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.