Virtual Team = Project Disaster? (Part 1)

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Teams  

I was talking to some project managers the other day and was asking them how things were going with their projects. One of them said that he had just been assigned a project where almost everyone on the team was remote; he screwed his nose up as if he wasn’t very happy about that. I asked him what the problem was. “It’s impossible to be successful when your team is virtual,” he said. “There’s just no way to manage the project properly.”

That’s a pretty strong statement, but I suspect that it’s a fairly common sentiment. In this two-part article, I want to look at why that doesn’t have to be the case--and explore some approaches that will help to make those projects successful.

Before we start, let’s have a little sober taste of reality. In the global economy that we all now work in--and with the constant pressure to do more with less--virtual teams are a reality. Whether it is outsourcing work, leveraging internal expertise that exists in other offices, supporting remote workers or any of a hundred different variations, if a project manager cannot successfully deliver projects where at least some of the resources are working virtually, then that project manager won’t have a job for very long.

Understanding the problems
At the most basic level, challenges with managing virtual teams come …

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