CHAPTER 1
WORKING IN A VIRTUAL WORLD

As Jeremy Bouchard adjourned his weekly team meeting, he paused to reflect how much his project environment had changed in less than six months. Until that time, the projects that he managed were traditional in that the project team was co-located, allowing the team members to conduct their team meetings across the table from one another and Jeremy to "manage by walking around" on a daily basis. Today, as he adjourned the meeting while sitting alone in his office staring at his computer screen, he realized how drastically things had changed now that he is the manager of a virtual project.

Jeremy's story is one of sudden change-change that was driven by the acquisition of his company by a much larger company with a global presence, Sensor Dynamics, a manufacturer of specialized sensor products in an emerging technology segment called the Internet of Things. Unlike many of his colleagues, he welcomed the change and looked forward to applying his well-honed project management skills on a larger scale with Sensor Dynamics.

That opportunity came quickly. Jeremy was assigned the project manager role for a new human biometric sensor product-an emerging market with rapid growth potential. Through a recent company reorganization, which is common following an acquisition, Jeremy is now reporting to the Project Management Office director, a veteran employee of Sensor Dynamics. His project team is a combination of people from his old organization and the new one. They are distributed across three locations in his home country and three locations in other countries.

He now finds himself leading a team of people, most of whom he has never met personally. Six weeks into the project planning process, Jeremy is trying to come to terms with the increased difficulty associated with managing a virtual project versus a traditional project. As he says, he is feeling like a "fish out of water" while trying to learn the nuances associated with changes in common project management practices and the complexities associated with leading a distributed, and mostly virtual, project team.

Even the most common project management tasks, like creating the project charter, are proving to be monumental challenges. In particular, Jeremy has continual disagreements regarding team member roles and responsibilities. Despite repeated attempts, he has not been able to establish team consensus. Additionally, there is growing conflict between two key project team members on the goals of the project. The conflict is threatening to cause wider team dysfunction. Because the individuals are separated by geographical distance, the conflict is escalating in every email exchange between the two.

Jeremy is also learning about people's reluctance to collaborate with one another on a distributed team. He has tasked two team members to develop a combined task plan since their deliverables will be intertwined. Two weeks into the effort, it has become apparent that they have not yet begun to communicate, let alone collaborate in any way to create the task plan. Team members seem very reluctant to share information. Jeremy cannot determine if the problem is a lack of trust or if there is an underlying sense that "information is power" to the owner. Hence, they are keeping information to themselves.

Then there is the technology problem. Jeremy has had to revert to the use of phone conversations and email in order to communicate and collaborate reliably. Even though Sensor Dynamics has deployed an enterprise-level team collaboration system, some team members are either unable or unwilling to adapt to the technology. This is especially true of team members in countries other than Jeremy's.

The most frustrating thing to Jeremy, however, is the realization that management by walking around is now impossible. He has not been able to establish a new method for connecting with his team members or for staying on top of project progress.

Jeremy decided to raise his issues with his manager, Brent Norville. Norville, the Project Management Office director of Sensor Dynamics, has been with the company for over a decade and has experienced the transformation of the company to a virtual organization firsthand. As Bouchard and Norville began their conversation, Bouchard shared that he was having trouble adjusting to the virtual project environment he was now working within.

Norville explained that he understood that the virtual project environment in which Sensor Dynamics executes its projects is significantly different than what Bouchard was used to. He also explained that he understood that the sudden change from traditional to virtual project management is the exception rather than the norm. Sensor Dynamics as a company has been transitioning for more than a decade, and most project managers who come into the organization have had some experience working on or managing virtual projects. Norville explained that it takes time to understand and effectively work in a virtual project environment. He also explained that many of the factors that make managing a virtual project so different have little to do with the project management fundamentals that Bouchard is well versed in. Rather, the differences come in understanding how those fundamentals have to be practiced differently and how more focus, time, and personal effort have to be applied toward leading the virtually distributed team. Norville also offered to act as a coach to Bouchard when needed to accelerate his transition from traditional to virtual project manager.

This conversation led Bouchard to realize that he was playing a game of catch-up to many of his project management peers who had at least some experience managing a virtual project and leading a distributed team.

Now, we have to recognize that Bouchard's story is an extreme example. Fortunately, the majority of project managers are not introduced to the world of virtual project management in such a sudden and abrupt manner. That does not mean that we did not each experience all or many of the perplexing problems facing Bouchard. We more than likely encountered them over time instead of all at once. Much like wading from the shallow end to the deep end of a swimming pool when learning to swim, most project managers can transition from traditional to virtual project management practices at a measured pace as their virtual awareness and confidence increases. However, we still hear stories of people being thrown in the deep end of the pool and struggling to learn and apply best practices to be effective.

Truth be told, nearly all projects today are at least partially virtual in nature. If your company outsources some of its work, or allows employees to telecommute, or is distributed in multiple locations (even in the same city), you are working for a virtual organization. Of course, distributed team members and the work they perform is not new, but to view our companies as virtual organizations is a paradigm shift for many. Even teams that are co-located work somewhat in a virtual manner through the prolific use of email, instant messaging, collaboration sites, social media technologies, and other forms of mobile applications. How often have you sent an email or instant message to people on your team whose offices are in the same building or possibly right next to your own? Likewise, how many times do we engage in teleconferences where we can hear a person speaking who sits near us in one ear and then a few milliseconds later in our other ear through the telephone receiver? For some, like Nora Bennington, this is a strange new world:

I just don't understand it sometimes. I'm constantly getting IMs [instant messages] from people sitting no more than 30 feet from me, wanting to engage in a conversation on a particular topic. When I get up and walk over to their offices to have a real conversation, they react with complete surprise. Like I'm violating some unwritten policy that we can't engage in real conversation anymore.

For Bennington and others, getting used to working on a virtual project is a slow process. Some don't even realize that the project world has changed so rapidly around them. In September 2015, Global Workplace Analytics, a company that helps organizations understand emerging workplace strategies such as telecommuting, open office, and flexibility work, updated its statistics on what it calls distributed or mobile work in the United States. It is showing some significant growth in this measure. From 2005 to 2014, this demographic of the workforce doubled from 1.8 million to 3.7 million. This statistic includes both nonprofit and profit-based organizations.1

But what defines a virtual project? By itself, the use of technology to communicate and even collaborate does not define a virtual project. Rather, a virtual project is one in which its resources are separated by geographic or temporal space.2 In extreme cases, the members of a virtual project are separated by organizational boundaries, national borders, continents, and multiple time zones.3 In such situations, it is highly likely that the members of a project team will never meet face-to-face. For many of us, this has been a major shift in the way we participate on project teams. For others, especially those who entered the workforce over the past 10 to 15 years, project work has always been conducted virtually. Within the next decade, the topic of virtual projects and virtual teams likely will no longer garner such attention, just as topics such as project scope and the triple constraints have moved from interesting to sleeper topics. Managing virtual...