Do you have a successful experience in working as a Project Manager remotely?

Evgeniya,

I did remote project management for about five years, managing a team six hours away. The arrangement worked out as I did most of the traveling (which was international). When home, I would visit the office one day every couple of weeks on average to keep connected with my formal reporting lines.

Our project war room had video conferencing along with my home office and other locations. So, between that and collaboration tools the arrangement worked out very well. My experience in general though is that there needs to be a compelling reason for a PM to work from home in a traditional enterprise (e.g. international stakeholders as Kiron stated) otherwise it is frowned upon due to the degree of engagement a PM has with stakeholders and team members in a local environment.

My employer's offices are all over the world, as are our suppliers, and our customers so on many of my projects, most of the people are remote to most others. It is an extremely large matrix organization so most people are working multiple projects, adding some significant challenges as a PM.

It is hard to schedule time with multiple people every time you have an issue. What I see some PMs doing is calling many 30 minute meetings to try to both raise and address an issue in the course of the meeting. Most come into the meeting blind to the subject, and it's a discussion that deserves more thought. I do not find that effective.

What I am doing more and more is having individual conversations with each of the critical stakeholders prior to when many need to meet, figure out how to focus the discussion, and how long a discussion should realistically take. It involves more time on my end for the pre-coordination and planning, but there are less large meetings and I find them far more productive.

From 25 year ago I am working in this type of environments. In fact, I firmly believe is the way of work for the next years due to organizations can take advantage of lot of things related to project mangement from costs to work time.

Evgeniya

I have experience doing both and have worked with both in-office and remote scrum masters, product managers, project managers, and IT.

My take is that remote is OK as long as the workforce are proven contributors with a high degree of discipline both in communication and the work.

My preference is in-office for the bigger, more costly, more complex projects.

Mikel

Hi Luis ,

I have a question reg 99.99 % availability on a project.. can you pl help me getting an answer for the below question..
You are operating a mission-critical system on behalf of one of your customers. You are contractually committed to high-availability of over 99.999% of the time. What methods and procedures will you install to ensure the needed system availability? How will you act when you find out the system is down unexpectedly?

Thanks in advance.
Shoba.