Project Management: 7 Tips for Managing Virtual Teams

The first law of project management states: it is your responsibility to ensure that deliverables and milestones are achieved on time and with the utmost quality.

No excuses; Even if you are managing cross boundary, expansive projects and managing Virtual teams.

There are many moving and sometimes, non-moving parts to a virtual team that makes managing them more difficult. Here are a few tips and techniques to follow:

1. Set clear project objectives and expectations for your team. Clearly communicate the project objectives, schedules and individual roles and responsibilities. It is important that everyone knows what they are doing, how their work contributes to the project, what other team members need from them, and why. Though everyone can work independently, it is important to keep the links in place and to repeatedly communicate and state the team’s objectives. Failure to do so can be catastrophic for the success of a project. 
2. Set the rules and tone early. At the beginning of the project it is crucial to let the team members know what is expected of them. Status reports, participation in conference calls, hours of availability, and deliverable schedules are essential parts of managing virtual teams.
3. Understand and respect different cultures. This is very important if you are managing team members of different regions and/or in different countries. First Learn and then Honour your team members’ cultural differences and their right for personal commitments and religious practices.
4. Choose the most effective technology to aid communication. The anchor of every virtual team is communications and the technology used to support it. Even as fuel prices soar, flying the team in for a meeting each week is not realistic. So, online chat, conference calls and webinars are much more effective. There are a number of technologies available such as Instant Messaging, Online LiveMeeting, Skype, and many other tools that support video and Web conferencing. Check that these tools are available, suitable and work efficiently in all your regions and countries. In addition, there are collaboration tools that allow team members to share and collaborate on documents such as SharePoint, Dropbox and many more.
5. Be very specific about time commitments. Never 'assume' or leave something to chance. Make sure that all team members know when deliverables are due. Make sure it is clearly definied in your project plan and, if needs be, draw them their own expanded section. You have failed if you have to remind them the day before. You never, ever want to have them scramble to get something done before close of business the next day. The chance of success will be nil or the quality of the deliverable will be greatly reduced.
6. Get the team together on occasion. Although it is expensive to bring remote teams together, it is a necessary element to managing a virtual team. To build and continue team chemistry, gathering the team together strengthens personal relationships and working partnerships in both the short and long term. Never underestimate the importance of building better relationships through team camaraderie and rapport.
7. Three hundred and sixty degree communication. The bottom line: you are the conduit for communications, the motivator and problem solver but when the team is working well, stay out of their way. Empower and trust your team to make proper decisions by working with each other and make sure you are not the bottleneck by insisting that all communication be channeled through you. After all you are not the project, you are just the project manager.

GPS chaos: How a $30 box can jam your life

IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning.

At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.

It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.

Why would a GPS outage cause such disruption? These satellite signals now do a lot more than inform your car's satnav. GPS has become an "invisible utility" that we rely on without realising. Cellphone companies use GPS time signals to coordinate how your phone talks to their towers.

Energy suppliers turn to GPS for synchronising electricity grids when connecting them together. And banks and stock exchanges use the satellites for time-stamps that prevent fraud. Meanwhile, our societies' reliance on GPS navigation is growing by the year.

Some are worried that we are now leaning too heavily on a technology that can all too easily fail – and it doesn't need a freak navy training exercise to cause havoc. Their biggest concern is a GPS jammer – a plastic device that can sit on car dashboards.

These can be bought on the internet, and tend to be used by say, truckers who don't want their bosses to know where they are. Their increasing use has already caused problems at airports and blocked cellphone coverage in several cities.

One jammer can take out GPS from several kilometres away, if unobstructed. No surprise, then, that researchers across the world are scrambling to find ways to prevent disastrous GPS outages happening.

Read more here

Project failure is predictable

This Dilbert cartoon summarises a few of project truths:



Consider some of the meanings expressed by this short cartoon:

• Complicated plans don’t work. If you can’t understand the plan, then be prepared to die (metaphorically speaking). Far better to break large projects into a program, or portfolio, of smaller one. If you can’t wrap your mind around the scope of a project, then it’s too big and almost certainly doomed to fail.
• “Spraying energy into the vortex of failure” doesn’t work. Neither wishful thinking nor the vain imaginings of an enthusiastic team are sufficient to solve the complication problem in the last bullet. Oh yes, if only wishful thinking worked, the world would be a better place.
• Your boss really doesn’t care. Sure, it’s a stereotype, and I beg mercy from all the great managers out there but, the fact remains, the myopia of people not directly connected to solving the problems can be strong. Which means their project is your problem.

Fundamentally, these three truths express mismatched expectations at so many levels that it’s almost impossible to separate the strands.

At the very least, learn to recognise signs of potential catastrophe well in advance. If you know a problem exists, then there’s at least some hope to fix it before failure strikes.

The Devil's Triangle of IT Project Management

The Devil’s Triangle describes a basic set of dysfunctional relationships that push many projects toward failure. As you have heard in other contexts; there are three people in this marriage.

Three parties participate in virtually every major software deployment: the customer, system integrator or consultant, and the software vendor. Since each of these groups has its own definition of success, conflicts of interest rather than efficient and coordinated effort are built into and affect many software implementation projects.

The Devil's Triangle

The Devil’s Triangle explains how economic pressures can drive software vendors and system integrators to act in ways that do not serve customer interests. It also offers insight into the ways some enterprise software customers damage their own projects.

Devil’s Triangle relationships are a short sighted and self-interested way of life for too many participants in the enterprise technology landscape.

Schizophrenic software vendors and split loyalties

Clearly, Software companies want to sell product licenses to end customers. However, the vendor’s loyalties are sometimes unclear, because 3rd party system integrators have a great deal of influence in most software deals.

Beware the Systems Integrator

As a result, although the customer buys the license, the system integrator may have a closer, better, stronger, relationship or partnership with the vendor. The link to the customer is more tenuous.

Although the customer is certainly important because he finances the deal, some integrators offer incentives to enable critical 'deal flow' to the vendor, making the integrator a key part of the software company’s sales process.

So who wins when a software vendor’s loyalties to the customer conflict with its relationship to the system integrator?

Wacky system integrators: billable time vs. customer success

When a project goes over-budget, the customer pays much of that extra cost to the system integrator in the form of additional services fees. In the best cases, these fees enable the service provider to perform additional, high value work improving business outcomes for the customer despite the higher cost.

Beware the Dual Incentive

System integrators sometimes have a dual incentive to build long-lasting customer relationships while racking up change order fees if the project runs late.

Sometimes, this situation creates an negative incentive pushing the integrator away from the goal of completing the project on time and allowing the cash to continue flowing, out of the customer's budget.

For these unscrupulous consultants, unsuccessful projects represent “annuity consulting” revenue coming at the customer’s expense.

This conflict has been described before:

• In private moments, many third-party consultants dream of long projects, where billable hours and customer purchase orders flow like water.
  
• This kind of annuity consulting is never good for the ERP buyer.
  
• Almost by definition, when projects exceed their schedule and budget, the extra dollars go into the consultant’s pocket.

Early warnings: The IT project failure dilemma

Early warnings: The IT project failure dilemma

I am confident that you will recognise the following dangerous “big project psychologies” and behaviours:

• Wishful thinking: we’ll be able to launch on time, because we really want to
  Self-congratulation: we’ve been working awfully hard, so we must be making good progress
• Testosterone: nobody’s going to see us fail. We ROCK!
• Doom-and-gloom fatalism: we’ll just keep coming in every day and do our jobs, and what happens, happens. (See Dilbert, virtually any strip).
• Denial: the project just seems to be going badly right now; things are really OK.
• Gridlock: the project is stuck in a kind of limbo where no one wants to make certain key decisions, perhaps because then they’ll be blamed for the failure
• Moving the goal posts: for example, we never really intended to include reports in the system. And one week of testing will be fine; we don’t need those two weeks we planned on.

An experienced Project Manager or good project leader, will of course be aware of all of these syndromes, and know when to probe, when to regroup, when to shuffle the deck.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s the leaders themselves who succumb to those behaviours and for people on the project periphery, such as other C-level executives, it’s hard to know whom to listen to on the team.