I

Executive summary

This presented assignment is part of the MBA studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf (FOM Hochschule für Oekonomie, Essen) and covers the subject “Managing virtual project teams - Current practise, problems and challenges”. While a project is a form of organisation which is characterised through its uniqueness, its novelty and a fixed end date, a virtual project team is distributed over different locations worldwide, but working together as one team. Remote communication between the team members is done through synchronous and asynchronous means of virtual communication. Because these media cannot transmit the full bandwidth of human communication, there must be rules set how to act with these different means of virtual communication in order to prevent frustration and communication problems. Additional difficulties may arise when a virtual project team is composed of people with different cultural backgrounds. In such a case, a project manager of a virtual team has to join communication skills with intercultural skills.

In order to work together under these circumstances, team building is crucial to make a virtual project a success. Successful team building in a virtual project first of all means that people with the right characteristics have to be chosen to form a virtual project team. For example, they must have a high level of self-organisation and social competence. Furthermore, building trust is crucial in order to make people who may never see each other in real life successfully work together.

In order to manage the task of a virtual project, a project manager of such a team needs a high level of social skills coupled with the skills of a motivator. The Blended Delivery model of Logica, a global provider of IT services, where a local core team works together with an extended virtual team, may be a good compromise between virtual and non-virtual project work and may combine benefits of both organisation forms.

II

Table of Contents

Executive  summary.  I

Table of  Contents  II

List  of Abbreviations.  IV

List  of Figures  V

List  of Tables.  VI

1  Introduction  1

2  Methodology  1

3  Definitions.  2

3.1  What is a project?  2

3.2  What is project management?  3

3.3  What is a virtual project team?  3

4  Motivations for forming a virtual project team.  6

5  Challenges and problems of a virtual project team and how to overcome them  7

5.1  Difficulties of remote communication and how to deal with them.  7

5.2  Dealing with different cultures.  9

5.3  Issues of team building.  12

5.3.1  Choosing the right people  12

5.3.2  Creating identification.  13

5.3.3  Building trust.  14

5.3.4  Dealing with conflicts  14

6  Qualities of a virtual project manager.  15

7  Current practice: Logica’s Blended Delivery model combining virtual and non-  

virtual  aspects as example.  16

8  Conclusion  17

References   VII

III

ITM .................................................................................................................................X

IV

List of Abbreviations

etc. et cetera DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. IBM International Business Machines Corporation IT Information Technology p. page pp. pages VoIP Voice over IP (Internet Protocol) www world wide web

V

List of Figures

Fig. 1: A distributed project… ..........................................................................................4 Fig. 2: …which consists of four teams..............................................................................4 Fig. 3: A virtual project….................................................................................................5 Fig. 4: …which consists of only one team........................................................................5

The red and blue figures from Fig. 1 to Fig. 4 were taken from

http://jodigame.beepworld.de/files/spiel-figur_blau.gif & http://jodigame.beepworld.de/files/spiel-

figur_rot.gif (25-03-2010)

VI

List of Tables

Table 1: Cultural dimensions, behaviours of team members and implications for the use of communication technology.................................................................................11

1 Introduction

Globalisation of companies in the form of national and international cooperation and mergers leads to new organisation forms and to new ways of collaboration. Large companies are forced to integrate their activities more and more on an international level. 1

Therefore, companies may form project teams which are crossing boundaries between time zones, cultures, countries and languages. Members of such teams are communicating mainly or solely through technical means of communication, i.e. e-mail, chat, video conferences etc. Some team members will never see each other face-to-face, even though they may work together for a longer period of time.

In this elaboration, it will first of all be defined what virtual project teams exactly are and why companies may be seeking to form them. After that, the difficulties and challenges of virtual team work will be discussed. In the last chapter, the current practice of Logica, a large international provider of IT services, should be described and analysed regarding these topics.

2 Methodology

The research methods used for this elaboration were literature reviews of books, scientific papers and further internet sources.

¹ Cf. Herczeg et al. (2000), p. 14