And ... if this pandemic lasts for many months

Luis,

I managed international projects remotely for many years and learned the hard way what works and what doesn’t (at least for my environments). I had successes and less-than-successful outcomes with teams, with most of the less-than-successful outcomes occurring on cultural way-of-working, risk tolerance, and corporate political concerns. In truth, physical presence was needed a lot more often than one might think, as the human interactions of vulnerability, empathy, and courage (to name a few) are not easily transferable with static remote communications.

In addition, problem-solving and brain-storming sessions (i.e., meetings and workshops) often require collaborative visualization (e.g., dynamic whiteboarding ) and team exercises to be effective. Let alone the need to examine the body language and facial expressions of your colleagues and opponents.

With that said, I foresee in the not too distant future the need for “realistic - virtual reality” collaboration tools, wherein we have a virtual presence in a virtual room, able to respond and read the participants no differently than if there was physical-presence. With such tooling, human interaction deficits would be largely mitigated.

With or without these tools, an empowered project manager is even more critical in remote environments as the elasticity of project variables correspond directly to the physical and cultural distance of the team members.

Dear Geroge
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a Toastmasters session in which all participants (42) had their camera on during the session
When the speaker and / or someone else is speaking, the image is enlarged, allowing to see what he says (oral language) and how he says it (paralanguage)

I watched, on television, an orchestra sing and play "Va, pensiero", also a chorus of the third act of the opera Nabucco (1842) by Giuseppe Verdi

The conductor placed at the center conducting the orchestra and each member of the orchestra (choir) in their home

Those tools you mentioned exist and are being used

Dear Luis,

How many of the forty two people will actually replay and watched the video that they made of the Toastmaster session.

People will take pictures and make videos in huge number for the novelty factor but as a tool for learning, its power seems to be diminishing.

The key to learning is to have interesting and engaging speaker and topics discussed in a format that you can relate to.

Also as for the virtual conductor, in the background a lot of mixing and time delays occurs that allow the conductor to sequence the musical movements together. Even though it may say live and real time, to get everybody member of an orchestra in sync with a piece of music using the internet and remotely in each of their homes is well next to impossible because of technical and practical issues.

For example if you watch the same streamed program from the Internet on different devices you will get different lag times that can range from splits seconds to half a minute in some cases.

I do admire that people are making the most of the tools that are available to them for their own benefit and everybody else benefit to try to keep life going as normal as possible.

Daire

Dear George,

Could you explain what you mean by "the elasticity of project variables correspond directly to the physical and cultural distance of the team members?"

Daire

Dear Geroge
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a Toastmasters session in which all participants (42) had their camera on during the session
When the speaker and / or someone else is speaking, the image is enlarged, allowing to see what he says (oral language) and how he says it (paralanguage)

I watched, on television, an orchestra sing and play "Va, pensiero", also a chorus of the third act of the opera Nabucco (1842) by Giuseppe Verdi

The conductor placed at the center conducting the orchestra and each member of the orchestra (choir) in their home

Those tools you mentioned exist and are being used

Luis,

What you described is not virtual reality. I’m talking about an immersive experience where your visual and auditory stimuli are fully engulfed in a virtual environment that appears real (e.g., a workshop or meeting experience). In this environment, you are able to interact and perceive individuals and devices as if you were there. You would be able to collaborate with them at a level that would emulate physical presence, removing the issues that go with static communications.

Hi Daire,

This is a generalized statement that the variables a project manager works-with are easily stretched and distorted when there is distance between the PM and the stakeholders / teams. Now, the PM may “get a handle on them,” thus the variables will start to take normal-form, but the difficulty of getting there correlates to the physical and cultural distance of the project.

Classic project variables: Time, Cost, Quality, Scope, Risk
Stakeholder management variables: Identification, Analysis, Management, Control, Politics
Etc., etc.,

Dear Rami
Thank you for sharing your opinion with us

As project managers do we have to predict scenarios and, based on those scenarios, identify and assess risks?

I disagree that VR/AR will take over the PM world (at least not in the near future).
The need for physical/VR/AR interactions is necessary to use all communication channels based on our sensors. If we use only audio via audio-conference, we have less opportunity to be effective communicators. But it will take some time trying-and-failing until we are good at it. Again, there will be a few gurus, minority of "kinda know how to do it", and overwhelming majority of failures because they will not be able to adjust.

I believe that video-conferencing will be paramount to create better teams, some PMs will excel at it, some will fail. We will notice a larger group managing by "checklist" or by the title of their position. On the other hand, those who manage by "charisma", "soft skills", verbally, influence, knowledge - will need to reorg the skills and adapt them to work in remote management.