Corporates across have experienced various transformations in the past year and will continue further, owing to the pandemic, in terms of the employees’ way of working. Remote-working has borne its strong prominence in recent times and leaders in organizations have adopted various practices to ensure the team’s outcome is not affected in any way. Few organizations would even consider this major shift as a permanent working model than a makeshift one. Hence it is imperative to take into account all sorts of challenges that it may potentially pose for the leaders or managers, right from team alignment and communication lapses to the team’s accountability for the work activities assigned. And once again the role of a Project Manager comes at the center in ensuring that the team is working towards the common goal.

“Co-located teams vs Distributed teams” has always been one of the crucial considerations Project Managers need to make to adopt the right governance style and structure, as a part of the project initiation. The challenges are not so grave when you have the same remote team which was co-located once, as there are certain working agreements already built and have trust and visibility in each other’s skills, strengths and weaknesses. However, distributed teams represent challenges at a different level, especially related to coordination and communication as the team members are located across the globe, working in different time zones, and might have never met each other in a face-to-face fashion. That said, it makes more sense when compared with a co-located setup, to have a well-laid-out communication plan when managing the distributed teams. When teams work under one roof, there are chances of having osmotic communication which helps plug in some communication gaps, if created. Such accidental communication is almost non-existent while working with distributed teams. Another perennial issue a project manager faces while coordinating with distributed teams is an absence of immediate feedback. In an offline mode, when team members gather to brainstorm or discuss something, the project manager gets an immediate sense of whether they are all aligned or not, based on their non-verbal cues like body language or facial expression. These are generally replaced by a long silence, which can have multiple interpretations and so the project manager is often left bemused. A few tips outlined below can help iron out these issues related to the distributed project.

Communicate excessively: Communication is all about ensuring that the key information is shared in an understandable format and in a timely manner, to make team members feel engaged. It is better to over-communicated than end up leaving any communication gaps. Communicating beyond what is required would have rarely led any project to suffer. While it could be a little tiring than normal, the project manager needs to find ways to communicate heavily with the team. There are various formal modes of communication like a daily scheduled sync-up meeting, periodic project status report meetings & email threads discussing specific topics keeping an entire team in the loop. And certain informal ones like online chat rooms, ad-hoc meetings with a small group, and one-to-one call with key people. With more such communication channels, team members would never feel left out and, in turn, would encourage participative decision-making. It is worthy for a PM to explore as many avenues of communication as possible. The value they bring for the project far outweighs the cost of rework or any other potential mistakes due to communication gaps.

Right people to be on-boarded: It’s no brainer that successful teams are formed by the people having the right mindset and attitude. And distributed teams are no different. The challenges presented in managing the distributed teams can be overcome when the team members are motivated and willing to take ownership beyond their functional expertise. Being cross-functional & self-organized is at the core of building successful teams and such team members always seek out to reach their fellow members, let alone PM to proactively brainstorm ideas, identify impediments and bounce off alternatives in the larger interest of the project. Hence, when forming a new team for the project, one needs to look out for the right traits in people while onboarding the team members. This initial consideration will resolve a lot of challenges that may potentially arise throughout the lifecycle of the project.

Collaboration over mere communication: As per conventional wisdom, the project manager needs to be at the helm of all communications concerning his project. However, care needs to be taken that the project manager doesn’t become the focal point for all the communications. While he needs to be a part of all communications, he shouldn’t become the bottleneck in the information flow within the team. The idea is to keep all the team members aligned, especially the ones who are supposed to take some action based on that. Project Managers can largely be consulted for any inputs required from external stakeholders or any escalations seemed imminent. Other ways to bring collaboration within the team is to have shared documents in a common repository, using ticketing tools & systems like Jira, keeping the project-specific documents updated so that the team can have clear visibility on the real-time updates and statuses of the projects. This softwares also help project managers to hold remote team members accountable for the tasks they’ve been assigned without having them constantly communicate the assigned tasks to each team member.

For instance, there are certain protocols that can be set when conducting various sprint ceremonies for the distributed scrum team. For teams working in different time zones, sprint planning – the longest ceremony in a sprint can be split into 3 shorter sessions over the span of two days. Other ceremonies (like Daily Scrum, Sprint Review & retrospectives) need to be conducted within the working hours that overlap for all the teams. The meeting time can be rotated so that the pain of working outside business hours can be shared among all the participants.

Working with distributed teams could be the new normal and are expected to stay at least till the foreseeable future. And so the skills of a Project Manager would be tested keeping this at the backdrop. Having the right people on the team with the documented communication plan, harnessing proper communication technologies, making use of project management tools with following the right collaborative practices will help leaders sail through this storm of uncertainty and embrace this transformation whole-heartedly.

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