Just as a straight road is easier to follow than a crooked trail, teams operating across time, distance and organizational boundaries generally find it much easier to get the work done when there is alignment between:

These are the precursors for effective virtual teaming without which the most elegant technology and sophisticated knowledge management system is apt to fall flat.

By aligning these precursors, virtual teams can significantly enhance the return on their investment in technology, time, people and effort.

Align Purpose and Properties

Scarce resources (including human attention) tend to gravitate toward clear goals. By establishing clear purpose and priorities, you help your team stay on track and enable them to proceed in a parallel or networked manner without continually having to check with you to determine what comes next. This saves time, effort and travel funds. You define shared purpose and core priorities based on team discussion and negotiation, not just a mandate from on high. Central to the process is clarifying assumptions about what the team is here to do, what takes priority, what each element is responsible for contributing to the end product, and how the team will align its resources.

Do your people know how to:

If not, the first step toward launching a virtual team is to engage the group in discussing your charter and coming to agreement on key priorities affecting your ability to achieve these goals. Then look at the team itself, how it is dispersed, and the working relationships that are critical to your success.

Align People

No team comes into being bereft of history, assumptions and organizational "baggage". A good percentage of the challenge of leading virtual teams involves figuring out what that "baggage" entails and how much of it must be jettisoned or modified in order for the

team to get on with its task. Critical to team success is the ability of all team members to define "What’s in it for me?" and to be able to convey how best to play to their strengths.

Do your people know how to:

If not, then how are you going to tell the players without a scorecard? You’ll need to create a basic "yellow pages" helping team members to understand each other’s past experience, current responsibilities, and individual talents. It’s useful to profile collaborative competencies within the team to see where you have "bench strength" in necessary skills and where there are gaps that need to be addressed. Open a discussion within the team about basic expectations of each other, both in sharing information and in working together.

Align the Work Practices

There are many ways to get work done, and for virtual teams, a sequential process is usually the worst. Determining how to make optimum use of collaborative and knowledge management tools to streamline workflow is a priority for all virtual teams. Establishing contact, sharing information, building relationships and collaborating on assigned tasks with speed and economy requires skill in using the entire range of synchronous and asynchronous tools.

Do your people know how to:

If not, then engage the team in doing a simple process flow of just one task – identify how you move work now among team members and identify just what it is that drives you to communicate, coordinate and collaborate. Then look at the tools you are using to do this. What takes too much time? What causes redundant effort? This is where you begin to define the need for better collaborative practices using the tools at hand.

Align The Protocols

Ask anyone what their pet peeves are with voice mail, email, shared calendars, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences and threaded discussions and you will get a litany of how these collaborative tools are routinely abused. It doesn’t have to be this way. By agreeing on basic protocols for reducing info-glut, maximizing access, clarifying action responsibility, and conveying context and required response times, virtual teams can stop annoying each other and more efficiently get down to the business at hand.

Do your people know how to:

If not, they you need some basic working agreements that define expectations of how you will work via technology. This is a good time to create a "map" of how people use technology now in their daily work and to identify come points of commonality within the team.

Align the Performance Metrics

One of the major concerns of any virtual team is its ability to "know what is happening" elsewhere. Performance metrics address not just the status of the work in progress, but also the viability of the team itself. Teams that fail to pay attention to their own level and quality of interaction tend to succumb to isolation, tunnel vision, or simply fall apart from entropy.

Do your people know how to:

If not, you can save both time and effort by focusing on ways and means of creating one, shared picture of both the work in progress, and of how the team interacts on a regular basis. Engage people in a discussion of what constitutes burn out and what team members can do to help each other avoid that situation.

Mini-Case Studies in Using the 5Ps

For further information on how the 5Ps can support your dispersed teams:

Call: Carol Willett, Executive VP for Learning and Innovation at 703-860-1145

Email: cwillett@akgroup.com

Visit our Applied Knowledge Group website at: www.akgroup.com