Forward Momentum: Delivering Results

By Vicki Wrona, PMP

I have always prided myself on my ability to manage and motivate my team as well as to get many of my employees promoted. I took the time to get to know their business and personal goals, to clear roadblocks, and to coach and develop them. However, it is a little different story when your team is completely virtual.

When I moved to the role of managing virtual team members, some aspects of my old management approach still worked well while others fell woefully short. Even the aspects that worked, though, had to be modified. For example, I couldn’t walk around and casually talk to everyone to see what they were working on, where they were concerned, and understand the daily nuances of the work at hand. This made a difference when communicating with my new virtual team. I found that much as I tried, I couldn’t relate to everyone as well as I used to. I started to be taken by surprise by things that happened (or more often, what didn’t happen), to hear of obstacles that I didn’t know were presenting themselves, etc.

What did I learn from this?

1)      Extra touch. My general management style was still good, but needed to be modified to include good use of technology and more conscious effort to keep in touch with everyone. It takes extra time to talk to people and get to know them. It also means making an effort to schedule a few more and focused meetings. When working remotely, the team default is to stay separate and not schedule any meetings. Also, it is not enough for me to talk to each person individually; I also have to make sure they are talking to each other. Surprisingly, often they aren’t.

2)      Increase feedback provided. In an office it was easy for me to provide ongoing, informal feedback to individuals to let them know how they were doing and to help develop them. Remotely, that is more difficult. I have to make an effort to let people know what has been done well or what was not done as I expected and encourage interaction with that person. I have to create a feeling of trust and openness so the dialogue can occur even when I do not initiate the conversation.

3)      Additional planning. I have to perform additional planning when communicating work to be done. This may include putting instructions in writing or creating more checklists than before. It may also mean creating processes for task management and completion, problem solving or conflict management.  Sometimes, processes need to be created for things taken for granted in a co-located office. Processes for version control, hand-offs, checklists of the common errors in completing work may have to be created to produce a consistent, quality product among scattered team members. 

4)      Use technology, but don’t let team members hide behind it. I had to adapt to relying a little more on lack of touch, such as using email, but not too much, because so much of the message is lost with this method of communicating. In today’s society, the bigger problem is getting people away from email and IM and getting them to actually call and talk to another team member. Yes, more communications are conducted using email and IM, and much of it is fine and has served us well. However, more misunderstandings do arise when using this medium and I have to be ready to step in when necessary to coordinate a call or a meeting to ensure people actually talk to each other to work things out. Other tools such as shared sites or collaborative software are essential.

5)      Meet in person. Make an effort to bring people together in person where possible. Have you ever noticed that you can build a pretty good working relationship with someone over the phone or over email, but once you meet, that relationship has moved to a whole new level? It’s different. That’s the power of face-to-face. Try to get everyone to meet each other at least once. Then the interactions are a little more personal and (hopefully) even better.

By Bruce Beer, PMP

Working with virtual teams and PMOs has enough challenges when they are all contained in the USA; however when these teams are global with different time zones and languages, it has a certain dimension that adds “interest” to life!

My first experience with a virtual team was when I based in the UK and was asked to manage a Pan-European project to implement a support service for Hewlett Packard throughout Europe. The application was developed in the US and was being implemented throughout eight European Countries as well as Asia-Pacific and the Americas.

OK so you get the idea – it was certainly a large virtual project. The things that made it interesting to manage were the different cultures, time zones, and languages. Take for example the European cultures – they ranged from those who conducted projects with total precision and accuracy, to those who agreed a course of action then went off and did “their own thing”, to those that tried hard, were great fun to work with, but didn’t always take life too seriously.

In Europe there are only two time zones – UK and European, so this was not a great problem, but we also had regular communications with HQ in Palo Alto on the West Coast – an 8 hour time shift. As for the language issue, I did not adopt the general English approach to languages, “Shout louder in English and they will understand”. I made an attempt to at least show willingness by using my schoolboy French and German which often caused much merriment from my colleagues, leading to everyone resorting to English as the common language – thank goodness.

What were the important lessons I learnt from this experience?

The first one was that for a virtual team, in my opinion it is imperative that the team meets face to face at least once, preferably on a regular basis. I held a kick-off meeting in the UK, then in addition to regular phone conferences we had status meetings every month rotating around the other Countries. When I say “we” I mean just the Project Manager from each Country, not all of the team members. This did of course add to the expense, but in my view the cost was easily justified by the smoother communication and running of the project. There was quite a lot of interdependence between the various Country teams, and trying to negotiate and get another Country to cooperate was so much easier when you had met the person concerned, had a meal and a drink together, and knew something about their family, hobbies, etc.

This leads to communication on a virtual team. This is even more important than with a local team where you can just go and visit a colleague to ask a question and catch up on progress. Communication has to be well thought out and planned taking into account time differences, language issues, project complexities, and cultural differences.

As for the different cultures, I just had to embrace that – I wasn’t going to change their culture, I just had to incorporate it into the plan. Some Countries needed more management or direction, others – once we had agreed a course of action, just went away and did it.

Languages did cause me a problem initially, but it seemed I was the only one who had a problem  – everyone seemed to speak English at least as well as I did, some were even better! There was one Swiss guy who could carry on multiple conversations at dinner in multiple languages, at the same time – I was impressed! In this project I was lucky we all spoke English – had I been dealing with non-European language speakers who could not speak English, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to manage.

I did meet and liaise with the US central developers and the PMs from Asia Pacific and the Americas to discuss any issues and cry on each other shoulders as necessary.

So the key lessons from this and subsequent large virtual teams were to:

1. Meet face to face at least once not just to discuss work but also to socialize and get to know the other team members a little, even though it added cost
2. Allow for and even embrace the different cultures
3. Consider and plan communications very carefully
4. Hope everyone speaks English!! Seriously, this could be a major issue on a global project and it can’t be ignored – a solution to communication and language must be found

By Kathy Martucci, PMP

We don’t find the concept of trust on most traditional lists of project critical success factors. Yet it may be the number one consideration in establishing and maintaining a high-performing virtual team. While it can be argued that trusting relationships are needed by all teams, they are even more important to virtual teams because of a lack of face-to-face time.

Let’s face it – we wonder what those people are REALLY doing? We email them; maybe call them, but have we ever met face-to-face? Do we share anything of ourselves beyond work issues?  Do we actually see them operate on a daily basis? Are THEY working as hard as WE are?

While multiple media are the channels by which members make the “physical” connection, there is little to no face-face communication in a virtual team. Yet it is only through meaningful interactions that people develop trusting relationships. More importantly, informal encounters (walking through the hallway, meeting in the kitchen), something that virtual team members cannot do even with the most advanced technology, have been shown to provide a common perspective that leads to enhanced collaborations.  

This is yet another challenge for the Virtual Team Project Manager to address. Building and then maintaining trust, which can easily be fractured given time and spatial differences, requires genuinely engaging the team toward that end. If trust can be achieved, more open communication, cooperation, a higher quality of decision-making, and more satisfaction in the decision-making process follows.

by Rob Zell

Many organizations are struggling today with the concept of incorporating social networks into the workplace. I don’t blame them. There are plenty of issues that immediately come to mind:

• How do you secure the information?
• How do you keep conversations appropriate for the workplace?
• How do you keep people productive?

There is plenty of information out there on this topic. A friend of mine sent me “a stack” of blogs and white papers that he uncovered to help me with some work I’m doing. The more I read, the more impressed I become with the usefulness of the technology and the speed it brings to organizations that embrace it.

As energizing as the technology is, there are those who worry that work will come to a screeching halt while employees tweet, blog, and update their status. Here’s the thing: they already are, whether you have a network or not.

Most organizations probably have a break room with the standard microwave, water cooler and coffee machine. Yours might be more high tech with a vending machine or two, maybe a TV running cable news or company announcements. You might have comfy chairs or even a video game machine. Of course if you are Google you have snacks, food service and even games. At some point in the day, people will gather there and chances are they will: 

• Talk about the business and what they are working on (which you probably don’t want just anyone to hear).
• Talk about something inappropriate (but hey, you weren’t there so it’s not like you’re responsible right?).
• Be unproductive.

To the best of my knowledge, and I admit I haven’t done any research on this, I don’t think anyone is trying to ban break rooms. In fact, more companies are focused on what goes on in the break room as a way to reinforce culture: team message boards, specialized services, recognition walls, fun artwork, etc. (See Google). To make matters worse, many of the people who “pop down” to the break room aren’t being social or engaging in your culture because they are on their Smartphone tweeting about how lame your organization is for not doing more to engage in social media.

So why not encourage dialogue and interaction in a controlled setting? There are some good tools out there that organizations are using to create conversations and accelerate productivity. Tools like Yammer (yammer.com) and even Microsoft Sharepoint encourage the kind of sharing that you desire. These tools have built in search functionality. With some training, your employees can quickly find the information they need. Learning often takes place on the job, with information shared between peers or handed down from supervisor to employee. With unlimited access to a monitored knowledge base, your employees can get immediate answers to performance questions and more importantly can get the right answer rather than the best shortcut.

Finally, in this increasingly virtual age, gathering around the water cooler is hardly feasible. With teams spread out across the globe, tools that shorten the distance between teams and improve working relationships aren’t just nice to have. Tools like these are a competitive advantage.

With the right tools and some cultural motivation, your teams can spend time in virtual space talking about the business, sharing best practices, adding productivity and providing real-time feedback on the state of the business. If that isn’t a strategic advantage, I don’t know what is.