Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World: Takeaways from PMI Global Congress North America

With over a third of projects being agile and more work being done by virtual teams, we aimed to look at how project managers can successfully combine the two. Having combined our expertise in managing distributed teams, we came up with a few practical, battlefield-tested tips in the area of communication practices, Web 2.0 tools and beyond, which can help bridge the gap for agile teams working across geographic boundaries.

In the first part of the session, Cornelius started with a case study of his own team, spread across 6 countries on 3 continents, and shared which tools and practices help them the most to collaborate efficiently. For instance, according to the experience of Cornelius' team, the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

There's no doubt that virtual teams have some very strong benefits, but there are certain serious bottlenecks, too, like the risk of miscommunication, limited visibility, etc. In my part of the session, I highlighted 5 pain-relievers that help me overcome the most common challenges in managing my team. Some additional tips came up during the Q&A. For example, when your team members speak different languages, don't let accents influence your perception of a professional. This is especially critical in the initial conversations, when team members don’t know each other yet and haven't yet built social and professional trust. Make sure that you give your team members "trust credit" in this initial phase, and always remember that behind that email ID is a real person, who likely works as hard as you do and is as professional as you are. It’s also crucial to remember and respect the cultural differences, and while keeping this in mind, work toward building a shared culture. Last but not least, as with everything else, it’s hard to create an ideal collaboration pattern right from the start. However, if you keep your eyes and mind open, constantly communicate and gather feedback from your team members, you can continuously iterate and improve. Eventually, you'll find your secret sauce for efficient remote teamwork.

I believe that one of the main prerequisites for the success of a distributed team is to make sure that everyone is on the same page – not only in terms of the assigned tasks, but also the general vision, applied processes, cultural awareness, information sharing and trust. It’ll be extremely helpful for team members to know not just what to do, but why and what lies ahead. This will help a lot in asynchronous communications, when you’re not immediately available to answer all of their questions and course correct. You have to think and communicate proactively in distributed teams, making sure you’re your team shares the same mission and vision, and understands the goals. So meetings in virtual teams are very important. Not only are they important, they are different, and in the final part of our session Elizabeth named some important techniques for making virtual meetings productive.

I’ve posted our joint slide deck on Slideshare, so that you can adapt some of these practical takeaways to your team:

Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World: Harnessing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Beyond

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To learn more details about our session and other ones, too, you can also check out recent tweets with the hash tag #pminac. Here are a couple of them:

@pm4girls: "Don't just give them tasks, give them reasons to help them understand vision and goals" @wrike talking about empowering teams at #pminac

@LewisCindy: From @wrike don't let accents influence emotional feelings about the person. Nice reminder #pminac

By the way, Wrike has just opened an interesting survey about remote work and the way workers see its benefits and challenges. I would really appreciate if you could spend a few minutes to have your say in this survey. As soon as we get enough responses, I’ll analyze the results and share them with you.

Project Management 7 min read

Tips for Introducing Granular Workload Organization to Your Project Team (Inspired by the Discussion at PMI LA Chapter)

Meet-ups with fellow project managers keep bringing up thought-provoking discussions and interesting ideas on how to maximize the efficiency of project teams. This time, I want to share some notes from the February dinner meeting of the PMI LA Chapter. After my presentation that focused on the ways of making distributed teams efficient, one of the most interesting questions that I heard from the audience was how to introduce a team to a granular work breakdown. No matter how talented and experienced your remote worker is, it might still be unproductive to assign him a huge, month-long task. There’s always some risk in thinking that he’ll do just fine figuring it out all on his own. This way, you severely limit your visibility into the work progress, and if the course goes wrong, you might discover it too late to clear things up. When you can’t discuss things with some of the team members directly and frequently, having more granular assignments might be a helpful tactic and make life easier for both parties. So how exactly do you make it work? Making a sliding scale work in planning First, you could use a sliding scale in planning. Your weekly plan for this week could focus on 5-10 things, just like your quarterly plan, but the scope of those things will obviously be quite different. You don’t have to build a detailed, upfront plan for 52 weeks on January 1st of the new year. If your only concern is visibility, then a weekly plan that only includes the current week is enough. As a new period of time comes, be it quarter, month, week, or day, you plan it, thus the term “sliding scale.” The closer this time period is to today, the more detailed your plan should be. You should however be aware of scope leap when using a system like this. When possible and reasonable, you should also delegate the planning to the employees who are doing the work. Most people feel more moral responsibility for getting the work done on time when they have promised the dates, not when the dates were imposed on them. This not only makes them more responsible, but also makes them happier. By the way, in our recent research on working habits, we discovered that sense of responsibility is the No. 1 productivity trigger: People feel stressed out when they feel no control over their life and work. By returning that feel of control back to them, you empower them. Did I mention that it also saves you from having to do the initial planning?:) It’s hard to come up with a better win-win. Of course, you should also review the plans and align them with higher-level objectives and other employees. Steps to building a new habit within the team Sure enough, it’s easier said than done, as some employees prefer murky schedules, so that they don’t need to report very often. Here are the steps that helped me introduce sliding scale, bottom-up planning: - Make sure to communicate your vision. Why exactly are smaller tasks a better option than bigger assignments? Make sure your team clearly understands the benefits and doesn’t see it as their leader’s new micromanagement whim.- Seed it by your own example. For instance, if you use a collaboration system with a newsfeed, when your workers see how you complete tasks one after another, this might give them a good deal of motivation. They wouldn’t want to lag behind. - When you want to implement some change, making it happen in one big swipe is often hard. Instead, support from a group of “pioneers” might be really helpful. Some employees are more open to new methods. Also, some might be more productivity-oriented than others. Form the “core team,” build the right productivity habit there, and it’ll be easier to later plug in others through peer pressure. - You can blend it into your team’s other working habits. For example, if you have weekly virtual meetings to discuss the work progress and the plans, how big is the difference between these two ways of phrasing the agenda? “Last week, we got 40% of the project completed” or “Last week, we got 10 tasks completed on the project, namely …” To me, the second version sounds way more concise, but it still plays nicely with the habit of discussing work progress every week. - In his awesome best-seller “Good to Great,” Jim Collins said, "Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action.” If, after some time and persistent efforts, the new habit still doesn’t stick with certain employees, you need to look deeper into the reasons. Are they your best performers who try to set up their own rules, or are they your worst performers who try to hide that behind ambiguous schedules and obscure “percent completed” updates? Do they simply need some extra motivation, or do they drag and slow down the whole team? Motivation and other benefits of granular tasks The advantages of slicing work into smaller parts are supported by psychologists. For instance, Joseph Ferrari, a professor from DePaul University, says that when the scope of work looks overwhelming, you get captured by the feeling of “seeing the forest and forgetting that it’s made of trees.” In the opposite situation, we can get valuable small wins. Quoting another interesting book, “Small wins are something people can experience pretty regularly if the work is chunked down to manageable pieces” (from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer). By the way, “small wins” have become a behavioral term, and they’re often discussed in literature. In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg concluded that a “huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.” What else is there in the habit of granular work organization? In addition to the benefits of clarity, visibility and easier tracking, this approach to distributing workload might also be an efficient way to eliminate procrastination. Another revelation of our survey on work styles was that 21% of workers see procrastination as one of the most dangerous productivity killers. So they’ll most likely thank you if you give them a good weapon to fight this enemy :)

Project Management 3 min read

Project Management 2.0: New Definition

Project Management 2.0 is an approach to managing projects that is brought to life by the use of Web-based, emergent, collaborative project management software and that focuses on collective intelligence, productivity and project leadership as the basic factors of project success. Here’s what I mean by some of the specific words in this definition. “Emergent” means that the software contains mechanisms to let all people involved in a project contribute to project plans and knowledge, so that the plans become more realistic and true-to-life, and project knowledge evolves over time. “Collaborative” means that the software is designed for groups of people or whole organizations to work together in an intersection of common goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. “Collaborative” also does not mean “excluding leadership.” “Project management software” covers many types of software, including programs for scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to organize processes and operations on a project. “Collective intelligence” refers to the joint capacities of a group of people to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language and to learn. You are welcome to compare this to the Wikipedia definition. Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of Web-based project management and collaboration platforms by Capgemini, Chicago Transit Authority, Australia's Defense Force and millions of other organizations. Fedora Project Wiki -- a place for end users and developers of the Linux-based operating system called Fedora to collaborate. What a Project! blog, which serves as a home to many projects at once. Use of other project blogs (Plogs). A project blog is a blog that is customized to record a project, or a deliverable task, with its goal, procedures and status changes. It includes a "completed" status, which puts an intended end to the blog when a project is completed. Not Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of personal blogs written by people involved in the project. These are for individuals, and although these blogs may contain opinions and information on project management, collaboration and the nature of projects, blogs like these do not imply teamwork and the achievement of common goals. Use of most traditional software systems, like Microsoft Project. As discussed earlier, they’re not emergent and are not focused on collaboration. Use of email and “classic” instant messaging for communications on a project. These applications do not allow interactions between people to be visible to the whole project team. You may, of course, argue that this definition is too tool-centric. Well, when trying to elaborate on my old definition of Project Management 2.0, I was thinking about the role of technologies in this emerging trend, and I came to the conclusion that we should not underestimate the influence of technological innovations on the way we do business, communicate and live. Following Manuel Castells, who wrote many scientific works on the IT Revolution, I’d say that “information technology is not the cause of the changes we are living through. But without new information and communication technologies, none of what is changing our lives would be possible.” This, in turn, brings me to the idea of a balanced project triangle: “people- processes-tools.” Tools are only a part of this chain, and this part is neither most important, nor insignificant. In order for a project to run smoothly, all three parts should be in balance. Now I’d like to find out what you think about this updated definition. I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

Collaboration 10 min read

Found in Translation: Tips to Collaborate Better with International Teams

Whether you hail from India, Scotland, the U.S., or anywhere in between, here are some tips to make collaboration that much easier with international teams—despite being thousands of miles apart.

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Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World: Takeaways from PMI Global Congress North America

Andrew Filev

Related articles

Tips for Introducing Granular Workload Organization to Your Project Team (Inspired by the Discussion at PMI LA Chapter)

Project Management 2.0: New Definition

Found in Translation: Tips to Collaborate Better with International Teams

Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World: Takeaways from PMI Global Congress North America

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Tips for Introducing Granular Workload Organization to Your Project Team (Inspired by the Discussion at PMI LA Chapter)

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