Managing the virtual project team
“Bzzz. Bzzz.”, goes the iPhone. 7:39am. The first email of the day arrives, announcing that the manuscripts for Unit 4 have been successfully deposited to DropBox and are now ready for integration. I log in to the shared Google Document status report spreadsheet to confirm that the appropriate cells have been coloured green and the date correctly recorded, and welcome another day as a virtual PM.
The PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) does an excellent job of standardizing and cataloguing the inputs, outputs, and processes required to successfully manage a project using the Waterfall approach. An unwritten assumption of the approach, however, is that project teams and project managers (PMs) enjoy the luxury of working together in a central location, sharing equal access to information, to time, to resources, and to one another. In the context of a modern business, however, the existence of this traditional team structure is fading, and enterprises small and large are composing non-traditional project teams to respond to specific project requirements.
