Tag: task-oriented

Virtual Team Project – Week 2

After a slow start with some scheduling difficulties, this week Team 2 agreed on a roadmap, picked up speed and is now one day ahead of schedule. In this post, I reflect on the challenges that we faced and how we prevailed. All the time mentions refer to the Irish/French time zones unless otherwise indicated.

Coordination

When we started sharing individual availability to set up a live team meeting, it quickly became evident that such a meeting would not happen this week either. Between studies, part-time or full-time jobs, and several time zones, the highest team count in any time slot was five out of ten. Five hardly seemed enough. Any decision made during the live meeting would ignore the input of half of the team. We could use the opportunity to at least get to know one another, but we would still exclude five people.

Why not have several partial meetings then? I did not suggest it because several meetings would mean an even greater time commitment from all members without the same social or task benefits as a full team meeting.

Without the possibility of a team meeting, we had to rely on our Whatsapp group chat. Still, I hope we can organize at least one team meeting or some task-focused partial meetings.

Task-oriented asynchronous communication

This particular virtual project is different from regular projects in a professional setting because our team members have to balance a student life (with several projects), a professional life (with other projects) and a personal life. At the same time, we all need to be able to rely on one another and to maintain a dynamic sharing of information and opinions. At least in the past week, we seem to have adopted a communication pattern:

• As the project manager, I start the day by listing the topics that we should discuss for the day and I ask the team members to share other topics they would like to tackle (the agenda).
• Then I might get the first topic “on the table” and make suggestions. I would rather avoid always making suggestions. However, in this asynchronous setting and with our busy schedules, I find that calling for feedback on my suggestions helps to launch the discussion.
• Team members start to participate depending on their respective schedules. The discussion continues until late in the evening – until US team members have had a chance to participate after work/college.
• Then, I recap the tasks we have completed and the decisions we have made. I also propose the next agenda. This way the US members can start to give their input and think about what they want to share or need from their team members.

The whole team stepped up to make asynchronous communication work. Everyone was up and running on Whatsapp by Wednesday morning. By Friday evening, we had agreed on a topic for the instructions, a detailed schedule and a new tester role. The writing/editing team (two in Orlando and two in Limerick) also agreed to have the first draft ready by Monday.

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon and the first draft is ready one day ahead of schedule and all four writing/editing members contributed content and feedback. This is great progress in a short amount of time.

Conclusion

Maybe we were not able to have a live meeting to get to know each other, but everyone focussed on reaching team goals and displayed a proactive and optimistic attitude. Asynchronous communication may have made us more efficient because our discussions are task-oriented. While we have not had casual chats, we are starting to share more personal information little by little. It seems that, for our team, bonding will happen slowly over the course of the project. This week showed that we can already trust one another.