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What is Virtual Team?
A virtual team also known as a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, or remote team usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and use digital nomads such as email, FAX, and rely on video or voice conferencing services. To cooperate. Example: - Company X, a toymaker X is facing heavy pressure from competitors. To solve the problem, Company X brings experts from the United States, Asia and Europe together to collaborate and create a new innovative aircraft design.
Types of virtual teams
· Global virtual team - These teams are located in different countries and cities worldwide. They may be employees of many companies who put in their efforts and resources (people, technology, money) to carry out shared projects and achieve common goals.
· Local Virtual Team - The members of a local virtual workgroup are usually from the same company. That company is either large or small, and has sufficient resources (technology required) to set up and maintain a virtual team workplace and organize its employees into a productive remote group.
· Networked teams - Typically, network teams are distributed geographically and not necessarily from the same organization. These teams are often formed and simply disbanded often; They are usually formed to discuss specific topics, where members from areas of expertise, possibly from different organizations, pitch their ideas in the same discussion.
· Parallel teams - are highly task-oriented teams that typically consist of specialized professionals. While they are usually only required for very short periods of time, unlike network teams, they do not dissolve after the tasks are completed.
· Project development teams - Similar to parallel teams, these teams are geographically distributed and can operate from different time zones. Project development teams are primarily focused on creating new products, information systems or organizational processes for users and / or customers.
· Work, production or functional teams - These teams are completely specialized, where they only work on a particular area within an organization (ie finance, training, research, etc.). Being operated from virtually different geographical locations, these teams are present to carry out routine or ongoing tasks.
Virtual Team management processes:
· Assembling - Probation periods are the first measurement to be applied when a remote teamwork organization begins. The team leader must decide on those who meet all the requirements of the probation period.
· Training - During this process, the team leader sets expectations in the form of future virtual teaming and then develops and implements a group training method to teach team members to meet expectations.
· Management - This process means using telecommunications technologies to manage the ongoing tasks and jobs of remote group members.
· To control - Team leaders establish performance measures to assess and evaluate team performance. This person needs to find out if the team is on the right track and can achieve the goals of the project at the scheduled time.
Benefits?
· Fare reduction and technology savings
· Lower transportation costs and less travel time
· Instant communication and information exchange
· Reduced scarcity of available resources.
· 24x7 availability of resources
Drawbacks?
· Poor control of virtual groups (this may result in less trust in virtual teams), as there are no direct control devices
· Problems to establish good virtual team leadership (compared to "physical" team)
· Witness for projects that require on-site control and management.
· Relationship and trust-building is less
