<p>A team fails or thrives on the strength of its management. Fitting the group's needs, personalities, and skills into a cohesive whole is seldom simple — and distance adds complexity. This book provides expert guidance, with proven practices, tools, and virtual team leadership strategies.</p>

Projects Without Boundaries

Preface

Working In A Virtual World

PART II PLANNING THE VIRTUAL PROJECT, BUILDING THE VIRTUAL TEAM

Planning The Virtual Project

It is well understood that the mission of any project is to create and deliver a solution that advances the business goals of the sponsoring company. It is also understood that there are two primary parts to any project: managing the project process and leading the project team. These fundamentals of project work exist in both traditional and virtual environments. However, how the project work is performed by the project team differs between the two environments.

Building A High-Performance Virtual Team

PART III MANAGING PROJECT EXECUTION, LEADING THE VIRTUAL TEAM

Executing The Virtual Project

When a firm begins to perform its project work virtually, success is often due to heroic efforts on the part of the project manager and a number of his or her team members. Achieving success consistently becomes a shared responsibility between project manager, project team, and senior leadership. It is the job of the senior leaders to establish a virtualization strategy and to remove any barriers to virtual execution success. The company's project managers are responsible for consistently ensuring their virtual projects are executed successfully and that business value is captured. If both pieces of the organization work effectively together, a continual increase in virtual project maturity and repeated success can be expected. As we underscore in this chapter, repeatable success in virtual project execution has to do with solid project management practices plus strong project team leadership.

Leading The Virtual Project Team

“I had to learn to let go.” That is how Jeremy Bouchard describes one of the major personal transformations he had to experience to become a better manager of virtual projects. What Bouchard is referring to is the sharing of tasking, problem-solving, and decision-making power between the project manager and team members who are geographically and organizationally distributed. However, this is only half of what we call the duality of the virtual project manager's role. The other half is the need to provide strong centralized leadership, particularly during the forming and storming stages of team development (as described in Chapter 4). This centralized/decentralized duality of the project manager's role is in effect on all projects, traditional and virtual, but it is amplified considerably on virtual projects due to the lack of face-to-face interaction and social presence caused by geographic distribution of the project team. Also, the duality of the role brings to light many of the challenges associated with managing a virtual project that were discussed in Chapter 1.

Empowering The Project Network

Leading A Multicultural Virtual Team

Gone are the days when a project's success is measured only by the accomplishment of the triple constraints. We now know that this is an overly simplistic and narrow view of success, largely because it ignores the human element. 1 We now correctly view projects as a set of technical challenges that must be overcome by a group of people who must work collaboratively and collectively toward the achievement of a common goal. Doing this requires that the set of people be able to share their ideas; coordinate their activities; discuss their insights, perspectives, and opinions; and collectively solve problems. It is this high level of human interaction that, frankly, makes project work so challenging. For virtual project teams, this challenge is compounded by the fact that team members are separated by time and distance, making human interaction even more problematic. As pointed out in Chapter 1, one of the primary differences between traditional projects and virtual projects is that the virtual project team must communicate and collaborate almost exclusively through the use of technology.

Using Technology To Communicate And Collaborate

Much of the pressure to succeed in managing a virtual project falls on the project manager. However, consistent and sustainable success is enabled by critical organizational elements that are the responsibility of a firm's senior leaders. In a recent study conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Center, senior managers of virtual enterprises who were asked if they are responsible and accountable for creating and implementing strategy for their firms, all responded that they do in fact own that responsibility. When the same senior managers were asked if they are responsible and accountable for execution of the strategy, however, answers were generally mixed. Some fully believe they are responsible for execution success, while others believe the responsibility lies with middle managers and virtual project managers. 1

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