3 More Tips for Working with Virtual Teams

Yesterday I looked at the roles that a clear project vision, excellent communication, motivational strategies and recognising individual differences have on successfully managing a virtual team.  To recap, a virtual team is one where not all the team members are based in the same location: a non-collacted team.  More and more project teams are like this now, as we work in an global marketplace, and with third-party partners.  Here are three more tips for making sure that your virtual team is as successful as possible:

1.   Resolve conflict effectively

Encourage your team to talk to you, and to each other.  One of the problems with virtual teams is that side conversations can take place, and a conflict could be brewing without you even knowing about it.  It’s everyone’s responsibility to handle conflict professionally – and conflict isn’t always a bad thing.  If two members of the team are having a difficult time, you can step in, but only if you know about it.  Therefore, you should encourage an environment where everyone is responsible for proactively identifying and working to resolve conflict.  Issues can be escalated to you where there is the need for more facilitation, but ideally the team can take some ownership for sorting out low-level issues themselves.

Conflict manifests itself in different ways depending on where you are in the project lifecycle.  In the early days, the issue could be lack of cultural understanding or language problems.  Later on, conflict could be caused by differing approaches to solving a technical or creative problem.  The approach to resolving these conflicts is going to be different every time, but you should at least be aware of the possibility that these will happen – and even more alert to conflict than you would be for a collacted team.

2.   Review performance continually

Just because things are going fine today doesn’t mean they will be tomorrow.  You want to be a high-performing team, but that doesn’t happen overnight.  And on a virtual team, it takes even longer.  Think about how you are going to get to a high-performing state – and that means working out what ‘high-performing’ actually looks like.  Chances are it looks like people working autonomously, referring to team members without having to go through you to open the channels of communication, but with regular progress reports and risk and issue reviews – and of course escalations up to you as the project manager.  Discuss what a high-performing team looks like with your team, and then that gives you a starting point on how to get there.

New people joining the team creates an imbalance in skills and experience, so one of your tasks should be to bring new people into the fold as quickly as possible, so plan an induction process as soon as you realise you have a new starter on the way – or someone gives you a clue that they are going to leave!

3.   Handle crises quickly

Projects have crises.  That’s nothing new.  But in a virtual team you have to act quickly to ensure everyone knows what is going on, and how the problem will be addressed.  One of the issues can be ensuring everyone has the same information at the same time, for example, about a corporate strategy change, or a restructure.  With team members in different time zones this can be difficult, and stopping the rumours can be hard.  Virtual team members can feel isolated at the best of times, so you really need to consider getting everyone together for a briefing in these situations, even if it is only on the phone.

Crises and changes can have an impact on the project, and the team will need to work out together how to step up and meet the challenge.  For example, if someone goes off sick and will not be back at work for a while, what impact will this have on the tasks that person will no longer be able to complete?  Who can step in and do those activities, or if no one is available, what impact will that have on the project’s critical path?  Understanding the issues gets you one step closer to being able to minimse the impact on the project delivery.  And of course, make sure you add an entry to the issue log!

These tips are based on my notes from a presentation by Dr Ginger Levin, PMP, PgMP at the PMI Global Congress North America in October 2009, with some of my own thoughts thrown in.  And there are more bits of advice for managing virtual teams in How to Manage in a Flat World, by Susan Bloch and Philip Whitely.

4 Tips for Working with a Virtual Team

A virtual team is one where not all the team members are in the same place.  This could be across several buildings in the same town, or across several timezones.  The most extreme examples would be a ‘follow the sun’ type team, with team members in Australia, the US and Europe/Middle East/Africa.  In this team example, you will find it difficult to get all the team members together as someone will be going to bed just as someone else is getting into the office!  However, you can successfully manage virtual teams.  Here are some tips.

1.   Have a project vision

Discuss the project vision – that is, the goal, objectives, end state – with the team at the beginning of the project.  This is so that everyone understands what it is that they are aiming to achieve, and can see how their part in the project contributes to the overall end game.  This is a really key point: it is a huge benefit to a team to have a common goal, and having everyone pull in the same direction should not be underestimated as a great way to keep the project on track.  Every time someone new joins the team, or if the project vision changes for any reason, have the discussion again to be sure that you are all still aligned.  This is as true for a collacted team as for a virtual team.

2.   Recognise individual differences

Not everyone communicates in the same way.  And in a virtual team, you can guarantee that most of your communication will be in writing – email, fax, documents, IM and so on.  Understand that people are different. Who is not so good in the mornings?  Who doesn’t have English as their first language?  Also take these points into consideration on conference calls, where you can’t see the body language of your colleagues.  As the project manager, make sure that on a call you encourage participation from everyone.

3.   Think about your motivational strategies

How are you going to keep this team together and on track?  People partake in projects for various reasons, most commonly because they think it will be good for their career, or because they didn’t have a choice.  Regardless, you need to consider how you are going to ensure that everyone gets the motivation they require to keep plodding on.  Consider especially those people who find it hard to work in a virtual environment – in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator terms, these people probably have type ‘E’ in their profiles.  If you gain your motivation and energy from being around others, a virtual environment is going to rob you of that contact with your team, so you should work out how else to bring that feeling into your day job to ensure your motivation doesn’t flag.  Talk to your team about how they are motivated – together and individually – to establish how best you can make the virtual environment work for them.

4.   Communicate effectively

This sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  It should do.  Communication across a virtual team is different to in a collacted team.  You can’t just all up and go out for lunch, or sit in a meeting room for two hours thrashing out the finer points of your project requirements document.  Think about the different communication tools that you use, and work out how best to adopt new ones to manage your non-collacted team.  And review constantly:  try something and if it doesn’t work, change it.  For example, pick the best time for your weekly project progress calls, but if it doesn’t seem like the best time for everyone after a couple of weeks, open it up to the team and ask them to suggest a better arrangement. Then act on it!

Tomorrow I will look at three more tips for managing virtual teams successfully.

These tips are based on my notes from a presentation by Dr Ginger Levin, PMP, PgMP at the PMI Global Congress North America in October 2009, with some of my own thoughts thrown in.

Project Management from a Distance – Part 5

In Part 4 of this six-part series, we covered the topic of what type of equipment and setup you would need for handling project management activities from afar. In Part 5, we will discuss the process of negotiating with your management on moving into a telecommuting role:

Part 1 – Why remote?

Part 2 – Will it work for you?

Part 3 – What type of job enables remote PM?

Part 4 – What setup do you need?

Part 5 – Negotiating when it’s not an obvious move

Part 6 – Staying the course

Instigation

Timing is everything. You’ve heard that before and no truer words were ever spoken when it comes to trying to negotiate a remote working situation in your project management role.

Sometimes it will just happen, as with it did for a role I had for over two years with one organization. My project resources were dispersed across the country, the clients I was running the implementations for were all over the country with locations globally as well. The home office is here in Las Vegas, but rarely was it a benefit to me so I rarely worked from a location at the home office. And that was ok with them – well, most of the time. There were a couple of projects where my key resources were located here in Las Vegas and they pushed for me to spend some time at the office…which I did. But 95% of the time, I was managing everything remotely.

When You’re Coming In

When you’re coming onboard at an organization, look for a time to mention it during the hiring process. If you wait till you accept the job, it may be too late. You need to ask yourself, “would I accept this position even if they won’t allow me to telecommute?” If the answer is ‘yes’, then it may be better to accept and then try to ‘sell’ the idea after you’ve been there awhile. If the answer is ‘no’, then you’ve got nothing to lose – bring it up late in the discussions when it’s apparent that they love you and want you badly. You may even offer to take the position for less money if you want that telecommuting option bad enough – they may see it as a win-win for them.

When You’re Already In

If you’re already inside an organization and want to change to a telecommuting/remote working situation, then you’ve got a different beast on your hands. Your best route is to put together some assumptions and numbers to help you sell the concept to your supervisor or executive management staff. Ballpark some overhead numbers that you’ll be saving them and if you can’t come up with numbers, at least be sure to provide a lengthy bullet list of benefits to you working remotely. And none of them should focus on YOUR benefits…they must all focus on the company’s benefits. That’s all they’re going to care about. The list should include:

• Increased productivity (stress your productive home office setup) due to fewer office distractions
• No driving time means more available work hours
• Greener setup – less fuel consumption, less pollution, smaller carbon footprint for the company (heck, they should allow all their workers to do it!)
• Decreased overhead for the company
• Healthier work environment – fewer sick days because as we all know many sick days aren’t really ‘sick’ days

Get creative, there are a lot more things that can be included on this list. And if you want it bad enough, you can always revert to requesting a pay cut in order to have the telecommuting option. One key note – if you think your request is going to meet heavy resistance, just go in initially asking for 2-3 days per week of remote work. Eventually move it to 5 days if it’s been successful.

Summary

Your approach is important. Be sure to stress to your management staff how much this situation will benefit them, not you. Point to your work record and your trustworthiness, and your dependability. Ensure them that they’ll always see that same level of leadership from you, but this new situation will make you even more available to their main concern – the external customer who you are ultimately running the project for.

Data Risk and Cloud Computing

Most of the information in this article is derived from a portion of an article from InformationWeek’s website in it’s alert/managerisk section. As more organizations move toward cost-efficient cloud computing, the concern for their data security increases…at least it should. Many bury their heads in the sand, but as you will understand from this article, there are many concerns and often times no one is certain where in the cloud their data is residing.

Head in the Clouds

If you think you have risk management in hand, chances are cloud computing will shake that confidence. Assurances about data segregation, privacy, and security, while nothing new, take on added dimensions in cloud services because you don’t know where your data is most of the time. Don’t think cloud computing will affect your organization? It will. Surveys conducted by Deloitte’s Security & Privacy Services show that many companies already have moved to some outsourced computing “because you can’t argue with the dollars,” says Deloitte partner Rena Mears. “Stop asking if cloud computing is going to happen. It’s already happening.”

Knowing data’s location is fundamental to securing it, and the location of data may have significant legal implications. It’s a problem that Chiquita Brands tackles head on when considering external service providers. “The first step for Chiquita,” says CIO Manjit Singh, “is to understand the regulatory requirements for every country we operate in. We then know the requirements we need to meet to protect our sensitive data internally. Then we have to ask ourselves and local authorities what an external provider needs to show to demonstrate they can protect our data as well as Chiquita.”

To do that, cloud and software-as-a-service providers have to agree to periodic security assessments by external auditors chosen by Singh’s team, and Chiquita must thoroughly understand the policy and procedures of the service provider, including who has access to the company’s data and equipment. For example, Singh points out that many providers have one policy governing their contractors and another for their own employees. In other cases, the provider may outsource part of its operations to yet another service provider. “You need to be aware of what’s going on in the facility and not just what relates directly to yourselves, which is a step a lot of companies miss,” he says.

The economics of cloud computing are so compelling that SaaS vendors are starting to host their applications in a cloud service. Two examples are point-of-sale software vendor PayGo and healthcare information manager MedCommons, both of which use Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud as an option to host their SaaS offerings. For providers like them, data may go through a chain of hands, all of which need to be known and evaluated.

Assessing the Cloud Threat

As the Chiquita example points out, assessing cloud security is difficult and ongoing. Providers are inclined to ask you to trust that they’re handling your data securely, without providing a mechanism to verify if that trust is warranted.

One instrument often suggested for verification is SAS-70 assessments. SAS-70 is a standard that dictates how audits of service providers should be done, but the assessments cover only the operations that the provider wants covered, and often the only document you get to see is the auditor’s statement of opinion, which provides an overview of the scope of the assessment and whether the organization does what it says it does. What you don’t see, and what consultant Pironti recommends that providers not reveal, is the detailed auditor’s report, which lays out what the assessor found, including the tests performed.

Deloitte’s Mears is of the opinion that generally accepted practices will be developed for cloud computing providers to communicate clearly what they’re doing to comply with requirements to secure and manage sensitive data. “Providers can’t let everyone do their own assessment,” she says. “It’s not sustainable for them.”

One group that’s generating some buzz is the Cloud Security Alliance, a group comprising industry and customer organizations. The group’s initial Security Guidelines document includes a set of questions to ask providers, and another set to ask about your own organization’s readiness to adapt to cloud services. Jim Reavis, co-founder of the alliance, expects version 2.0 to be ready by October, providing more specific guidance, exploring the threats to cloud services in more detail, and providing more precise definitions.

Reavis believes it eventually will be mandatory for cloud providers to pass a security certification. The challenge for CSA is to create certification requirements that don’t suffer from PCI’s snapshot-in-time problem and that are directly applicable to cloud environments. In addition to working with the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, CSA will likely work with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the International Organization for Standardization, auditing and security groups, as well as enterprise IT, service providers, and other stakeholders to come up with meaningful assessment and certifications, Reavis says. CSA is gaining support with backing from big-name companies like Dell and eBay, as well as cloud providers.

Chiquita’s Singh says certifications are a starting point, but “we and other Fortune 500 companies wouldn’t be satisfied with a certification. We’d still require the right to have our own auditors perform an assessment. SMBs might be satisfied with them, but global companies view certifications as a starting point, from which we exercise the extra diligence of our own assessment to our requirements.”

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.