|
BPR SPOTLIGHT - VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for
more spotlight articles
This
article originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of
PDBPR
EXPERT COMMENTARY:
Want Virtual
Results? Use a Virtual Team
by Preston Smith,
New Product Dynamics,
co-author, Developing
Products in Half-the-Time
Increasingly, managers are turning to virtual teams
to develop new products. But increasingly, they are displeased
with the outcomes: mediocre performance or lackluster
products. There is a more effective alternative –
co-location. But first, we must understand why virtual
teams have become so popular.
Virtual teams sprout from two
sources. One is new communication technologies – everything
from overnight express to the Web – that allow activities to
be carried out at a distance. The other factor is subtler but
more disturbing. In my experience, many companies are
fragmenting their operations geographically. Through
acquisitions and mergers, they unwittingly split their product
development resources among dispersed sites, believing that
technological patches will cover any gaps
created.
Even without acquisitions, most
manufacturers are becoming more global. Sales and marketing
activities now span oceans, and manufacturing is done offshore
to cut costs. Consequently, we now design products for markets
on various continents, in several time zones, for people in
many cultural traditions, speaking many different languages.
The same complications often arise when integrating design
with global manufacturing.
Management seems to presume that
virtual technologies will advance fast enough to effectively
overcome geographic dispersion. To some extent, this is true.
Videoconferencing saves travel expense, time, and jetlag.
E-mail allows us to work in multiple time zones and easily
broadcast information to as many individuals as desired.
However, e-mail also allows critical decisions to sit in an
in-box indefinitely. Worse, we have no idea whether our e-mail
message was understood or is being acted upon. Yesterday’s
phone tag has become today’s e-mail tag.
Recent books, such as Mastering
Virtual Teams (Duarte and Snyder) and Virtual Teams
(Lipnack and Stamps), suggest how to work with virtual teams.
But these books seem to presume that physically co-located
teams are impossible. These authors show us how to survive
with what we seem to be stuck with. Yet, all the
managers I know who have experienced the power of co-location
would employ it again if time-to-market were critical. These
managers will go to great lengths to provide as much
co-location as possible for their development
teams.
So, how do we provide co-location
in a fragmented, global world? First, recognize that if speed
to market is critical, time is money. Calculate the cost of
delay (Chapter 2 of the book Developing Products in Half
the Time: New Rules, New Tools, [John Wiley & Sons,
1998] shows how). Be willing to spend money to get the team
together. For example, Carrier Corporation couldn’t co-locate
a team developing a new air conditioner because they were
assigned a manufacturing site and a test facility in different
regions, that they could not move. They compensated by
conducting liberal team training at the project’s outset,
spending generously on travel for the whole team, and
pre-booking eight hours of videoconference time every week for
the duration of the project. Carrier essentially bought time
through co-location.
If you can bring the team together
for only part of the project, make it the initial portion, for
several reasons. The team needs time together initially to
build trust. At this time they should explicitly establish the
work methods they will use throughout the project and decide
on roles and responsibilities. With this groundwork in place,
the team will feel comfortable moving much faster later in the
process.
Another reason for an emphasis on
early face-to-face communication is that this is the stage of
the project when the issues to be communicated are the most
ill-defined. In-person communication will help greatly in
quickly and accurately resolving this fuzzy
material.
Think about who most needs to be
co-located. You can obtain much of co-location’s benefit at a
reasonable price by analyzing your teams to discover the
intensive communication links, then co-locating these
partners.
Finally, realize that the
alternatives to co-location are not equal. Consider them in
terms of the electrical engineering concept of bandwidth.
E-mail requires very little bandwidth to communicate
electrically, but it can’t communicate graphics, emotions,
sounds, or tempo. The telephone requires more bandwidth, but
provides some communication richness. Video is broader
bandwidth still, and is also richer. The ultimate in both
measures – bandwidth and richness – is face-to-face presence.
The books listed above will help you judge when each medium is
needed.
Now that I have used
co-location liberally, I should define it, because I
find that many people who haven’t yet accepted it tend to
water it down – getting watered-down results in return. A
co-located team is one in which marketing, engineering, and
manufacturing (at least) are located in a 30-by-30-foot area,
such that they can see each other while working and overhear
each other’s conversations.
BPR SPOTLIGHT - VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for
more spotlight
articles | 
