Articles

Managing Issues on Virtual Projects

Problem solving can be difficult with distributed teams. Encouraging collaborative solutions can make a huge difference.  

Key Takeaways  

PMI Picks offers the following tips to engage the team effectively throughout the process:  

All projects have challenges. Sometimes it’s as simple as a couple of short delays, sometimes it’s a fundamental flaw in the solution that requires wholesale changes.  

Identifying, assessing and solving project issues, and then preventing similar issues from happening again, is one of the most important things that project managers, and their teams, have to deal with.  

With remote teams, this process of problem-solving is often more challenging.  

It starts with even identifying that an issue is happening. Most project issues start small, and it takes a strong team working together to see the signs and understand the potential problem.  

When team members are working together every day, sharing ideas, updates and approaches it’s much easier to identify those problems than if everyone is working on their own tasks with less interaction and collaboration.  

It’s therefore critical that project managers do everything they can to maintain that environment of working together, not just through video conferences but through effective use of collaboration tools.  

Project managers must create an environment where someone working at home on their own feels just as comfortable reaching out to a colleague as if they were just the other side of that cubicle wall.  

Similarly, issues are solved more quickly when everyone works together to analyze the impact, cause and approach to resolution. In remote teams, the tendency is that initial discussion of the issue and analysis be conducted as a group in a virtual meeting, but then for everyone to go back to their own environment and work on the solution independently.  

That might result in the current issue being solved, which will provide some validation to the approach. But it will fail to provide the best possible chance of success, the most effective understanding of what happened and why, or the greatest likelihood that the problem can be avoided in the future.  

Much better is for the entire process to be conducted collaboratively. Something as simple as the creation of a single document capturing the steps being taken to analyze and resolve the issue will help with that. When every team member is reviewing and updating the same document there is automatic collaboration because each team member sees what their colleague is doing and can respond.  

This can be enhanced through tools and techniques like a matrix of different solution approaches where everyone contributes to the pros and cons of each choice. Not only does this help drive engagement, but it’s also an effective tool at getting to the best solution having considered all options.  

These documents also become part of the historic project record, helping to prevent problems from occurring again and becoming available inputs to future projects. In some ways, information captured in this way from remote teams is easier to leverage than the work done to solve issues among collocated teams because there is always an electronic record of the process the team went through.  

Dealing with issues on projects with remote teams is different. But it doesn’t have to be more difficult—if the project manager creates an environment and promotes behaviors that encourage collaborative solutions.