Project Management Needs To Adapt To Remote Teams

When project management emerged in the 1950s, it was mainly used in construction, engineering, and defense. Within a few decades, the concept had migrated to the broader business world because it boosted efficiency and results for nearly any group working side by side.

It’s become ubiquitous in recent years, to the point that it seems as if everybody is managing a project or three — which is often a problem. In 2015, Harvard Business Review found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams were dysfunctional.

Project Management and Distributed Work

It’s no surprise that many of today’s project managers are struggling, and it’s not due to a lack of training or certification. The reality is that project management was not designed for complex remote projects or what we call distributed work.

Every widely used project management methodology, from Scrum to Agile and beyond, assumes the whole team is working together in the same office — a situation that no longer reflects our working reality.

Today’s projects need to be managed in a new way, particularly since the challenges are increasing along with the share of dispersed teams and distributed projects. Businesses need to modernize their project management approach to reflect the realities of today’s work environment.

Best Practices for Distributed Teams

At Virtira, we started tackling this project management crisis over a decade ago and have developed a set of key steps and best practices that ensure optimal efficiency and productivity for distributed projects that stretch across your city — or around the globe.

The trouble often begins at the very inception of an initiative. Nowadays, a project objective might be more about satisfying an executive’s whim than implementing a strategy or fulfilling the company mission. Maybe the boss wants project completion to coincide with a public stock report or hopes to make a splash announcement at an upcoming sales meeting.

Thus, one of the crucial initial steps is defining project success. “What is the project, and why are we doing it now?” should be your first two questions for any project proposal.

Small Steps Can Lead to Big Outcomes

Answering these questions often starts with transforming project success from a single, ambitious end target into a series of small, incremental goals that create a stream of positive outcomes for the executive. These short-term milestones allow you to demonstrate forward momentum. They also help teams reduce risk, reevaluate, and, most importantly, allow the executive to show success in order to secure more funding or extend the timeline.

Because a project in midstream could lose funding, team members, or a key supporter at any time, project managers need to deliver results early and often. Once you have a firm grasp of success and a set of feasible deliverables, work backward to set interim milestones that inch you closer to your ultimate goal.

How to Get Started

Hold a brainstorming call with a core planning team to set milestones and seek stakeholder input. For distributed projects, plans must be easy to understand and designed for all team members, executives, and non-project managers.

Your first communication about the plan should be as simple as a timeline with expected deliverables at each milestone. Express your information visually so the concepts are easily grasped and organized as much as possible.

Create detailed plans for the first 90 days, then sketch in the next 90. Extend the plan every month and adjust for the long term as needed. Identify the relevant individuals and bring them into the loop in advance if critical approvals or inputs are needed.

With each deliverable, bake in time to review with your team and the executive and tweak as needed. Remember, you are aiming to deliver value, not scope. Thus, the less demanding each deliverable, the more likely you are to reliably show success.

How Do You Know If You’re Succeeding?

People love to ask what success will look like, but this falls short. The better question is, “How will we know the project is having the impact we want it to have?”

For example, if your project aims to reduce customer wait times, you need to capture wait times prior to starting so that you have a data point to compare your results against. You may need to add a survey to your project to gather qualitative feedback before and after delivery.

Finally, change management and risk management are more important with distributed projects because of the increased unpredictability.

For the former, the best approach is to engage all key stakeholders — including sponsors, executives, tertiary managers, client partners, government, contractors, and end users — from the start to determine what change is acceptable and where it’s most likely to occur.

Pay Close Attention to Team Dynamics

When looking for risks, pay special attention to team members lacking enthusiasm, making errors, or showing indecisiveness. In 2014, leading consulting firm Deloitte found that more complex projects fail more often. Yet it’s not the complexity that creates failure — it’s failing to put the right people and controls in place.

Download our one-sheet project template to get your project off to the right start.