The Challenge Of Managing A Virtual Project Team

In today’s world most large companies act as global players. They pursue opportunities around the world. A typical large project is a coordination effort of simultaneous complex tasks and activities in different geographic areas. The members of a global project team are geographically distributed; they share one vision, but have diverse cultural and linguistic background. The project’s early planning stages may be led from London, detailed planning and engineering maybe done mainly in India, whereas construction activities take place in Dubai or China.nSo what? Don’t we have e-mail and electronic means of transferring information quickly? There should be no reason why the project stakeholders couldn’t expect a quality end result, with the project closing in budget and on schedule. That’s the expectation – yet here comes the challenge. nSince we grew up we have learned how to interact with each other in a natural work group. That is what we can do best. In day to day work life there is a huge flow of communication amongst the members of a natural work group. Communication is typically face to face where more than 80% of the information is transmitted by body language, facial expression and tone of voice. A natural work group has had the time to get to know each other, good and bad. Newcomers will find a grown social structure into which they can integrate. Over 50% of the relevant information takes place informally; which means in hallways, elevators, lunch rooms or in the line at the cafeteria. nThe global project manager’s challenge is to manage a project team whose members work well together and provide the outstanding team performance of a natural work group although they don’t see each other very often, work in different time zones, have diverse cultural background, speak different languages, do not know each other personally, may not be familiar with the project objectives, will use distance communication rather than face-to-face communication, have backgrounds and abilities unknown to the project manager and miss out a big piece of normal information flow. On top of that they may only work part time for the project. nSuccessful project leaders with international experience will therefore employ principles to overcome the challenges mentioned above by applying:n• Strong team alignment methodologiesn• Strong team building processes n• Enhanced communication techniques and toolsn• Techniques to monitor and control performance from a remote locationn• Techniques for people leadership from a remote locationnThe Project Management Knowledge Areas which need special emphasis for such a globally distributed endeavor are Communication Management and Human Resources management. Online training programs for project managers on these subjects are offered by the Project Management Institute PMI® and online education providers specialized on the subject. Since any project will perform as good or bad as its project team a structured approach to apply these principles will be the decisive factor for large global project’s success.