Virtual Team Coming Together

This past week I had the opportunity to observe a relatively new "virtual" team, perhaps 8 weeks since formation, get together in person for the very first time. This team is comprised of at least 15 persons - including government civil servants, active duty military personnel, and contractors. I say "at least" because the number changes every week based on who calls in. They have been meeting weekly in virtual fashion since early April, using teleconferences supplemented by a nice online package called "GoToMeeting" for sharing documents and keeping everyone on the same page. The majority of the team members are on the U.S. East Coast, but several, including the team leader, are located on the West Coast, a three hour time difference. They're functioning as a project management team, and at this time, and for the next two months or so, they'll be in PMBOK(C) Phase 2 (sometimes referred to as "planning", most commonly a term used by the PMI). Then, in August, some of the work they're planning and scheduling will come to life and get underway - modifications to a ship.

Perhaps a month or so ago, one of the team's principals, the fellow in charge of putting together the master schedule of design changes to the ship, began to plan a "conference" - an in person gathering of the team's key players to discuss their ideas and make decisions on the changes that would be scheduled. This conference would involve a lot of "what if" schedule postulation and discussion, some horse-trading and negotiation of priority projects, and lots of opinions flying around regarding what options were available in terms of satisfying the various external stakeholders (like the operations organization that sends the ship on missions; missions would be sacrificed if the ship was in port getting upgrades).

I spent some time the morning of the first day of the two day "conference" helping the conference leader as the members trickled in to the meeting location in Virginia. They arrived from California and from New Jersey, and from two floors away in the same building. The digital projector was fired up, displays were put up for an agenda, the seats began to fill, and within a half hour there were 18 people in the room. I stayed with the meeting during its entirety for almost seven hours (it was even continued the next day).

I was intrigued with how this team would function as it came together in person for the first time. Would they need some "get to know you" time? Would some be reticent to speak out? Would others attempt to dominate the conversations? Would they have difficulty in reaching consensus oriented decisions? Surprisingly to me, the group functioned well in almost all these regards. They used a flexible agenda, and shared information, opinions, ideas, suggestions, and collectively made decisions on their schedule planning. With the exception of some organizational finger pointing, the team showed little dysfunction. So why did this happen, and what can we learn from it? Here are my opinions:

1. For the most part, everyone demonstrated good listening skills. This was especially evident by the on-the-hot-seat scheduling person (who wasn't the team leader on this day, but who led most of the discussion), and who, along with the team leader, led by example
2. The members showed they could make respectful exchange of ideas without interrupting or showing negative reactions
3. They were polite to one another in terms of their tone, language, and vocal expression (maybe this fades away if they spent more time together!)
4. They appear to have trusted one another, for the most part, from the start. This was especially pleasing to observe since they hailed from different organizations, locations, and vested interests. I can only speculate that most of them gave trust before expecting to have it earned (in other words, "you get my trust unless you do something to violate it"). It also may have been helpful that some of them from disparate locales knew one another from the past - either through common military service or from working on other projects together. This fact alone may have accounted for a significant aspect of why they jelled together so quickly.

It was genuinely impressive to see this virtual team come together for the first time and make real progress on their planning and schedule issues. I don't necessarily expect that this team won't have teamwork problems in the future, but when it mattered to make good use of their limited time, they clicked very fast and worked well together. Would that more teams conducted themselves in this way!