Thursday, December 17, 2009

What are the best practices for selecting, building, and engaging effective virtual teams?

I'd suggest you take a look at ProjectConnections.com - they have a number of checklists, templates and guidelines on how to set up, manage and delegate responsibilities with geographically dispersed teams. The first link below is to their virtual teams area, which has links to various virtual team papers, checklists, etc., on the site. And specifically related to your mention of the selection process, the second link is a paper on selecting, getting 'aligned' in several key areas, and staying that way. (This paper is a free Member resource which requires a quick registration - but worth the few minutes to do so, in my experience using things from this site.) Some of the other virtual team resources listed at the first link may be part of their Premium subscription, but if any of those look interesting (in answer to your questions), there's a free trial that lets you get to Premium content for a couple of weeks at no charge. Finally, the third link is a totally open access short article on some practices to consider in building virtual teams. As to your question about what is the most difficult phase of dealing with virtual teams, I personally believe it is the kickoff off the project. That paper I mentioned above has a section with some recommendations for exactly how to do kickoff steps with virtual teams.

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