The Virtual Project: Managing Tomorrow's Team Today
The concept of the virtual team is so new that little research exists to explain how to manage one. But you need your team of widely dispersed personnel up and running—yesterday.
Here are some tips. by John R. Adams and Laura L. Adams
EXTRAORDINARY DEMANDS ARE PLACED on project personnel—demands that require extraordinary commitments in order to accomplish the task at hand. Generating this commitment through the process of team building is a primary responsibility of any project manager. The processes of team building have been studied extensively by both academics and practitioners for decades, but until recently, nearly all of these studies were conducted within the bureaucratic setting: that is, the team members shared a common workplace, saw each other frequently, knew each other well, and expected to continue working together for an extended period of time. The team building concepts developed within such an environment naturally reflect these working conditions as either stated or implied assumptions, and the concepts derived from these studies can be assumed to hold only as long as these assumptions hold.
These team building concepts still hold for projects intended to support and improve bureaucratic organizations. In the vast majority of cases, however, the working conditions experienced by modern projects differ greatly from those surrounding traditional bureaucratic work. Nevertheless, the basic definitions of team building concepts continue to emphasize the assumption of typical bureaucratic working conditions. For example, one leading textbook in the field (Kast and Rosenzweig's Organization and Management: A Systems and Contingency Approach, McGraw-Hill, 1985) states that "actual teamwork involves small groups of three to fifteen people that meet face-to-face to carry out their assignments." Even in PMI's current PMBOK Guide (pp. 99–100), one of the five basic "tools and techniques" of team development is called "collocation," which involves "… placing all, or almost all, of the most active project team members in the same physical location to enhance their ability to perform as a team." In both of these publications, the concept of the virtual project is clearly ignored.
