Monthly Archives: September 2013

The foundation of teamwork is having a shared vision of the situation. From that, the team can create an action plan to move towards a common objective. When the team is dispersed on different campuses, different cities or different countries, creating the shared vision and plans becomes even more difficult, so in most cases, its poorly done or not done at all.  This leads to people working on the wrong things, the right things in the wrong order, or right things with the wrong information.  These situations are called “synchronization errors”.

Some of the most synchronization errors arising from location confusion can be boiled down to two root causes:

Time Phasing – delays in communications.  When working across multiple time zones and across different schedules, the critical information is often communicated at different times.  In an environment with a distributed team, it’s difficult for people to get the answer when they need it, leading to blockages (waiting), quality problems (working with erroneous assumptions), and missed opportunities to accelerate progress.

Batch Communications – not all information is shared with everyone.  When the teams come together once or twice a week (or even every day) on a conference call, the communication is limited in scope and duration.  The typical informal communication around lunch or in the coffee room when teams are co-located just does not happen with remote teams.  Thus, the team loses a critical aspect of collaboration – information and insight.

Since the time shifting and distance are difficult (until someone changes the need for sleep and invents the teleporter), you’ll have to work on two dimensions of team communication: frequency and content.

So first, the content.  We typically don’t have much time, so we want to give the team a quick overview of the project and the status so we can focus on moving forward.  We like visual project boards to show project context combined with purposeful, stand up meetings to focus on moving forward.  With a distributed team, you’ll need two identical boards or one electronic board.

Visual Portfolio Board review
Team at board

Electronic Visual Project Management Board

Anyone can put up a board that visualizes the project, but the key to creating value is how the board is designed and how you run your formal communications process.  The stand up meeting sets the stage and establishes a hierarchy to solve problems; it focuses the team on the future and orients them to action.  Additionally, this reduces the need to meet other times and even if you need a high frequency of meetings per week, the duration is shorter and the content more meaningful than traditional project reviews.

The critical information to synchronization are:

Which projects have the highest risk?  The board shows the status of ALL work in the system, so the team can see big picture and how each piece fits together.

Which tasks are the most critical in those projects?  The board shows the flow of each project or work stream to quickly identify those tasks that are stuck.

Who owns them?  Each task has a name of the manager accountable for the completion.

What is the action to accelerate completion?  The resolution is assigned in the stand up meeting.

This solution was implemented in at one of our client’s site.  They were concerned that they would fail to deliver a new product, and identified a specific chipset design for a critical component as the main cause of the delay.  The team responsible for the design was far from the assembly site and had fallen months behind without even knowing it.  By using an electronic visual project management tool, the chipset team saw the overall progress of the project and saw their role in the project execution.    The visual project system helped the team bring focus to their efforts. By being alerted to the significance of their contribution and the delay in their progress, they had re-prioritized other less critical work and assigned additional resources to their task, closing a four month output gap in just one and a half months.

 

Read more about how to synchronize work at the right times in our new eBook, Remote Control: How to Get Productive Teamwork from Distributed Project Teams.

Schedule a Consultation

Click Here

Managing any project team can be challenging. Managing a distributed team is a challenge cubed.

 

In any project, coordinating the workflow among your resources is almost always difficult. When multiple teams are involved, that challenge is multiplied; if those teams are distributed across various campuses, countries or even continents, the effect on complexity is exponential, escalating the challenge in three dimensions:

Poor communications: When you collaborate across distances, bringing everyone together for meetings or calls may be difficult or impossible, compromising the decision-making process.

Distance adds delays: Every mile adds minutes (or hours, days and weeks) to the workflow. Working across multiple locations means additional wait
times for parts, information, decisions, responses, plans and more.

Too many variables: For managers, there are simply too many moving pieces, too many parts (tasks, supplies, locations and resources) and too much data to manage project information effectively among all the players.<

For distributed team management, the ugly truth is that traditional tools (such as spreadsheets, groupware, SharePointTM, and ad hoc meetings) fail to master the project execution complexities imposed by multiple tasks, resource groups, and locations. The combination of data profusion and location confusion makes it difficult for managers to balance load and capacity: the resources available for the work at hand.

There are any number of tools that might help, but a truly effective solution must give you the power to control the four most urgent challenges faced by managers of distributed teams:

Synchronization of work and resources
Managing deadlines –commitments and delivery of internal and external task completion dates dictated by the project
Reconciliation of resource capacity with work load
Managing risk – understanding the level of uncertainty in the project plan to effectively manage execution

I will expand upon each area further in the coming weeks, but if you want to jump right to the solution and learn how to get control of your distributed teams, read our newest eBook, Remote Control: How to Get Productive Teamwork from Distributed Project Teams.

Remote Control eBook Cover

Schedule a Consultation

Click Here