Project Managers onsite or remotely?

I am Program Manager for Latin America working inside the Enteprise PMO in the division named Innovation and Transformation. Each project that is critical for the organization survival is leading by that division. it does mean program/projects from creating a new manufacturing center to creating a business continuity environment or implementing a new way of doing things like Agile. Because of that I have to work with people belonging to different countries due to the activities distribution between centers. Because that programs/projects are level one (according to our clasification) time frame is no more than one year and budget is important.

Cesar -

Many factors are to be considered including the budget :
Organisation / geographical culture
Project's criticality & complexity
Team structure & competency levels
Tolerance & expectations of key stakeholders

For very high critical, complex projects with tough stakeholders and with the challenges of having distributed teams, it is recommended to have the PM at Onsite. Once in a while the PM can travel to meet the distributed teams as well. It actually makes a lot of difference in building good relationship rather than only audio / video calls.

If there are not many challenges then the PM can work remotely and can make customer & team visits once in a month or so.

Cesar -

I'm a pragmatist so I'll always go with - "it depends". Things like urgency, stakeholder perceptions, availability of collaboration technology and many other factors will dictate which approach is best for a given project.

Kiron

I believe most of the projects can be managed remotely, dependent on the nature of the projects. However, face-to-face communication is still vital for many stakeholders, which needs to be accommodated for.

Cesar, from my experience, unfortunately, video conference calls are often not as effective as face-to-face communication. It may work well for some stakeholders, whereas others may consider it not being fit for purpose / may feel limited to contribute / participate etc. I personally always aim to have the first interaction on a face-to-face basis and during the course of the meeting, discuss and agree approaches that would work best for individuals. Some stakeholders may prefer regular written updates, rather than video or face-to-face meetings, whereas, others may prefer biweekly face-to-face reviews. It really does depend on the importance of the project to them / how much their business-as-usual activities are potentially to be affected. I do believe PM needs to be able to accommodate for different stakeholder preferences to avoid delays / improve satisfaction etc., therefore, I think projects being delivered 100% remotely is rarely the best course of action.

I think most projects could be handled remotely.

That being said - I can see the status of software or IT projects remotely fairly easy. No matter where I go it will always have to be viewed on a computer.

Building construction may be another issue. It can certainly be set up to view the building remotely, but it would be much harder to dig in and get the details of how things are from a visual inspection.

Process improvement projects are more abstract. I have done these remotely, but with purely remote teams. I think being remote would be harder if you were working on improving a process that exists solely in the physical world in one building. It could be done, I just think it would be harder. In both cases, you are very reliant on the output of the results being the key to success. You are not always going to be able to "see" the project status - which I think makes it more irrelevant where you are located. In some cases it may be more useful to be present in the building Manufacturing comes to mind and the production process because you can watch the process occurring more easily than some other business type processes.

Cesar, depends on the project. If the project is delivered for external company that is paying for it, the original quote should accommodate for several visits as a minimum. If we are talking about internal projects then it would depend on how critical the project is. As per constraint model, if the budget is very limited for the project, then it is likely to impact a number of activities and therefore, the time required might be much greater. Talking about comms process, yes, however, it is quite high-level in the beginning, to enable flexibility / adaptability to specific requirements.