Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are teams of people who primarily interact electronically and who may meet face-to-face occasionally.

Examples of virtual teams include a team of people working at different geographic sites and a project team whose members telecommute.

Introduction

What is a team? One of the more accepted definitions comes from Kazenbach and Smith in Wisdom of Teams.

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Generally, teams have from two to twenty-five people. More than that, they tend to break into subteams. Teams need complementary skills or the right mix of skills to do the job assigned. These skills fall into three categories: technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills. A team's purpose and performance goals go together. Both must be clear or confusion will likely result. It is important that the team own and commit to the purpose and shape it if necessary. In addition, teams need to develop a common approach or method on how they will work together to accomplish their purpose. Finally, groups become teams when they hold themselves accountable for the outcome.

What is a virtual team? There are several different definitions of virtual teams, but what these definitions have in common is that, in addition to being a team, virtual team members are physically separated (by time and / or space) and that virtual team members primarily interact electronically.  This researcher defines virtual teams as teams of people who primarily interact electronically and who may meet face-to-face occasionally.

Reasons for Virtual Teams

Reasons for virtual teams center around the differences in time and space for team members.

• Team members may not be physically collocated.
• It may not be practical to travel to meet face-to-face.
• Team members may work different shifts

Specifically, teams may be distributed because of the new realities facing organizations such as:

• organization-wide projects or initiatives
• alliances with different organizations, some of which may be in other countries
• mergers and acquisitions
• emerging markets in different geographic locations
• the desire of many people and government organizations for telecommuting
• the continuing need for business travel and information and communications technologies available to support this travel
• a need to reduce costs
• a need to reduce time-to-market or cycle time in general (the increasing velocity in business)

Types of Groups

• Task groups
• Friendship groups
• Command groups
• Interest groups

These groups also can exist as virtual groups. For example, an example of a virtual command group would be a national sales team distributed throughout the United States. An example of a virtual task group could be a small software development group of people telecommuting to their office. A virtual interest group could be a group of investors sharing strategies and outcomes. A friendship group might be represented by a virtual community.

Certainly other examples exist and some groups overlap as well.

Note: This researcher uses the term "virtual team" in this web site as a "virtual task group" or a "virtual command group" where team members are focused on a specific set of goals..

Strategies for Virtual Teams

• Hold an initial face-to-face startup
• Have periodic face-to-face meetings, especially to resolve conflict and maintain team cohesiveness
• Establish a clear code of conduct or set of norms and protocols for behavior
• Recognize and reward performance
• Use visuals in communications
• Recognize that most communications will be non-verbal -- use caution in tone and language

Technology Supporting Virtual Teams

One way to think about teams is that teams are a network organization -- a set of nodes and links -- wherein the nodes are of course the team members and the links are the communications channels or primarily face-to-face interaction.  In virtual teams, the nodes are the same -- team members -- whereas the links are primarily virtual (electronic) and software is used to mediate the interactions.  In simple terms, then

virtual teams = teams + electronic links + groupware

Benefits of Virtual Teams

• People can work from anywhere at anytime.
• People can be recruited for their competencies, not just physical location.
• Many physical handicaps are not a problem.
• Expenses associated with travel, lodging, parking, and leasing or owning a building may be reduced and sometimes eliminated.
• There is no commute time

Team Productivity

Michael Sampson of shared-spaces.com proposes "7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity" (© 2005. All rights reserved.) Below is an adaptation of his paper.

In an ideal world, teams need the following capabilities:

1. Shared Access to Team Data. A secured place is provided for storing data, documents, discussion threads etc so team members can access the shared data, add new data or documents, and edit or revise existing data or documents depending on their level of access.

2. Location-Independent Access to Team Data, People and Applications. Team members can read and write documents associated with the project from multiple locations. Access may be given through a wireless connection on a laptop, a secured web page through an Internet café etc.

3. Real-Time Joint Editing and Review. During the course of writing a new document or reviewing an existing one, team members often want input from others on the team. Team members need a quick method of inviting someone else to view the same information on their screen, to jointly navigate through a document, and to permit the other person to directly change the text they’ve been writing.

4. Coordinate Schedules with Team Aware Scheduling Software. Teams need a calendaring and scheduling system that automatically balances personal appointments, enterprise-wide meetings, and project team events.

5. Build Social Engagement through Presence, Blogs and Instant Messaging Systems that display the presence of others, and enable real time discussions help re-construct the spontaneous opportunities afforded by face-to-face teamwork.

6. Enterprise Action Management. Teams need a way of tracking who is doing what, and what needs to be done next.

7. Broaden the Network through Automatic Discovery Services. Teams need to be informed about other people who have expertise in the project they are working on. Internal automatic discovery services constantly scan the minute-by-minute chatter of the organization—the emails and IMs, the documents being written, the web pages being read—to build a sense of who knows what, and to create bridges for communication between distinct experts. External automatic discovery services are less mature, but enable people to track certain keywords or phrases of interest (e.g. RSS, perhaps).

Technologies

Groupware

• working together at the same time and place
• working together at the same time but differentplace
• working together at a different time butthesame place
• working together at a different time and place.

Applications are listed in (normal text) and major products or product groupings are listed in (italics).

Conferencing

There are three basic forms of conferencing:

1. Audio conferencing
2. Data conferencing
3. Video conferencing

Telephone companies provide audio conferencing bridges as a service and as a product. Other companies (see References) also provide products for audio conferencing.

Microsoft's NetMeeting is a good example of a data conferencing product. While NetMeeting also supports both audio and video conferencing, currently it is best at data conferencing.

Microsoft's NetMeeting and LiveMeeting;  Interwise; and WebEx conferencing are good examples of multimedia group conferencing products. There are many other products that address the conferencing space. NetMeeting, for example, lets team members share and collaborate using applications such as Word, Excel, Visio, and any other Windows based application. Chat and whiteboard are other supported functions. While audio and video over IP are built-in, network bandwidth limits constrain the quality of service.

Search the Internet for a list of other suppliers.

Collaboration

One key advantage is that Groove works on a peer-to-peer basis and does not require anyone to set up and administer a server site.  Everything necessary is done at the desktop or laptop level. 

Groove supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Electronic Mail

Search the Internet for a list of suppliers.

Electronic Whiteboards

Search the Internet for a list of suppliers.

Projectors

Search the Internet for a list of suppliers.

PCs

Other Hardware

Calendars

Security

Security is an important consideration for virtual teams especially if transmitting sensitive information over a network. A variety of firewalls and Internet security software packages are available.

Many email and conferencing products support various types of encryption or other security methods.

Methods

Purpose

Without a well defined, understood, and supported purpose, it is not likely teams will be successful.

Meeting Agenda

Good agendas state the purpose of the meeting, what subjects will be covered, who will cover them, how much time will be allocated to each subject, and expected outcomes.

Agendas should be developed by the team for the next meeting and distributed ahead of time.

Sample Agenda

Date: mm/dd/yy

Purpose: The purpose of this meeting is to review the project status and schedule to see if we're on target.

Process Check

The facilitator may elect to go around the room and ask each meeting participant in turn to respond or simply ask for people's thoughts as they occur. Note: it is important to leave sufficient time for this part of the meeting if the data collected is expected to have meaning. People need to feel they are not being rushed and this is an important part of the meeting.

Sample Process Check

Code of Conduct

It's a good idea for team members to establish ground rules for the following:

• Attendance policies
• Location of meeting and the time
• Assignments
• Breaks
• Duties of members
• Agendas, minutes, and other records (responsibility)
• Expected behavior
• Other items as necessary
• "Netiquette" for the group (e.g. always acknowledge receipt of a message even if you can't reply to it immediately)

Decision Making

• Brainstorming
• Consensus Card Method
• Criteria Rating Technique
• Delphi Technique
• Nominal Group Technique
• Paired-Choice Matrix

A decision log is useful during the life of a team and may be of value in subsequent teams. A decision log may include information about decisions made such as:

• Date
• Decision title
• Description
• Decision-making process (consensus, manager, ...)
• Implications of decision
• Rationale of decision
• Context of decision

Action Item Log

An action item log may include:

• Action Item number
• Name
• Description
• Date assigned
• Person assigned to
• Expected completion date
• Actual completion date

Brainstorming

Brainstorming works well in groups that meet face-to-face as well as with groups that meet virtually.

Steps:

1. Select a topic and time frame
2. Poll each participant for their ideas.
3. Write them down. (NO evaluation of ideas here.)
4. Stop when time is up or no more ideas are offered
5. Now, evaluate, prioritise, and select ideas

Open Space Technology

General Problem Solving Method

1. Diagnose and define the problem
2. Collect and analyze relevant data
3. Develop alternatives
4. Evaluate alternatives
5. Select the best alternative
6. Analyze possible consequences of the decision
7. Implement the decision

Lessons Learned

After Action Review

Information to include:

• What was the project about? (context and description)
• What when right during the project? Why?
• What when wrong during the project? Why?
• What should be changed for the next project?
• Was the overall project successful or not? Why?
• What information do you think would help subsequent teams from your project experience?