Virtual Team Concept in Project

Subject: Virtual Team Concept in Projects

A virtual team can be defined as a group of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed people work together using a combination of information and communication technologies such as e-mail, internet conversation channel e.g. Skype, audio / video conferencing for accomplishing the organization task or project.

Team members would be assembled from different nation and elsewhere in the world.

Virtual teams would be in multiple time zones and different languages. Furthermore, team members would be with different cultures, and different work approaches.

Even virtual teams are more dynamic than traditional teams, but there is a great problem existing in the virtual teams, the absence of rich face to face communication. Team members seldom or even never have face to face opportunities to communicate with others due to geographical environment. A number of drawbacks then were associated with virtual teams.

- ineffective communication in the absence of nonverbal components of messages

- lack of intimacy

- conflicts caused site-specific cultures between team members

- people management is more difficult

- lack of trust and difficult in share understanding between team members

- difficult to monitor the performance of team members

- difficult to perform quality management and risk management

- difficult to implement a common set of standards in different cultural and linguistic environments

- lack of project progress visibility

- difficult to implement solutions

However, a carefully designed and implemented virtual team can offer variety of benefits to the organization. These benefits include,

- possible to assemble the work force with skilled, qualified and talent workforce regardless of the distance

- enhanced information dissemination

- knowledge sharing within organization easily

- Cost saving (reduced traveling etc.)

- flexibility on working time schedule and resource allocation

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