. for relationship-driven communications (i.e., staying in touch and being personal). Communications of an important nature should be cohesive and never delivered in fragmentary pieces that have to be cobbled together by the receiver. Mutually assess the communication preferences of yourself and your team members to develop a communication plan. Avoid assumptions and revisit your plan on a regularly basis especially when the nature of the work is about to change.

3.    Incorporate less didatic forms of communications

Determining the right amount of detail and when to provide detail is an ongoing responsibility of a manager with a mobile worker. As a general rule, less is more. This leaves bandwidth for the times when lengthy, explicit instructions and information are essential for the work at hand. Try working with more story-based forms of communications. Sharing tidbits from the field and office in the form of stories, anecdotes, case studies (use cases), jokes, innocent productive gossip, and even metaphors will relay context, encode key pieces of information, and give mobile workers a sense of inclusion.

4.    Spend more time listening

Obvious, but counterintuitive. When you are out of easy reach and you are tasked with managing the performance of others it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of needing to transmit lots of information. In most cases the opposite is what is most productive. Make listening a priority. This is the hardest and most tiring aspect of managing others. It is also the single most important thing you can do accelerate the development of strong relationships. Listening is not enough. Keep an open mind. Be present and try to enter the perspective of the speaker. This will help you ask effective questions and identify what direction to go with your own needs and agenda. You’ll be surprised at what emerges.

5.    Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow

Structure is critical. Adopt rules of engagement that place people at the center of their own decisions. Managers provide the boundaries and constraints but let employees define the working and communication styles, tools, and processes that will help them perform at the best. Set expectations on two fronts. First, treat these employees’ defined practices as privileges that can and will be modified if key performance metrics are not hit. Second, let employees know there will be times when a projects or work require less flexible, employee-driven communication and reporting practices.

6.    Manage deliverables, not activities

Lots of project-oriented work is well suited to mobile workers. Even roles that are more task driven can be effectively managed if they are broken into deliverables. For mobile workers this may mean collapsing some of the activities of a business process or workflow that had manual checkpoints and controls associated with them into deliverables. Automation where possible can be used or batching activities into larger groups can transform task oriented jobs into deliverables. Realize that there can be many facets of people’s jobs that need to be adjusted to accommodate a mobile work style.

7.    Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities

When you manage mobile workers, relationships are at the heart of your job. Performance management does not need to be a loathsome, “administrivia” obligation. Designing some unstructured, informal ongoing dialogs with mobile employees about their performance goals and personal development plans is a great way to strengthen communications, and shows an active interest in employees and relationships. This might look and feel very different from one employee to the next. This is another tangible way managers can adapt their style to match the needs and preferences of employees. It works best when the performance management conversation flows in both directions.

8.    Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise

According to a recent survey conduct by HR.com and ic4p, listening and trust are the two most important factors to virtual and remote teams. Without trust, relationships are bankrupt. Abuses of trust can always be found but these occur in spite of whatever systems we put in place. Mobile workers thrive when managers give them complete trust. In some respects managers of mobile workers have no other choice. Use trust to create strong relationships. When some concrete behavior and not just someone else’s word of mouth shows that trust has been violated, then take it away, but not until then.

9.    Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers

Every employee is different. Mobile workers make it easier for managers to take a more personalized approach in how they work and interact with members of their team. It takes more work and effort on a manager’s part but the results can be phenomenal. Understanding what enables each employee to perform at his or her best is the most important responsibility of a manager.

10. Leverage technology

Technology drives and supports managing mobile workers. Using technology well is not as simple as it appears. Standard models of communication and transaction should not always be mapped in a simple one-to-one way. Communication and collaboration technologies offer new and exciting models. These need to be purposely exploited in order for organizations to realize the full extent of benefits these wonderful new capabilities and features offer.

Beyond email, IM and phone, Web conferencing plays a key role in virtual team enablement. Take an inventory of “stuff” you need to collaborate on with your virtual team. If the list includes Word docs, spreadsheets, software applications, or anything else on your desktop, Web conferencing will be critical for collaborating in real time. You’re projects will lag if you can’t be on the same page with mobile workers.

IT Leaders Struggle with Bringing Social Networking into Formalized PM Processes

The July 20, 2009 issue of InformationWeek brings us an article by John Soat on how IT leaders are wrestling to bring informal collaboration into rigorous processes such as global project management and product development. I’ve included a portion of that article – including a discussion on how one company is using IWMS vendor Skire’s Unifier product to managing their project, collaboration and communication needs.

I’ve personally worked with several people at Skire during an evaluation of their product and found this article very interesting. Please read on….

The Right Place for Social Networking?

Nevsun Resources is a mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and its biggest project is developing mines in Eritrea, a small country on the east coast of Africa. Using a browser-based, software-as-a-service project management tool, logistics clerks, engineers, and project managers are sharing documents, cost outlines, and project schedules across continents, giving CFO Peter Hardie in North America what he calls a “real-time review” of the project in a fairly remote area of Africa. “The spectrum of people using it is broad, and that’s what we were hoping we would get out of the system,” Hardie says.

The system – called Unifier, from the vendor Skire – lets Hardie “bridge the time and distance gaps that exist between the project principals in Vancouver, Eritrea, and South Africa,” he says. It helps Nevsun control costs and track expenditures down to the invoice level.

Social networking norms increasingly are creeping into formal project planning and product development tools and processes. And at many companies, the rules both formal and informal for how to use those social computing tools often aren’t written down. Nevsun’s system let’s people comment and ask questions about a record or specific aspect of the project. But there’s always a way to opt out of the collaboration flow. Asked if he uses the ad hoc communication capability in the Unifier system, Hardie says: “Me, personally? No.” Instead, if he’s reviewing specific costs and has a question, he’ll simply pick up the phone and call somebody.

As almost all business becomes global in nature and business processes increasingly are managed online, companies continue to push the limits of technology created to manage projects and teams across time zones and geographies. The goal is to communicate more effectively, work more closely with partners, leverage ephemeral information sources, and ultimately get as close as possible to the feel of what’s really going on.

Nevsun’s experience with Skire is just one cross-continent example. In product development, vendors such as Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and others are plowing Web 2.0 capabilities into their product life-cycle management platforms, adding collaboration and complexity.

Running alongside these formal platforms is the aggressive use of Internet-centric social networking platforms and tools – wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence awareness, peer reviews, search – to foster internal teamwork and tap into wider communities of knowledge. Yet IT teams are wrestling with how these tools function in concert with collaboration technology, such as document management, project management, and product development systems. Are they adjuncts, integral parts, or even replacements for tried-and-true software?

Plenty of CIOs also are wary of the data integration, security, and productivity issues raised by the introduction of social networking technology in the enterprise, especially when tied to a process as critical as developing a new product or completing a project. Yet some of embraced the dynamic nature of social computing and turned it to their advantage.

Four Challenges to Ad Hoc Collaboration

Creating Norms. When you have a wiki and formal project or product development software, what conversations happen where? One idea: If it’s tied to a process step, keep it in the formal tool. If it’s about improving that process, go to the wiki.

Breaking Convention. Product development is a high-stakes process. Injecting social networking conventions adds risks. Yet it could be vital to global teams that innovate ideas as well as execute.

Finding Insights. Done wrong, wikis can create islands of insights that the right people will never find.

Conquering Fear. Subject experts might be wary of sharing hard-earned insights, since they see that as their value.

Taking Steps Toward Better Resource Management

This post is basically the intended “Part 2” that I never got around to back in February when I published “Project Management and Startups: Resource Allocation and Usage – Part 1.”

In all of my years of Project Management one of the most frustrating parts has been managing resources. It’s hard enough managing resources on your own project or projects, but the bigger issue is that usually those resources are working on another project as well. And here I’m only talking about the ‘people resources.’ These are the living, breathing resources that can tell you what they’re doing and the other projects they’re working on for other PMs. At least when you hear it verbalized like that, you can do so compartmentalizing in your head of what they have going on, what their current priorities are, and what their general availability is to perform next week’s critical task for you on Project ‘Y’.

When you’re dealing with equipment resources, then you’ve brought into view an entirely different variable…and problem…that makes resource management an even more difficult task. Equipment resources can speak for themselves, don’t understand what critical tasks you have assigned to them and certainly can’t work harder and faster to make it seem like they’re doing two tasks at once. In fact, equipment resources can never multi-task.

Case Study – Privately Owned Las Vegas Company

A couple of years ago I connected with a Las Vegas company that is sort of in the entertainment industry. They supply mechanical automation and control equipment to the theatrical, themed attractions, motion pictures, and touring production markets. So there were two things different for me about this type of project management consulting work….

• It wasn’t a typical IT project – in fact it really wasn’t IT at all. The PMs were not your typical PMs…they were more like project administrators or even gate keepers. Operations had accountability to the CEO for the projects. The PMs did not really ‘own’ the projects like we would think of PMs owning projects.
• It had a strange cool factor. Their equipment was used for shows I had been to on the strip, movie stunts I had watched in theatres, and theme park rides I had been on.

At any rate, it definitely forced me to change some of my thought processes as I tried to build processes around what they were trying to do project-wise and for resource management. They lacked project templates, that’s for sure, and I helped them build those by first reviewing their open projects, then understanding the project flows, and finally understanding what a ‘typical’ project usually consists of.

The Issue

The bigger issue – and the real reason they called me in – was to help them figure out how to manage their resources. The great sales guy up front was the CEO and he was good at making sales…which meant he was also good at over-committing resources. They had a great reputation of supplying a great product on time and when show and movie releases depend on it your reputation can sink fast if you don’t deliver.

This may seem simple to some of the readers here, but it was news to them. First we inventoried all of their resources – people and equipment. As you can imagine, with this type of operation most of their resources were equipment. Both the equipment for the productions and the equipment to make the equipment for the productions had to be managed – since they actually made most of their own equipment in-house.

The Solution

To do this, I utilized MS Project – as I had done for their other projects and future projects as we crammed them into the templates I had created for them. I then loaded all resources, with cost rates, codes, etc. into a separate MS Project schedule to be utilized as a shared resource pool. We then linked all current projects to this pool meaning that the projects themselves did not have resources loaded – they were tracked in the separate shared resource pool MS Project file.

It worked great and it gave the PMs, the Operations Manager, and the CEO excellent insight into where their resource commitments were today and two months down the road as they were looking to had more customers and projects.

Other Possibilities

There are other solutions and I priced doing the whole MS Project Server and MS Project Professional combination for full collaboration. They’re a profitable shop, but something like that was more than they needed at the time. And web-based tools like ProjectOffice.net can offer good, cheap collaboration among PMs and personnel, but that wasn’t on my radar at that point in time either.