How to manage virtual teams?

For a virtual team to succeed, members generally need to be aware of the difficulties of dispersed collaboration and find effective ways to overcome those obstacles on their own. This highlights the need for people to be more self-sufficient in how they manage their own work because the team leader is less in a position to help.

Consequently, companies that are serious about virtual collaboration must target their HR efforts not only at designated team leaders but also at team members so that those individuals can develop the skills necessary to work in a virtual setting.

Well, to have the most effective of group discussions, project plannings and so on... there should be a proper agenda mailed to everyone who wud attend the meeting later on...

The team moderator takes the responsibility of getting the desired output, and sees to it that the conversation goes as planned.

Effective tools and softwares like Groove will defen help. But also, training to the team members by the HR as to how to communication in a virtual environment will be an added advantage.

Video COnferencin is a gud idea... but the freq use can be expensive... esp in places like India...

Groove remains the best way to keep virtual teams on the same page - besides providing total reliability and security, it also works offline - and keeps everyone in sync without the need for expensive servers, IT management and special communications - will even work in the field off a cell phone / GPRS connection.

 http://ashokhingorani.blogspot.com/

Co-ordination of work and synchronization of project tasks amongst the virtual teams is thoroughly important. For this to happen, the communication infrastructure should be top class with adequate redundancies in place. Also, there must be appropriate feed-forward and feedback management control systems in place in order to check any digression or handle any errors in the project implementation in a timely as well as proactive manner. 

As part of project plan we need to plan for what is to be communicated (identified stake holder requirements) , to whom to communicate and frequency of communication (daily/weekly/bi-weekly), how ever i belive that in the real time scenarios your best should be working at on-site and not at off-shore this not only build his/her organizations image but also would avoid less communication, in Saudi Arabia Thursday and fridays are holidays and week starts on Saturday, a person  who is working on-site at KSA can not trouble the offshore team to work on every saturday and sunday

However i beleive Team building would play a major role to produce best O/P while managing virtual teams motivation towards organizational goals and project sucess, outing sometimes,rotate on-site off-shore chances may be on a phase wise, good performance apprisals, promotions etc ...       

As people are located at geographically disparate locations, audio/video conferencing would be one of the options where one can brainstorm  the ideas and discuss the issues.

watch it .. digest it..implement it..

virtual minds ...virtually interacting ...in virtual Cosmos...

= Virtual reengineering ... by virtual 16th DAN black Belts..

Share Recording means the work done  by one team should be visible by another team or stored at common (shared location) plcae so that each of resource of team can follow the work of others.

Lets say if your group is in the 3-4 contries and every country having different colleage to discuss on the project.The conference meeting/call will be the option to include more than 2 persons into the meeting and try to do brain storming on the matter/topic which needs to be.So we can add the more ideas on the same time.After finishing the call anybody from the group take the initiative to write down the mail of the disscussed points and mailed it to the other countries group colleage and ask for the agree and disagree about the points.Using the mail we can track for future  tracking. I think this is 1 of the way to manage virtual team .

Each member of the organization is itself a consultant.The idea is to interact in such a manner that it motivates everyone,make comparisons by giving examples as such that no one gets to know to whom is the example quoted to and yet everyone knows it.Keep secrecy and motivate behind the sceen

One of the problems with virtual teams is that no one wants to take timely decisions. My experience has been that a well informed team about business benefits of the initiative tends to produce better results. This, actually works, with teams of contractors as well and not just employees.

 1: Establish team objectives

The team members need to know and understand what it is that they are doing together. If they understand only their own role and their own work, they will always just be individual contributors.

 2: Remind everyone they are a team

If the team members think they are all working independently, they will act independent. If they know they are part of a team working on common objectives and deliverables, they will tend to feel better about their work and be more active in their collaboration with other team members.

 3: Establish ground rules

Even though the team members may be remote, they still need to exhibit a common and acceptable set of behaviors. In fact, this is probably more important for virtual teams. Ground rules include things like setting the hours during which the team members are expected to be working, establishing lunch times, determining which meetings are mandatory (in-person, Web-based, or via telephone), and defining expectations for communication turnaround times

 4: Obtain the right technology

I suppose there have always been virtual teams. However, this trend has accelerated in the past few years. The technology is there to support virtual teams — there is really no reason to be without it. This includes fast access to the Internet, audio conferencing, videocams, collaborative software, and shared directories.

 5: Look for opportunities to socialize

Team members located together have opportunities to socialize throughout the day. Virtual teams don’t usually have this same opportunity to interact with each other, so it is more important for the project manager to look for ways they can bond. This might include getting everyone together one time in a face-to-face setting — perhaps for a project kickoff meeting.

 6: Be sensitive to cultural differences

It’s possible that your virtual team all thinks and acts the same way. However, more and more virtual teams consist of people from multiple countries and cultures. If you are the project manager on this type of team, make sure you have some appreciation for the differences in how people work and how they behave.

 7: Communicate, communicate, communicate

You need to be extra proactive in your communications to make sure everyone understands what is expected. People can start to feel isolated if they do not receive regular communications. It is hard enough to keep everyone informed on a “regular” project. The communication lines on a virtual team must be opened up especially wide. As project manager, you can provide this steady stream of communication.

 8: Adjust and compromise on time differences

Remember that what’s convenient for you may not always be convenient to the team members. I was on a project team at a large global company where the manager insisted that team meetings start at 9:00 am. That was convenient for him but resulted in hard feeling from people in other locations who needed to stay very late for these meetings.

 9: Be extra diligent in workload management

Be precise and explicit in assigning work to the virtual team members. You also need to ensure that work is completed on time.

 10: Give people shorter assignments

This is not the time to give people long assignments and hope that they are completed by the deadline. Instead of assigning a six-week activity, for instance, assign the work in three two-week activities. In the former case, you won’t know for sure if the work was done for six weeks. In the latter case, you can tell every two weeks if the work is on track.

I agree with Sumitra to promote self leadership across the team members. I would also like to add that empowering the members to (i) take their decisions, (ii) make their own mistakes and (iii) share learnings with other members also helps a great deal. These of course have to be within the framework of the policies, however, many times virtual teams are slowed down or die out because of bureaucratic processes which should be avoided.

I would say that any one managing a virtual team would look at the skills that are required for a normal team. All the comments and ideas above are also required for a normal team to be working and effective.

In addition to the managing normal team working skills they need to address the co-ordination of the team activities in virtuallity with processes and tools.

In a given situation like this, and moreover when it is so clearly understood that different cultures, people with different languages exists in the team, I strongly suggest that the management has to figure out a person who is multilinguistic, who is capable to adopt himself / herself in any given situation / circumstance, who can simply mingle up within no time with other team members, who is potential enough to understand his / her team's concerns and who is passionate about almost everything around his surroundings, can be entrusted with a job of leading the entire team in order to ensure smooth functioning of the project, ensure better prevailing conditions, ensure continuous upliftment of member's morale and so on will certainly not only drive the entire team but also the entire Organzation as a whole towards the "success". I am sure it works.