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BPR SPOTLIGHT - VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for
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This
article originally appeared in the March 1997 issue of
PDBPR
DISPERSED TEAMS ARE THE PEOPLEWARE
FOR THE 21st CENTURY
AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA
LIPNACK AND
JEFFREY STAMPS, CO-AUTHORS,
"VIRTUAL TEAMS"
Nothing was more clear at this month's gathering of
the International Association for Product Development than
that, however desirable they might be, collocated development
teams are increasingly not feasible in a globalized setting.
The big challenge, then, is how to make teamwork work across
distances. After more than 20 years of helping mobilize
flexible, cross-boundary organizations, and with thousands of
interviews to draw from, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
have written a new book, Virtual Teams: Reaching Across
Space, Time and Organizations With Technology, to
demystify this subject. It won't be out till next month. We
caught up with them for a preview:
BPR:
This book is part of a trilogy. What are the key messages of
the other two, and how does the new book flesh out the
trilogy?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Our 1993
book, The TeamNet Factor, centers on the network as a
form of organization. We show its variations at every size,
from small groups, to enterprises, to alliances, to nations.
In that book, we coin the word "teamnet" to put people back
into networks and to emphasize the multi-level (groups within
groups) nature of networks. We show how networks offer
practical approaches to solving old problems and launching new
initiatives. We also offer three chapters on methods to
develop networks, along with several chapters that focus
specifically on small business networks.
"Our 1994 book, The
Age of the Network, provides an overview of the impact of
networks and their strategic importance. There, we place
networks--the signature organization of the Information
Age--in the context of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and small
groups, which dominated earlier eras. We show how companies
use networks to their strategic advantage. These nimble,
boundary-crossing configurations also incorporate what is
uniquely valuable about each of the earlier
forms.
"In Virtual
Teams, we look at how this most fundamental
organization--the team--is transforming ('morphing,' in
computer lingo) into an extraordinary new 21st century
version. We focus on small groups of people working across
boundaries, supported by the new computer and communications
technologies. Increasingly, this is the reality of everyday
work life for many people."
BPR:
What exactly is virtual teamwork? Is this one of those
out-on-the-edge subjects, or something mainstream managers
need to understand now?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Well,
here's the out-on-the-edge response: Virtual teams are the
peopleware for the 21st century. And here's the mainstream
reality: Most people work with others who are more than 50
feet away from them. MIT's Tom Allen has been doing research
on this for more than 20 years. Data indicate that when people
are more than 50 feet apart, their likelihood of collaborating
more than once a week is less than 10%. So, as people work in
teams, crossing space, time, and organizational boundaries,
they must master the principles of virtual
work."
BPR:
What's the basic business case for virtual
teamwork?
Lipnack/Stamps: "The basic
business case is simple. Work in the 21st century is complex,
in constant flux, and global. Organizations that were
perfected in the 19th century--bureaucracies--are not
sufficient to deal with the pace of change. The problems that
the companies we write about have solved with virtual teams
are the familiar ones: Time-to-market, product quality,
profitability, customer satisfaction, strategic
direction."
BPR:
Assume I've barely figured out how to use e-mail: is virtual
teamwork something I really need to know
about?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Great
question. People confuse virtual teams with technology. We
interviewed 75 people for this book and many said exactly
these words without being prompted: 'It's 90% people and 10%
technology.' Some of the best virtual teams that we looked at
use very little technology. E-mail serves the purpose for many
efforts. But when a virtual team wants to gain the
productivity advantages that the Internet and intranets
provide, then it benefits enormously from the construction of
online virtual workplaces. We detail this in Chapter 8 of the
book, "A Web Book for Virtual Teams."
BPR:
But many in product development circles, where
cross-functional teamwork is now center stage, believe
collocation is essential. How do you
respond?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Tom
Allen's research we mentioned earlier is powerful and should
not be ignored by advocates of 'extreme virtual teams,' those
that never get together face-to-face. As humans, we thrive on
spending time together, and these encounters are where trust
develops most rapidly. We encourage virtual teams to meet
regularly, particularly at the beginning of their work, for
quick effective planning and relationship
building.
"However, it is very
important to understand what Tom Allen is saying. In essence,
what his '50-foot rule' indicates is this: It is impossible to
collocate more than about 10 people. Steelcase, which has done
extensive research on workplace performance, uses Allen's
research as a design principle. They make office environments
for pods of no more than 10, located within 50 feet of one
another, and then 'augment,' to use Doug Engelbart's elegant
verb, their collocation with technology."
BPR:
Some would argue that a compromise solution is to
collocate the core team and let the extended team be virtual.
We saw this recently with a new product team at Square
D.
Lipnack/Stamps: "Great idea
but it's not always possible. Sometimes, particularly with
complex projects of any scale, the expertise required far
exceeds the number of people who readily can be collocated.
The solution is to collocate the people whom you naturally can
bring together and link them to others. 'Link' is the
operative word here. It is not sufficient to collocate pods of
people and expect them to work with others without careful
design. Complex product development projects require complex
organizational design and intentional communication design.
The most successful virtual teams we document follow these
principles."
BPR:
What pitfalls should I watch out for and how can I prevent
them?
Lipnack/Stamps: "All of the
pitfalls that can trip up a collocated team are dangers to a
virtual team, but even more so. Alan and Deborah Slobodnik, of
Options for Change have done the best summary we've seen of
'team killers.' They include: false consensus, unresolved
overt conflict, underground conflict, closure avoidance,
calcified team meetings, uneven participation, lack of
accountability, and forgetting the
customer.
"Interventions, of the
types they provide, address these problems. Virtual teams
introduce yet another 'team killer'--technology adoration.
Some people think that you can solve virtual team problems by
setting up e-mail lists, opening chat rooms, and mounting
desktop conferencing. Wrong. Technology can help virtual teams
but only when used in conjunction with the overall strategy of
the organization."
BPR:
I'm a development team leader: what should I watch out
for?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Product
development teams, particularly software development teams,
have been among the true leaders in creating virtual teams.
The most famous virtual team created the Internet more than 25
years ago. Virtual teams have also created dozens of computer
languages, including Ada, which we write about in the book,
that are critical to many global processes today. Frankly, it
is hard to identify any product today that is not the work of
a virtual team, whether explicitly recognized or not. Sun
Microsystems, which launched 70 boundary-crossing 'SunTeams,'
used this simple definition: 'Process improvement through
teamwork for customer satisfaction.' If you reverse-engineer
that definition, you will avoid a lot of
problems."
BPR:
Can you site concrete examples of virtual teamwork generating
better products quicker and more cheaply?
Lipnack/Stamps: "NCR's
recent mammoth virtual-team triumph, the creation of its
WorldMark computer system line, is a great example. The
program involved more than 1000 people in multiple locations,
both internally and externally. It came in ahead of schedule
and on budget, thus playing a significant role in contributing
to NCR's remarkable turnaround."
BPR:
When is a team too large for virtual teamwork? How do you
manage that problem if you're working with a project involving
masses of players scattered around the
globe?
Lipnack/Stamps: "There is
an enormous body of research about the effective size of
teams, which generally points to the obvious--5 to 10 people
is the ideal size. Virtual teams enable teams to scale. By
working in small groups, connected across boundaries through
commonly shared processes and commitment to a shared purpose,
ever-increasing numbers of people can work together
effectively, as WorldMark proves."
BPR:
You say virtual teams are high-connectivity/low-maintenance
organizations. This seems counterintuitive. One more time:
isn't it honestly a lot easier for a team to stay on top of
things and maintain synergy when it's
collocated?
Lipnack/Stamps: "We've
found the best collocated teams use principles incorporated by
the most successful virtual teams: a clear purpose, a focus on
people, and concentration on the links that connect them. If
collocated teams also take the step of creating virtual
workplaces for themselves, they can actually improve their
productivity radically."
BPR:
You are advocates of TeamFlow software, which is
based on Toyota's deployment charting method. What is it and
why do you recommend it?
Lipnack/Stamps: "TeamFlow
is the next generation of project management software,
optimized for groups that work across boundaries. It allows a
team to see its work--tasks, deliverables, meetings,
decisions, and milestones--in relation to who needs to be
involved. It also allows the team to see its work in relation
to the groups that it is a part of, and the sub-groups that
make it up. Very powerful. We've been using it on all our
projects for the past seven years to great effect. It's
PC-based, runs over networks, and a Web-based version is on
its way."
BPR:
Let's sum up: why is virtual teamwork something mainstream
managers need to understand today?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Look
around you. Does everyone you work with work for the same
organization? In the same location? Probably not. The
onrushing explosion in information and communications
technologies makes change in how we team inevitable.
Dataquest, which provides technology research, predicts that
personal computer (PC) sales, of which there were none in the
world in the 1960s, will top 100 million annually by the year
2000--one PC for very 60 people on the planet; and, by the
same time, more than 60 million people will use cellular
phones--which did not even exist in the 1970s--according to
Action Cellular Network. Voicemail, rare in the 1980s, is now
widespread and all but indispensable in most organizations
today.
"Fastest growing of all
is the Internet and the World Wide Web, with its internal
offspring, intranets. The number of new daily Internet
connections surpasses anyone's ability to accurately count
them. According to Matrix Information and Directory Services,
which has tracked Internet growth for many years, electronic
connections among people and computers expand perhaps on the
order of 100% annually.
"Distance-spanning
communications tools open up vast new fertile territory soil
for 'working together apart.' For the first time since nomads
moved into towns, work is diffusing rather than concentrating
as we move from predominantly industrial to informational
products and services. In all industries and sectors, people
are working across space and time. Virtual teams thrive in big
companies like Hewlett-Packard and Eastman Chemical Company,
in smaller ones like Rodale Press and Buckman Laboratories,
and even smaller ones known only to their own markets like
Tetra Pak Converting Technologies and US
TeleCenters."
Key
Learnings:
-
Virtual
teamwork--linked groups of geographically dispersed people
working collaboratively--is the "peopleware" of the 21st
century.
-
Virtual teamwork is
90% about people and only 10% about
technology.
-
Virtual teamwork does
not eliminate the need for occasional face-to-face
encounters; conversely, if a collocated team takes the step
of creating a virtual workplace for itself, it can increase
productivity.
-
The trick is to
collocate the people you can naturally bring together and
carefully map processes and design communication links with
the extended virtual team.
-
Virtual teams face the
same pitfalls as collocated teams, with one additional team
killer--technology adoration.
BPR SPOTLIGHT - VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for
more spotlight
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