Integrated Framework for Virtual Team Management

doi:10.2498/iti.2012.0363

Integrated Framework for Virtual Team Management 1

Ante Martinic1, Kresimir Fertalj2, and Damir Kalpic2 KONCAR – Power Plant and Electric Traction Engineering Inc., Fallerovo setalište 22, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia 2 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Unska 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. Virtual teams are increasingly engaged in globalized business environments. Virtual teams work across space, time and organizational boundaries with links ensured by information and communication technologies. Communication, collaboration, and knowledge exchange are the most important in virtual teams’ operations and their efficiency directly influences teams’ performance. In this paper benefits and challenges of virtual teams are described, and description of software tools used by virtual teams is given. Previous efforts to provide efficient communication, collaboration, and management tools and frameworks for virtual teams are summarized. Some promising research directions are indicated. Finally, integrated framework for virtual team management is proposed.

Keywords. virtual teams, project management, collaboration, software tools, groupware 1. Introduction Globalization of business drives organizations to increased usage of virtual teams. Main reasons for using virtual teams are evident in projects that are not restricted to local geographical areas, where skills required for the project are not available locally, when companies need to cut costs, etc. Usage of virtual teams influenced project management (PM) paradigm that has begun to change due to an increasing number of distributed projects involving team members from different locations, organizations, and cultures. Current and future PM will be more concerned with tracking project work processes and efficient sharing of information and knowledge among project contributors. Task interdependence and member distribution across time, space, and technology will make high

degree of collaboration necessary to accomplish project work. Virtual teams primarily rely on electronic means of interaction. Extensive development of information and communication technology has provided infrastructure necessary to support development and operation of virtual teams. Projects performed by virtual teams require more intensive and more formal communication, collaboration and project control than projects with collocated teams. These aspects greatly depend on well-defined processes and on implemented tools and technologies. Improvement of processes, tools and technologies directly contributes to team performance and project success, and as such shall be in the focus of this paper. In this paper we give an overview of virtual teams environment followed by an overview of related work. Based on related work we indicate some promising directions for future research, including standardization as a basis for tools development, improvement of technical concepts for integration of appropriate tools, and development of architectures for execution and management of project processes. Following indicated directions we propose integrated framework for virtual team management.

2. Virtual Teams Environment 2.1. Virtual Teams Team can be defined as a relatively small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A virtual team is a group of people who use electronic means to communicate with each other more often than face-to-face meetings. Virtual team can work across space, time and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of

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communication technologies [9]. In other words, virtual team members use internet, intranets, and other networks to communicate, coordinate and collaborate with each other on tasks and projects even though they may work in different geographical locations and for different organizations [2]. Throughout the literature, virtual teams are also referred to as distributed teams. Communication links are what distinguishes virtual teams from traditional collocated organizations. These links define the ‘virtual’ part of the team. It is the degree of online communication, not the dispersion of the team that primarily characterizes a team as virtual. This means that a collocated group that conducts the majority of its business online may also be considered a virtual team [8]. For business growth, many companies may take on projects that are not in the local geographic area. Also some of these projects require resources and skills that are not available locally within the company. A way to address these issues is the establishment of virtual project teams. Some of the main reasons for using virtual teams include [9]: - Team members may not be located at the same place. - It may not be practical to travel to meet faceto-face. - Team members may work different hours. - Workers life style, social and family commitments may prevent relocation. - Virtual teams enable an organization to be more responsive to market demands. - Workers tend to be more productive – less commuting and travel time. - Possibility of providing a global workday of 24 hours [7]. Not all projects are suitable for virtual teams. Projects requiring a lot of face-to-face meetings or hands-on physical or site work are not suitable as the project team members have to be physically available on location for such meetings and tasks. Projects that require significant intellectual endeavors are more suitable for virtual teams. As information can be easily transferred electronically, the project team members can deliver their knowledge and experience via electronic means from anywhere in the world. To summarize, advantages of using virtual teams are that project has the right mix of personnel, cost-effective global sourcing, and shorter product development cycles by utilizing

time zone differences. One of the major disadvantages of virtual teams is the high demand for communicative, cooperative and collaborative efforts among team members.

2.2. Virtual Teams Management

and

Project

In globally distributed environment PM is a more difficult and complex task to undertake than it is in a co-site project. Communication between virtual team members is normally electronic with limited opportunities for synchronous contact, depending on temporal difference. Coordination, visibility, cooperation and communication are all negatively impacted by distance as illustrated in Figure 1 [2]. Distance

Introduces Negatively impacts

Negatively impacts

Barriers & Complexity

Cause

Coordination & Visibility

Cause

Communication & Cooperation

Figure 1. Virtual Teams Environment

Procedures must be put in place to facilitate and monitor the level of cooperation between remote team members. Each team member must know what is required for a work product and also when each work product is due. This requires effective reporting schedules and structures keeping team members informed of progress. There is a requirement for continuous visibility into team’s activities and operation at all locations. Communication difficulties must not become a barrier to effective virtual team operation. This requires having a common vocabulary for all aspects of the project and the use of effective communication tools that are understood and utilized by all team members. Effective policies and procedures to facilitate communication between sites should be put in place [2].

2.3. Software Tools used by Virtual Teams Generally speaking, software and services that help groups of workers to do their job better is called groupware. Groupware tools can be

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categorized into a so-called groupware matrix, according to time and place of team's collaboration as shown in Figure 2 [12]. Same time ''Synchronous''

Different time ''Asynchronous''

Voting, presentation support (whiteboard)

Shared computers (documents, messages)

Same place ''Co-located''

Chat, videophone, telephone

E-mail, workflow, shared data-stores

Different place ''Distance''

Figure 2. Groupware categories

Numerous tools exist for different types of activities, ranging from open source to highly specialized applications. In the reminder of this section, types of tools will be briefly described. Group Support Systems - These systems allow people to share, organize, evaluate, make decisions, and plan for action. GSS tools are mostly used for the purpose of decision making, and then they are known as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Chat and Meeting Tools - Meeting tools provide ways to communicate in real-time with other team members by typing, voice, or video. Some tools include chat rooms, whiteboards, and more. Typically, all participants must have compatible software installed, and optionally, may need a headset, microphone, and video camera. Information Broadcasting - Applications in this category are used to distribute information to team members and others with blogs, podcasts, presentations, and Webinars. Blogs are online diaries that combine text, images, and hyperlinks. Blogs allow the author to categorize the entries, which lets visitors limit posts to a specific topic. Unlike presentations and Webinars, podcasts let team members retrieve information on demand. Information Sharing - Many collaboration software suites include calendars, file galleries, forums, bulletin boards, application sharing, content management, and workflow management. All these can be used to share information.

Information Gathering - Surveys, project management and scheduling, feedback, and time tracking let team members collaborate on the current deliverables. Surveys are used to collect information, usually without verification, about a specific activity or concept. Surveys help to better understand the activity or concept, identify areas of concern, and see if more information needs to be gathered. Project management and scheduling are used primarily by project manager to monitor progress on specific tasks and those assigned to the task. Feedback identifies areas of strength and weakness. Feedback is used to adjust project plan and identify topics for future surveys. Time tracking is sometimes part of project management and is used to see how much time is being spent on a specific task. Wikis - Wiki is a website that allows easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative wiki websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems. RSS Feeds and Other "Push" Technologies - "Push" technologies deliver information from a server to users. Users may initially request the information, but it is delivered when ready. Users have no control over when the information arrives. Push technologies include e-mails, faxes, voice mails, newsletters, and RSS feeds [1].

3. Some Problems and Possible Solutions 3.1. Related Work Intensive usage of virtual teams began in 1990s with more extensive development of information and communication technologies. Since then, considerable research on different aspects of virtual teams has been done [11]. Papers that analyze virtual team environments generally agree that communication and collaboration aspects are the most important challenges in project management and project delivery. Interaction between virtual team members is supported by different software tools and other technologies. Being so, some authors discuss and propose architectures and technical concepts that can enhance virtual team interaction and virtual team management. Summary of this work follows. Chen et al. [3] propose a collaborative project management architecture. It includes middleware used for integration of different components of

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the architecture. For middleware authors use a concept based on universal data model. Romano et al. [14] describe prototype of a collaborative project management software to support advanced collaboration levels between team members, increasing efficiency of project managers and team members. Maciel and David [10] present a serviceoriented middleware architecture aimed to support the reuse and the interoperability across collaborative systems. Some issues related with groupware interoperability built on heterogeneous middleware platforms are also discussed. Integration of services across distinct groupware tools is not covered in this work. Dustdar and Gall [5] define an architecture that can be used as a foundation for the flexible integration of collaborative systems (such as workflow management, groupware or business process modeling) with teamwork services that support distributed and mobile collaboration. The same authors in another paper [6] analyze needs for process awareness in virtual teams. Paper distills a framework for process aware virtual project teams exploiting different existing technologies. Whitehead [17] addresses collaboration in software engineering distributed teams. His research indicated that there is a trend of movement towards web based tools, but there is still no integrated environment that covers the entire development lifecycle. Ramesh and Dennis [13] suggest an objectoriented model to virtual team design that requires standardization of team’s inputs, processes, and/or outputs. Such structure should minimize the need for extensive members’ coordination and help team to overcome some limitations of virtual environment. Si et al. [15] propose a semantic SOA based framework for product collaborative design. It facilitates collaborative work of design teams in different disciplines. Gupta et al. [7] propose a service-oriented architecture based paradigm in which globally distributed teams work on the same software development task in a sequential manner. Wang and Wang [16] use the concept of service oriented architecture to design and integrate a web based collaborative PM software. Integration of tools other than PM is not considered in this work. Some interesting problems and research directions are indicated in the rest of this section.

3.2. Standardization of Tools It is often difficult for virtual team members to communicate efficiently and understand each other, especially if team members come from different working environments and different cultures. Virtual team members use different software tools for interaction, data exchange and project tracking. Usage of tools provided by different vendors can also contribute to somewhat difficult interaction, since the same entities can be differently represented in different tools. We believe that more efficient virtual team performance could be achieved with standardization. Using standards, interaction and understanding among team members would be improved. Communicated information and produced artifacts would be more understandable and their exchange would become more straightforward. Standardization could be introduced by development of comprehensive common data model for domain of virtual teams. That model should be used as a basis for development of applications, communication interfaces and data exchange protocols. Existing applications could also be accommodated to common data model by using additional modules that would translate application proprietary data models to common data model and vice versa.

3.3. Integration of Tools Existing tools used for project delivery and especially for PM are generally not suitable for usage in heterogeneous environments that are quite common for virtual teams. Current tools are usually monolithic applications with limited possibilities for data exchange. To be efficient, project team members usually have to use tools from single vendor, which is a quite limiting factor. Some previous work addressed problem of tools interoperability and tools integration but PM tools have received limited attention. Furthermore, integration of collaborative tools aspects in PM tools and vice versa could bring benefits to virtual team effectiveness [4]. This idea can be extended and applied to e.g. software development and other engineering tools used for production of various project artifacts. Not only pure data exchange should be addressed, but also a possibility to orchestrate various tools into an efficient, flexible and user-friendly framework. We see a possibility for improvement in this aspect too, specifically by developing a

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comprehensive SOA based framework for seamless tools integration.

Integrated Framework for Virtual Team Management

Project Management Processes

4. Integrated Framework for Virtual Team Management Based on elaborated concepts of tool standardization and integration along with the concept of managing project processes we propose integrated framework for virtual team management as illustrated in Figure 3.

Project Work Execution Processes Project Communication and Collaboration Processes

Tools and technologies Service Oriented Architecture

Technology Standards

The concept of business processes can be applied in the PM domain. This could especially be beneficial for PM with virtual teams, since more formalism in PM is required when virtual teams are in question. Some of the previous work addressed the topic of project processes, but no comprehensive framework that could efficiently support project processes planning and execution has been suggested. We believe that architecture based on scalable and flexible architecture like SOA could improve the usage of project processes and increase efficiency of virtual teams. Based on that architecture, project processes suitable for virtual teams could be modeled, and in the planning phase, simulations could be performed. Project tracking and interaction between team members could also be positively influenced. PM tools, development tools, engineering and other tools could be additionally enhanced with features for more automation in project delivery and project status tracking. The need for explicit interaction between team members would be reduced, while team’s awareness about the project would be increased. Usage of aforementioned standardization, along with tools integration framework, would simplify the task of building such architecture. Furthermore, in real world projects, close out activities often pass without enough attention. This problem is even more notable when virtual teams are involved. Previously mentioned architecture and project processes could be further utilized to make project close out artifacts and activities by-products of the project lifecycle itself. That way, project team could be relieved of additional project close out efforts, while more information could be stored in the knowledge base to be used in future projects.

Project Management Standards

3.4. Managing the Project Management Processes

Methodology

Methodology Framework

Common Information Model Tool Orchestration Framework

Figure 3. Integrated Framework for Virtual Team Management

Proposed framework combines PM and technology standards to build comprehensive integrated framework for project processes management in virtual team environments. Underlying tool orchestration framework utilizes technology and PM standards to provide formally structured common information model for project management and project execution domain. This model in conjunction with SOA architecture provides platform neutral infrastructure as a basis for value-added usage of tools in heterogeneous environments. On top of the tool orchestration framework methodology framework for project processes management and execution is structured. Since all segments of the integrated framework are built on PM standards, tight integration of processes and technology is achieved creating environment that can be easily understood and used in distributed, heterogeneous environments such as those inherent to virtual teams.

5. Conclusion This paper describes the characteristics of virtual teams, their advantages in project delivery and specifics of the environment in which they operate. To be efficient, virtual teams need more than just a set of tools dealing with different aspects of their operations. They need a comprehensive, integrated framework to manage and support their everyday activities. In this paper we summarized previous efforts aimed to provide such frameworks, indicated promising directions for future research, and proposed a concept of integrated framework for virtual team management.

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