Moloy ChakrabortyPrincipal Project Manager| WSP UK LTDHigh Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom
Your project is executed with a globally spread virtual team. The project progress has been found to be too slow. Which measure is most likely to immediately help team members act as a team and speed up the project?
A) Technical training for all team members
B) Daily phone conferences and detailed reporting
C) A team meeting at a location convenient to all team members
D) Collocation of team members at a suitable place Saving Changes...
I agree that B is the most appropriate answer. However, careful to keep the daily conferences limited (in time and attendees) and don't overburden with reporting. A good initial call to align the team with strategic follow-up calls and reporting will increase efficiency through alignment while not burdening the team with excessive overhead. The reasons I discounted the other choices. A - Technical retraining does not address teamwork. It is likely that the evaluation of the slow project progress considers the talent that has been allocated. C - It is not likely that this is a cost effective or timely response. Although strategic face-to-face meetings could be part of the solution. D - Not practical or immediate. Saving Changes...
What is the root cause of the problem you are trying to solve? Team building issues are not the same as task dependencies.
The biggest impediment I've found, on work being done globally, is significantly different time zones. Colocation can solve this, but is more expensive than having people adjust their schedules, for a short time, so that they overlap.
We had a major project where the only team the vendor had that worked on our specific issue was in Germany. We would find a problem in the morning and report it. Their team would work on it overnight, and we would test the fix the next morning. If there were more problems, it could take a week for a few hours worth of work. Having the people involved overlap their schedules for a few hours, each day, sped up the process to the point that issues could sometimes be resolved the same day.
I realize this isn't always possible, but it's cheaper than collocation. Saving Changes...
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