Managing a Global Team Project
The planet is shrinking. Well, it’s not literally shrinking, but that’s one way of saying that global communications have grown so fast paced that the world is truly one community in a lot of respects. The Internet, email, instant messaging and VOIP have made it feasible to conduct business with trading partners all over the world without leaving your workplace.
For many organizations at the cutting edge of new business paradigms, geographically isolated businesses are becoming a thing of the past. You may easily set together a business consortium or project team of subject matter experts from around the world and in all time zones. Indeed, this type of decentralized management of company projects is becoming more the rule than the exception in the twenty first century commercial environment.
So, just as those in marketing, product development and investments have already learned how to maximize a project team that is separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, the project manager must also adapt the project management methodology to accommodate a similar approach to getting business done.
Thousands of firms have used conventional project management as a systematic way to take a project from scope to implementation. There is no need to discard this well developed system. But as new business paradigms come to play, we need to adjust even a basic approach like project management to meet the way business is done in this century.
The key to any successful endeavor is communication. That is the problem of having a crew spread over a large geographic area. You’ll probably be working on the entire project with people you never see. To enable frequent and up to current communications, we need to leverage the technology we have at our disposal such as…
§ Blogs, wiccis and shared working spaces. Group sharing scenarios are becoming more and more widespread on the web. A tool set on line where team members may publish progress reports, leave emails, update the project management software, file expense reports and keep in touch with each other facilitates the kind of communication that keeps the team moving forward successfully. Blogs, private message boards and wiccis are also great ways to have an ongoing “conversation” between team members that anyone can look into and get up to speed with the content of what has been done and what is planned for the project.
§ Managed email trees. Email is an apparent approach for a project manager to keep in touch with team members rapidly. But it might be a little hectic trying to stay up on fast moving email trees. That could be a good reason to trap all emails trees within your on-line project management software so the contributions of everybody on the team can be captured for subsequent evaluation.
§ IM staff meetings. IM can be broadened so it’s not just two people. You can use an IM conference room to arrange your weekly staff meetings and record the entire events in the IM log so that nothing discussed “falls through the cracks.”
Learn how to use cyberspace as the principal “place” for interaction among members of your project team and you may practically assemble a team of highly specialized individuals from anywhere in the world. This greatly enhances your capacity to tap the greatest minds for your job and simplifies the project management process. It will take time to get used to it and there will be some mistakes along the road. However, if you are able to run global teams with the help of internet tools, it will be a skill that will be handy to execute global projects successfully for your organization.
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