Effectively Managing and Profiting with Virtual Project Teams

By Scott Shulga – Revised January 30, 2009:

Information technology industry surveys consistently show that over 80% of IT development projects end-up late, over budget or “on the shelf”. This sorry statistic combined with current business management war cries of “Reduce costs!”, “Do more with less!”, “Reduce headcount!”, provide a formidable challenge to IT management when new application solutions must be implemented. Many organizations are creating virtual project teams, using a mix of offshore, outsourced and key internal resources in an attempt to provide a cost effective approach for meeting business needs. But even the most savvy project manager must watch out for a formidable set of project risks.

Although virtual project teams may provide significant rewards to an organization, new risks and challenges quickly emerge for those inexperienced in this type of team approach. Project team members can no longer “throw requests over the wall” to the next cubicle. Project managers must plan and implement an effective project infrastructure to support team members. A project infrastructure can best be defined as the software, hardware, network, data, and content comprising the working environment of the project team. Here’s how using an integrated project infrastructure can significantly reduce the risks commonly associated with the virtual project team approach.

Communication – The success of any project relies on crisp, moment-to-moment communication of task assignments, responsibilities, milestones, issues and problems. The timeliness of corrective actions relies on the speed of team member communication. An infrastructure providing real-time project information, via the Internet or a virtual private network (VPN), that connects team members, management and customers is required to have a chance at success. Great team communication will also serve as the basis for building the trust, group synergy and espirit de cor required to be successful.

Project Life-Cycle Methods – Many IT organizations have problems consistently following standard project life-cycle processes in areas such as requirements gathering, conceptual design, technical design, program documentation, and testing. With virtual project teams, enforcement of standards becomes doubly difficult. This risk can be reduced if team members can access the project methodology via an effective project infrastructure as part of their daily work. This infrastructure contains the latest process and standards documentation and provides templates for each activity and deliverable, so team members naturally follow processes and create standard deliverables as part of their daily activities.

Management of Project Tasks – One popular management technique for local project teams is “Managing by Walking Around” – that is having brief daily one-on-one discussions with team members to understand what they are working on, resolve issues and set work priorities. With virtual project teams, the project manager no longer has this luxury. The project infrastructure must “serve up” the daily tasks and problems to be resolved by team member by priority. An effective approach is an e-dashboard for each team member displaying tasks and milestones, issues to resolve, upcoming team teleconferences and other assigned customer requests. A project manager’s dashboard contains a roll-up of the team’s tasks and status along with the PM’s own task list.

Project team knowledge and cross-team collaboration – The most valuable asset of any IT organization is the collective knowledge of its staff. One of the greatest risks of using a virtual project team is loss of this collective knowledge. Since most virtual teams use contractors and/or offshore outsourcing, a knowledge-based approach must be implemented as a way of effectively capturing their applications and technical knowledge. A project infrastructure providing knowledgebase capability will allow team members to collaborate on and share source code, articles, lessons learned, tips & tricks, procedures, sample deliverables and other project artifacts. If coupled with a powerful search and retrieval engine this capability will provide great payback on future projects.

Quality of Deliverables – It’s tough enough creating quality deliverables that meet customer expectations when the project team is local. For virtual project teams, the quality plan and process must be documented and posted for team members, management and customers to review and follow. Many organizations have process and quality initiatives underway, such as SEI/CMM, ISO and Six Sigma that require on-going quality measurement on project, department and company levels. The monitoring of these measurements or metrics provides feedback to management on the progress of quality improvement. The project infrastructure should support these initiatives.

Reporting of Project and Budget Status – A common joke around the IT industry is that a project is often 90% complete for most of its duration. Issuing a truly accurate status report to management and customer is important. Capturing time and status by task on a daily basis is a critical input into the status reporting process. If the project infrastructure provides the vehicle to collect hours worked, estimates-to-complete and percent complete by task, the project manager can validate these items and get an accurate picture of where work stands against budget and schedule. Add any issues to be resolved and the project manager has the fundamental basis for giving an accurate project and budget status.

Proper Security – Use of the Internet as the backbone to collaborate on a project presents new risks to the team used to working in the confines of the corporate intranet. It’s the project manager’s responsibility to not allow his or her project environment, documents and data to become accessible to the competition, or even worse, hackers on the Internet. To insure proper security, the project infrastructure should use industry standard security approaches such as a VPN or employee user validation techniques, SSL, digital certificates or LDAP Authentication.

High Customer Service Levels During and After Implementation – Whether a customer is an internal department or a professional services client, high levels of customer service are expected. During the project, a great technique for elevating customer service is by granting the customer on-line access, perhaps through their own e-dashboard, to certain parts of the project infrastructure. The current status of project tasks, issues and deliverables can be made readily available to the customer for review and comment. In this situation, the customer continually has expectations set properly. After implementation, if knowledge sharing has not been addressed, customer service will certainly be negatively impacted. An ever-growing project knowledgebase coupled with an on-line customer help-desk function with electronic assignment to the correct support team member will allow timely response to customer queries and problems.

To help implement a project infrastructure solution, there are many software product alternatives that address one or more of the risks facing virtual project teams. Some major products include Planview, CA Clarity (Niku) and Microsoft Project Server. Other emerging products include Leader’s Assistant from ByNet Software (www.leadersassistant.com), CollabNet and Basecamp. Leader’s Assistant appears to be, at this time, the most cost effective solution addressing most of the above risks with a fully integrated, web-based solution.

To summarize, if a project manager focuses on mitigating the eight major risks for virtual project teams by implementing an effective, integrated project infrastructure, the probability of project success will be much higher than industry statistics.

Project Management Services & Products

ByNet Software Products and Services work together with the result that our clients benefit from both avenues to improve their business.  To discuss how ByNet Software products and services may assist your company to achieve excellence in managing its projects, please contact ByNet Software at 949.932.8906 or via