Managing marginalisation in virtual teams

by Francis on October 23, 2011

How­ever you con­fig­ure your vir­tual work teams you will always fin­ish up with groups with more and groups with less con­trol over the way the pro­ject is run, groups who get all of the mes­sages and groups who get only some, large groups who can oper­ate self suf­fi­ciently and small groups who can’t.  In amongst all of these com­bin­a­tions of groups you will have some who oper­ate at the centre of the oper­a­tion and those on the mar­gins.  These mar­gins can be geo­graphic, tem­poral or tech­nical, but whatever their form, they are always there and must be con­sciously man­aged and con­trolled to keep your pro­ject on track.

When per­son­nel start to feel mar­gin­al­ised they will begin to behave in ways that are either con­tra to the best interests of the pro­ject or at least not dir­ectly aligned with the pro­jects needs, usu­ally this is not a con­scious or mali­cious reac­tion, simply a sur­vival instinct kick­ing in to help the per­son­nel feel­ing mar­gin­al­ised to believe they have a pur­pose.  These per­son­nel may react in one of sev­eral ways, usu­ally pre­ceded by some form of plea to the pro­ject or line man­age­ment to be allowed to be more engaged.  They could try to do what they believe is the best for the pro­ject, this may be right or wrong when judged against the cent­ral view of the pro­ject goals but at least they would be try­ing, they could simply mark time, doing minor, less con­trib­ut­ory tasks they know to be in the interests of the pro­ject but not neces­sar­iliy the abso­lute best use of their skills and time, or they could act­ively res­ist the cent­ral views of the pro­ject, through either leav­ing the pro­ject to seek more engaged roles else­where or in the worst case act­ively sab­ot­aging the activ­it­ies of the pro­ject through res­ist­ing efforts from the project’s man­age­ment group to dir­ect their and oth­ers efforts. [click to continue…]

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Merits of face to face meetings in a virtual teams project

by Francis on August 21, 2011

There are times in every vir­tual teams pro­ject when there is little real sub­sti­tute for a face to face meet­ing, get­ting every­one, or at least a major­ity of the project’s key play­ers into a single room for a series of meet­ings is peri­od­ic­ally essen­tial to keep the pro­ject on track. These times would typ­ic­ally include, but not be lim­ited to;

  • Plan­ning ses­sions both before the start of a major pro­ject with sub­stan­tial unique fea­tures and at key mile­stones within the pro­ject where it may be going through major struc­tural or organ­isa­tional changes,
  • Kick off meet­ings for com­plex, high value or high risk projects,
  • Cli­ent reviews and present­a­tions (at any stage of a project),
  • Peri­odic internal reviews of pro­ject status,
  • “Spon­sors” meet­ings — though many of these can be held vir­tu­ally, hold­ing some face to face can still bring advantages,
  • Les­sons learned ses­sions — which can be con­duc­ted as a com­bin­a­tion of both face to face a vir­tual pres­ence with some mem­bers of the pro­ject team trav­el­ing to the meet­ing and oth­ers call­ing in when needed,

Now cer­tainly these meet­ings bring value to the pro­ject, and if prop­erly exploited also provide bene­fits to both the base organ­isa­tion and the indi­vidu­als involved; they allow for addi­tional side meet­ings that oth­er­wise would not hap­pen, they allow for some social inter­ac­tion and they allow the vis­it­ors to develop more of an under­stand­ing of the envir­on­ment and cul­ture of the host­ing office, all of which can help the pro­ject and the organ­isa­tion work bet­ter together on cur­rent and future endeav­ours. Yet for all of these bene­fits, many pro­ject organ­isa­tions either put little merit to such meet­ings or in some instances act­ively or pass­ively dis­cour­age them. [click to continue…]

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Outsourcing of higher skilled work and its impact on the virtual team relationship

13 August 2011

For most of the time the vir­tual teams approach has been used in the mod­ern indus­trial world, which is really since the inter­net and com­puter tech­no­logy reached a point where it could sup­port multi centre work, one of the key aspects most heav­ily exploited has been to out­source the more labour intens­ive, less tech­no­logy or […]

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In at the deep end of international communications

9 August 2011

Some time ago I pos­ted a piece titled “Provid­ing ongo­ing assist­ance in the devel­op­ment of inter­na­tional com­mu­nic­a­tion skills” where I dis­cussed ways organ­isa­tions can sup­port their per­son­nel when they are work­ing in vir­tual team based pro­jects, how some ongo­ing sup­port can help the team to con­tinue to grow together and through that growth deliver a […]

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Turn right at the hot dog stand…

7 August 2011

I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a col­league recently where we were dis­cuss­ing dir­ec­tions from an air­port arrivals gate to the city shuttle bus, which, in a little detail was to turn right at the hot dog stand then left a few meters later, exit through the glass doors and look for the shuttle bus. […]

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Do you need a communications coach?

28 May 2011

Quite some time ago I star­ted to think about how best to help senior and gen­er­ally very busy man­agers improve their com­mu­nic­a­tions abil­it­ies when run­ning or work­ing in vir­tual team envir­on­ments.  These people usu­ally come from a world where they are assumed to know everything and yet never have the time to learn new skills […]

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Making first contact across international projects

26 February 2011

Some­thing which comes up quite fre­quently in dis­cus­sions I have with col­leagues, par­tic­u­larly those new to work­ing in vir­tual teams, is whether there is a pro­tocol for estab­lish­ing con­tact at the start of par­ti­cip­a­tion in a new pro­ject. I have dis­cussed this with a num­ber of col­leagues and given it quite a bit of thought […]

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Overcoming communication silos in international projects

11 December 2010

Within com­mu­nic­a­tions in inter­na­tional pro­jects, one often over­looked facet which can be eas­ily addressed, requires com­plex and com­mit­ted effort and can cause sub­stan­tial dam­age if handled badly is the man­age­ment of bar­ri­ers affect­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions between the vari­ous inter­na­tional parties. One of the biggest influ­ences on a pro­jects abil­ity to develop and main­tain an effect­ive inter-office […]

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Providing ongoing assistance in the development of international communications skills

4 December 2010

In an earlier post I dis­cussed the dif­fer­ent levels of sup­port and train­ing offered by organ­isa­tions to their people when deploy­ing them onto inter­na­tional pro­jects, either as ex-pat’s or as home office based per­son­nel work­ing as with inter­na­tional offices. Many organ­isa­tions, in my exper­i­ence and obser­va­tion, will give their per­son­nel some level of induc­tion and […]

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Reasons to leave the cost of training in your project budget

7 November 2010

Often, dur­ing the pro­cess of ini­ti­at­ing new pro­jects, it seems that agreed budgets come under pres­sure, par­tic­u­larly when the newly appoin­ted pro­ject man­ager and cli­ent are review­ing where the mon­ies are to be spent, one of the the first thing to be ques­tioned and, often sub­sequently removed, is the cost of train­ing, which, while an […]

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