White Paper: 3 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail- and How To See it Coming by Wayne Turmel

Ten years ago - heck, five years ago - few people worked on teams with geographically dispersed members. Today, this is very common. Every manager needs or will need to learn how to manage and inspire team members they regularly see "live."

Pal and witty guy Wayne Turmel (a.k.a. The Crank Middle Manager) has written this helpful white paper: 3 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail- and How To See it Coming. You can down load it for free by clicking on the link. A couple interesting quotes from the paper:

• "70% of managers above 1st-level supervisor now have at least one team member who is not co-located with them."
• "Technology and online tools are great but they are effective only if they are used to create context and human connections. Mere data transfer will result in short-term time savings and long term communication problems of the project."
• "A good project requires a mix of synchronous (people can talk at the same time) and asynchronous (people use them at different times) tools to be truly effective."

Comments

[Virtual team challenge]

Following are the techniques such as have a live meeting to jump-start the project, take advantage of today’s technology, know the time zones everyone is in, keep your calls to 45 – 60 minutes, keep everyone actively involved with the conference calls, focus on your meeting and project management skills, develop team building skills. These techniques will help to manage virtual team in good way.