CHAPTER 9
SUSTAINING VIRTUAL PROJECT SUCCESS
Much of the pressure to succeed in managing a virtual project falls on the project manager. However, consistent and sustainable success is enabled by critical organizational elements that are the responsibility of a firm's senior leaders. In a recent study conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Center, senior managers of virtual enterprises who were asked if they are responsible and accountable for creating and implementing strategy for their firms, all responded that they do in fact own that responsibility. When the same senior managers were asked if they are responsible and accountable for execution of the strategy, however, answers were generally mixed. Some fully believe they are responsible for execution success, while others believe the responsibility lies with middle managers and virtual project managers.1
The same study highlights the difference in philosophy among senior managers of firms considered leading virtual enterprises. Senior managers there believe they are responsible and accountable for both setting strategy for their companies and ensuring the necessary organizational changes and behaviors are driven across the enterprise to enable successful strategy execution by virtual project teams.
There is significant evidence that the frustrations and challenges project teams encounter in other virtual companies are due in large part to the failure of senior managers to lead in the removal of the execution barriers unique to virtual organizations. We define virtual execution barriers as fundamental organizational structures, power bases, and behaviors that prevent companies from effectively operating in the virtual project environment. A series of organizational, operational, and philosophical changes must occur to prepare and enable an organization to move from a locally focused model to a geographically distributed model. Without these fundamental shifts, effective virtual project execution is severely challenged. The most common and significant barriers are the following.
- Organizational structures and performance measures that limit the collaborative team dynamics that are necessary on a virtual project.
- Differences in culture—country, company, and functional—that are not characterized, understood, and assimilated into the organization.
- A development model that does not support the highly collaborative and interdependent nature of distributed project team activities and promotes significant time delays.
- Skills and competencies of project managers that have not kept pace with the more comprehensive set of skills and competencies needed to be successful in the virtual environment.
In order for virtual project teams to begin operating more effectively within a highly distributed work environment, senior managers must step beyond setting strategy and become personally engaged in enabling virtual project execution success. Specifically, senior managers of geographically distributed companies need to establish the right structures and performance measures to foster a highly collaborative and distributed project environment. The managers must drive all changes necessary to deemphasize strong organizational silos that create collaboration barriers and must also change individual performance measures and rewards for their middle managers and team leaders to ones based primarily on achievement of team goals and secondarily on individual and departmental goals.
As a company expands its activities across the globe, it rapidly becomes a multicultural entity. Senior managers must work to converge national, functional, and organizational cultural aspects of the organization and its workforce. Doing so aligns the enterprise to a common vision, company value system, and way of doing business. The converged cultures manifest themselves as the project culture for each multinational project team.
Product and service development in a virtual environment requires a high degree of horizontal collaboration, synchronization, communication, and integration. Senior managers of virtual organizations must evaluate their current project execution model to determine if it is fully effective in a horizontally networked arrangement. If needed, they must drive changes toward a development model that is more collaborative and resistant to inherent time delays.
Senior managers must ensure that the role of their virtual project managers is appropriately defined to meet the broader based requirements to succeed in a virtual and potentially global environment. Along with appropriate role definition, senior managers must ensure that project managers possess the requisite knowledge, skills, and experience to lead a virtual team. The team leaders also must be empowered—have the responsibility and authority—along with senior management support—to effectively manage across the functions within an enterprise.
This chapter details the primary organizational changes that must be instituted by senior leaders of an enterprise to achieve consistent and sustainable virtual project success.
Changing Organizational and Team Structures
Many best-in-class virtual organizations have changed their fundamental thinking about how their organizations are structured. They have implemented approaches that minimize organizational hierarchies while de-emphasizing departmental silos and adopting more flexible organizations with horizontal networks of personnel and resources. This transition was spearheaded by many companies in the high-technology industry to take full advantage of their internationally distributed workforces.2 This fundamental change in thinking is based on four foundational success factors for virtual organizations and their virtual project teams:3
- Virtual project managers need direct access to the senior management leadership of the enterprise.
- Successful execution of virtual projects is dependent on effective management of the interdependencies and interfaces among the distributed team members.
- Geographically distributed virtual project members need timely and complete access to all important technical and business information that directly impacts their project.
- Decision making power must shift from the top of the organization to the virtual project team within clearly defined decision boundaries.
Figure 9.1 Example Virtual Organizational Structure
Traditional, hierarchical organizational and team structures create a direct barrier to these four virtual project success factors. To ensure alignment between a firm's business strategy and its virtual project execution output, senior managers and virtual project managers must have direct access to one another. They must, in fact, work together as a leadership team. Traditional hierarchical organization structures normally prevent this from occurring due to the layers that exist between senior executives and project managers. The greater the number of layers between project managers and top-level management, the greater the probability of misalignment between strategic goals and execution output. This is a result of the lack of direct communication between executives and project managers as well as the skewing and diluting of communication as it passes through the layers of the organization.
Another complexity that can impact hierarchical organizations is agency theory. This situation occurs when there is a misalignment of goals between a manager (the “principal”) and an employee (the “agent”). This is typically prevalent in organizations with strong functional silos. Agency occurs when functional managers design goals that provide the greatest benefit for their functional organization, with the strategic goals of the company being a secondary consideration.3 If virtual project managers are reporting directly to functional managers and do not have direct access to senior managers, many times the project team drives to achieve the goals of the functional organization, not the goals of the overall business.
Since project managers within a hierarchical structure are most times contained within a functional silo, it is very difficult for them to reach across the organization and drive cross-discipline and cross-geographical collaboration in a virtual environment. A hierarchical structure can force project decisions to move beyond project managers to the functional managers of the organization. When a decision crosses organizational boundaries, the decision must move to the appropriate organizational function and down the chain of command within a silo. This method of decision making in a distributed organizational setting is very ineffective and inefficient because of the time it takes to reach a decision.
The same structural barriers exist when it comes to accessing technical and business information. Team members normally have access to the functional specific data and information contained within their organizational silo; however, seldom can they directly access data and information contained within another functional silo. The project manager, therefore, must resort to the same chain of command approval path just described in the paragraph above and will realize the same result—delayed or forbidden access to critical data and information.
Finally, hierarchical structures are power driven by design, with those at the top of the organization possessing the most positional power. Virtual project managers possess little positional power, which creates an execution barrier that makes it difficult for project managers to lead and influence a widely distributed set of project stakeholders. This situation normally leaves functional managers, who are more disconnected from the project and who are not familiar with the daily execution activities, in charge of project decisions.
To address these issues, best-practice virtual organizations have moved to organizational structures that are flatter, with fewer layers of management. An example of a flat organizational structure that works well for virtual organizations is illustrated in Figure 9.1.
Figure 9.2 Virtual Project Core Team Structure
In this lattice or matrix structure, project managers have easy access to the top management of the organization. This access creates a direct communication channel and collaborative arrangement between senior leaders and virtual project managers. This communication linkage is a critical element in setting and maintaining alignment between business strategies to virtual project execution outcomes because it fosters direct communication, which leads to an aligned community.
A lattice structure also results in a de-emphasis of functional silos, with the various organizations now owning a shared responsibility for project success. Each of the functional managers must invest in the project by providing resources (people, money, equipment, or materials). The return on investment is dependent on the successful achievement of the project goals. Therefore, participation in cross-organization collaboration is in the functional managers' best interests.
Also of critical importance for success in a highly distributed virtual environment is that decision making power shifts to project managers. (See Chapter 6.) When a flat organization structure is instituted, the balance of power moves away from functional managers and to virtual project managers. This gives project managers greater decision making power and more degrees of freedom to operate.4 Transfer of power enables virtual project managers to distribute decision making power to the local level, where people with the best information and most knowledge about a specific project situation perform their work.
Finally, a flat organization structure allows project managers to execute their primary role in leading the virtual team—integrating the work activities and work output of the distributed team. The flatter organizational structure enables project managers to work horizontally across functional disciplines of the enterprise. In doing so, they drive the creation of the holistic solution that directly contributes to the realization of the firm's strategy. (See Chapter 2.)
Modifying Virtual Project Team Structures
A change in the way a firm organizes its project team structure may be necessary to ensure maximum collaboration is occurring in the virtual environment. Like hierarchical organization structures, hierarchical team structures also stifle cross-team collaboration and communication. The project team structure therefore must be flattened to create a network of specialists and enable the integration of work flow and work output across the distributed team. Communication and collaboration should occur horizontally across the team, not vertically through a team hierarchy.
Figure 9.3 Core Team Collaboration and Communication Triangulation
The project core team structure is the most common team structure found in companies that operate in a virtual project environment. (See Figure 9.2.) The virtual project core team is the cross-discipline leadership and decision making body of the project. Its members are responsible for ensuring that both project and business goals are achieved.5
The virtual project core team consists of the team leaders who represent the organizational functions and provide leadership for the delivery of their function's element of the product or service under development. 6 The core team must become very cohesive and be willing to share responsibility for the success of the project. As Figure 9.2 illustrates, the project specialists within each of the geographies are only one level removed from the virtual project manager.
The core team structure is highly integrated, meaning there is joint consideration of trade-offs, decisions, and problem resolution among members of the team. Coordination and communication within the core team occur both horizontally and vertically. Figure 9.3 demonstrates the triangulation of collaboration and communication that takes place on a core team. Directions, decisions, and cross-team issue brokerage comes from the virtual project manager, while cross-team communication and work coordination occurs between the on-site project team leaders. Status, decision consultation, and issue escalation flows from the project team leaders to the project manager.
Each member of the core team must be committed to the success of the other members on the team. A primary responsibility of virtual project managers is building a trusting, cohesive core team and leading them to mutual success by way of project success.
Modifying the Project Execution Model
Time is never on the side of virtual project managers. Time always presents a multitude of challenges that easily cause delays that are counted in days, weeks, and occasionally in months. Virtual projects face a loss of time efficiency due to their inherent complexity. Difficulties coordinating work and driving effective communication across multiple time zones is well known and documented. In addition to time zone challenges, however, time also presents a more perplexing and potentially dangerous challenge for virtual project managers. We are referring to time lapses between project activities, team deliverables, and project milestones caused by geographical separation of work. If not managed carefully, the lack of efficient time management by the project manager and the team can have an adverse impact to the project schedule.
Figure 9.4 Increasing Risk with Increasing Time between Project Events
Although even the newest virtual project managers learn quickly how to cope with their project's specific challenges, time lapse challenges are not as evident because much of the work and communication is happening behind the scenes. Many times time lapses in work outcomes do not become evident until a project moves outside its success control limits or until it fails outright. (See Chapter 4.)
Past analysis has demonstrated that the greater the time between project milestones, team deliverables, hand-offs, or cross-team touch points, the greater the risk that projects will experience significant schedule delays. (See Figure 9.4.)
Figure 9.5 Accelerating Project Deliverables
Virtually distributed team members perform much of their work and create their project deliverables based on a set of requirements and a series of assumptions that are made during the project's planning stage. When requirements change or assumptions are found to be false, they are typically discovered during hand-offs of work elements or during integration activities.
With a decrease in direct communication, lack of informal meetings, and limited synchronous collaboration among distributed team members as compared to traditional project teams, it is rare that missed changes in requirements or incorrect assumptions are discovered through communication and collaboration. Rather, they are found when inconsistencies between what was delivered and what was expected are discovered.
The result, of course, is rework. Any time rework occurs, productivity decreases, time lapses occur, additional money has to be invested, and the project goals are compromised. To combat this negative impact to the project timeline, best-practice virtual organizations adopt an accelerated delivery mechanism that decreases the amount of time between project deliverables and hand-offs. We refer to this mechanism as a rapid delivery model. (See Figure 9.5.)
In a rapid delivery model, work output is decomposed into small deliverables, which can be worked on and completed within a short period of time. As shown in Figure 9.5, each team has a series of deliverables that are separated by two or three weeks in duration, thus accelerating the integration process. With constant focus on rapid development and hand-off of deliverables among team members, it becomes difficult for the work of a virtual project to veer too far off course before the problems and miscommunications are discovered and corrected.
This process provides the team the ability to test assumptions in an accelerated manner and potentially reduce the amount of rework. This step-by-incremental-step model is highly effective and rather standard on virtual projects. The model works because it forces team members to communicate and collaborate on a continuous basis throughout a project life cycle. When this model is utilized, the need to create a project map in addition to a project schedule increases (see Chapter 2), as this tool becomes the team's focal point for planning and managing rapid development of its deliverables.
Changing Behavior by Changing Rewards
How well a team works together is, of course, critical to project success, especially so for virtual projects. In Chapters 5 and 6, we emphasized the importance of establishing a “One Team” philosophy while building a virtual team during the initiating and planning stages of a project. To sustain the One Team philosophy throughout the remaining stages of the project, a firm must modify the recognition and reward system for its virtual teams to emphasize and reinforce team performance over individual performance.
All teams, whether traditional or virtual, share at least one common attribute: To be highly effective, they require a supportive reward system where personal success is dependent on team success.7 Effective execution in a virtual project environment requires a high degree of collaboration among team members; therefore, the reward system for virtual teams must put a premium on collaborative success. Team performance measures must be designed to include working across geographical boundaries, successful integration across cultures, sharing of information, completing interdependent deliverables, sharing critical information to support virtual teamwork, and meeting team objectives. Because of these important team-based factors, this requires rewards that are based on team results instead of individual effort.8
The challenge is to create a fit among the characteristics of the individuals on the project team, the goals of the virtual project, and the characteristics of the reward system. Because teams can differ greatly in mission, structure, processes, and member makeup and distribution, no one reward system design will be universally effective. Each organization must design its own system. Doing so, unfortunately, is not a simple task. A common approach is to design a reward system that combines both skill-based and performance-based rewards, both of which are heavily influenced by the achievement of the project goals.
Skill-Based Rewards
Skill-based rewards are used on virtual projects to motivate the development of functional expertise of virtual project managers as well as team members. In addition, skill-based rewards are used to focus on the development of cross-functional knowledge and virtual team operating skills that are needed to participate as effective and capable team members of the virtual project and drive virtual communication and collaboration.
Depth of expertise in one or more functional areas utilized on the virtual project is often critical to execution success. Skill-based incentives reward individuals for developing deeper levels of expertise within a knowledge area and help to retain the technical expertise within the organization. Typical implementations of skill-based rewards involve defining multiple levels of expertise within a knowledge area (such as project management, engineering, marketing, or manufacturing), and when individuals demonstrate that their competency exceeds their current level, they are promoted to the next higher level.
Performance-Based Rewards
To ensure that skill-based rewards are impacting team results, virtual project team individuals must prove to the project manager and senior management that they have demonstrated that the skills within their functional expertise level were used to help further team collaboration and contributed to the success of the project on which they participated. Team-based performance achievement must be a defining criterion for promotion to the next level. This is the basis of performance-based rewards.
We must discuss two important points concerning performance-based rewards. First, bonus plans do a better job of motivating team members than skill-based pay raises. Second, team members assign higher credibility to objective performance measures based on team achievements.9 Therefore, organizations that tie rewards to quantifiable measures can more effectively shift team member behavior from an individual focus to a team focus than organizations that take a more subjective approach, such as utilizing a manager's rating system.
The challenge in using performance-based reward systems for virtual project teams is that the reward system must be specifically designed to support a particular team. The team reward system must use measures and metrics that demonstrate successful team performance and tie the rewards to the achievement of project goals.
An additional challenge is the timing of the rewards. The most common practice for rewarding team performance is to recognize and reward team members at the conclusion of the project. Often, however, team membership changes over the duration of the project. Therefore, it becomes difficult to gauge the contribution of members who participate in but are not part of the effort at the conclusion. One approach to address this challenge is to implement a phased approach to giving rewards. As team members achieve goals through various project phases, incremental rewards are given to those who participated and are deserving of reward in each phase.
Management Rewards
Recognition and rewards for senior and middle managers offer challenges as well. Specifically, we are referring to the organizational managers who provide resources and other support and services to virtual project managers and teams. The rewards and recognition model shifts significantly as an organization transitions toward a network structure necessary to enable effective virtual collaboration. As we discussed in earlier chapters, one key characteristic of the collaborative approach is one of purposely driving project related decision making from organizational managers to virtual project managers.
Senior leaders must evaluate their middle managers based on the shift to the new model. Functional and department managers should be rewarded not only for their efforts in building strong functional teams, but also for their roles in supporting virtual projects. Specifically, rewards should be based on how well they provide mentoring and coaching and whether they help remove obstacles, provide creative input, and guide team member skills development—all of which lead to organizational value and long-term virtual project success. Importantly, virtual project managers should be given the opportunity to provide performance feedback for a firm's middle managers.
Figure 9.6 Emotional Intelligence and Cultural Awareness
Senior leaders should be evaluated and rewarded on how well the organization has transitioned to a virtually distributed model. Senior leaders must design an organization that effectively operates in the virtual project environment. Then they must pay careful attention to establishing the opportunities for virtual project teams to perform successfully.10 Doing this also includes ensuring that the rewards and recognition for organizational managers are properly aligned and administered in order to contribute to the success of virtual project teams.
Promoting Cultural Awareness
Organizations that utilize virtual teams on an international basis will face workforce cultural diversity resulting from the acquisition of talent worldwide. The effectiveness of any internationally distributed virtual project team depends largely on the engaged participation of its team members from all geographies involved, where participation involves contribution of information, sharing of ideas, and involvement in the team decision process. Proper management of cultural diversity and intercultural interaction among team members is therefore critical to team success. Senior management of organizations must revamp the cultural vision of the enterprises to embrace and fully benefit from the increasing involvement of multicultural teams.
Laura Smith, executive director of U.S. Human Resources for Edelman Public Relations, a firm of 65 global offices and over 5000 employees, is an expert in managing an international workforce. She is an advocate for corporate cultural awareness programs and believes one critical element is needed for program success: “Lead and support it from the top of the organization.”11 Smith also suggests that senior managers consider adopting these factors as being important in cultural awareness programs:
- Ensure a clear strategy is in place when acquiring talent.
- Create networking opportunities to build an inclusive culture.
- Conduct ongoing cultural awareness training to promote understanding.
- Measure and evolve supporting business processes.
Employees who are more aware of and comfortable working in culturally diverse organizations are more prepared to recognize and act on global opportunities and are able to operate more effectively in a variety of cultural and business environments, whether traveling abroad or participating as team leader or a member of internationally distributed teams.
Figure 9.7 Virtual Project Manager Competency Model
Various team leadership studies indicate that looking at the impact of emotional intelligence traits, especially the social skill trait, may be a key element to effective cross-cultural leadership.12 Figure 9.6 illustrates this point.
Creating long-term relationships among multicultural team members, clients, and other members of globally distributed organizations is an excellent example for utilizing social skill. This result can be further characterized as proficiency in building relationships and networks and the ability to build excellent common ground and needed rapport with all personnel with whom virtual project managers must interact to perform their roles successfully.
Many scholars and practitioners agree that emotional intelligence capabilities need to be included in any cross-cultural training and development to assist virtual project team members and other employees in recognizing elements and nuances associated with varying cultural backgrounds. Additionally, virtual project managers should be selected based on their training and knowledge in specific emotional intelligence competencies, such as empathy, emotional poise, and self-control.
Developing Virtual Project Managers
It is rare when a person comes to the role of a virtual project manager fully qualified, possessing both the full set of skills and competencies required and experience. Successful virtual project managers constantly seek to learn and broaden their knowledge and experience to take on more complex and challenging work. It is therefore critical that senior leaders of virtual organizations create a learning environment that encourages virtual project managers to continually seek improvement and growth.
Noel Tichy, author and noted scholar, has stated that while management skills in the areas of finance, manufacturing, and marketing are important for organizational success, they are insufficient for effectively leading, planning, and sustaining organizational change and transformational initiatives.13 We must keep in mind that all project managers are change agents. Through the performance and implementation of their projects, they transition the status quo within an organization from point A to point B; in other words, from current state to future state. Doing this requires a broad-based set of skills that goes beyond traditional management.
Project managers who manage virtual projects must be highly competent and capable individuals who possess the right skills to lead virtual project teams. However, success in the role goes beyond skills alone; they also must be highly competent individuals. Competence is defined as the knowledge, skills, and qualities that managers use to effectively perform the functions associated with management in the work situation.14 A simple algorithm sums it up best:
Figure 9.8 Virtual Project Manager Team Leadership Skills
Figure 9.7 was designed to characterize the necessary competencies and skills needed to succeed in managing virtual projects and leading distributed project teams. The information presented in the model is based on research by the authors and was derived from firms that execute effectively in highly distributed project environments. As the model demonstrates, much of the success of virtual project managers is driven by their behavioral and human-oriented capabilities.15 In the sections that follow, we provide an overview of each competency area.
Team Leadership Competencies
The foundational elements of effective team leadership apply whether one is leading a traditional team that is co-located at a single site or an international team that is highly distributed across continents. Virtual project managers must learn how to apply their team leadership capabilities in a virtual, and potentially multicultural, team environment. Imagine, for example, the challenges you would face trying to influence key managers critical to the success of your project who are located in other geographical locations with no face-to-face personal contact. This dilemma, no doubt, makes leadership more difficult for the virtual project manager.
Figure 9.8 summarizes the crucial team leadership skills for the virtual project manager.
Specifically, we are referring to the ability to lead cross-organizational, cross-geographical, and cross-cultural teams. Virtual project managers need to be able to build, coalesce, champion, and lead the team to create solutions that will satisfy the company's customers. The team leadership competencies fall into two categories: core leadership skills and augmented leadership skills. Team leaders who possess the augmented skills, in particular, are significantly more likely to be successful in virtual project environments.
Core Leadership Skills
The foundational elements of effective team leadership apply for domestic teams that are co-located in a single site or global teams that are distributed across multiple sites and countries. Success begins by applying the core principles of team leadership and then understanding how to extend these leadership principles for application in distributed team environments. The core principles of team leadership are listed next.
- Creating a common purpose
- Establishing team chemistry
- Building and sustaining trust
- Demonstrating personal integrity
- Empowering the team
- Driving participation, collaboration, and integration
- Communicating effectively
- Managing team conflict
- Making tough decisions
- Providing recognition and rewards
We described the core team leadership principles in detail in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5.
Augmented Leadership Skills
In addition to the core leadership competencies, several other important leadership skills need special attention due to their importance to virtual team environments. These include influencing skills, prioritization skills, symphonic and systems skills, and political savviness skills.
Influencing Skills
In virtual team environments, team members rarely report directly to project managers. For this reason, project managers must become proficient in influencing team member actions. Project managers also need influencing skills to positively affect the actions and decisions of the senior management team, key partners, suppliers, customers, and support organizations. As John Maxwell states in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, “Leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less. If you don't have influence, you will never be able to lead others.”16
Successful influencing involves gaining support for your team when needed, inspiring others to do their best, persuading others to follow your direction and coalesce around a common team purpose, and creating strong relationships. It is about moving things forward without pushing, forcing, coercing, or threatening. Influencing traits of a strong virtual project manager include being socially adept at interacting with others in any given situation, having the ability to assess all aspects of information and behavior without passing judgment or injecting bias, and being able to effectively communicate your point of view to change opinion or change course of action.
Prioritization Skills
The ability of virtual project managers to set and balance team priorities is one key indicator of success. The first step in setting priorities is checking to make sure the assumptions driving the project priorities are correct. It is one thing for team leaders to set the priorities; those priorities must be validated with the primary sponsors of the project. If the assumptions behind the priorities are incorrect, the priorities themselves may be incorrect. Once the priorities are validated, project managers should manage to the priorities. For example, if cost containment is the highest priority of the project, a project manager must be emphatic about staying within the financial constraints. If technological leadership is the highest priority, the project manager will need to keep the team focused on the technical aspects of the project and provide the necessary resources to ensure technological success.
Symphonic and Systems Skills
Symphonic skills involve achieving balance and optimization across multiple diverse, but related elements. It represents arranging the pieces together harmoniously with the objective of achieving a synergistic improvement. Being able to see the big picture, crossing boundaries, combining disparate elements, seeing broad patterns are all characteristics of symphonic skills. This ability normally resides in individuals with broad backgrounds, multidisciplined mindset, and a broad spectrum of experiences.
Systems skills involve the ability to assemble pieces together harmoniously, resulting in a synergistic improvement. People who have systems skills can see the big picture, combine elements into a new holistic entity, and see relationships between unrelated fields and broad patterns. Usually this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds, and broad experiences.
Systems skills also include the ability to see relationships between relationships, which is also known as systems, gestalt, and holistic thinking.17 Author Peter Senge presented systems thinking as a framework from which one can organize and understand events, behaviors, and phenomena that affect one another in the short- and the long-term. Those who apply systems thinking rather than linear thinking can see the dynamics that are reinforcing an event or limiting growth.18
Figure 9.9 Virtual Management Skills
Systems skills are also critical to virtual project managers. A system is a collection of parts that can be combined into an integrated whole to achieve an objective or entity. To understand this definition, you must understand what a functioning integrated whole is. For example, a bicycle is a functioning system. However, if you remove the handlebars, it no longer is a functioning bicycle. Those skilled in systems thinking can view projects and activities from a broad perspective that includes seeing overall characteristics and patterns rather than just individual elements. By focusing on the entirety of the project or, in essence, the system aspects of the project (inputs, outputs, and interrelationships), virtual project team leaders improve the probability of achieving the practical end solution and customer expectations.
Political Savviness
Organizational politics originate when individuals drive their personal agendas and priorities at the expense of a cohesive corporate agenda. Company politics are a natural part of any organization, and virtual project managers should understand that politics are a behavioral aspect of leading that they must contend with in order to succeed. The basis of organizational politics is really twofold: the desire to advance within the firm and the quest for power (usually in the form of controlling decisions and resources).19
Virtual project managers must actively manage the politics surrounding their projects to protect against negative effects of political maneuvering on the part of stakeholders and to exploit politically advantageous situations. In order to do this, project managers must possess both a keen understanding of the organization and the political savviness necessary to build strong relationships to leverage and influence the company's power base.
The most effective way to manage in the organization's political environment is to leverage the project stakeholders and powerful members of the network who can help achieve the project objectives.20 The key is to avoid being naïve and to understand that not every stakeholder sees great value in the project. In our experience, virtual project managers who practice effective stakeholder management are more likely to succeed. Stakeholders come to the table with a variety of expectations, demands, personal goals, agendas, and priorities that many times are in conflict with one another. Project managers must rationalize and resolve these competing requirements by striking an appropriate balance between stakeholders' expectations and project realities. Team leaders, therefore, must be politically astute by being sensitive to the interests of the most powerful stakeholders and must, at the same time, demonstrate good judgment by acting with integrity.21
Virtual Management Competencies
Besides the normal challenges facing virtual project team leaders (time, distance, language, culture, and limited face-to-face interaction), another challenge is that, as in most projects, team members do not report directly to project managers. Leading teams of people who not only do not report to them directly, but also are distributed geographically create greater team leadership challenges. To deal effectively with this core principle of virtual projects, project managers have to develop and refine what we refer to as virtual management skills. Figure 9.9 shows a number of the more critical virtual management skills. Virtual project managers with these skills are at a significant advantage.
Cross-Cultural Management Skills
Competence at cross-cultural management is critical in leading teams in the highly distributed, multisite environment. Cross-cultural management skills are the ability to understand the behavior of people from diverse nations and cultures. These skills include awareness of cultures managers are directly involved in and understanding attitudes, differences, and behaviors. Such skills emphasize improving the interaction and working relationship among team members, management, and suppliers from all the cultures represented in the direct and broader team. To be skilled at cross-cultural management, we must examine our own biases and prejudices and, when possible, observe and learn from culturally proficient role models.
In regard to leadership skills and style, one approach may work in one culture, but not work in another. According to Nancy Adler, author, professor and consultant,
Some researchers suggest that American approaches to leadership apply equally well abroad. However, most believe that leaders must adapt their style and approach to the cultures of the involved employees and clients. That is, they believe that leadership is culturally contingent.22
Regarding observed actions and behaviors in various cultures culturally skilled virtual project managers also are adept at:
- Listening for hidden communications in voice intonation and looking for non-verbal cues relative to facial expression, behavior and physical movement.
- Watching for blinders to cultural sensitivity in themselves and team members, such as stereotyping and projected similarity.
- Studying their team members and interpreting their specific cultural biases in regard to power distance, uncertainty avoidance, context, and perceptions of career success and quality of life.
Only through understanding and appreciating the unique characteristics of team members' cultures can team leaders show members the respect and understanding that each person desires and deserves. Few team leaders ever obtain a complete level of understanding. However, this should not prevent us as team leaders from making our best efforts to sharpen our cultural skills, awareness, and behavior.
Virtual Communication Skills
Communicating virtually requires us to broaden our perspective and appreciation for the entire communication process due to the comprehensive challenges facing the exchange of meaning in a highly distributed, multisite environment. Communication is any behavior another person perceives and interprets as the understanding of what was meant. Communication includes sending both verbal messages (words) and non-verbal messages (tone of voice, facial expressions, behaviors). It includes consciously sent messages as well as subtle messages that senders are totally unaware of having sent. Communication, therefore, involves a complex, multilayered, and dynamic process through which people exchange meaning.23
Communication on a geographically distributed team is complicated by the physical separation of team members and the resulting reliance on technologies to facilitate team communication. Virtual team leaders need to develop skills in selecting the appropriate communication technologies given the tasks required, technical competence of the team members, and infrastructure capabilities within the geographies in which team members reside. Virtual team leaders must then become proficient in the use of communication technologies selected so they can teach other team members how to use them. Team leaders also must be able to use and model the appropriate communication etiquette associated with a technology.
Facilitation Skills
Simply put, facilitation is the act of assisting team members to reach their collective goals by helping to make team communication and collaboration easier and more effective. Good facilitation skills help to ensure that relationships among team members continue to develop and that ongoing communication and collaboration among team members is occurring as needed. Facilitation skills needed in a virtual environment go well beyond those needed for co-located project teams.
Communication and collaboration in a virtual team environment does not occur spontaneously at the onset of a virtual project, even if team members are familiar with one another and have worked together previously. The geographic and time separation among team members creates communication and collaboration challenges. Virtual project managers must therefore utilize facilitation skills to overcome the time, distance, and cultural barriers to stimulate and sustain effective virtual communication and collaboration within their teams.
Many aspects of successful leadership of a virtual project team covered in this text rely on strong facilitation skills on the part of team leaders to:
- Craft the project vision and common purpose,
- Establish the team norms,
- Create the team charter,
- Solve project-related problems,
- Build strong personal relationships,
- Reach good decisions,
- Manage conflict between team members,
- Identify and manage cross-team deliverables,
- Brainstorm new ideas, and
- Enforce team rules.
Each aspect of virtual team leadership just identified is critical to project success, and each requires facilitated discussion and collaboration among the virtual team members. Primarily, virtual project managers must provide the facilitation leadership.
Core facilitation skills include the ability to draw out varying opinions and viewpoints among team members, to create a discussion and collaboration framework consisting of a clear end-state and discussion and collaboration boundaries, to summarize and synthesize details into useful information and strategy, and to lead the adoption of technological communication and collaboration tools. Other facilitation skills that are beneficial include using personal energy to maintain forward momentum, being able to rationalize cause and effect, helping team members to establish one-on-one relationships, and keeping team members focused on the primary topics of discussion and collaboration.
Arguably, the most critical facilitation skill is project managers' ability to lead virtual meetings. Since a significant amount of communication and collaboration among members occurs in team meetings, virtual team leaders have to develop skills in planning and conducting remote meetings. Virtual team meetings will run the gamut from some face-to-face meetings, phone conferences, video conferences, internet-based data sharing meetings, or some combination of all of these. These meetings should involve pre-planning an agenda with time-boxed topics, sending any necessary materials to all members prior to the meeting, setting the meeting ground rules, facilitating the discussion to ensure a mutual understanding of all conversations, and periodically checking to see if quiet members understand the discussion and are fully engaged.
Utilization of the various technical tools available should enhance good facilitation practices by enabling team members to share concepts, merge information, and formulate new ideas. Technological tools, however, will not make up for poor and improperly facilitated meetings.24 Project leaders are responsible for facilitating effectiveness and relying on technology tools for efficiency.
Networking Skills
The ability to network successfully across worldwide hierarchical and organizational boundaries is a tremendously useful skill, given that customers, senior managers, team members, and other critical parties are dispersed across multiple distances, sites, and countries in a virtual organization. Virtual project team leaders first must know how to determine the organizational landscape and who is in it. Doing this involves effective stakeholder identification and political mapping capabilities. Team leaders then must be able to use and extend this knowledge to develop the ability to choose the right mode of communication to address customers, senior management, team members, suppliers, and others.
As a keystone member of the project network (see Chapter 6), the virtual project manager must possess the ability to connect other individuals within the network needing to communicate and collaborate with one another. The strength of the project network is dependent on direct interconnections among team members who are virtually separated and lack the ability or knowledge to create the connections on their own. Networking skills give virtual project managers the ability to do this.
From a team perspective, effective networking skills gives virtual project managers the ability to create a sense of urgency in team members who may be isolated from the rest of the team or are being pulled toward other competing priorities. Networking skills are required to assist these team members in feeling like they are part of the team and to align their personal work priorities to those of the project.
Emotional Intelligence Skills
There exists a strong argument that the Intelligence Quotient (IQ), which traditionally has been the measure of intelligence, ignores key behavioral and personality elements. Beyond IQ, success depends on the awareness, control, and management of our own emotions, while influencing the emotions of others around us. This forms the basis of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI). As leaders of virtual enterprises have searched for the most critical leadership competencies, they have learned that EI contributes to as much as 90% of the differences between star performers and average performers.26 Additionally, research by the Center of Creative Leadership found that the primary causes of derailment in executives' career aspirations involve deficits in emotional competence, such as difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.27
Daniel Goleman, author, psychologist and science journalist, describes emotional intelligence as “managing with heart.”28 His groundbreaking book, Emotional Intelligence, redefined what it means to be competent as a leader and describes EI skills as critically important in virtual team environments where face-to-face interaction and involvement is limited. Being acutely in tune with and sensitive to emotions and emotional responses of team members is critical to building a high-performing team.
EI skills consist of personal competence and social competence. Personal competence involves both self-awareness and self-management, where self-awareness is the ability to accurately perceive one's own emotions and moods in the moment and understand one's tendencies in various situations. Self-management is the ability to use awareness of emotions to stay flexible and direct one's behavior positively. Thus, self-aware project managers stay on top of their own reactions to team members and others and manage their own emotional self-regulation to think before acting or reacting.
Figure 9.10 Business Skills
Social competence includes social awareness and relationship management skills that enable project managers to understand others and manage relationships. Social awareness is the ability to accurately pick up on the emotions of others and to understand what is at the root of the emotions. In essence, socially aware project managers are empathetic and can understand and react appropriately to the emotional needs of others. Relationship management is the ability to use personal competence and social competence to recognize both one's own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully. This capability forms the foundation for the bonding and building of long-term personal relationships over time.
Contextual Intelligence Skills
The contextual environment in which project managers operate in virtual settings is increasingly complex. The environment is continually evolving and is both dynamic and turbulent. Decisions must be made quickly and must be useful and practical. Project managers able to perform successfully given these challenges have a high degree of contextual intelligence.
Context is the setting in which events occur. It consists of internal and external factors surrounding the circumstances of the event. Understanding context can directly impact how one responds to the events and to transform data into useful information. Matthew R. Kutz, author of Contextual Intelligence: An Emerging Competency For Global Leaders, defines contextual intelligence as “the ability to quickly and intuitively recognize and diagnose the dynamic contextual variables inherent in an event or circumstance, which results in intentional adjustment of behavior in order to exert appropriate influence in that context.”29 It results in integrating and diagnosing information while exercising and applying knowledge pertinent to the contextual situation.
Contextual intelligence skills are “innate [abilities] to synthesize information quickly and effectively,” according to researchers Erik Dane and Michael Pratt. People with these skills are astute at detecting attitudes, motivations, and resistance of parties involved in specific events.30 Team leaders who possess a high degree of contextual intelligence are able to cognitively and intuitively assimilate the various data and observations surrounding an event and convert this new understanding into information useful to making decisions.
Business Competencies
Strategic thinking and business fundamentals are key competencies needed for project managers leading and managing complex and critically important projects. This is true whether the project is a traditional or a virtual one. In many enterprises today, strong business competencies are required to fulfill the project manager role, including the ability to develop a compelling project business case that supports the company's business goals and strategies, the ability to execute the project from the business perspective, and the ability to understand and analyze the financial aspects of a project. (See Figure 9.10.)
Figure 9.11 Customer and Market Skills
Project managers may be called on periodically to apply these skills and capabilities during a project. These business skills are definitely enhanced through virtual project managers' prior experience and exposure to international markets and customers.
Business Fundamentals Skills
To be successful from a business perspective, virtual project managers must possess sufficient business skills to understand the organization's business model and financial goals. They must be able to utilize economic, financial, and organizational data to build and document the business case for their projects and be proficient in business terminology when communicating with senior managers and other business stakeholders.
Virtual project managers must have a working knowledge and some proficiency in business fundamentals including ability in financial analysis and accounting, international management, political issues, law and ethics, resource management, negotiation and communication, and management of intellectual property. In addition, project managers may need to possess a working knowledge of the local and international economics in which the project is operating.
Strategic Thinking Skills
Virtual project managers must think strategically to align projects to the organization's strategic objectives. A part of strategic thinking involves a basic understanding of the industry in which the business operates. Knowledge of industry trends, competitors, and supply chain implications is a fundamental part of keeping projects viable.
Worldview Skills
Being proficient in global business also means possessing a worldview. Possessing worldview skills involves having an awareness of the global environment, including social, political, and economic trends. Managers of multinational projects must be able to apply their worldview knowledge, skills, and competencies to consistently succeed while participating as a critical member of a firm's global business.
Globalization is driven by a set of forces that have operated interdependently throughout recent history. (See Chapter 1.) Knowledge of the three primary globalization forces—economic forces, political forces, and technology forces—provides virtual project managers a greater contextual understanding of the environment in which they operate. Project managers' worldview capability is, of course, significantly enhanced through personal experience and exposure to international markets, cultures, and team members.
Customer/Market Competencies
For virtual project managers, customer and market competency involves having a thorough understanding of the industry and market in which their companies are doing business and how the product, service, or other capability they are creating is used. The better virtual project managers and their team can align the capability with customers' needs, the greater the potential for customer satisfaction and project success. Figure 9.11 highlights the skills involved in customer and market competency.
Figure 9.12 Process and Project Management Skills
Product or Service Knowledge
At a minimum, virtual project managers must understand customer needs and desires that are pertinent to the new product, service, or other capability under development. This understanding requires that project managers have sufficient technical knowledge to recognize how the needs can be met by the capability and how to integrate the elements of the design and development into a successful solution for customers.
Market Knowledge
As a company grows, scales, and expands, its customer base and the markets it sells in or serves become more diverse. These changes may require virtual project managers to embark on a continual learning path to stay abreast of various markets. We do not mean that project managers need to be the customer, market, and industry expert on the team. This is not the role of the project manager and would most likely consume most, if not all, of a manager's time and energy. Rather, virtual project managers must know how to tap in to this type of expertise within the enterprise to maintain a general level of knowledge and to bring pertinent information to the virtual project team.
Customer Commitment
Virtual project managers must be consummate customer advocates for the projects they manage. This means being skilled in voice-of-the-customer. The “voice of the customer” is a process used to capture the requirements from customers, both external and internal, in order to provide customers with the best product and service quality. These techniques ensure customer needs and desires are reflected in the final capability. As customer advocates, project managers must understand how their customers define quality and how it should be measured.
Process and Project Management Competencies
Process and project management is the final element of the virtual project manager competency model. As shown in Figure 9.12, project managers of both traditional and virtual projects must be trained and competent in the core processes of the firm they are serving. In addition, they must possess the fundamental project management knowledge, practices, methods, and tools to manage their projects to a successful outcome. Possessing these competencies raises the probability that project managers will gain and hold the confidence and trust of the project team members, project stakeholders, and customers.
Process Proficiency
An important aspect of this core skill set is that of possessing a solid working knowledge of the specific processes and practices of the company. Knowing how things get done, the policies and procedures that must be adhered to, and who must be involved and approve various aspects of the project is critical for the successful completion of every project. If it is a product-based company, for example, project managers must be thoroughly familiar with the firm's new product design, development, and market launch processes to ensure that team effort adheres to management's requirements and expectations as to how products are designed and built.
Life Cycle Management Skills
A challenge in leading a virtual project team is ensuring that all team members are following the same processes and methods and are using the same tools, when appropriate. A foundational element in driving process consistency across the virtual team is to ensure that all members adhere to a common life cycle for the coordination of work activities from ideation to project closure. The ability to effectively use a life cycle to manage a virtual project team's work will help to drive common language and terminology, establish a common cadence of activities, and provide common decision and synchronization points throughout the project cycle.
Project Management Skills
In addition to being skilled in the core project manager competencies required (e.g., Project Management Body of Knowledge, PRINCE2, Agile, etc.), virtual project managers must be proficient in applying the methodologies in a geographically distributed project environment. As an example, communication management is a core competency for any project manager. However, none of the methodologies describes how to apply communication management for virtual (and sometimes multinational) project teams. This knowledge has to be gained outside of core project management methodology training, as does knowledge in all of the core project management competency areas.
Stakeholder Management Skills
Stakeholder management is a skill that is critical to virtual project management success. Virtual project managers may have to manage stakeholders, both internal and external to the organization. Effective stakeholder management helps team leaders gain cooperation from the highly influential stakeholders, cut through competing stakeholder agendas, and positively influence stakeholders who may be inhibiting progress. Project managers who are skilled in stakeholder management must understand three things:
- Who the stakeholders are and what their needs are.
- How much influence each stakeholder has on the project.
- Stakeholder allegiance and attitude toward the project (Project managers should never assume all stakeholders want the effort to succeed).
From this information, virtual project managers can determine which stakeholders must be managed and how to manage them. (See Chapter 4.)
Competency Takes Time
As stated earlier, it is rare for virtual project managers to enter the role proficient in all competency areas. It is also difficult to imagine that any of us could be completely proficient in all areas of the competency model. Review of the model shows why the project manager role requires a broad and varied set of skills. Virtual project managers cannot gain the necessary expertise in a classroom or from a book; competence increases with experience. The role needs to be practiced. Improvement comes with a history of successes and failures associated with actually leading virtual teams and managing virtual projects. Evidence of competence comes from a track record of proven accomplishments that represents an individual's experience base. A considerable amount of time is required to achieve expert-level mastery in anything—including virtual project management.31
The knowledge, skills, and abilities described as part of the virtual project manager competency model are, therefore, most useful for growing and developing a firm's virtual project managers, once they are in the role. This capability is important because further gains toward consistent virtual project management success are made through continual improvement in performance.
In ongoing dialogues, direct managers should focus in part on understanding their project managers' growth and career aspirations and should balance those aspirations with management's short- and long-term performance expectations of the project managers. The results from this exercise serve as the basis for an individual development plan for project managers over a period of time (annually in most cases, or more frequently). Career development planning is a process of targeting where individuals currently are in their performance and capability, where they want to be in their career at some time in the future, and then developing a plan on how to get there.
Many project managers are in the discipline because they enjoy the role and want to make it their career. Most highly effective project managers are self-motivated and demonstrate a desire to self-assess, aim for continual improvement, and are persistent in attainment of personal goals.
Virtual Project Management Journey
The situation seems a bit surreal to Jeremy Bouchard as he raises his glass to toast the Sitka project team. He is seated at the VIP table, alongside Sensor Dynamics' senior leaders, who are celebrating the launch of their newest product offering for autonomously driven automobiles and the team that made that happen.
Jude Ames, Vice President of New Product Development, just completed his keynote presentation, a presentation that was full of accolades for the Sitka project team and their performance. The greatest surprise of the evening so far was Ames's words about Bouchard himself: “I would like to extend my personal thank-you to the Sitka project manager, Jeremy Bouchard. Bouchard stepped up to the challenge of leading a project team that spanned multiple sites and multiple continents. He quickly and consistently helped the team perform as a single, cohesive unit.” Ames went on to say, “Because of Jeremy and the entire Sitka project team's efforts, we have nearly $500 million in advance orders for our product. This could be our first billion-dollar product line. I am pleased to announce tonight that the Sitka team has won Sensor Dynamic's highest recognition, the Pinnacle Achievement Award.”
Nearly three years ago, as Bouchard was sitting alone in his office, frustrated with his new virtual environment, he could never have imagined his journey as a virtual project manager would lead to this moment.
Becoming an effective virtual project manager is a journey. Sometimes, as when a person has no prior experience managing traditional projects, the journey is not overly obvious. However, most of the time the journey is quite obvious and a bit overwhelming because of the complexities of virtual projects. This complexity causes the virtual project manager's work to be more complicated. During the journey, project managers always should rely on and leverage their core project management skills and savviness and remember that leadership is all about people, regardless of where they live and work. Managers should show care, commitment, and concern, along with respect and individualized consideration for every virtual teammate. Doing this provides a good foundation on which to start. Then project managers should layer on the tools, templates, assessments, and best practices detailed in this book to become efficient and effective in managing projects and leading teams in the virtual world.