The projects which are typically termed as the largest of the lot, involves multiple vendors, partners & client teams. Organizations tend to outsource the non-core elements to third-party vendors in the quest to cutting costs or getting access to specialization. Thus it brings in multiple teams & stakeholders to achieve a certain project outcome. Naturally, managing such projects becomes challenging for the Project Manager as there are several communication lines to manage. Moreover, the greater challenge lies in aligning each team’s interest with the larger interest of the project. While the team’s synchronization can be maintained by having an effective communication plan at its place, the underlying self-interests of the team can become a major blocker in taking key decisions. There could be disagreements in a few project-related aspects like delivery timelines, requirements, communication which impacts projects adversely & one can easily find teams passing the buck onto other teams. The ownership aspect is conspicuously missing in such projects with people ending up playing blame games with no clear sense of responsibility.

Let us first understand the root cause of why such a thing happens. Each team belongs to different organizations and even client, at times, has business & operations teams that are outsourced to other organizations. Every team has different motives: A vendor might look to increase their profitability and reduce the amount of work rather than focusing on successfully meeting the project criteria defined initially. A client might want to get the maximum work extracted from their vendors and partners within the minimum possible duration and budget. Unfortunately, the people who are involved in dealing with such outsourced teams are being rated against such benchmarks. Each team has a different set of senior folks to escalate to. So when there are no converging goals amongst the teams, making teams work towards the common project goals becomes a herculean task for the project manager who is primarily responsible to carry out smooth project deliveries. This “Your team” vs “Our team” mindset needs to be completely removed to smoothly deliver the projects.

Since I am involved in one of such projects, I could feel there are a few steps that should be taken, to bring teams work together for a common outcome:

Forming & Building Relationships: Collaboration among team members is one of the critical components for the matured project team. There are no successful deliveries if teams fall apart. As project managers, it becomes of utmost importance to have a complete focus on building relationships between various teams that are involved from the beginning of the project. The vendors may have their own supplementary goals but that can only be achieved if they drive the success of their clients. The vendor’s sustainable long-term success is intertwined with attaining their client’s goals. Individuals working for other organizations shouldn’t be viewed as an external team, as they are an integral part of the project. This can only create hindrances in their relationships, which would eventually reflect in their project discussions & deliveries. Hence, project managers from each team should meet every day for a few minutes to share their experiences, flag any issues if any & ask for assistance as required. These interactions can form a close relationship which can further trickle down to their team members as well.

Achieving Transparency: Once the emotional bonds are formed and maintained, project managers from the respective teams need to focus on maintaining the team’s accountability of their work assigned in a very clear and transparent way. Modern project management tools like Trello, Jira, slack can be used to get a clear understanding of the timelines & assignment aspects, only to iron out any confusion and confabulations around the same. Such tools need to be updated with the project details on a real-time basis & followed by the concerned team members. While the minutes & the action items derived from the 'all teams' meet should be easily accessible to all, the key project impacting decisions from the intra-team meetings also need to be updated & visible to all.

Setting up working agreements: PMs from the respective teams should meet up and agree on the below ground rules:

Team members would be called by their name, rather than naming them by the vendor organization name. This small thing can really help individuals feel like a part of one team rather than belonging to different organizations.

In any task, they carry out or any discussion they do, during the lifecycle of the project, each team should keep project goals above their self-interest. There are no secondary goals, keeping the project goal as the only one.

Each team needs to be honest and own up their assigned task completely, without pushing it onto others by manipulating any sort of numbers or discussions. This would completely iron out the inter-teams accusations.

The competency level of all the teams might not be the same and hence as one team, team members should consider doing coaching & mentoring to their fellow members in other teams.

Distributed external teams are only going to be a norm in the future and so project managers would be heavily tested on this front. Managing multiple stakeholders in the project was only one difficulty level PMs used to handle, however, managing multiple external teams coming from various organizations mapped to the same project is a level-up challenge that PMs need to surmount. Culture varies across different organizations which certainly would catalyze their working style & collaboration within teams and so the crux of the challenge remains is to treat both the external and internal teams as one single team.

Thanks for reading . Please feel free to share your comments and feedback.