Five Strategies for Managing a Virtual Team

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  Communications Management   CRM   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

Project managers spend a lot of time “managing” things: people, activities, communication, conflict, issues, risks, the customer and even third-party vendors (the list goes on and on). And this doesn’t really change if the project is being run remotely (a remotely located project manager overseeing a project that is being implemented by a geographically dispersed project delivery team).

However, there are certain strategies and actions that the PM may take when managing a virtual team in order to make it more productive. These strategies will also increase the likelihood for a successful project implementation--and hopefully a very satisfied customer post-deployment. I’ve personally found these to be beneficial because over the past four years, I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Focus on building relationships
You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter, audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can …

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