Daily Archives: April 12, 2014

Surviving with virtual teams in outsourced environs – Part I

The last decade has changed entirely the world of IT. Rapid outsourcing has created new opportunities and challenges with the ever increasing workforce that has gone virtual.

During one of the routine Project Managers meeting that I preside over, I was talking to a project managers d was asking them how things were going with their projects. One of them said that he had just been assigned a project where almost everyone on the team was remote “There’s just no way to manage the project properly – he chimed. For those that cannot adapt to this environs it makes it really challenging to survive leave alone being successful.

This is a fairly common sentiment. lets understand some approaches that will help to make those projects successful.

Before we start, let’s have a little sober taste of reality. In the global economy that we all now work in–and with the constant pressure to do more with less–virtual teams are a reality. Whether it is outsourcing work, leveraging internal expertise that exists in other offices, supporting remote workers or any of a hundred different variations, if a project manager cannot successfully deliver projects where at least some of the resources are working virtually, then that project manager won’t have a job for very long.

At the most basic level, challenges with managing virtual teams come down to communications. Because the team members aren’t all in the same place, there are more barriers to communication–resulting in communication delays, a lack of clarity in what is being communicated and the potential for communication loss. Technology also plays its part, some use poor technology or none at all expect everything to go seamless. There are cultural issues to deal with as well.

In recent years, there have been tremendous advances in enterprise-level project portfolio management (PPM) tools that include many features for collaboration and communication to try and overcome these barriers. But ironically, they can actually add to the problems if not utilized properly. This occurs when team members and/or the project manager rely on the tool to overcome all of the communication challenges for them and become less communicative outside of the tool (“I’ve entered the update into the PPM tool so I don’t have to do anything else…”).

In theory, the benefits of virtual teams should greatly outweigh the negatives–access to better expertise than is available on site, lower cost resources that help the project stay on budget, etc. However, communication problems can completely eliminate those benefits very quickly, and that’s what makes managing virtual teams so difficult–the downside appears very quickly whenever a mistake is made.

Success with virtual teams really can be as simple as ensuring effective communication; but creating an environment where that occurs consistently is the challenge. To me, there are a series of steps that have to be undertaken to ensure that the environment is right:

1. Build a strong sense of team. A common problem with virtual teams is a failure to view virtual team members as just as important a part of the team as the person sitting next to you. From the outset, it is vital that all team members feel that they are a part of a team of equals, all of whom are needed for the project to succeed.

2. Ensure that the person initiating communication understands that it is their job to break down the communication barriers. Too often, the person providing the communication–a team member providing an update, a project manager communicating a change, etc.–relies on the recipient of the communication to overcome the communication barriers.

3. Validate that messages have been received and processed correctly. Assumptions can be the death of any project, and with virtual teams validation requires a more conscious effort–you won’t bump into the team member at the water cooler to check that they understood.

4. Use technology appropriately. Modern PPM tools are tremendously powerful tools, but they are only as good as the people using them and the data that they contain. If people don’t understand how to use the tools effectively, then they quickly become additional barriers to communication.

5. Remain focused on the positives and eliminate any finger pointing. When teams are geographically dispersed, it becomes easier to play the blame game because people are not always able to defend themselves and personal relationships aren’t always as strong. This never helps the project to deliver and must be avoided at all costs.

Surviving with virtual teams in outsourced environs – Part II

In my last post I covered most of the tips and techniques to adapt, lets look at some more additional tips to succeed.

1. Build a strong sense of team – bringing all team members together
It’s human nature to build the strongest relationships with the people that you spend the most time with simply because you get to know them better. Relationships are more important than ever now with the new realities in workplace with lot of gadgetry and the influence of millennials. When a colleague is simply a voice at the end of the phone or a name in the e-mail directory, it’s difficult to be as invested in their success as the person sitting next to you whose hobbies and kids’ names you know. Use every opportunity to know better and get insights from others as well where feasible.

In a project, it is vitally important to build a high-performing team where each team member feels as though they do have a responsibility to each of their colleagues on the team, where they feel that they are letting their colleague down if they are late or perform badly. That means that each team member has to be “real” to every other team member.

In a perfect world, I will try and hold a project kickoff meeting with all resources onsite so that the project starts with a strong foundation of people getting to know one another. But in reality, that isn’t always possible. What I will always try and do is create an environment where everyone views their colleagues on the team as complete people, not just resources responsible for tasks. There needs to be awareness of cultural differences and respect for people’s privacy, but there are a number of ways that this can be achieved.

I do think that it’s important to try and incorporate both voice and video in these initial kickoffs. With modern technology video conferencing, Skype, webcams are readily available and it’s always nice to put a face to a voice—again, it helps to create a sense that the person is more “real”. Of course the kickoff is just the first step in overcoming the communication challenges that can exist with virtual teams, and as we continue this article next time we’ll look at the remaining steps as well as bringing everything together as a cohesive project management approach.

Break down the barriers
It’s impossible to avoid communication barriers when you have virtual teams–physical distances remove the option of face-to-face communications, time differences may limit options for telephone conversations and language barriers may make direct communication virtually impossible. However, those barriers don’t need to create problems for the team, and I always work on the premise that it is the responsibility of the person initiating the communication to ensure that the barriers don’t prevent understanding of the message.

We do this all of the time in our daily lives–we talk to our children differently than we talk to our spouses, we speak differently with friends than with colleagues, we use different styles in formal versus informal communications, etc. With virtual teams, we need to apply this same approach to our colleagues, consciously attempting to provide messages in a format that the recipient will be able to understand with the minimum of “translation”. At the simplest level, that may actually be language translation–the person originating the message should ensure that the message is translated into the language of the person who receives the message, but in many cases the need is more subtle.

Consider a situation where the project manager needs to communicate a change to a virtual team. The change isn’t occurring in a vacuum–it’s come about as the result of various discussions, it has a knock on impact elsewhere on the project and potentially beyond the project, and it may have been approved only after consideration of a number of alternatives. While a virtual team may have some awareness of that, they likely won’t have as complete a picture as the team members who are co-located with the project manager–so the project manager needs to make sure that he or she communicates not only the change itself, but also enough background information to allow for the change to be understood and accepted.

Validate messages
The physical communication of messages is only part of the solution–the other key element is to validate that the message has been received and processed appropriately. This is something that happens automatically when teams are working in the same place–a simple “Did that e-mail make sense?” or “Did you have any questions about that change request?” is all that’s needed.

When team members are virtual, validation requires more conscious effort–and it also needs to be done in a way that is constructive rather than inadvertently belittling. I know of a virtual team member who got very upset when asked if he understood a change that had been introduced; he felt that the project manager was suggesting that he was too stupid to understand it (although that may well be evidence of failings in building a strong sense of team up front).

Validation really comes down to testing assumptions that are made, and there are a number of ways that this can occur. With a team that I have worked with quite a lot, I can get away with using simple voting buttons in e-mails–an underused piece of functionality that allows for basic feedback such as confirmation of comprehension or a request for further explanation. With issues that are more complicated, I will only use push-type communication methods like e-mail to provide backup material and will address the issue in a status meeting allowing for immediate discussion and indirect confirmation that the message has been understood (“How do you think that might affect you?” for example).

In some cases, validation can be built into the project portfolio management (PPM) tool, especially when communication is from the team to the project manager. An easy example is to have the project manager review and approve task updates that are provided by the team, but in this case all tasks should be reviewed–not just those from virtual team members that could cause a sense of double standards. The validation also has to be meaningful–if the project manager approves everything automatically, then the validation fails.

Appropriate technology use
Building on the concept of building validation into PPM tools, these tools now offer tremendous support for the management of virtual teams. Many include powerful collaboration tools or are capable of integrating with an organization’s existing collaboration software, providing a consistent platform for virtual teams to work together and share information. The problems start when project managers assume that the tool is capable of doing everything and that all users will embrace the tools in the same way. Just because tools offer collaboration tools doesn’t mean that people will maximize the benefits that those tools offer–we can all think of organizations that use tools like Microsoft SharePoint as nothing more than a directory structure.

The project manager needs to work with his or her team to agree on how the different features of PPM and similar software will be used for this specific project, and needs to monitor for compliance with that usage. In some cases, there may need to be further training and support provided to individuals to help them to become comfortable with the tool, and this can also be a way for team members to strengthen relationships with one another. I have often been in a situation where one office is more familiar with a particular tool than another, and I can then ask a team member who is more comfortable using the tool to act as guide and coach for virtual team members to help them in developing their skills with the tool. Frequently, the virtual team contains the expert users on such tools and end up teaching the “home” team on how to make the most of the tool.

Remain focused on positives
One of the biggest challenges with virtual teams occurs when things start to go wrong on a project. Because virtual relationships between team members are often not as strong as the relationships with people who are co-located, cliques can quickly develop resulting in people “taking sides” and pointing blame at others. This most obviously shows itself when the virtual team is from a vendor, but it also happens when everyone is with the same organization. Often the remote workers feel as though they are the victims because they don’t have immediate access to the project manager or key stakeholders, and they therefore don’t feel as though their positions are given fair representation.

It is vitally important that the project manager helps teams to stay focused on resolving problems and not pointing fingers at one another; he or she must clearly be seen to be objective, never allowing any suspicion that one group is being favored over another. While the steps described above and in the last article will help to create such an environment, there is still the potential for difficulties when problems arise. The PM must lead by example and act swiftly to correct any inappropriate behavior. During such stressful times, the barriers to communication may be greater, so the PM should focus on the best possible means of communication–telephone over e-mail, and ideally with voice and video to ensure that body language is also communicated and the potential for misunderstanding is minimized.

Conclusion
From what we saw in the last two posts it is no more apt to say this is “impossible” to be successful with a virtual team, virtual teams were becoming the norm so PMs would have to be able to manage them if they wanted to continue managing projects. Virtual teams have been a reality for many PMs for many years, but it is fair to say that they are still intimidating for many PMs and are viewed as somehow “different”. A quick browse of job boards reinforces that sense–many ask for experience with virtual teams if they are going to be used as if it is a different skillset than traditional project management.

lets also remember that fact that it does a disservice to those people who work virtually. Success with virtual teams comes from an ability to focus on effective communication and building teams with strong bonds between the team members–not always simple to do, but also not something that is fundamentally different from any other form of project management. If a PM finds that “impossible”, then I suggest that they look at their own skill set before anything else!