A virtual team can be seen as a group of different experts or
individuals who come together to perform some work together from
different geographic locations and their communication greatly
depends on the tools of communication technology, for example,
email, FAX, and video or voice conferencing services to coordinate
for their work.
I was the part of a virtual team in one of the IT Company
situated in Silicon Valley. The virtual team was responsible for
developing cloud for one of the airline customers. The team
included the members from the USA, India, Australia, and the UK.
After some initial issues in coordinating and managing the
activities, the project was completed on time.
The positive things which worked well were as below:-
- The team consisted of experts who were having a great
experience in working on cloud platform thus the members helped
each other.
- Despite the difference in time zone, we managed to have a
common time when all the members were online to discuss the issues
and aspects of the project
- There was no language barrier as all were English speaking
members.
- Team members helped each other to come out of any kind of issue
if encountered.
- One of the members from Indian took the lead in acting as a
team leader and he was able to manage the team quite effectively
and it was possible due to his good coordination and managerial
skills.
However, we faced the below-mentioned issues:-
- There was uncertainty prevailing among the team members about
the project which included the doubts about what is the project all
about, how they are going to help the team to accomplish the
project objectives and how they are associated with the
organizational goals.
- Due to the time difference, there were some issues related to
the common meeting time but it was handled by the acting team
leader as he used to send reminders and alerts.
- The team was also having some conflicts as all the members were
having a very strong IT and cloud background and thus there were
many occasions where one member was not open to the suggestions of
others.