Introduction

A Virtual Team — also known as a Geographically Dispersed

Team (GDT) — is a group of individuals who work across time,
space, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by
webs of communication technology. They have complementary
skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent
performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they
hold themselves mutually accountable. Geographically dispersed
teams allow organizations to hire and retain the best people
regardless of location. Members of virtual teams communicate
electronically, so they may never meet face to face. However, most
teams will meet at some point in time. A virtual team does not
always mean tele worker. Tele workers are defined as individuals
who work from home. Many virtual teams in today's organizations
consist of employees both working at home and small groups in the
office but in different geographic locations.

Summary of the Literature on

Learning in Virtual Teams
Background on Virtual Teams
Virtual teams are utilized in multiple settings, including education
(teams formed among students of distance learning classes),
professional development, as well as corporate and community
organizations. The use of virtual teams is growing in popularity
especially in work-related and educational organizations. Research
findings from a study conducted by Ceridian Employer Services,
which focuses on whether a small business allows its employees to
work in virtual teams reveals that the ability to work in virtual teams
has started to play a big role in the recruitment and retention of
employees (de Lisser, 1999). According to the same authors, 50% of
employees of large and small companies considered the ability to
work in virtual teams a very attractive incentive to join a company.
In addition, 66% indicated that the ability to use the Internet and
work in virtual teams was an “excellent” reason to stay with a
company. In educational settings, instructors use virtual teams to
complete course assignments. According to (Anderson & Garrison,
1998) distance education courses provide access to education to
students who are unable or willing to come to a traditional
classroom. There are multiple learning advantages to working in
virtual teams. One advantage is the creation of learning
communities. The other benefit is in the opportunity to work
collaboratively to generate new knowledge. The notion of learning
communities has been contributed to the idea of a “learning
organization. (Senge, C., Ross, Smith, & Kleiner, 1994) referred to a
learning organization as a way to bring people together to learn and
improve. (Grabener, 2000) defines the responsibilities of members
of learning communities; “manage their own learning, and co-
operate with others in theirs through processes of negotiation and
discussion” (pg. 1). Thus people who come together in a continuous
learning collaborative characterize learning communities.
Working in virtual teams presents unexplored opportunities for peer
interaction as teams create new knowledge to resolve their problem
or project. (Anderson & Garrison, 1998) suggests that a growing
literature base supports the use of peer interaction in formal face-to-
face educational settings. Damon (1984) asserts that the best
conditions for intellectual accomplishment are environments that are
motivated by discovery, the reciprocal feedback between mutually
respected persons and the free exchange of ideas. In addition Lipman
(1991) contends that the notion of “community” in education and
intellectual development is crucial. On the other hand, Turkle
(1995) and Robey et al., (2000) supports the idea that communities
can develop and thrive despite physical distance. Furthermore,
learning community should not be absent in the virtual learning
environments such as virtual teams (Anderson & Garrison, 1998).
According to Kitchen, collaboration is a second advantage of
working in virtual teams. (Kitchen & McDougall, 1999) explains;
“To collaborate (co-labor) means to work together, which implies a
shared goals … to create something new or different through the
collaboration, as opposed to simply exchanging information or
passing on instructions” (Kaye, A., 1992 pg. 2 as cited by (Kitchen
& McDougall, 1999).
Collaborative learning is further defined as a technique that supports
constructivist learning because it involves small groups of people
working together to resolve problems (Yaverbaum & Ocker, 1998).
Dede (1996) includes the notion of “communion” which is defined
as the “psychological/spiritual support from people who share
common joys and trials …” (pg. 17) among his components to create
collaborative projects in online environments.
Collaborative learning is distinguished from cooperative learning.
Kitchen & McDougall (1999) suggests that cooperative learning also
includes the option to divide up tasks and assign them to individuals
based on specialized knowledge and skills of the members.
However, Susman (1998) agrees but concludes that cooperative
learning significantly increases student learning when the
participants elaborate on the material with others. Kitchen &
McDougall provides an example of cooperative learning as
distinguished from collaborative learning, when asked about the
perception of collaborative learning in a virtual team, one respondent
stated, “ it was if four people were working separately; together”
(pg. 252). The results of a meta-analysis on collaborative learning
revealed that using collaborative techniques can increase: student
academic achievement, diversity awareness, high-level thinking,
inter-group relations, and individual self-esteem (Slaving, R., 1999;
Saran, S., 1990 as cited by Kitchen & McDougall, 1999).
Educational theories are shifting toward collaborative constructive
conceptions of learning ((Anderson & Garrison, 1998). One such
notion is co-construction or the shared construction of knowledge in
groups Chung (1999) maintains that learning is viewed as the
process of knowledge construction, which is mediated, by social
interaction and tool use (Vygotsky, 1962 as cited by (Chung, 1999).
Chung goes on to assert that as a result of this change a new
educational paradigm has shifted from classroom lectures to
individual exploration, from individual work to team learning.
One notion of constructivist learning focuses on the responsibility of
the individual to construct meaning while rejecting the idea that
knowledge can be transmitted in whole from the teacher to the
learner. A second notion of constructivist learning more pertinent to
this paper, focuses on the shared construction of knowledge. This
shared construction of knowledge is present in socio-constructivism
theory because it emphasizes the collaborative nature of knowledge
construction. Socio-constructivist asserts that knowledge is a social
construct that is the property of organized individuals. They reject
idea that the locus of control of knowledge is in the individual
(Prawatt, 1996). One of the positive assumptions of collaborative
learning is that knowledge is socially constructed in teams (Kaye,
1990 as cited by Kitchen & McDougall, 1999). Gunawardena, Lowe,
& Anderson (1997) and Robey et al. (2000) support the idea of
socio-cultural constructivism at work within virtual teams.
Along with the above advantages of virtual teams, there exist a
number of disadvantages as well. This paper will address three
those disadvantages, the virtual reality of the team, trust, and
communication. First, virtual teams, are challenged because they are
virtual: they exist through computer mediated communication
(CMC) technology rather than face-to-face; they often times report
to different supervisors (Cohen & Mankin, 1999); they function as
empowered students and professionals who are expected to use their
initiative and resources to contribute to accomplishment of the team
goal (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000); and they are expected to become
interdependent, successfully negotiate cultural differences, and
accomplish this through computer-mediated technology. Lipnack &
Stamps (2000) assert that
“one of the reasons virtual teams fail is because they overlook the
implications of the obvious differences in their working
environments. People do not make accommodation for how
different it really is when they and their colleagues no longer work
face-to-face. Teams fail when they do not adjust to this new reality
by closing the virtual gap” (pg. 19).
Second, trust in virtual teams is a large issue that received a lot of
attention in the literature (Jarvenpaa, 1998; Lipnack & Stamps,
2000; Robey et al., 2000). While the issue of trust is not
insurmountable the ability to develop trust is a major factor of team
success. One theory that has been used to examine trust in virtual
teams is swift trust theory (Meyerson et. al., 1990 as cited by
Jarvenpaa, 1998)). In a study that utilized 350 masters students from
28 universities, Jarvenpaa, (1998) offers that the swift trust theory
suggests that virtual teams make categorical judgments of other
members (whom they have never seen and had no information upon
which to assume their trustworthiness) based on positive stereotypes.
Jarvenpaa notes several factors that may negatively influence trust in
global virtual teams; time, distance, culturally diverse and globally
spanning members, and the reliance on CMC technology. Although,
researchers who examined trust in virtual teams conclude that trust
can be established, they caution that the initial impressions of trust
among team members is critical (Jarvenpaa, 1998; Lipnack &
Stamps, 2000; Robey et al., 2000; Warkentin et al., 1999) making it
difficult to establish trust in later stages of team development.
Finally, communication is a challenge in virtual teams. The issues
with communication include the lack of non-verbal cues, the
inability to take advantage of incidental meetings and learning
(discussions at the water cooler or copy machine); members
experience difficulty engaging in spontaneous written
communication; insufficient attention to the socio-emotional issues;
and lack of trust between team members (Hron, Hesse, Cress, &
Giovis, 2000; Jarvenpaa, 1998; Lipnack & Stamps, 2000; Warkentin
et al., 1999). According to Warkentin et al. (1999) people rely on
multiple modes of communication when conversing face-to-face,
such as voice tone, inflection, volume, eye movement, facial
expressions, hand gestures, and other body language. These cues
provide for a methodical conversation process. They serve to
facilitate turn taking, convey subtle meanings, provide feedback, and
thus regulate the conversation flow. CMC precludes the normal
give-and-take of discussion (Warkentin et al., 1999). Additionally,
virtual team members may fail in their attention to the emotional
aspects of these environments, which may serve to promote an
eruption of a sequence of negative comments, which may prove
difficult to resolve in a virtual environment (Jarvenpaa, 1998). In
order to overcome some of the communication issues, researchers
have suggested a number of tools, prompts or rules to guide the
discussion (Chung, 1999; Jarvenpaa, 1998; Lipnack & Stamps,
2000). Others have recommended that the teams meet face to face
when possible (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000;Robey et al., 2000).
Despite the growing popularity of virtual teams research in this area
is still in its infancy. However, new rich online environment
provides a new and exciting context in which we can add to our
knowledge on the cognitive/rational as well as the more
humanistic/meaning-making aspects of learning. Now, I examine
learning in virtual teams.

Summary of literature
A review of the literature on learning in virtual teams reveals three
explicit themes learning communities, collaboration, communication
and co-construction of knowledge as well as and two implicit
characteristics. These implicit characteristics included, learning in
virtual teams is hegemonic and the cognitive learning aspect is
sufficient to explain all of the learning that occurs within these
environments. The virtual teams created learning communities in
which a shared or social construction of knowledge occurs. These
characteristics seem a natural fit for learning in virtual teams. Close
supervision, or a learning environment in which the learners did not
have much of the control over the learning process would be
prohibitive of team processes. Additionally, communication in these
environments makes them unique learning opportunities for learners
since the majority of it is text. Text based communication is missing
non-verbal social cues that can prove to be problematic for the
learners. Robey et al. (2000) concluded that learning is an ongoing
and dynamic process thus what was learned about learning situated
in the virtual team is that it continued to evolve. With this in mind
our understanding of learning in virtual teams is continuously
evolving.
In conclusion additional research is needed in all aspects of learning
in this environment. The research primarily consisted of pre-
selected case studies. Few of the studies were conducted in naturally
occurring settings. There were few empirical studies including a
small number that utilize adult learning theories even though they
were studying adults. More importantly, only a small segment of the
studies attended to the emotional or affective aspects of learning.
Finally, literature that highlights the differences of learning
experiences between members in the workplace and the educational
environment, as well as how learning experiences of virtual
members add to the knowledge we have concerning traditional
cross-functional teams can be the focus of future research efforts.

Why virtual teams?

Best employees may be located anywhere in the world.
Workers demand personal flexibility.
Workers demand increasing technological sophistication.
A flexible organization is more competitive and responsive to the
marketplace.
Workers tend to be more productive; i.e., they spend less time on
commuting and travel
The increasing globalization of trade and corporate activity.
The global workday is 24 vs. 8 hours.
The emergence of environments which require inter-organizational
cooperation as well as competition.
Changes in workers' expectations of organizational participation.
A continued shift from production to service/knowledge work
environments.
Increasing horizontal organization structures characterized by
structurally and geographically distributed human resources.
Proliferation of fiber optic technology has significantly increased the
scope of off-site communication.
Benefits of virtual teams:
Some members of virtual teams do not need to come in to the
workplace, therefore the company will not need to offer those
workers office or parking space.
Reduces traveling expenses for employees.
It allows more people to be included in the labor pool.
It decreases both air pollution and congestion because there is less
commuting.
It allows workers in organizations to be more flexible.
By working in virtual teams, physical handicaps are
not a concern.
Allows companies to procure the best talent
without geographical restrictions.

Problems with virtual teams:

Difficulty in managing the performance of the team.
Misunderstanding in communications is the leading complaint
among members of virtual teams.
This problem is magnified when working with teams across cultural
borders because of nuances in the English language
Working on a project over the virtual workspace causes lack of
project visibility.
Difficulty contacting other members. (i.e. email, instant messaging,
etc.)
Differences in time zones.
It can be difficult for team members to fully comprehend the
meaning of text-based messages.
Building trust may be challenging because mechanisms different
from those used in face-to-face teams are required to build trust
Distrust can also be incurred due to insecurities of job retention if
the offshore team members are less expensive and more proficient at
the task at hand.
Members fail to take 'ownership' of project
Specific nuances such as facial expressions and other subtle gestures
can also be missed through virtual communication as opposed to
meeting face to face.

Tips to ease communication

problems for team members:
Allow the team members to get to know each other by arranging
occasional face to face meetings. This can also be accomplished
using webcams and video conferencing which may or may not
necessitate that all team members use the same hardware and/or
software applications.
Allow team members to get an idea of where the overall project is
going. This way each member will know how they fit into the
project.
Create a code of conduct. This will avoid delays and will make sure
that requests are answered in a timely fashion.
Do not allow team members to disappear. Have a calendar for each
team member so that everyone's schedule is available to view.
Develop trust among the team.
Incorporation of team member details such as family life and mutual
hobbies are proven techniques for building trust.
Store charts, diagrams, etc. on the internet so that the whole team
can see them.
Create a 'face book' which includes information about background,
interests and helps team members get to know each other better.
Individuals choose the information to share. Connections and trust
are built through relationships.

Who are the members of virtual

teams?
Members can either be stable or change on an ongoing basis.
Members can be in the same company or from various companies.
Members can live in the same community or in different countries.

Basic types of virtual teams

Networked Teams consist of individuals who collaborate to achieve
a common goal or purpose; membership is frequently diffuse and
fluid.
Parallel Teams work in the short term to develop recommendations
for an improvement in a process or system; the team has a distinct
membership.
Project or Product-Development Teams conduct projects for users
or customers for a defined period of time. Tasks are usually no
routine, and the results are specific and measurable; the team has
decision making authority.
Work or Production Teams perform regular and ongoing work
usually in one function; the team has clearly defined membership.
Service Teams support customers or the internal organization in
typically a service/technical support role around the clock.
Management Teams work collaboratively on a daily basis within a
functional division of a corporation.
Action Teams offer immediate responses activated in (typically)
emergency situations.
Offshore ISD Outsourcing Teams Setup in which a company
subcontracts portions of work to an offshore independent service
provider to be worked in conjunction with an onshore team.
Offshore ISD is commonly used for Software development as well
as international R&D projects.

Reasons for virtual teams in the

workplace:
Allows for people in different parts of the world to come together to
work on a project.
Creates alliances and mergers between organizations.
Extends the market to different geographical locations.
Reduces costs for an organization.

Nine key steps to developing

virtual teams:
Secure a project-based idea conducive to collaboration.
Build a business plan to include the team vision, purpose and goal.
Identify critical players to support the project.
Select people who can contribute their core competencies to the
project.
Enlist their service.
Establish an initial meeting with members to lay down the
groundwork, set guidelines and processes.
Strategically align all members to the projects goal.
Set a timeline.
Monitor activities and progress.

Critical success factors of

virtual teams
The existence of availability standards.
Ample resources to buy and support state-of-the-art reliable
communication and collaboration tools for all team members.
Increased success of such tools are highly dependent on proper
proliferation of high speed fiber-optic transmission which best suits
high density transmission.
The existence of corporate memory systems such as lessons learned
databases.
The existence of written goals, objectives, project specifications, and
performance metrics; results orientation.
Managers and team members with a better-than-average ability to
accurately estimate.
A lower-than-normal ratio of pushed to pulled information.
Team communication is prioritized by the sender.
Human resource policies, reward/recognition systems as well as
career development systems address the unique needs of virtual
workers.
Good access to technical training and information on how to work
across cultures.
Training methods accommodate continual and just-in-time learning.
There are standard and agreed-on technical and "soft" team
processes.
A "high trust" culture; teamwork and collaboration are the norm.
Leaders set high performance expectations; model behaviors such as
working across boundaries and using technology effectively.
Team leaders and members exhibit competence in working in virtual
environments.
Effective division of work that plays to each team member's
strengths.
Facilitate effective dissemination of knowledge. Tacit knowledge
possessed must be shared in a manner deemed explicit enough to be
efficiently rendered and cross-referenced amongst team members.

Team-building key for virtual

workplace
Darleen DeRosa, Ph.D., a managing partner at On Point Consulting,
focuses her research on virtual teams. DeRosa earned her PhD in
organizational psychology and invested four years of graduate
school at the masters and PhD levels obtaining her degree. She chose
to focus on this area because she feels that even though
organizations have invested so much time and money into virtual
teams, organizations are missing the foundation for virtual
workplaces; support.
DeRosa’s study included surveying and interviewing 10 different
major international firms; two thirds agreed that the performance of
virtual teamwork is “important or very important” to the
fundamental success of their business. Of 21 virtual teams, sixty-five
percent claimed that they’d had never participated in an effective
team building session, thirty-six percent said they had never met
their team members face to face. Teams that had been together for
less than a year were more productive and performed substantially
better than teams that had been together for more than a year. An
overall observation is that productivity and performance decreases
over time.
A recent study by the Gartner Group; an American research
company, stated that by 2008, 41 million corporate employees will
operate in a virtual workplace at least one day per week.
Having employees working in a virtual workplace poses some
concerns and challenges, most of which would be eliminated by
working in a physical office. Most of these challenges stem from the
lack of face-to-face interactions among team members. Darleen
DeRosa discovered seven key challenges that employees are faced
with when working in teams in a virtual workplace. Here are the
challenges that she has identified in her research:
• Companies must compensate for the lack of human contact, and
find appropriate ways to support team spirit, trust and productivity.
• Leaders
must be especially sensitive to interpersonal,
communication and cultural factors.
• No trust, no team. Trust is a top factor in determining virtual team
success. But interpersonal trust, compared to task-level trust (a faith
that team members will do their job) is more difficult to achieve in a
virtual environment.
• Team building pays off. Virtual teams that invest time in team
building perform better than those that don't.
• Team performance tends to drop off after one year. Attention must
be paid to interpersonal, communication and cultural factors to
prevent a "peak-and-decline" syndrome.
• Technology makes virtual teaming possible, but isn't a perfect
substitute for human interaction. Teams must be careful to use the
appropriate technology for various tasks.
• While meeting in person requires time and expense, virtual teams
that meet once or twice a year perform better overall than those that
don't meet. To help make an easy transition from a physical office to
virtual workplaces for employees, organizations have created
“virtual water coolers” and chat rooms to encourage employee
interaction and communication.
DeRosa has concluded that companies are not optimizing their
virtual workplaces. There is an enormous potential for increased
productivity and performance, however organizations have failed to
build the foundation for making an easy move to virtual workplaces.
People tend to be more receptive to face-to-face interactions. A
virtual workplace eliminates this human contact. As a result, in order
to build the foundations for a successful workplace, organizations
have to find a way to replace human contact with an equivalent
interaction. Increased productivity and performance should be the
driving forces for finding that replacement and endorsing the
movement to virtual workplaces.

Managing the Virtual Employee

The Project Management industry is changing; we are moving away
from the days of the boardroom meetings and group gatherings, to
the virtual team world. Full and part time employees work each
week from a home (Home office employees) or a remote office
(corporate or remote office, in another town or state) 100% of the
time. This is still a relatively new direction but more and more
companies are starting to offer this kind of work arrangement for
their employees. The question is; how effective is it?
How does a Project Manager (PM) handle a virtual team? What are
the challenges and issues he/she faces on projects? Can a PM be
effective with a team spread out across the country, and in some
cases the world? Can they really bring a team together and be
successful?

Virtual Team Members present the following challenges:

Lack of Accountability
Out of site, out of mind! When a team member does not have a PM
around to make sure a task is completed, sometimes tasks do not get
finished.

Missed meetings/deadlines
Sometimes team members don’t show up to meetings or miss
deadlines on their assigned tasks. There are also times, due to other
priorities, team members will miss multiple project meetings leaving
the PM not knowing what is happening with their piece of the
project.

Lack of communication
Sometimes team members do not communicate enough with the PM
and/or the rest of the project team. This lack of dialog will become
an issue when something goes wrong and you are unable to solicit
any help from that team member.

Training Issues
How does a PM handle the situation where the virtual team member
is not capable of handling the assigned task? This is not just a
situation with virtual employees; it occurs with onsite staff as well,
but the situation is more serious when the virtual team member is not
on site and cannot easily be helped or trained.

Home Office Infrastructure Issues

Hardware, power failures, phone or ISDN line down, all issues that
are common to a home office, that hardly ever occur in a traditional
business facility.

Home Office Family and home Issues

When virtual employees work from a home office, sometimes family
and home-related issues receive a higher priority than work issues.
That is only human nature. These issues come in the middle of
getting the project work completed. Issues such as: kids sick at
school, doctor’s appointments, car-pooling all seem to take top
priority when the employee is home and able to get away for a
“couple minutes��? to do these chores.

All of these issues can be showstoppers for projects. They can

literally stop a project in its tracks if a PM does not have established
procedures in place to use to handle these issues when they do occur.

What can a PM do?

Here are a series of tips to make managing a virtual employee or

team-member more effective:

Virtual Office Rules and Guidelines

Establish, document, approve, and adopt firm guidelines to set the
virtual team member expectations for communication, infrastructure,
work hours, interruptions, etc. Make virtual employee policies, not
guidelines, and ensure that they are followed while the employee is
working an offsite work place. Each employee or team member is to
sign and approve these polices before they start in this virtual work
position. If they don’t sign the agreement, then that employee will
not be eligible for any virtual positions and should not be allowed to
work remotely.

Virtual Employee Qualifications

Not all employees fit the role of a virtual team member. There are
three basic qualities that a person needs to have before they should
be approved to work in a virtual position.
1. Great Communicator.
2. Very experienced in existing position or similar position.
3. Dedicated to project and a team player.

If the virtual team member has all three of the above qualities, the
PM should have very few problems working while they are working
together on their project(s). If any one of these is missing, it could
lead to some serious issues for the PM and the project as a whole.

Communicate
Communication with your virtual project team member has to be
well documented and occur frequently throughout the project. When
working with virtual team members, it is a good idea to establish
communication guidelines. Those guidelines could include,
maximum amount of communications per day, standard times to
communicate…etc. However, a PM should not be afraid to call,
email, or do whatever you have to do to understand what is
happening on your project, if your virtual employee is able to
provide that information. When team members are remote, quite
often they tend to forget that they are accountable to your project.
This is where good communication skills, established guidelines, all
play an important and critical role on projects.

Team meetings
The PM needs to have mandatory recurring team meetings
(scheduled per project requirements), regardless of the size of the
project. The PM must make sure there are open communications
between all team members at those meetings. When the team is
virtual, there are tools such as Net meeting or Video conferencing
that could be used to help bring the team together. If that is not
possible, try to schedule a meeting room and bring the team
members who do sit onsite into the same room, to allow some
“face��? time between the onsite team members. This will go a
long way to team building on your project.
One Team
The PM has to treat their virtual team(s) as they treat a “one-
location��? team. The locations of your team members cannot be
a barrier to the success of the project. The PM has to do everything
they would normally do with the project team as if they were all
sitting one or two cubes away. If possible, if the entire team can be
brought together at a single location, do so. It will be a great way to
put a name, personality and face to each team member. This face to
face will also go a long way in building a great project team.

Follow-ups and hard deadlines

The PM needs to do follow-ups and set hard deadlines for your
project tasks. This is usually done in a scheduling tool such as
Microsoft Project. When this is done initially for the project, the PM
must do a team review of the project schedule and get individual buy
off on the assigned tasks. Throughout the project, the PM must
continue to follow-up with each team member and ensure that
assigned deadlines are met.
When the team members are a couple cubes away, the follow-ups
are very easy to do. When the teams are remote this becomes much
harder and trickier to do for the PM. This is where the strong
personal relationships that the PM has built up throughout the
project will assist them in these follow-ups.

Ownership
All team members (on site and virtual) must have both ownership
and accountability on a project to make it successful. If either of
these qualities is missing, it is going to be very difficult to have a
success in the project. If the team member commits to a date to have
a task completed, then they must make those dates. If they miss the
deadline, then that team member is accountable to the project team
and needs to do whatever it takes to get the task done as soon as
possible. When having virtual team members, it seems that it is
much more difficult to get a handle on and put corrective action into
play when deadlines are missed. The PM throughout the project
needs to stay informed by each team member to ensure that dates are
not missed whenever possible.

Multi-Tasking
As the PM of a virtual team member, you need to be aware of the
multi-tasking that each of the team members will be involved in. The
PM must try to make sure that those “other" tasks do not get in the
way of completing the project. Multi-tasking is unfortunately a
reality these days, but if the PM is aware of this, understands the
impacts, factors it in, it should not affect the project deadlines.

In closing, managing virtual teams is not an easy task, but if the PM

is prepared ahead of time and follows the tips above, this will go a
long way toward being successful in your projects. The most
important tool a PM can use is to communicate. This is nothing new,
and something that all successful PMs do anyway, but it is very
important when your tester is 2000 miles away and you are shipping
your product in the next 2 hours.

Aiding Software for Virtual

Teams
Virtual teams are often spread all over the globe, ranging from
different offices to different cultures; so how is it that they can
remain on track with objectives and come together to achieve goals
to contribute to the organization? The answer is that they use
collaborative technology--in particular they use software that allows
virtual teams to be as efficient as same-location teams.
Software that aids virtual team functioning can be separated into two
main categories--software that provides ease of communication and
software that provides task and document organization.
Software that improves the ease of communication often includes
features such as presence awareness, instant messaging, and web
conferencing. These tools allow team member to be accessible to
their teams 24 hours a day. Members can have real time
conversations and do not have to follow lengthy correspondence as
dispersed teams have had to in the past, which leads to greater
efficiency.
Software applications that organize team tasks and documents also
improve their teams' efficiency. These programs consist of a central
location where all members can access important documents to the
team, track progress made, assign tasks, and even provide calendars
with key dates and timelines to keep all members current.
There are many software programs for virtual teams, such as Lotus
software by IBM, NetMeeting by Microsoft, Facilitate.com by
Facilitate.com, Think-tank by Group Systems, and many more.
Software of this type is a fast-developing area, so organizations
should look often for software programs that suit the size and
functionality of their teams.
Examples of Collaborative Software
Virtual World Software: Ongoing research is indicating that virtual
worlds, such as Second Life, can help with virtual team
collaboration. However, virtual team leaders should think beyond
mimicking reality to foster successful collaboration
Other software titles, including MetaTeam, provide a team
framework that models group structures, interactions and processes
in a way that enables dispersed team members to participate more
fully

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