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I live in the Seattle area where most of the early outbreaks occurred in the US. Precautions in the area have gone to shutting down all restaurants.. One employee at my own company tested positive, and then all non-essential personnel were sent home. I myself have seen quite a number of PM related effects.
- Working virtual is great, but if tens of thousands of new employees are suddenly working from home full time, it overloads the network. You get WebEx problems, network connectivity issues, phone line issues, and it slows things down.
- Instead of MBWA (Management By Walking Around), there are more scheduled meetings required to review project performance, and that adds overhead.
- If you don't have a dedicated "Work" workstation at home and suddenly work from home full time, you will be less efficient. Everyone in my office has at least 2 monitors. If you just take a laptop home, things like managing multiple documents is difficult, and it can be very un-ergonomic. Even if you have a nice personal office at home, it may not be easily compatible with company provided hardware.
- Your sub-tier suppliers can have their own sets of issues. You may deal with things like part shortages due to staffing issues. Even if your own business runs efficiently on a purely virtual basis, not every business you deal with will be able to adapt so well.
- Morale may start to suffer. Personal interactions, and the working relationships we build are important when facing difficult times. We chat with our co-workers, have retirement parties, eat lunches together, and other things that suddenly cease.
- Financials become critical. When many businesses are shut down or negatively impacted by the measures taken to contain the outbreak, every "nice to do" but not "must do" project gets shut down.
Some of the issues with a sudden transition to virtual work will quickly be resolved, but it does create a lot of disruption until things are stabilized.
