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Moving to Virtual Projects Can You Do It?

The project management discipline is experiencing a fundamental change in strategy, tools and techniques. Induced by a myriad set of forces, project managers, team members and executives today face a new breed of opportunities and challenges. Several long-held assumptions related to the methods used to achieve the key objectives of projects are being challenged by new business realities. In several aspects the traditional project management approach appears to be unable to meet the pressures associated with the new economy.

In order to enhance its competitive position and to increase profitability, the new organization should be more effective in managing project details, controlling costs, allocating resources, and adhering to an optimized schedule. On the other hand, business processes are increasingly becoming virtual processes, staffed on the fly by transient teams and distributed across the globe. In order to satisfy these conflicting requirements, management needs a structured, integrated and fully scalable solution for coordinating people, teams, resources and projects that are distributed throughout the enterprise.

Today, the bulk of an organizations activities have a project focus. The development of a software system, the launching of a marketing campaign, the implementation of a new information system, the development of a new product, or the purchase of equipment are all examples of projects. A common challenge to all of these projects is maintaining ongoing communication among project participants. Other challenges include the coordination of the flow of tasks among project participants, and the management of resources to ensure that projects schedules and budgets are met.

Why Virtual Projects?
In todays rapidly changing business environment it is critical for organizations to position themselves to take better advantage of new opportunities that might not be possible through traditional approaches. It is no longer feasible for individual organizations to maintain the entire set of key skills potentially needed on the 21rst century projects.
A virtual project is an optimal way to work in the current environment of time compression, distributed resources, increasing dependency on knowledge-based input, the premium on flexibility and adaptability, and availability of electronic information and communication through networks.
Virtual projects provide a vehicle that can dramatically increase a companys opportunities to create new business in markets normally inaccessible to them. This is because they have a broader skill set and product knowledge base coupled with a deeper pool of personnel to potentially use. Company affiliation and physical location, two of the prime hindrances in the past, are removed as barriers.
It is important to understand that working virtually with personnel from diverse backgrounds isnt something that organizations necessary want to do. It does complicate managerial tasks. Nevertheless, collocation is not always possible or practical and virtual projects are becoming the norm rather than the exception. A prerequisite for the effective management of virtual projects is to have a throughout understanding of their characteristics. These are tackled in the following section.

Characteristics of Virtual Projects
Virtual projects often have some or all of the following characteristics:
1) Involvement of multiple organizations
2) Physically distributed team members
3) Diverse technical backgrounds of team members
4) Advanced technology
5) Aggressive schedule
Although these characteristics are not limited to virtual projects, they are also available on most contemporary projects; nevertheless, the distributed nature of virtual projects increases the complexity of these issues dramatically. In the following sections, these issues are discussed in detail.

Involvement of Multiple Organizations
All virtual projects involve multiple organizations. This does not necessarily imply different companies. Some virtual projects have different sites within the same company collaborating, each with its own distinct organizational structure and culture. Most virtual projects are large projects, but this is not meant to imply a large number of team members. Large means that the project requires multiple skills and multiple departments, site or organizations. Some of the projects analyzed actually started out with a small team (3 to 7 people) and continued to operate in a lean manner throughout the projects lifetime. Projects that operate this way keep costs down by pulling-in critical skills only as necessary. The important characteristic is the involvement of multiple organizations, which brings diversity of organizational structures, cultures, and methods.

Physically Distributed Team Members
Team members interactions are affected by physical location. New technologies (e.g., electronic mail, teleconferencing, and the Internet) allow for physical distribution of team members, but they also affect personnel interaction dynamics creating a new set of non-technical issues to be managed. Diverse Technical Backgrounds of Team Members When team members are rapidly pulled together from different organizations with differing backgrounds and experiences, this results in an increase in the breadth of knowledge, but at the same time increase the likelihood of internal project conflict. This conflict is often compounded by physical distance, which must be carefully considered as it can influence the optimum approach to conflict resolution.

Advanced Technology
Most virtual projects involve multiple organizations with multiple skills trying to solve a new complex challenge.

Aggressive Schedule
Aggressive schedules seem to be more the norm than the exception on most projects today. Nevertheless, it is important that this characteristic be stated explicitly. Aggressive schedules are one reason for moving away from traditional collocated team members to virtual teams. In virtual projects, a lead organization creates alliances with a set of other groups both internal and external that possess the best-in-world competencies to build a specific product or a service in a very short period of time.

Critical Success Factors for Virtual Project Management
One of the best sources of information that tackled comprehensively Working Virtually is Trina Hoefling book Working Virtually Managing People for Successful Virtual Teams and Organizations. The majority of the material in this and the following sections represent a direct synopsis of chapter 4 of this valuable reference.
Nowhere is change going to be more dramatic than in the way organizations functions in the new millennium. Integration is not just hardware, software, and platforms. Integration defines the people, the work, the communication, and the very structure of organizations. A consistent, integrated, systematic approach to virtual work will yield the best results. In virtual organizations, processes are built around information, knowledge management, and collaboration. This usually means change for most organizations, regardless of the core business. Each organization needs to take an honest inventory to assess its current alignment and readiness for virtual work. If that same organization aligns its systems and processes for co-located and virtual work, chaos can be avoided. What does it take to move a traditional organizational structure to a networked, collaborative structure? The four critical success factors (CSF) for virtual work implementation are:
1) Technology
2) Work environment
3) Business processes
4) People
All four CSFs are examined and aligned from the perspective of a networked collaboration. The organizational model looks more like a spider web than a silo. People are aligned with projects and customers, rather than functional departments. Electronic communication and networks, rather than hierarchy, form the backbone of the infrastructure. Work environment, business processes, systems, and infrastructure support reward full involvement, full access to whoever is relevant regardless of title. All strategic partners and stakeholders are connected suppliers, workers, customers, and markets, contractors, even competitors.
Not every organization, however, is ready to fully leap into a web metaphor. They may, in fact, feel caught in a web if leapt into without preparation. Virtual work can and does succeed in more traditional organizations and those in transition, although the distributed global economy is forcing many organizations in a direction that is more permeable.

Readiness, Willingness and Ability
An organization considering virtual project management should assess its readiness, willingness, and ability to work and team virtually. This includes assessing the organizations people, technology, work environment and culture, systems and processes.
Readiness is the organizations literal preparedness for a virtual work environment. Willingness has to do with desire. Ability is the capability of infrastructure, systems, processes, and people to operate in a virtual environment. Readiness, willingness, and ability across the four critical success factors may not be the same. For example, the technology may be ready and in place. The systems and processes may be ready with a few revisions. In the following sections an outline for assessing each one of these critical success factors is discussed.

Technology
The following is a template for assessing the organizational readiness and willingness from a technology perspective.
1) How effectively does the current information technology infrastructure support remote access and collaborative tools?
2) Does the organizations budget support equipping and support remote team members?
3) How does the organization handle equipment and network issues now?
4) How might security policies need to change in an electronically connected environment?
5) Is bandwidth adequate everywhere it will be needed?
6) Is the mechanism in place for knowledge management access and sharing?

The following is a template for assessing the organizational ability and training needs from a technology perspective.
1) Do the collaborative tools function in a way that supports business processes and peoples needs?
2) Can data move quickly enough from workstation to workstation, regardless of location?
3) Do all have equal access to tools and training?
4) Do team members know how to fully utilize the collaborative communication tools available, and are they comfortable sustaining relationships through tool usage?

Work Environment
The following is a template for assessing the organizational readiness and willingness from the work environment perspective.
1) What is the attitude toward virtual work? (Is it seen as mainstream, special circumstances, exception, or a perk?)
2) How do the organizations culture and values support or contradict virtual work?
3) Will virtual work have any impact on the customer?
4) Is the organizations core culture conductive to virtual work?
5) What is the overall management style? Communication style? Meeting style?
6) How are teams currently being used? How might that change if virtual teams are implemented?
7) Does the union support virtual work?
8) What is the competition doing with virtual work?
9) How well designed is the office to accommodate more team meeting spaces?

Drop-in cubicles?
The following is a template for assessing the organizational ability and training needs from the work environment perspective.
1) What communication plans, educational campaigns, and other change management strategies need to be implemented?
2) Are resources (time, facilities, budget) set aside for virtual team development and project planning activities?

Processes
The following is a template for assessing the organizational readiness and willingness from the processes perspective.
1) Which job families and functions are virtually conductive?
2) How do remote locations communicate and report to the rest of the organization?
3) How is productivity measured? How will this measurement change virtually?
4) What systems are set up that support and measure virtual work?
5) What beliefs does the organization have about compensation and incentives?
6) Do these change in a team or virtual environment?
7) Do reward systems recognize work across boundaries and collaboration?
8) How will the career paths of employees change in a virtual environment?
9) How well do current business processes support virtual workflows?
10) Are human resources, organization development, corporate communications, and other functions able to adjust their delivery mechanisms and policies or procedures to support virtual work?
11) How does training currently being done? How do remote employees impact that?

The following is a template for assessing the organizational ability and training needs from the processes perspective.
1) Can delivery systems get resources and tools to the people when needed, regardless of location?
2) Can training, product updates, and mentoring be delivered virtually, or in combination with face-to-face?

People
The following is a template for assessing the organizational readiness and willingness from the people perspective.
1) What are the management constraints? Support? At what levels or divisions?
2) What are the human resources constraints or supports?
3) Overall, what do people like about virtual work or teams? Dislike?
4) How committed is the organizations leadership to virtual work as a strategic initiative?
5) What is the greatest challenge that a virtual team member faces? A virtual manager?

The following is a template for assessing the organizational ability and training needs from the people perspective.
1) Do people know how to fully utilize collaborative software tools?
2) Can team leaders and members rally a team around a common purpose, and maintain commitment and productivity, regardless of dispersed team members?
3) Are people trained in remote operations, netiquette and voicemail etiquette?

Summary
Managing virtual projects requires an assessment of the organization regarding how aligned it is with a greater move toward virtual work. The organization should be ready, willing, and able to accommodate the change required to its technology, work environment, processes, and people associated with virtual project management.

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