What's over there?

We have IQ, there’s Emotional Intelligence (EI) – I say we add  EQ – environmental intelligence based on applying that Emotional Intelligence to what’s going on with stakeholders.

A quick recap, a stakeholder is someone who has a professional interest in the outcome of a project.  That interest may be acknowledged and formalized – corporate board, supervisor, project team and internal or external customer.  It also may be unacknowledged and informal — parallel project teams; teams up or down stream of the project’s production flow (e.g., Shipping), or through a functional group associated but not directly affected (e.g. accounting or marketing).

A stakeholder’s analysis is typically an informal data gathering process.  Perform it during a project team meeting.  The following three steps are recommended:

Identify who will be impacted by the project inside and outside the organization.  It is helpful to draw it on dry erase board or flip chart in a counter clock-wise fashion with the candidate project at 3 o’clock.

Identify outcomes, desirable (+) and undesirable (-).

Identify how often a group should receive information.  Information gleamed here feeds into the project’s responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) or RACI.

Why is this helpful for managing conflict in virtual teams?  Understanding the information and communication needs of stakeholders is critical in all teams, in virtual teams the opportunity to pick up informal, non-verbal ques is far less.  So a project manager needs to be much more deliberate to unearth potential problems

Related Articles

• Virtual Teams – Conflict Resolution – Prepare (tapuniversity.com)
• Virtual Teams – Conflict Resolution, Risk Assessment (tapuniversity.com)
• 5 Common Types of Conflict Found in Project Teams (brighthub.com)
• IQ or Wits Check; Fallacies and Cognitive Biases from Game in the Brain (gameinthebrain.blogspot.com)
• 10 Typical Activities of a Project Development Team (brighthub.com)
• 10 Ways to Resolve Conflict Between Project Team Members (brighthub.com)

Just a little bit of risk that needs to management

Step Two of Resolving Virtual Team Conflict is to treat it as a potential risk.  The advantage of looking at team conflict as a risk is it’s an easier to say “hey let’s treat team conflict as a risk element, something that might happen” rather than “gee, we’re conflicted and at each others throat, upper management help!”

The following table is taken from a real life project at a dot.com company in 2001.  As with other projects at this start-up, the project was ripe for conflict and full of risks.  While the technology as leap frogged ahead in 10 years, the issues with virtual teams remain.

The purpose of this project was to deliver an innovative solution to a large software company.  It required an “all hands to one side of ship” approach using brute force to complete.

Unique was that resources were distributed across three locations, Silicon Valley, Shanghai and a Midwest Operations Center.

Conflict was included as a potential risk element and mitigated through structured, consistent communication (via conference call, Internet chat, web conferencing and shared document store).  This approach helped achieve an ambitious and high risk, release to market.

See Table 1.

Table 1.  Risk assessment with conflict element

Preparing the baking pan for project success!

Conflict. The mere term evokes a strong response. In today’s environment, examples of conflict are replete: Middle East, War on Terrorism, Political Divides. Intra personal conflict also appears to be increasing. Project managers also encounter a variety of conflicts: inadequate resources, changing organizational direction, project direction, disagreement among stakeholder groups, clash with functional teams, role conflict, team unity, and missed communication.

The answer to the first question is yes – conflict will occur.

That is not necessarily bad. Consider this. The Latin root of conflict (conflictus) means to “strike together”. Popular connotations are conflict pulls “apart”. Unresolved conflict pulls apart. Properly resolved conflict brings vibrancy to a project.

In 2002 I wrote a series of articles addressing conflict in virtual teams and shared some steps to actively manage conflict using a the acronym PRE-EMPT. 

The first step is to Prepare. Learn from past projects. Historical information is vital (it’s also a part of Organizational Process Assets now, a rather universal Input). Use it. Understanding and learning about past project flows in general and conflicts in particular provide a powerful insight to a current project.

Know your own standing as a project manager. Are you new to project management, new to the organization, or a veteran of several successful campaigns? Regardless of the entry point, it is vital to understand your strengths and weaknesses as well as how you are perceived by the team, stakeholders and organization. What are the team’s strengths and weaknesses? If the team is newly assembled, then time spent seeking this at the beginning pays dividends.

You hope they have your back

While delivering over forty Effective Virtual Team workshops at TAPUniversity since 2006, one question we encourage participants to ask is “well, OK, how does this differ from team members we see in person?”

Swift Trust is one concept worth digging in to help answer the question of differentiation.

Trust applies to all teams. Teams lacking trust do not function effectively: they hoard information, seek self-serving interests over the good of the many, and end up in defeat. Teams with trust, however, rise above challenges, they build each other up, and contrary to many, they can be extremely successful.

Trust is needed in both virtual and in-person teams but what is different for virtual teams is the concept of swift trust. That is, you afford someone trust on a limited basis, with whom you have not met in person. Basically, allowing them the ‘benefit of the doubt’ until that trust is breached.

Trust is built through consistent behavior and delivery. For virtual teams, trust that begins ‘swiftly’ needs consistent nurturing. A week long gap in communicating with someone you typically see face-to-face does not seem as long as going a week without receiving an email, phone call or discussion board thread from someone at a distance.

Swift trust that is lost in a virtual team is often more difficult to regain than in-person teams. To repair broken trust these three steps are helpful:

• Acknowledge the breach in performance through as personal a medium as possible (e.g. phone call rather than email)
• Make commitments for communicating progress and yet don’t over commit to make up for a wrong. That typically leads to a downward spiral of further misses.
• Stay as fact-based as possible and avoid over interpretation or excuses

This may be you, right now. Or if not, in your near future!

Virtual teams are geographical dispersed teams (GDT) who are formed for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes the virtual team is formed as a result of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), or a collaboration among organizations may trigger it, perhaps a key employee moves or a company wishes to get some “boots on the ground” in a new city.  Regardless of the motivation, virtual teams are a given in a dynamic global community.

The Fourth Edition PMBOK references virtual teams as a tool and technique for Acquire Human Resources (Section 9.2).  That single tool and technique can produce a wealth of questions for the PMP exam.  From conflict, to communication overhead, twenty-four hour work cycle and requirements gathering challenges – there’s a long list of topics to discuss and validate.

Virtual teams are a practice area for TAPUniversity.  We have studied them and helped others become proficient in managing them since 2005.  Frequently traditional management wisdom does not apply and may even back fire.  Virtual teams also have proven a sticking point for the Agile SCRUM movement, which, in its initial manifesto, had co-located teams as key principle.  Over the next few weeks we’ll dig deeper and share more about virtual teams.

Please share your experiences as well.  What’s worked well?  What hasn’t?  What’s changed for you in the last ten years in working with virtual teams?

• The Project Manager’s authority and their resource availability range from little or none in a Functional organization and increase on the continuum to High to Almost Total in a Projectized organization.
• In a Balanced Matrix, both the Project Manager and Functional Manager have some control over the budget. Organizational structures to the left of the Balanced Matrix on the continuum have the Functional Manager control the budget, and those on right have the Project Manager control the budget.
• In a Weak Matrix and the organization to the left, the Project Manager’s role is part-time. Whereas organizations to the right of the Weak Matrix have Project Managers who work in the capacity of a Project Manager full-time.
• In a Balanced Matrix and the organizations to the left, the Project Management Administrative Staff works part-time. Whereas organizations to the right of the Balanced Matrix have full-time Project Management Administrative Staff.