Diverse teams dynamics and trust

Thanks for the insights. For the stakeholder strategy, do you establish meetings with team members (or sub teams depending on size) and also with their management or their internal leaders? Do you put in place formal specific SLAs or do you just work with basic rules stated in contracts?

Thanks for such practical suggestions, I like the one about creating your own team culture. Do you rely just on daily project events and interactions or do you sometimes also organize some team building events?

I primarily meet with team or subteams, and I keep my company’s internal leaders and other companies’ managements informed of the meetings and their outcomes. This makes it far easier to obtain decisions from them when required, as opposed to trying to catch them up with all the particulars of a situation.
In projects like this I prefer to establish formal SLAs. They essentially restate the various agreements laid out in the contracts the various parties signed with one another, and they do a good job of managing expectations across all the stakeholders.

I don’t usually engage in traditional team building events. They can be costly and difficult to organize with distributed teams, and their success depends mostly on the participants’ openness to the idea. Also, external vendors will likely charge their usual hourly rates if you want their people to attend a team building event, and that’s on top of the event’s registration costs for their people. It’s possible to make the vendors assume these costs during contract negotiations, but they have little incentive to do so after the contracts are signed.
All the engineers on my current co-located team hate typical team building events, and forcing them to attend would create ill will. However, they naturally gather to talk about non-work things like multiplayer gaming and TV shows, so I join their discussions to foster an environment where non-work interactions are encouraged, so long as all our work is still done. The results of this have been superb – our collaboration is great, and we are highly productive.
With distributed teams I also encourage people to strengthen their interpersonal relationships through non-work interactions. It can be difficult to draw external vendors into this idea, for their management often instructs them to act in a particular manner with customers. However, we hold quite a few teleconferences each week, and I typically call in 15 minutes early. I strike up a non-work conversation with others who call in early, and we end up having a great time before the meeting. This has helped people get to know one another better, and has resulted in team members collaborating more with each other via instant messaging. I plan to continue doing this with teams in the future.
I’ll also look into more non-traditional team building ideas. For example, my team got the chance to tour a Microsoft data center a few months ago when we were assessing Microsoft’s cloud hosting capabilities, and they loved it. In the future I’ll seek more opportunities for this team to take a behind-the-scenes look at technology.