One of my former students asked me to tell her about the dynamics of a virtual team, I figured I will share my answers with all of you as well:
How do you accommodate the time difference while working with an overseers member of your team?
We pick times that work best for everyone. We also limit synchronous communication by relying on asynchronous tools such as Yammer or shared documents such as Google Docs.
What is the greatest challenge of working in a virtual team?
Team members have many competing priorities that lay outside the team. There is a degree of cohesion that is impossible to create without having some face time.
What types of technology or devices do you and the members of your team use to communicate with your colleagues overseas?
Skype, Gchat, phones for conference calls, Gotomeeting for remote presentations, Google docs for shared documents, Yammer and sms for team interactions, e-mail to communicate with the colleagues who are still stuck in the past.
Who heads your virtual team? how does the individual manager your team?
Depends on which team. I am one of the co-leaders for www.Mindbounce.com and lead www.bucketb.com, but majority of the teams in which I am involved do not have an explicit leader and are managed on peer led basis. For example, www.startupaccelerator.org lacks explicit leaders and the leadership of www.posipair.com is wise enough to act collaboratively. Typically, even in teams I actively manage, I let the project list document do the management function, only handling exceptions and insuring that communication that needs to happen happens.
What advantages, if any, do you see in working as a virtual team?
Thousands of dollars and hours saved to fly the people back and forth. Access to a widest possible pool of talent. Ability to utilize people as needed, while allowing them to work on other projects.
What disadvantages, if any, do you see in working as a virtual team?
Communication is more clinical and it is harder to build comradeship. When things break, they REALLY break. Having heart to heart conversations is even tougher than in person. People can drop off the face of the earth without notice much more easily then if they had to come and grub their stuff off the desk.
What are your recommendations for a virtual team to be successful?
Have someone financing the project. Make sure you have a customer who is not shy about telling your team to deliver what was promised. It is good to have people who have worked with each other on prior projects and crucial to have people who can be professionals without being babysat.
The other day I was at Alterra on Humboldt and was surprised to see them use heating to keep their outside space usable during winter. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the business reason for it, and if anyone else did that I would not give it a second thought. However, Alterra is very emphatic about being sustainable and environmentally conscious and this just caught me completely off guard.
Maybe it did not register with most of their customers, and frankly it makes little difference to me, since I am only willing to pay coffee shop prices for my chai if I am meeting with someone who wanted to meet there, but just maybe this inconsistency is precisely the sacrifice of the organizational purpose at the altar of the expedient that when done on a massive scale of much larger corporations that causes most of the phenomenon that are frustrating in our world today.
Again, Alterra is one of the strongest local brands, and by all means, I wish them well. And maybe this was not an oversight, but rather a conscious trade off given the limited resources, they like every organizations must face, but I would love to live in a world transparent enough where we as consumers and investors can know what drives these decisions and have a way to vote with our dollars to occasionally express our displeasure or mild irritation when we see something bothersome in the way particular business decisions are made.
On the other hand, the more practical solution in the short run is for government to stop subsidizing energy and start taxing it in the proportion to the cleanup costs for the pollution we all generate, unfortunately, that too is not politically expedient.
While the presentation below view the business models a bit to narrowly, only in terms of the transactions, this is a great place to start developing and refining the understanding of the business opportunities. Take a look and tell me what you think:
In Christianity there is a belief that it was the devil who caused men to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which causes them to be separate from God and seek independently the path of right and wrong. In this video, the same argument is presented from a very different perspective. A must watch for anyone who is either ultra liberal or ultra conservative.
